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of the ambush out the window, turned and faced his attackers and staged a new
broadsword battle on the fl y.
At the end, Robin died, as some of the old stories told, near a convent where
he had been hiding. As he lay in the grass, the “Deer” (dancers in fanciful deer cos-
tumes) gave him comfort and love. On that downer note, the children were led back
around the lake toward the turret where they began. As they passed a giant rock,
Robin arose on top of it, dressed in a stone-colored tunic spotted with live mosses.
ROBIN:
I am like the turning of the seasons. The Robin that you know is an
image of leaves and sunlight and summers long ago. . . . And still I live, as
do we all, because each time that I have spoken, each time my hands have
shaped the air, there have been echoes
—
echoes that will ring for as long
as the sun makes mornings. We change the world by living, for better or for
worse . . . and now I think it better that we dance. [MUSIC. The Company in-
volves the audience in a dance.]
Each step in the process was a learning experience in interaction design, from the
writing of the script to the staging design and fi nal performances. I learned about the
places where the boundary between audience participation and the necessary ac-
tion were elastic and where they couldn't be, and how to keep the plot on track with
interactive “coauthors.” The following year, I began my career in computer games, de-
signing interactive fairy tales for the CyberVision computer; but that's another story.
least in part, as drama's attempt to increase its sensory bandwidth, cre-
ating the technological siblings of the kind of participatory theatre de-
scribed in the previous sidebar.
The notion of “interactive movies” that gained popularity in the late
1980s had its roots in both cinema and computer games, and both cinema
and computer games combine theatre and technology.
10
In drama, the use of
technology to create representations goes at least as far back as the
mechane
10. Earlier works, such as productions of Lanterna Magica and the branching movie at the
Czech pavilion at the 1967 expo in Canada, were relatively isolated. The idea of interactive
movies has been rekindled and transformed into a bona fi de trend by advances in multimedia
technology. Likewise, there were early experiments in interactive television in the mid-1970s
(such as the failed Warner QUBE system). Interactive TV had to await similar technological
advances before fi nally becoming a 1990s buzzword.
