Real or Virtual Shepherds

KENT -- Kent State's School of Theatre and Dance will present the Kent Second Life Ensemble performing in two plays from the Wakefield Mystery Cycle, The Creation and The Second Shepherd’s Play, at 7:40 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 9, and Thursday, Dec. 11, and at 7 p.m. and on Wednesday, Dec. 10, in Stump Theatre in the Music and Speech Center.

This presentation will allow audience members to view the "live" and "virtual" performance of the actors. Kent State's Second Life Ensemble will present two plays this December within the virtual world.

The location of the production in Second Life (SURL), is Theatre, Tir Tairngiri (212, 47, 28). This international collaboration of visual, computer and theatre artists is funded by a grant through the Office of the Vice President for Regional Development, with support from the School of Theatre and Dance, the Computer Science Program, the Research Center for Educational Technology and the College of the Arts.

Special support for the demonstration is provided by Kent State Teleproductions, which will enable audience members attending the Dec. 10 Stump Theatre performance to see simultaneously "backstage" into the world of computer animation and virtual performance. The Kent Second Life Ensemble — composed of Zapytowski, Mark Monday, assistant professor of theatre, and 12 Kent State students — will perform this groundbreaking virtual play in Second Life while sitting side-by-side at computers located in the same room.

Currently, there are Second Life theatre companies that conduct productions together with actors performing their lines into microphones from their own personal computers, but Zapytowski says that there is no other group in Second Life that has performed in the virtual world from the same location.

"We are streaming audio into Second Life which hasn’t been done with a play before," Zapytowski says. "We can do this because we have our actors all in one place." He added that the group will be using specially created lighting instruments to allow the ensemble to create a theatrical lighting design in Second Life. This too is a first in the virtual world. "But no other project has the support of a major university, the support of a computer science department and is producing at the technical or artistic level at which we are working," Zapytowski says.

For those interested in viewing the production virtually in Second Life, the productions will take place "in world" on Dec. 9 at 4 and 5:15 p.m.; Dec. 10 at 5:15 p.m.; and Dec. 11 at 4 p.m. and 5:15 p.m. in Obradlan Siorai, or Theatre Eternal, which Steve Zapytowski, professor of design and technology, constructed in Second Life.

For more information about the production, contact the project principal investigator Zapytowksi at szapytow@kent.edu.