Infecting the Audience
by Jason Booker
An ongoing experiment in immersive theatre, ZED.TO created ByoLogyc, the story of a company with too much ambition and a controversial approach to healthcare. After creating a new drug, ByoRenew was introduced to VIPs at the Toronto Fringe Festival (where this ingenious interactive piece won the Innovation prize). Shortly thereafter, hackers infiltrated the company, tampered with the drug, overran their systems and mined the data to create a virus that has been unleashed on Toronto, as seen through their website, Twitter feeds, Scotiabank’s Nuit Blanche and other arts events over the summer and early autumn. Now, with the infected rates rising, ByoLogyc has created the climactic Retreat at the Brickworks. Retreat is intended to save audiences from impending doom, offering hope, a cure and possibly the identity of the hackers known only as EXE.
For a play about the end of the world, a place where hackers have infected an unsuspecting public by tampering with a new pharmaceutical, there’s a strange lack of panic. Instead, audiences are assigned a group upon entering registration and medical clearance must be given. With four different levels of tickets on offer, there are multiple tracks occurring in Retreat, each led by a member of the company ranging from the IT Department to Human Resources and the Security taskforce where participants will interrogate their fellow audience members. Naturally, the CEO also has an audience, the Board of Directors, who are treated to snacks and the cure but have to figure out how to handle this public relations disaster.
Retreat acts as a choose-your-own-adventure piece, occasionally offering audience members the chance to switch tracks. However, in my group, we were tame: quiet and observant but shy. When presented with challenges to solve (cracking a code, locating a message board or orienteering), we tended to function as a large unit that preferred to watch than participate – slow and steady, hiding from the monsters. So that, while the show has lots of exciting possibilities, many are left up to the audience to sort out and take control, which means, unfortunately, that some cajoling of your group-mates, convincing people of your correctness, jumping ship or overthrowing the authority figures is required.
Is this an experience in conveying the world created by the artists to the audiences or is it an experiment about seeing how audiences will react or interact with the show?
While the show seems to have lots of potential, it is loaded with content about the company and its history and backstory about the staff and their motivations that cannot be clearly communicated to the audience, not in the existing format of the piece. It sometimes seems as if the creators could not decide whether to make it a play about the actions in the moment or the unravelling of corporate power, greed and ambition. Is this an experience in conveying the world created by the artists to the audiences or is it an experiment about seeing how audiences will react or interact with the show?
An example of the communications issue: the audience is told to look out for infected people – but not told what the virus does to people or how one might identify a person who was infected. The threat of being around someone who is infected is supposed to be enough to scare us. (Sounds like a comment on our society of fear…) In our group, as we were outside the Brickworks, being lead up a steep gravel-covered path in the dark, we were informed that the infected would apparently be acting erratically – as if a trek up a damp hill in November with strangers is typical.
Retreat remains one of the most daring pieces to take place in Toronto, pushing the boundaries of what theatre is, how to blur the line between audience and participant and exploring form. The piece has rather magnificently crossed through the various festivals, publications and web presence that exists in Toronto but, unfortunately, concludes with a bit of a disorganized and unexplained ending before dispersing its audience into the night. Refine certain elements of the show, focus the audience on what they need to know or what they should be experiencing to understand the goings-on and ByoLogyc will become one of the savviest shows around. Unfortunately, this limited-run may be the last piece of the puzzle before the company is permanently put to bed. Let’s see what the future holds in store for young theatre creators in Toronto after this…
