ERWIN’S MANY WORLDS
The Project
Created by the team of Trevor Barrette, Michaela Di Cesare and Patrick Park, Erwin’s Many Worlds is an experimental piece of digital art. Centered around the titular Erwin, Erwin’s Many Worlds dives into the multiverse and examines the many possible realities - both exciting and mundane, that we all inhabit.
Artists
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Trevor Barrette (he/him) is a queer theatre-maker, performer, stage manager and teacher based in Montreal (Tio’tia:ke). Upon graduating from theatre school in 2011, he founded the award-winning KaleidoscopeMTL for which he has directed their ten productions, including four of his own original musicals. His work has been presented at Centaur Theatre's Wildside Festival, Segal Centre's Academy, CETM Inc's Next Wave Festival, PlayShed Theatre's WRK'N'PRGRSS and the Montreal Fringe Festival. He has had the pleasure of performing with the National Arts Centre, Centaur Theatre, Geordie Theatre, Repercussion Theatre and Scapegoat Carnivale as well as in readings and workshops with the National Theatre School, Infinitheatre and Teesri Duniya Theatre. Trevor has proudly served his community as President of the Montreal English Theatre Awards and Vice President of the Quebec Drama Federation. When not making theatre or performing, Trevor can be found completing his stage management credits or teaching musical theatre creation to kids and teens.
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Michaela is a playwright and performer with a Master’s Degree in Drama from the University of Toronto. Michaela’s solo show 8 Ways my Mother was Conceived was presented in Toronto, Montreal, New York City, Ottawa, Hudson, Winnipeg and Stratford. Michaela wrote and performed in In Search of Mrs. Pirandello (2016 WildSide Festival Centaur Theatre). Michaela’s next Centaur production was the MainStage world premiere of Successions in the 2017/2018 season (Outstanding New Text, METAs 2018). Her play Extra/Beautiful/U won first place in the 2017 Write on Q competition presented by Infinitheatre. Her play FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) premiered with Geordie Productions in September 2019 (Outstanding New Text Nomination, METAs 2020).
Michaela was playwright-in-residence at Centaur Theatre for the 2019/2020 season writing Terroni or Once Upon a Time in the South. She is currently working on two new plays Hot Blooded Foreigner and Oppression Remedy, as well as the television pilot The Simulators. Screenwriting credits include the web series Sex & Ethnicity and the short film The Carcass.
As an actor, theatre credits include Winter’s Daughter (Tableau D’Hôte Theatre / Segal Studio), A Bear Awake in Winter (Next Stage Theatre Festival/Factory Theatre), Gratitude (Oren Safdie/MainLine Theatre), Birds of a Feather (Roseneath Theatre), Urban Tales (Centaur Theatre/Urbi et Orbi), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Humber River Shakespeare) and State of Denial (Teesri Duniya Theatre). Film & TV credits include NBC’S Transplant, Mob Hits, No Good Deed, Mafia INC, The Engagement, The Bold Type, Mike, Fatal Vows, A Stranger in My Home, Sex & Ethnicity.
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Patrick Park is a Montréal based performer, graduate of Concordia University’s Theatre Performance program, and alumni of Black Theatre Workshop's Artist Mentorship Program. Featured performer credits include: Mythic: A New Musical, Prom Queen, Fancy Nancy: The Musical (Segal Centre), Hairspray (CSLDS/Centaur), Punk Rock (BCT/Centaur), and Attempts in Flight (Dai Bao/MTLFringe). Film/TV: Best Sellers, Appelles-moi si tu meurs. He is also a member of the dance group, East2West, performing on stages across Canada and the US as well as on YouTube for an audience of over 1.5 million subscribers. @patrickpark
The Residency
Before the DDI
Before participating in the Digital Dramaturgy Initiative, Erwin’s Many Worlds was in the concept and research stage of the work. The team’s primary focus was on Erwin’s story & the dramatic structure of the piece with no experimentation around medium.
While there had been no concrete prototyping done, a considerable amount of technology had been baked directly into the concept. In their application the team wrote:
“Erwin’s Many Worlds can be found at the crossroads of “Black Mirror” and “Paranormal Activity”. Using simple webcam technology, Erwin’s Many Worlds is a complex, multi-narrative, metatheatrical character study that explores the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics (the MWI) and questions the notion of free will in our society.”
Using the Many-Worlds Interpretation as a foundation for their research, the team was interested in exploring the concept of free will in theatre and how audience agency affects the both the experience and perhaps even the outcome of the piece - an analog to the quantum physics concept that observing a particle in fact changes the reality of that particle.
In the age of digital theatre what agency does an audience have? The Erwin’s team wanted to develop a prototype over the residency week that would allow them to test out the audience experience of watching many simultaneous versions of a character as well as being able to hone in on one specific world at a time.
The Erwin’s Many Worlds had consultations with the following experts:
Alain Mercieca
Adil Mansoor & Scott Andrew
Mishelle Cuttler
Pre-residency, the team of Erwin’s Many Worlds posed the question:
In the age of digital theatre, what agency does an audience have?
During the residency
It became apparent very early in the week that rapid prototyping was going to be a core component of what this group would need to advance their work and test their concepts. As such a small greenscreen studio was created in an office that they would have access to for the entire week and some time was spent creating a rough platform for them to test with.
As is often the case with projects in their early stages there were a lot of ideas around both the content and form. Something that came out of the consultation with Alain Mercieca was that the group needed to refine their focus. If the form and the content are both experimental it can be too much for the audience to take in. An example given was Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More where the form was extremely complex and experimental but the content was simple.
A strategy for content creation was also formed out of this consultation. While the group had previously tried to write all of the Erwin storylines simultaneously it was suggested both for ease and for cohesiveness that they switch to creating one Erwin - “Erwin Prime”, write their storyline out fully and then start creating the other Erwin storylines which connect into it. There was a real push to keep the narrative simple so that the audience doesn’t get completely lost in a sea of Erwins.
An early prototype was created in OBS to allow the group to see what it’s like to watch multiple Erwins simultaneously as well as a tool to aid in content creation. Trevor and Michaela were able to be in a separate space than Patrick, see the footage that was being created live, in context with the prerecorded Erwin’s, and give direction to him over an earpiece.
A secondary prototype was created in Touchdesigner which tested some of the concepts of audience agency and choice with the user being able to choose which Erwin they wanted to focus on.
By using rapid prototyping techniques and being able to test ideas live, questions quickly emerged around audience stamina. How many streams can a person watch simultaneously? Does that differ from the amount of audio feeds? How do you still keep and direct an audience’s focus if you’ve given them that amount of agency?
During and post residency, the question posed by the Erwin’s Many Worlds team changed:
How does the evolving form of “digital theatre” address / push the boundaries of audience stamina? Perhaps “digital theatre” isn’t an accurate descriptor of the work coming out of these efforts — but that this is an entirely new and exciting art form
Post Residency
Post the residency period the Erwin’s team was very encouraged by the fact that they were able to build a prototype over the course of the week and that their proof of concept was successful. Prior to the residency, Erwin’s Many Worlds only existed in a conceptual state, so having concrete evidence that the concept is possible and artistically interesting will help the work advance much faster than before.
For their next steps, the team wants to find the funding for both tech and text based workshops, ideally bringing in twelve actors to work some choral Erwin moments and see how different actors can embody the role. With more budget, they hope to begin to work with designers and a cinematographer to define some of the potential artistic choices. Both the digital and textual elements of the project are very exciting moving forwards.
The general consensus by the end of the week on a definition of digital theatre was that perhaps all of this digital work doesn’t need to be contained by the construct of “theatre” Theatre exists in the way that it always has and why do these new projects need to be shoehorned into its structure? Since the onset of the pandemic, theatre artists have been trying to reinvent “theatre” to work digitally but perhaps they’ve gotten too hung up on the idea of “digital theatre” instead of accepting it as a new and exciting art form. It is okay for it to be different.
Tools Used
Touchdesigner was used to prototype some of the more interactive components of the piece. Like OBS it is able to longest multiple different video feeds but instead of having to create various scenes Trevor was able to test out what the experience would be to click on the different Erwins and expand their video. By testing this component with others it allowed for feedback on what an audience finds overwhelming vs intriguing, attention span & the threshold folks watching might have for stimulation.
OBS was used as a simple, rapid prototyping tool. It interfaces with a variety of webcams as well as cellphones through various plugins. Trevor was able to make various OBS scenes to test out different numbers and configurations of Erwins in real-time. OBS has a built-in recording feature so the team was also able to record their experiments to review and tweak afterward.
EpocCam was used to turn Patrick’s cell phone into a camera that could stream video wirelessly to Trevor’s computer. One of the areas that the team was investigating was vlogging culture and by using a cellphone they were able to create a more dynamic camera that Patrick could manipulate.
