The SL Shakespeare Company Returns to Shakespeare with Twelfth Night:
In Their Usual Trademarked Extravagance…

Shakespeare, Second Life: The SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) will perform a full ensemble performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: Act 1 in a special short-run advance miniseason as part of their Fall Season 2008 repertoire. Opening on SLSC Thursday, November 13th (following a “sneak peek” on November 12th), the full-length Act 1 is the first part of the culmination of a summer’s worth of rehearsal-performances in SLSC’s tag-team staged reading series of Twelfth Night.

Maintaining their tradition of visual and theatrical extravagance, the miniproduction also introduces the usage of multiple rotating sets, incognito animation preloading, global lighting and weather control to SLSC stagecraft technologies. Live dynamic camera control by a director finetunes the performance with a cinematic appeal, while international subtitles, the SLSC’s “Pay as you Will” philosophy, and the play’s location in the confluence of four island simulators of the SL Globe Theatre make the performance accessible to as many as possible.

Directed by Ina Centaur and Voice Directed by Enniv Zarf, the production stars MadameThespian Underhill, Joff Fassnacht, Prospero Frobozz, Ludo Merit, Maedin Tureaud, and Lorne Harlequin, and also a motley cast of “silent actors” who create a different variation of a background crowd each time.

Miniseason schedule (All times SLT or GMT-8):
Wednesday, Nov 12 - 11 am “sneak peek”
Thursday, Nov 13 - high noon
Friday, Nov 14 - 1 PM
Saturday, Nov 15 - 2 pm - (ticketed)*
Sunday - no show
Monday, Nov 17 - high noon

*Most of our shows at the SL Globe Theatre are free, but VIP/ticketed shows charge a nominal admissions fee of L$500. The smaller audience may entice.

ABOUT The Company: <<<
The SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) is a resident-funded and resident- supported professional theatre company that embraces the best of what Second Life (SL) has to offer. Since 2007, we have been making history by providing extravagant and unforgettable theatrical performances on Second Life. With each show, we continue to shape the field by developing and releasing a new technology for virtual theatre on Second Life. Our vision is to make live Shakespearean theatre available to anyone anywhere with a computer to create new possibilities in entertainment, culture, and commerce for residents of a diverse, unbounded geosphere. Those are the side effects of our mission: to make Shakespeare cool again! Latest News: http://blog.SLshakespeare.com

ABOUT The SL Globe Theatre <<<
SL Globe Theatre, sLiterary is a virtual reconstruction of the Original Globe Theatre that historians conjecture stood in Shakespeare’s days. It is meticulously adapted as a functioning theatre in the massively multiuser virtual world of Second Life. The SL Globe Theatre is the most historically accurate rendition of the Globe Theatre on the Internet. Its SL rendition is set in the confluence of 4 island simulators - thus allowing for the maximal number of local audience members. Web preview: http://visit.SLshakespeare.com

Drop by a free show (or a VIP-ticketed one), take photos, post to the group, and win! Drop by the SL Globe Theatre anytime before the show for a sneak peek of the sets.

SL Globe Theatre Pit entrance: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/Shakespeare/255/255/25
SL Globe Theatre Main entrance: http://SLurl.com/secondlife/sLiterary/23/13/23

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The NEH recently switched from the icky PureView form (which actually requires a Windows 98 machine to use!) to Acrobat form packages. It’s interesting the pdf is made to emulate the old PureView form interface. After about half a dozen submissions errors (Error: Intake servlet is unable to save the data. Error message:: Broken pipe), I finally get a grantor-received email, so I guess I’m FINALLY done. Yippee!

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Pillar #1: Ransom for the SL Shakespeare Company & SL Globe Theatre

Shakespeare, Second Life: The SL Shakespeare Company last month announced its Fourteen Pillars Fundraising Campaign, whose goal is to fill up all fourteen pillars to raise L$14 million, L$1 million per pillar. On Friday, July 18, to kick start the closing weekend of its month-long Twelfth Night staged reading series, the troupe plans to hold a “Twelfth Night MegaFundundraiser” in attempt to fill up the first pillar.

At 1 pm on Friday the 18^th, seven actors will be jailed for their acting crimes by “an evil director,” likely Enniv Zarf, producer and director of the Twelfth Night staged reading series. Each actor’s bail will be set to L$100,000. Their goal is to woo the audience with only improv acting and their wits. Enniv Zarf explains, “The practical point is to get all of them out by 7 PM so that we can give the encore performance at our previously scheduled time.”

For the remaining L$300,000, the Company also plans to turn the SL Globe Theatre into a true black box theatre—“black, black, and nothing else”—in the historic first ransom of a virtual building.

Ina Centaur, artistic director and executive producer, comments, “We are truly what we say we are—a group of thespians and other professionals dedicated to our craft, bound together by Shakespeare, and way-too-excited to wait for outside funding before beginning something truly spectacular within the virtual world of Second Life. Furthermore, beyond the fact that we are trying to be Shakespeare’s analogue in live virtual theatre (the man was the foundation of modern theatre; we aim to establish the foundation of virtual theatre), we are also trying to create good within and for the audience of a virtual world that has more often been associated with the bad. In turn, though the money would be raised to create the good within, we believe this good will flow out of Second Life through the positive impact of the experience we create.”

Centaur has also been involved with numerous fundraisers based in Second Life, most notably her recent notable contributions in the Second Life Relay for Life campaigns. Despite her success she holds uncertainty in this upcoming fundraiser, “While my RFL teams together have raised over L$3 million through passive efforts and huge bursts through short-term events, we had the relatively easy job of campaigning for an existing and well-established charity for a direct health-related cause. Albeit The SL Shakespeare Company is known to be a source of good in Second Life, the concept of campaigning for major funding for a good within Second Life may be too revolutionary for others to get. We’ve got some tough mileage ahead, both with the technology and production mechanics, and also with convincing people of our ideas… We’ll just have to see what happens.”

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Shakespeare, Second Life: In June 2008, the SL Shakespeare Company (SLSC) announced the “Fourteen Pillars Fundraising Campaign” to help raise capital for its highly anticipated full-length full-ensemble production of Hamlet and other Shakespearean works. The goal is to raise L$14 million to fill up all 14 currently-empty pillars of the Campaign.

In a backstage private presentation given to VIP and members of the 1300+ member SL Shakespeare Company group on Second Life, executive producer and artistic director Ina Centaur gave a brief recounting of the various Globe Theatres she had built on Second Life and other virtual realities, and also the Second Life land problems the Company had to face, which ultimately forced her to invest in purchasing four island simulators for the Theatre. She then explained the Company’s goals and revealed its financial status, “We’re not funded by any external agency other than our own passion for the endeavor—and that’s really also internal… And it is so rare to see that in a humanities project, but we have it! We’ve already done what other projects with hundreds of thousands of real US dollars could not do. But, to maintain it for any longer, we will need your help…”

The problem arose in April from the Company’s all-too-sensational, but all-too-sudden miniproduction of Hamlet: The Mousetrap, which featured a cast of a baker’s dozen live actors and introduced the faces of the play’s main characters, including Hamlet, Ophelia, Claudius, Polonius and Gertrude. Centaur explained the miniproduction’s major problem, “We tried our best to work the schedule based on the actor’s availabilities; but having Second Life as a second or third or fourth or lower priority simply won’t do for a full-ensemble full-length production.” Managing director Sabina Stenvaag stated, “Scheduling was chaos, and we’ve even had to deal with some last minute re-casting before a show opened.” Co-executive producer and director Enniv Zarf agreed that, “The only way a full-length full-everything production would work is if we had everyone taking Second Life seriously, take their roles as a full time first life job for a month.”

“We’re going to continue no matter what. We hadn’t planned to ‘demote’ our productions to staged readings, but we had to do so due to funding and because we wanted to be able to continue to perform,” said Enniv Zarf.

Ina Centaur explained, “Outside institutes and funding agencies do not seem to understand what we’re doing, and that perhaps explains for their reluctance in funding. We’re new and we’ve got a sprakling new idea. For the past eleven months, I have been spending a huge chunk of my time in both finding and fostering the SLSC. The theatre prides itself in its professional productions and large-scale venue—but those come at a cost. Practically everything I have done on Second Life is in attempt to break even and make the theatre self-sufficient within Second Life.”

The Campaign’s characteristic donation kiosk is a self-updating posterboard, which visually represents the fourteen empty pillars as printed woodcuts on aged parchment. As the funds accumulate, the pillars will appear “filled.” Currently, two kiosks are placed in the SL Globe Theatre. They will soon be dispersed on the walls of upcoming builds in the Shakespeare island simulator as “Elizabethan graffiti”.

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I get so much done when SL is offline.

Finished makeup editions for Kassia and Dria, and also finally pdf2tga’ed the SL Shakespeare Company programme!

And now for more SQL fun @ SQLzoo…

Two Table Join

1b. Show the who and the color of the medal for the medal winners from ‘Sweden’

SELECT who,color FROM ttms JOIN country ON (ttms.country=country.id) WHERE country.name=’Sweden’

1c. Show the years in which ‘China’ won a ‘gold’ medal.

SELECT games FROM ttms x JOIN country y ON (x.country=y.id) WHERE y.name=’China’ AND x.color=’gold’

2b. Show which city ‘Jing Chen’ won medals. Show the city and the medal color

SELECT city, color FROM games JOIN ttws ON (ttws.games=games.yr) WHERE who=’Jing Chen’

2c. Show who won the gold medal and the city.

SELECT who, city FROM games x JOIN ttws y ON (x.yr=y.games) WHERE color=’gold’

3a. Show the games and color of the medal won by the team that includes ‘Yan Sen’.

SELECT games,color FROM ttmd JOIN team on (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE team.name=’Yan Sen’

3b. Show the ‘gold’ medal winners in 2004.

SELECT name from team JOIN ttmd ON (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE ttmd.games=2004 AND ttmd.color=’gold’

3c. Show the name of each medal winner country ‘FRA’.

SELECT name FROM team JOIN ttmd on (ttmd.team=team.id) WHERE ttmd.country=’FRA’

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 If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels anywhere but in that one well-funded church endeavor, it would be akin to a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it.

I think I have discovered that it’s not the beauty or merit of a piece that gets it the support it needs, but the level of publicity it attains. Having to both self-publicize, direct, and produce a piece makes it triply difficult – and funding as well is enervating. It takes precious life from art — and I do mean that both ways. After giving out a funding spiel describing SLSC initiatives, all I want to do is log out and poof — literally. And having to self-publicize just means I can spend that much less time on the actual art itself. Which defies the purpose of working on my own project…

If Michelangeo painted the Sistine Chapels in the streets of Sicily, people would walk all over it, and its colors and vibrancy would be stolen on the soles of countless travellers.  

In school, I used to think that missing an earned point there and here due to random grading errors didn’t matter. That was also what the prof’s said. But, the truth is that a few points missed here and there add up. It’s like in an old friend’s reminisces of AP Spanish, where extra credit was granted “randomly” to students who shout out “pointa, pointa!” for answering random hodge-podge. And in the end, it was this one extra credit point she missed that made the difference between an A and a B. For her, it meant losing out on being valedictorian. Microecon is life, really. A dollar saved here and there every day multiplied by 356 days becomes a size-able fortune. Similarly, being unlucky enough to receive grades on the borderline for dozens of courses, and not having the heart to fight for the next…

And then there are stories that you’d think were published on The Onion, rather than CNN, that, although AP-style, is just so full of… story. Take this one, for example, where a judge is accused of falling asleep during a trial, requiring treatment like a queen, among other things… and the fact that she can still stand all that personal invective-type drama against her really does illustrate an extremely strong character. 

It really is all about the guts and bull to fight, to get the word out.

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The SL Shakespeare Company’s Miniproduction #1 is *finally* over after the press-only show earlier today! LOL, for the first time in a looong time, I got to take a break to check out the various other live events on SL. Fun!

And in other news, I really have to start finishing Skin City and Shakespeare. Hmm, so why am I not hiring out? Well, I bought 4 sims… and now I’m broke… and not just that, I almoooost forgot how much I love building!

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Live theatre is — by nature — temporal. Although it’s guided by the playscript, as implemented in the director’s vision, what goes on during showtime is quite often spontaneous, and in some cases filled with so many surprises of serendipity or misfortune that nothing appears like anything the director had in mind. But, the magic of it all is that even if the theatre burns down or if a backdrop collapses on an actor’s back… everything always ends up “right”… from one POV at least!

Virtual theatre in a MMOG is all that — and more. You have the advantage of a potentially infinite and globally unrestricted theatre, but technical issues on serverside, clientside, and yourside make the combination something of a blender jumble.

In a virtual theatre set in a platform like Second Life — which, because of its general nature and free-range customization appeal, suffers from significant performance issues when more than two dozen avatars are in the same locality — issues such as sim crashes, viewer crashes, ruthing (when an avatar’s appearance reverts to the default avatar), attachments being misplaced, textures not loading, prims not loading, local lighting being too local, collisions going berserk, and lag… often occur!

Although my test system should be more than sufficient to view Second Life, the actors all appear horribly ruthed for every single performance (even the ones where we didn’t pack the house). I can only imagine that the audience might end up suffering a different or worse POV due to system differences — but, then again, our strategy thus far has been to keep publicity inworld… such that those who visit are well aware of the quirks of Second Life, and would understand that it’s the platform collapsing as we all attempt to gather there at one point.

In a Second Life theatre set in the intersection of four-sims (currently, that is the only way to hold a large event on one location, as each sim is limited to 100 avatars), there are also problems with simcrossings. For a round theatre like the Globe, audience members may get “eaten by prims” as they cross sim borders, due to physics oddity. This bug should really *not* be an issue, as a virtual world whose “safe lands” to walk on spans only 256×256m2 … is a small world indeed! (Please vote here.)

The SL Globe Theatre is set on the intersection of sLiterary, Primtings, Skin City, and Shakespeare, and is home to the SL Shakespeare Company. It has an entire sim dedicated to the stage (and VIP audience members), and thus has an audience capacity of up to 300, supporting up to 400 local avatars.

Now, when a sim crashes, it basically looks like 1/4 of the Globe is gone. And it’s not always obvious that that’s what happened. You’d think it’s because your viewer spontaneously derezzed the view further than a certain viewdistance, but when you see ocean instead of land — the vast emptiness of an area once teeming with green map dots on the minimap makes it evident that the region has crashed.

Time is an interesting complication to get straight and universal for a medium accessible to an international audience. Daylight Savings Time, especially, becomes confusing when different regions of the world observe it differently or not at all! We had scheduled 10 runs starting on “SLSC Thursday,” but skipped Wednesday (assuming it might be downtime Wednesday), but I’d forgotten that the 10th and closing show occurred on DST… until the day of the show.

Second Life Time is actually PST or PDT, when DST is observed. But, those across the pond apparently don’t observe DST until more than two weeks after California switches over. Interestingly, we had a crowd arrive at both the 3 PM PDT and the 3 PM PST. We thus ended up doing an “encore finale” at 4 PM PDT (the old 3 PM PST), where we had the voice director do a speaking cameo for Francisco, after spontaneously upgrading the old Francisco to Horatio (who could not make it to the 4 PM). We also had a missing Francisco for the 3 PM, and had the Ghost voice out the role of a visual truant Francisco.

Chaos? No, but there does exist method in the madness… The only sane way to accept it all is to keep an open mind — and to take it all… passively, as accepting of everything as you can.

And, of course, we didn’t get to sign a restrictive license from DPS where we aren’t allowed to deviate from script. The advantage of performing a play written by a guy who’s so set for posterity there are (literally!) busts of him ubiquitous… and especially when we’re not certain if the plays we have are accurate per se, and when we’re pretty sure his players improv’ed their way through… is that when all else fails… the play is free to become truly live… temporal and spontaneous as the spoken word.

In closing, I’d like to address the cynics who believe that this endeavor is in vain, both because of platform and nature of the medium. While I’m well aware that there are plenty of greenscreening technologies that interface, in real time, real actors with virtual sets, the beauty of having a theatre in a virtual world is that… the theatre is actually *in* a world. I think that distinguishes a play from something seen on a 2d screen — you can see it at various angles if you tilt your head a bit… or a much wider angle if you become restless and start pacing through the seats. And, when it’s over, you can continue to “live” in the virtual world knowing that you’ve just attended a major Shakespearean production… perhaps with your virtual family or with friends separated by great spans of space and time. Although you’d view it using a technological interface (and, perhaps, with your view limited by this interface), it’s immersive, and you’re a part of it.

(Cross posted at Hamlet Production Blog - Ina Centaur Blog doesn’t allow commenting, but feel free to comment on the other blog)

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