"AE-RI IN OTHERLAND" DIRECTOR’S NOTE (Virtual Reality Performance) Arts Council Korea Symposium by VR Director Esther K. Chae

https://artson.arko.or.kr/artson/board/view/219?cid=3002

There is a girl named Ae-ri. 

Her name means “lovable pear blossom,” created from the Chinese characters for “love” and “pear.” She opens her eyes one day to find herself in a strange world, a world she cannot comprehend. “Strange, so strange.” Everyone is different from her. Or rather, she is different from everyone else. Where is this place? What is this place? The most fantastical thing of all is that these strange beings clearly exist, despite looking and sounding preposterous to her.

The main character of this story is the writer herself. Coming to Korea at a young age after being born in the U.S., she struggled with an unfamiliar environment, a language she doesn’t understand, and distant relatives. To her, Alice in Wonderland isn’t just about imagination and whimsy. It felt real. Otherland is a world that no one has experienced before. Korean folklore and Alice in Wonderland meet in this bizarre setting, where Western and Korean languages and philosophies collide. In this scene presentation, Ae-ri meets Humpty Dumpty, a “languish eggspert", to theatrically indulge in wordplay using English, Korean, and Chinese characters.” (Introduction from December 18th, 2020 performance program) 

“Curiouser and curiouser!” as Alice in Wonderland exclaims.  Or rather “????, ?? ????. (Strange, so strange)” as Ae-ri utters in confusion. I could use these same expressions to describe the journey of my play, “Ae-ri in Otherland,” the story of a girl named Ae-ri who navigates her way through Otherland, where Korean folklore characters collide with those from “Alice in Wonderland.”  I wrote it in 1995 as my master’s thesis at the University of Michigan.  Three years later,  I directed it at the Yale Cabaret while pursuing my MFA in Acting at the Yale School of Drama.  

And then 22 years later. 

Jeong-sik Yoo, Yale School of Drama Technical Design and Production alumni, reached out to me regarding a virtual reality performance proposal using VR headsets, sponsored by Art Council Korea - would I be interested? …Yes, I would! So began our international pre-production of “Ae-ri in Otherland,” during a global pandemic, using the newly launched Spacial app, which was developed by my TED Fellow colleague Jinha Lee, and the most recent Facebook Oculus Quest 2, with the creative team all over Korea and me in the US. Of course, we also used KakaoTalk, Zoom, email, Youtube, Facebook Live, voice messages and sometimes, even an old school phone chat!

The rehearsals process: 

After technical director Jeong-sik Yoo sent me a VR headset Oculus Quest 2, our somewhat expressionless avatars met up in a VR meeting room in Spatial.  Though Jeong-sik was in Seoul, Korea, and I was near San Francisco in the Bay Area, the Oculus headsets allowed us to meet and walk through the virtual space together in real time. He showed me various digital stories and concept boards he had worked on previously.  Once immersed in this fantastical 3D virtual space, I knew “Ae-ri in Otherland” would play well.  It doesn’t get any more “otherland” than this.  I chose one of my favorite scenes, where Ae-ri meets the hoity-toity “languish eggspert” Humpty Dumpty.  She teaches him a pointed lesson about how Korean and Chinese characters and idioms are used. A flurry of engaging word play and funny cultural sparring ensues between them. 

I couldn’t have asked for a better creative team.  Not only because the technical director, actors and dramaturg are top professionals in their fields AND savvy hackers of technology, but also, and more importantly, because the team members themselves are experienced “otherlanders” -- fluid in Korean/Chinese writing as well as Western culture and languages. 22 years ago, it was lonely being the only one being fully bi-cultural and trying to get the production up in the way I envisioned it .  But to now collaborate with a team that understands my nuanced artistic intention, culturally and linguistically, to create an utterly original artistic performance, is thrilling.

Technical challenges and rewards:

Spacial is made for virtual meetings, not performance.  At least not yet.  So the avatar’s face doesn’t match the actor's full expressions. And it doesn’t come with the lower body part so the actor’s body movements are limited. The arms get warped and twisted, as the technology isn’t there yet for the Oculus VR handset to match the actor’s movement. Maybe it feels similar to when Second Life debuted?  

Artistically, therefore, I directed the performers to think of themselves more like voiceover actors who are bringing life to their real-time avatars.  Especially for the audience members with VR headsets, all the audio would be very close and clear, as if on earphones.  Lots of vocalizing of grunts, sighs, and giggles were very effective.  If anything, any loud and bigger volume would have needed to be modified -- a big contrast to live theater. 

Playing around with the design (set, prop, costume) with Jeong-sik was for me like being in a virtual candy shop. If we wanted something, he could go design it or find it and then upload it into our performance space.  The actors and I could move, expand, hide or magically make our props appear. The actors even enlarged a virtual PDF of the script to read from during rehearsals. 

Our attitude during the rehearsal was to be as playful as possible with our problem solving in this new virtual performance world.  We invented new and fun performance languages, such as “Lock the egg ?? ??.”  Because one mistaken click of the Oculus’s hand-held triggers could move or remove  the virtual images or props, we needed to secure and lock the Humpty Dumpty egg costume into which actor Kim Jin would have to insert her avatar. 

The performance: 

The VR live performance took place December 18, a Friday evening in the U.S. (the morning of December 19 in Korea).  Around 10 audience members from around the world attended with VR headsets (3D) and many others through Youtube’s live stream (2D, with live comments) and Spacial's new smartphone app, which just launched two days before (2D but with capability to move around the VR performance space).   

The talented actors Soo-hye Jang (Ae-ri) and Jin Kim (Humpty Dumpty) seamlessly executed the performance of “Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall.”  I won’t describe it here, as it is best to be experienced. Watch here: performance link 

Audience interactions & feedback: 

One of the most exciting aspects of a virtual reality performance is that the audience has no physical boundaries to attend!  We had a diverse audience coming from different parts of the globe -- including VR/AR experts with their own VR headsets who had awaited to experience our experiment; friends who logged on from their cell phone app; and other people who just happened to stumble upon our Youtube livestream from their computer.  This type of VR performance dissolves the traditional limitations of how an audience experiences a live performance.  Even though this project developed as a result of  the pandemic, we are now exploring a new platform that overcome the challenges of in-person performance, and we’re developing a new artistic paradigm, both in performance process and audience participation. 

Next steps: 

During our post-performance feedback, one audience member, a gamer from Hong Kong, said he wanted to participate in Ae-ri’s journey, deciding what actions she might take, just as in a video game.  That led Jeong-sik and I to start talking about real-time audience participation, where multiple VR performance stages/rooms co-exist in different areas. The audience members can choose where they want to be and input what they want Ae-ri or themselves to say or do.  For example, there could be a VR stage, called “The Mad Hatter's Tea Party,” where the audience members are actually sitting at the table with the actors and participate in the dialogue. At another stage called “The Rabbit on the Moon/Korean Folklore,” audience members could learn about K-culture or how to play salmulnori.  The possibilities are endless.    

 I am inspired that a scripted play can evolve into a new performance genre combining aspects of video games in which live audience members’ inputs and interactions are integrated into the storytelling. The Peabody-award winning show Artificial successfully used the gaming platform Twitch and worked this kind of real-time audience interaction into the script.  But that used a 2D screen platform. I believe we might be the first project to bring this to a global audience in a 3D, virtual-reality world. 

Our creative team will continue to play/think/imagine what new and engaging performance languages and paradigms can be developed using endlessly evolving technologies.  And we will not be limited to only currently available technology, as we also give feedback for the technology to adjust and grow to needed artistic expressions. 

Indeed, we have entered into another new frontier of the Wild Wild Web. We welcome any suggestions and thoughts and ask you to join us as we embark on this curiouser and curiouser adventure.