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SARAH ELLIS: My name is Sarah Ellis. I'm Director of Digital Development at the Royal Shakespeare Company. My role is about imagining the future through our past,

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our present, and working with our company to extend a theatre making toolkit through new technologies. But also to look at international collaborations with artists that can re-imagine Shakespeare and think

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about the relevance of our work in the 21st century. I think the RSC as the form of theatre has always had a relationship with technology. And as part of that always embraced innovation.

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The Royal Shakespeare Company over its long history has always innovated, whether that's through artistic practise, whether that's through infrastructure. And the sort of age we're in now, the digital age,

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has embraced what those technologies that are coming into our everyday world and how we can apply those technologies in a theatre making toolkit. So the question for the RSC is what

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technologies it chooses that are useful, innovative, that moves the form forward. And hark back to candlelight being a technology. Electricity being a technology.

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And embracing those opportunities for us to tell stories in new ways, and also give an amazing portfolio and toolkit to designers, directors, producers, artists, actors, creative teams to be able to imagine those worlds

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of those stories in new ways. Over the last few decades, we've seen a profound shift in the connection between generations. And that's mainly come from the fact

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that we are in the only time where we will have a workforce that have lived by growing up without an internet. And a workforce that have lived only with the internet.

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And it's the convergence of those generations that is the most interesting part, in my opinion, of how we connect craft and new technologies and new ways of working.

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And how we bring that together and not see that as a binary opposite. So over the past 20 years, we've seen exponential growth in what a digital world is, what a virtual world is.

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Taking that away from a computer screen, but actually thinking about that more pervasively. But we've also seen a huge spotlight on craft as a result. And how we make our work and the tactility

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of our work and this virtual space that's emerging. What's exciting about that is that theatre can sit with both. Theatre as a 3D space and can imagine worlds. And the opportunity and the swiftness

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of those technologies coming into our spaces is really rapid. But we need time to make sure that they become tools rather than technologies and have a usefulness around the craft

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of making Theatre. And I think that will take a lot longer for us to establish. So we've seen a big shift over the past 20 years from video projection being a screen on a stage,

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and we're seeing a lot more integration of technology. The video projection has become a lot more pervasive in terms of integrated into the design of a set. We're seeing integration of BSL and captioning as well

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into creative captioning. And there are practitioners out there that are experimenting with what it means to look at a play from a non ableist approach.

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And that accessibility is within everyone's needs around the work. We're also seeing motion capture, volumetric capture, photogrammetry, labels in terms of basically taking images

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of 3D digital assets into the pre-production process, virtual model boxes, how we make our work in a game engine that allows us to look at and modularized work rather than. And a designer can make choices in the moment in real time.

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So the speed of those technologies and integrating into that has become very useful. And I think things like motion capture, computer vision, 3D web, I mean web 3.0 are, again, the emergent technologies that

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are coming up along the track as well. And these are new tools that need to embed in traditional practise. I mean, the main focus I think for us

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and a main stage production with groundbreaking technology was The Tempest back in 2016. And that was the brief and sort of provocation from Greg, the director and Artistic Director at the time,

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for that production of Shakespeare's last play. It's one of his most innovative plays. And in the play, there is spectacle which we felt demanded a digital spectacle in 2016

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and the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. And therefore, for us to go into partnership with a major technology company and motion capture studio at that time and explore the play through that lens

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was really groundbreaking. So as much as the technology was groundbreaking, actually the collaboration and setup of the production was groundbreaking.

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And that allowed us to not only think about Theatre but those technologies that are used in film and gaming, it allowed that production to have optics in a different space and capture the imagination

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of other industries of how Theatre innovates, its capabilities, it's scale, and ambition. So really the technology was the tool to actually be groundbreaking in many ways

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and reach new audiences. And some of the successes and groundbreaking this was the technology itself and what we were doing was cutting edge at the time.

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And still is to a certain extent. But the technology also allowed us to be really groundbreaking when we think about audiences and how we can reach them and how we can connect with them.

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So I think Shakespeare was an innovator. And how his contemporaries innovated at the time is quite well documented. And those plays have always had a resonance in the generation

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that they've been in due to their context. And I think that the innovation within the plays, the magic of those plays allows us to place a sense of realism through that magic with audiences.

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And technology can disappear through the storytelling of those plays. And they are a gift to designers who would like to explore and re-imagine

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those characters every generation that we put them through. And in the generation that we're in now those plays are deeply significant in terms

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of their subject matter and the characters. But they're also really elastic for us to have cultural reference points that we understand in society.

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We know those plays. But we can re-imagine them through a contemporary lens. And that one of the most significant impacts in this generation is the technology that

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has been democratised and distributed like the printing press was for the folio that allowed Shakespeare's plays to still be with us today because we have a document of those plays.

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That it is in that spirit that I think that technology is a really live conversation for us in terms of his plays. And how when we look at innovation, how significant

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is that in our pockets. We have a phone that is not just a phone, but a storytelling surface. And that how do we in terms of Theatre

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reach out to those spaces now beyond the infrastructures and buildings that we occupy. The RSC has that pervasively across its portfolio and programme to look at public engagement.

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Its purpose as a charity absolutely extends those principles by thinking the specific relationship to technology the democratisation of technology of what audiences have available to them

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and how we can reach them. We look at technology much more not just on the technical delivery of a staged production, but also how we can use the channels that we have

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and the global reach that we have to connect. And not only do we look at ourselves as a broadcaster, but we then can convene a conversation and a dialogue because it's a two way multiplicity multiple community

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that we can convene with different voices, different opinions. And that's super exciting for us. And I think that as we move forward

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much more relevant for us to be in those spaces and part of those conversations. One of the biggest challenges around new and emerging and cutting edge technologies coming into the Theatre

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production making process or toolkit is their readiness. And that we can get very excited about a technology, but it's got to be robust. It's got to work eight shows a week.

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It's got to be delivering. And if it breaks down, we are then breaking a contract with an audience. So the testing of those technologies

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in a research and development phase is super important. The integration of those technologies so that they're working alongside existing technology that we're using and not obstructing that.

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Those are really important practical concerns. So the challenges around technology are is that technology taking away from the storytelling? What's its purpose?

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What's its intentionality? Are we showcasing a technology or are we serving the story? And it's always the latter that we're looking at. So is that technology easier achieved by a piece

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of paper and some sellotape? If it is, then we should make those decisions based on what's best for the story. So one of the biggest challenges is

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infantilizing that technology. And the other challenges is making sure that technology has a readiness to go into production that is robust, safe, doesn't obstruct an audience

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experience, whether that's due to it working or it getting in the way of sharing those stories. I think researchers accessing this collection online is a great resource.

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What's always great about having a relationship with a researcher as opposed to being a practitioner is that in the moment you don't often have an academic lens on why you're making those decisions.

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And what that research does is allow it to play back to us on the decision making we had at the time, the context of the time, the social context. And so by placing this work in the context of collection

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and research, we will learn more about ourselves through that rigour and academic lens. And as practitioners, we're often very present tense or even future tense.

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But we need a relationship with the past also and reflection to innovate also. So that's where it's from my perspective. A brilliant resource from my perspective,

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but also a brilliant resource for anyone doing this work in the future.