SHARK! THE INTERACTIVE MUSICAL
Shark! empowers the audience to make tough choices and join the performers as they grapple with issues thematically represented by a great white shark. This performance project explores themes of racial identity, gender identity and the secrets that lie deep below the surface. The audience can input suggestions, vote on choices, and become shark, mentor, or hero in this 60 minute interactive musical. Developed at Georgia State University and based on the interaction practices developed in Dance Engine, Shark uses a web-based application that allows audience members to use their phone to vote, control lights, alter music, and be immersed in the performance. The goal of each performance is to transition the audience into performers.
Shark explores the classic monomyth with the great white shark representing the challenges in our own lives. Safety, risk, danger, and defense are all explored at the waters edge in this performance where the audience has control.
The audience is given progressively more control over the show. The audience votes on which actor will play the hero and the actions that the hero takes. The audience also controls the mood and forward progress of the production by changing the music, and working for or against the hero when faced with the shark.
National Performances
- Brigham Young University, 2025
- Science Gallery Detroit, DEPTH curated exhibit, June 2019
- Michigan State University, April 2019
- Georgia State University, April 2018
Story Structure in Shark
Collective storytelling is the central element of Shark!. The experiences, choices, and objectives of the audience as a whole drive the story forward. Each person in the audience is offered a role of their choosing; hero, mentor, trickster, villain, and their decisions shape the story that they are watching and creating. This inverts the theatrical convention that the actor represents the individual and the represents audience as society. In Shark! the audience explores the multitude of choices and identities of performance that live within us all. The obvious tools of interaction used in this performance are the mobile application, lights, music but the central principle and the one that makes this performance possible is intention. Shark! uses the audiences innate understanding of ‘how a story should go’ to explore objectives, conflict, and consequences. In theatre, the audience can again explore the function of play in processing, connecting, and exercising creativity.
Branch-Point
Shark began with a branch point narrative style where choices are presented to the hero and audience and result in either death or a new branch-point. If death, the performance “rewinds” to the nearest choice point and the audience is presented with new options. This concept of branching narratives is a technique often used in video games and choose your own adventure stories. The workshop performance of Shark! at Georgia State University used Branchpoint narrative as the driving concept behind the script and performance structure.
In early rehearsals, it became clear that a narrator was needed to help the audience navigate the choices presented and transition from audience to performer. The audience needed an ally, someone who had one foot in each world; both in and out of the story. Information in a story is personified and delivered from a point of view. Early rehearsals with choice points presented from a neutral stance felt removed and distant from the theatrical storytelling. With the addition of the narrator, point of view, bias, and an alliance were possible.
Monomyth
The workshop performance of Shark! at Michigan State University was built on audience’s innate understanding of story structure. The monomyth or “Hero’s Journey” as coined by Joseph Campbell, outlines common elements in many stories. The creative team used these key moments as the structural grounding in composing the moments of tension, the interactions, and the music.
Long-form Improv
Research using long-from improv as a source of additional interactions and narrative structure was begun in 2019/2020. The focus of this research explored further personifying the currently invisible elements of control. In Dance Engine all audience participants are chosen at random. This was an initial choice made by the creative team to further remove the temptation of controlling the performance. Shark! which also aims to put the audience in the drivers’ seat, does not benefit from this invisible randomness. All elements of a story are personified (even natural disasters have an intent and purpose). The invisible and random element of the server used in the earlier iterations of Shark! fought against the storytelling mechanism of the intent for all elements of the narrative. Early rehearsals using a human stage manager and lighting designer, both visible to the audience, who vocally or visibly chose audience members to interact was far more successful. The “server” needed to be a part of the story, the conflict, and have a clear objective. Additional research exploring interactions based on audience physical movement (such as raising and lowering an arm to change tempo) rather than hidden on a phone was also moving in a positive direction. This greatly increased the integration of the audience as part of the scene in early steps of interaction and made the audience member (and their intent to help or hinder the hero) a visible part of the story. This research was halted before performance testing due to COVID.
Elements of Interaction
The audience interaction eased step-by-step into the performance as early workshops illustrated that the majority of the audience was unwilling to jump into a musical. The barrier to entrance was far higher than with Dance Engine where the audience was slowly introduced to the language of the dance but did not have to contend with lyrics or narrative.
In this illustration the image (A) on the left represents the significant but not insurmountable barrier of an audience member entering the performance space. The central image (B) represents the increase in challenge of an audience member ‘leaping’ into a performance role in a musical. In Shark the interactions moved the audience through a series of increasing levels of engagement to reduce the challenge of joining the actors on stage (represented by image (C)). This concept of stepping or scaffolding the performance interactions was developed in Dance Engine.
Introduction: Audience is introduced to the seaside town. Before the story starts popular music with shark themes is playing (the most successful in performance was Baby Shark) and the audience is invited to dance, with short filmed excerpts of this dance recorded for use later in the show. Audience members are also randomly assigned control of the tempo of the song being played. The purpose of this introductory section is to establish the ideas of interaction.
The narrator then begins the song “Plenty of Fish” which introduces the cast of actors and the conflicts between them. Before the final refrain, the audience is asked to vote on which hero they would like to see in the performance. The vote is a poll on their cellphone (and any audience member can vote as many times as they want). The minute by minute results are heard in the music and projected on the screen. Each choice is assigned a distinctive musical sound (buoy, sea bell, wind chime) and that sound becomes louder and more present if that choice is winning the vote. A bar graph projected on the screen updates to show the percentage of votes for each pair of actors.
The Call: “Death Ballad,” begins as a gentle “I want” song between the saxophone player and the actor cast as the sidekick. By the end of the song the saxophone player has been eaten by a shark and the sidekick runs off to find the hero. The hero is asked to fight the shark and the audience is given another choice point. Does the hero accept the call, or does the hero dismiss the call? The audience then collectively decides by shifting the soundscape (major key = accept, minor = dismiss) while the hero sings “I will ride this wave.”
Challenges: The server picks random audience members and a light shines on them. The narrator then approaches and asks if that audience member has suggestions for the hero. This casts the audience as potential mentors. The narrator is interrupted as the shark enters. The narrator then instructs the audience “lights off for the shark/lights on for the peep”. Audience members have a lightswitch on their phone and if they leave the light on, the actor in that light will be safe from the shark. If they turn it off, the shark can eat that actor.
Abyss: As the hero faces the impending big ordeal they are assisted by the narrator and audience in finding the one thing that will help them defeat the shark. The audience is asked to text in their suggestions and these suggestions are projected in a word cloud. The narrator works the chosen item into the “Talisman Song.” The hero then faces off with the Shark in “The First Boat Battle” and the audience again has control of the tempo to either help or hinder the hero.
Atonement: The hero has learned from their fight with the shark and this, and the wisdom of the pre-recorded audience dances, are woven together in “Circle Back.” At the end of which, the shark returns and the hero calls on the audience to rise and help fight the shark.
Return: The audience, both those standing and those who remained seated, are invited to sing the final song with the cast which is a reprise of the opening song.
Creative Artists on Shark:
- Project Director: Alison Dobbins, Professor Michigan State University
- Music Composer/Lyricist: Dr. Alexis Bacon, Assistant Professor Michigan State University
- Performance Director: Dr. Shondrika Moss-Bouldin
- Movement Choreographer (MSU performance): Brad Willcuts, Associate Professor Michigan State University
- Software Developer: Dr. Charles Owen, Associate Professor Michigan State University
- Lighting Designer: Michael Kraczek, Associate Professor Brigham Young University
- Technical Director: Bradley Branam, Associate Professor University of Oregon
- Video Designers (MSU performance): Zachary Hall & Brian Kusch, Michigan State University