Sam Gentle.com

Hangouts Theatre

Hangouts drama masks

One area that I think is tragically underexplored is new kinds of performance that are made possible by the internet. The amazing power of broadcast-era technology all but killed theatre and live shows as entertainment for the masses, but these days we have enough technological power for new kinds of non-broadcast performance.

I'm most excited about the future of the current set of popular livestreaming services (Twitch, Ustream, YouTube, Livestreamer). Right now streaming is still fairly fringe, but it's made a popular niche for itself in video games and political protests. But as we get to a point where people think of streaming as non-chalantly as they do taking photos or videos on a modern smartphone, I think we'll start to see some truly novel forms of performance spring out of that.

I have a moderately interesting idea along those lines, which is to make a theatre show entirely set in Google Hangouts. Hangouts works much like a traditional stage: people enter, speak for some amount of time, and then exit. I think you could create a really compelling experience using the up-close intimacy of videoconferencing. Imagine Hamlet online: the angst, the confrontations, the intrigue - all conducted via video calls!

And the coolest thing is that you could do it all live. You would actually be watching the actors connect and disconnect from the call as it happens. And although it's a fairly timid step into the possibilities of online performance, it would really be something special to create a bit of that live theatre excitement online.