Agency in the story creates an emotional, immersive and enjoyable experience for audiences. However, agency introduces complexity: if an audience member can talk to the cast whenever they want, the cast must then balance the narrative with improvisation. But what if we want our audience to have even more agency, beyond just talking? What if their actions have consequences? What if they can affect the story? Well, then it gets a bit more complex.
In Alien Rescue one audience member is the Hero - they talk to the cast, the cast talks back, and they have agency to make choices that actually affect and change the story. We have up to 15 other audience members who we call Sidekicks, and they wear very tiny avatars that are miniature flying droids. They are muted for the show but we’ve given them visual agency: they can flash lights on their avatar either green, red or yellow. In this way, we create a novel way for silent audiences to communicate with both the Hero and the cast.
To be honest, weaving in and out of improvised moments with a Hero during a scripted performance is not impossible. It does take practice and it requires the cast to know the scene on a molecular level: every single beat and moment is deeply ingrained. The challenge is to listen carefully to the Hero and play with their contributions and questions and statements. We ‘yes and’ the audience, and that requires the cast to have a solid background with improvisation and a deep understanding of all the characters and lore of your story. Then it’s about allowing the improvisation to take its natural course until the actor decides it’s time to return to the script - after all, we are not just there for the Hero, we have our Sidekicks to entertain as well, so we need to keep the story moving.
I describe this as a Level 1 Agency. Just have the ability to freely converse about the story with the audience member and then lead them back into the scripted lines.
The next challenge is when the contents of the scene must be rearranged in order to accommodate an audience’s spontaneous contribution. If there are 3 important beats or moments in a scene, it is entirely possible that because of when and how an audience member interjects, you may need to change the order of those beats. For example, we have a scene in a large lab where 3-4 important moments must occur. The scene starts with “everyone split up and see if you can find a clue”. Depending on where an audience member might go in the room, beat A or B or C will have to come first. So the cast must not only be able to move off script into an improvised exchange, they also must be able to juggle the actual order of the content to suit an audience’s choice. This is learnable through repetition and study, but it’s not easy.
I describe that as Level 2 Agency: being able to rearrange the order of beats in a scene to accommodate audience agency.
Level 3 is where you give an audience actual and real choice in the story: agency to actually affect the outcome. This requires branching storylines. After all, reach choice means real options for all choices. If you claim to let the audience affect the story, but don’t actually follow through, it’s more like perceived agency, not true agency.
For example, if you present your audience with 2 doors and give them the agency to go through either door they like, you really can’t have the doors both leading to the same place. That is false agency, they don’t really have a choice, you’re putting them on rails and driving them to a predetermined place.
Similarly, you can’t just make 2 different looking rooms but keep the content of whatever scene happens the same in both rooms. That is also not true agency, it is perceived agency.
Real agency means that each room really is different and each scene really is different.
This requires your entire cast to memorize both scenes and be prepared on a moment’s notice to perform either one of them, depending on the audience choice.
The more actual agency you give, the more you must demand that your actors prepare for.
In Alien Rescue we have 2 major branching storylines, a Heroic character arc and a Villainous one. We offer our audience opportunities to go down one of these two paths. And of course that means the cast must memorize both endings and be prepared to enact one or the other. Beyond that we have even more areas of agency: some are simple “aside” moments where characters reveal new story information based on actions a Hero makes. Others are moments where audiences have the chance to make choices that have a butterfly affect: at the moment the choice seems insignificant, but later it turns out it was actually important and that it had a significant affect on the story. Real agency with real repercussions to an action.
All of this adds up to a highly immersive and emotional experience of shared storytelling, where the audience feels part of the experience, beyond watching it from on the stage, they are living the experience and no performance is the same, it’s very different each time.
To demo this we will run 2 scenes from the show using some volunteers from the audience.
Let’s look at the trailer first to get a sense of the characters and world of Alien Rescue:
To set up the scenes: our Hero has accepted an invitation to join a rescue mission with an armed alien rights activist group. They are trying to rescue the Zibanejor, a creature with the most toxic blood in the galaxy. The creature is held captive in the Kelosite Research Facility, where it is being weaponized in an effort to win a long-standing war between two civilizations. Our group is on the side of the ‘good guys’ and the Scientists weaponizing the Zib are the ‘bad guys’. We’ll first find our group trying to get through a locked door in one of the labs. Above the door is a massive security camera with an eye that follows you wherever you go, it’s very creepy. OK, action!
(once they go through the doors) OK, cut.
Now we’re flashing forward a few scenes. Cello - played by Craig here - has died. Through the magic of VR though, he hops into a new avatar and activates a voice mod, allowing him to play a new character, Onai the scientist (a bad guy). In this scene, the team has discovered a Secret Lab - one that can ONLY be discovered by the Eyebots. OK, action!
Great job Alex and Eyebots! You can see in this scene we’re giving a lot of agency to our Eyebots as well, they can vote and try to influence the Hero. Also, while you can’t really see in this demo, the only way this secret lab scene even plays out is if first an Eyebot discovers the hidden door and opens it. So we don’t even play this scene every time, only if an Eyebot triggers it.
And then you see how Alex had a few options available. We had 2 clear ones, live or kill, and there’s even a 3rd one that is more subtle: take Onai with you to the next room. For the ‘let live’ or ‘kill’ choices, each of those trigger a butterfly effect that creates small changes to the story, and for the “take Onai with you” that really opens up a whole new set of options, because at that point a number of other things can play out, some of those options we have yet to discover, but we know they exist.
Ok, so now you’ve got a bit of a sense of how we at Alien Rescue tackle audience agency. It’s complicated and takes a lot of work, but the results are pretty cool: audiences collectively role play, we create a shared storytelling environment, and the result is an emotional, exciting experience for everyone, including the cast.
Now I’m going to turn the stage over to the cast and let them field some questions about what it takes to work in this manner.