Todd Eckert
Producer

I’d like to start with a simple statement: An Ark is not a work of AI.

There’s a current technological fixation I’m not sure I actually understand. The idea is to take the human elements of art, music, and theater—truly the most meaningful and vulnerable of our endeavors—and replace them with computer-generated whatevers. It’s a process of inferring plausible fiction and presenting it as truth—the solution to a problem no one actually has—which erodes the foundation of our shared experience every time it’s employed instead of someone real. And yet it appears to be succeeding on its perceived novelty alone.

I’m interested in the opposite: how we might utilize technology to expand the traditional forms of theater and film into something that isn’t otherwise possible—to bring us closer to the truth of ourselves through new experience. It feels like the essential point of art in the first place, and it was how we started when Simon Stephens and I began talking about trying to create a new form of storytelling. He responded with a gorgeous script—reflecting his relentless curiosity and a universality of the human spirit, which is almost impossible to pull off. Sarah Frankcom’s direction always centers around the humanity of the work, which is its greatest asset. And this cast! We literally managed to get all of our first choices, which never happens. Except that it did.

Ultimately we’ve tried to make An Ark a humble yet radical reimagining of how stories work at their most human. I’m happy to again be presenting together with Alex Poots and The Shed—a new work is best created with old friends.

Simon Stephens
Writer

Todd Eckert talked to me about the potential of mixed reality 10 years ago. As soon as he did I was struck that it would be possible to write a new play in the second person. A play in which each individual audience member was addressed personally by the actors. The idea of using a new technology to create the most intimate and human play imaginable haunted me. I wrote the first notes towards a draft as the pandemic hit its heights in early 2021. It made sense to me then to write about the theme I return to most obsessively. “How do we live when we know that we die?” It strikes me that our world is run at the moment by rich old men who refuse to acknowledge their own mortality. Their fear is legibly the fear of small children. They want to be kept out of prison and reassured that they will live forever. I wanted to write a piece that allowed us all, both separately and all at the same time, to look fearlessly into the heart of what it is to die for a while. It struck me that it might just be the greatest of all adventures.

Sarah Frankcom
Director

Throughout my professional life I’ve defined myself as a theater artist, and I’ve historically only ever been interested in working in the live medium. Whether directing performance or telling stories with actors and audience sharing the same space, I’ve always felt it’s in communal experiences that art can ask the most challenging questions, and best reveal the mysteries of human existence. However when I saw some of the amazing work Todd Eckert and Tin Drum have been making using full dimensional film I became very excited about how it might take an audience into a remarkable relationship with a group of actors, and create completely new opportunities to experience a play and make theater. Although still in its early stages of development, this new medium creates a magical space for an extraordinarily intimate and mesmeric encounter with actors and story.

I’ve collaborated with Simon Stephens many times over the years and directed the premieres for four of his plays. This new medium requires a different kind of text and dramatic storytelling, and I loved reading Simon’s response to the intimacy offered by the device and knew I wanted to work on it immediately. We have been on such an exciting shared journey to develop the play with actors. The beginning of the making process is the same as making a theater show—we cast, rehearsed, and then captured the play in a studio in Grenoble, France. There is no capacity to edit the capture so the actors had to film the play from beginning to end a number of times. Then the creative team started to shape a world and curate an audience experience for An Ark to live in.

An Ark is an unexpected meeting between the living and the dead in a public space. The technology allows us all to be in the same room, some of us to be physically present and some of us not, but we are briefly brought together in real time and space. We sit right in the middle of a conversation between four very different people who are strangers to each other bearing witness to their lives and deaths—sharing secrets, breaking confidences, remembering things long forgotten. Sometimes they speak directly to us, the audience, and sometimes they speak to each other. And when there is nothing left to say, they leave us and we are returned to the everyday. Whose life have they described? Who are the living and who are the ghosts?

What does it mean to be truly alive and present in life? An Ark has been a brilliant opportunity as a theater artist to make a play in a very different way whilst pioneering a new art form for telling stories and asking universal questions.

Top image: The cast of An Ark during the volumetric capture process. Left to right: Rosie Sheehy, Arinzé Kene, Ian McKellen, and Golda Rosheuvel. Courtesy Tin Drum.