One person starts the process. They select another person, or rotate their hat twenty degrees, and start thinking about the other people they need. Sometimes they send a message to many, many strangers (using a newspaper's classified ads section, or the internet) inviting them to a brief interview. Sometimes they invite people they know from past experience.
After interviewing people, the person gets them together, often four to five times a week, to read, practice, and memorize a sequence of statements and movements that come from their imagination, the script, and the environment. This group spends several weeks together like this.
Meanwhile, the person who started the process starts to create another group. Sending messages (again, to strangers, and often, to people they know) the person tries to convince people to assemble at one of many times, at a particular place.
In this moment, the two groups meet. One group plays out the sequence of movements and statements they have been practicing for the past several weeks. The other group sits still and watches them silently. Once the first group completes the sequence of movements and statements, the second group makes noise by slapping their hands together. Then they leave.
I'm deliberately using common terms to describe the process of making a typical theatre performance. Two groups come together for a little while: one group makes the show, the other consumes it. A third group brings them together--gets the space, makes the two groups, and makes sure they can come together at the right time.
The common theatre performance has these parts and they move more or less the same way every time.
What could be changed?
For starters, the script could change. I don't mean change between performances--I mean, change during performances. During practice, even. Imagine a script that re-writes itself (Never mind how that happens for the moment. We'll get to that later.) as the players are rehearsing, based, for example, on the experiences they have personally, outside of the experience of the rehearsals. One player has a difficult day, and the words they're asked to read that night reflect their experience. The other players ask a different set of questions. The play still flows around a core theme, but the details are subtly changed.
What else can be changed?
The nature of the interaction between the two groups can change. Some typical theatre has high interactivity between the audience and the players, such as the Blue Man Group. But most of the time, interaction is sitting and listening silently. The audience members rarely become a part of the making experience. So let's imagine that the audience is co-opted into the performance from the moment they enter the experience. Perhaps at times they don't realize it--they walk into a room, and in another room, their face appears lit large on a screen above a different audience. A player starts to talk with them--perhaps guided by a script that was written on the spot by a remote observer--and the whole dialogue is broadcast to the audience in the other room.
The difference between a player and an audience member is continually blurred by a mitigating party that creates guidelines for their interaction, and uses the environment to communicate the guidelines in subtle ways.
In fact, let's imagine the players, audience, and playwrights, directors, and technical experts can change places at a moment's notice. The environment facilitates this transformation.
What can change in this environment?
The typical theatrical performance has a stage, a seating area, a backstage, a green room, a lobby or waiting area, and a technical control room. What if all of these environments were instead features of existing environments? For example, actions taken in the lobby (button pushing, movements, speech) change the environment in the theatre itself--and the people there, acting in the theatre, change the lobby environment. I use change to indicate anything that we can easily change about an environment--the lighting, the sound, the distribution of people in the environment, even the words those people are invited to say. All of these things can easily be changed on the fly with simple, common, everyday technology.
I like theatre, but I want to do more with it. I want Bucketworks to be a place where anyone who enters can, sometimes, find themselves drawn into a performance they didn't know they were giving, with an audience that is creating their reactions and stimulations. Where performances are altered on the fly by their audiences, using simple controls that make the environment change. I want to see actors and audiences stimulated beyond their comfort to a true feeling of risk, because I know they will make meaning from the experience.
The technology is already there for this. We have things like the wikipedia, which means we can have things like the remotely written realtime script. A group of writers around the world, watching what happens in the environment, can 'suggest' lines through hidden screens that are visible to actors only when they are looking in the right direction--and computers can connect actors to scripts with the environment automatically and in realtime. Cameras then relay the realtime situation from multiple points of view to--other people, in other rooms which are identically capable. Sometimes, the audience is scripting the interactions in another environment, and sometimes, their interactions are scripted and they are following along.
Obviously, this can get really random. But the idea of a performance growing organically from the participation of people in an environment, dissolving all the boundaries around the parts and pieces in typical theatre, is intriguing, risky, and challenging.