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Sunday, February 7, 2016

What is twenty-first-century magic?

More from the team behind the Royal Shakespeare Company's performance-capture Tempest:
"What's twenty-first-century magic? Well, I guess it comes in some kind of digital form these days. We've started to see a lot more in film, in the world of movies, but we've never really explored that in the theatre context.... It's the creative process that drives the technology, and not the other way around. So it started to be a match made in heaven, from that point of view." 
– Stephen Brimson Lewis, Director of Design, RSC




"With The Tempest we're really trying to redefine theatre, in some respects, and find a way to bring in new digital technology and really leverage it to make the story deeper, to find new ways to connect with a character, and maybe a different audience... an entirely new generation."
– Tawny Schlieski, Research Scientist, Intel

"The most exciting thing about what we're doing at the moment is enabling an actor to have a real connection with an avatar. It's the sort of thing that I do on a daily basis in the studio for films and video games. In this instance, we're doing something that's going to be a live theatrical experience. What you see is what you get." 
– Ben Lumsden, Head of Studio, The Imaginarium

"The play demands a spectacle. There's a masque in the middle of the play, an insubstantial pageant, which fades into nothing, but it creates wonder. I want to let the guys at Intel know a bit about what that tradition was, just how elaborate those masques were, and how they were pushing the envelope." 
– Gregory Doran, Artistic Director, RSC