As 080808, the second UpStage Festival of live online performances, draws closer, one of the 14 selected performances has already begun: “Calling Home: Part 1” by activelayers was presented on Tuesday 1 July.

The show revolves around four elusive characters, who are perhaps lost or searching or need to be called home, and who may or may not be connected to each other. Rather than providing a linear narrative, “Calling Home: Part 1” introduced these characters and threw down some of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of their lives, for the audience to ponder. Beyond the performance, further clues are provided on the activelayers web site (part two of the whole), where each character has a profile and links to their blogs and email addresses. The characters also appear in other online environments and email lists as they wander cyberspace, looking for a way home. We are invited to engage with the characters via all these means, to discover more about their personal pilgrimages.

activelayers are Cherry Truluck (UK), Suzon Fuks (Belgium/Australia), James Cunningham (Australia) and Liz Bryce (Aotearoa/NZ); the group collaborated on “The Old Hotel” which was performed at the 070707 UpStage Festival and formed activelayers early in 2008 to continue their collaborative work. As some of the more experienced users of the cyberformance platform UpStage, their performances have pushed the software to new limits. In “The Old Hotel” they found ways to add audio to UpStage before that was available as a feature, and in “Calling Home” they are experimenting with the use of multiple stages – active layers in action!

An UpStage “stage” is a web page which delivers visual, audio and textual material to an online audience in real time. Using more than one stage simultaneously creates a sense of multiple co-existing worlds that can criss-cross and overlap – avatars travel between stages, news items are echoed and transformed, and the sound from all stages is heard at once. It’s definitely a new challenge for the cyberformance audience: it took me some minutes to get over my anxiety of missing out on something – I was switching rapidly from one window to the other until finally I understood that there was no fast-paced narrative to try to keep up with, rather the gradual unfolding of character and situation. It’s always possible to scroll back in the text chat to catch up on anything missed, but in fact I didn’t have to do this. Once I found the rhythm of the piece, I moved more slowly between the stages and lingered where my interest took me.

Grand Uncle’s Hendrix-obsessed radio show and dreadful smoker’s cough provided a background score for the show, while specific sounds were used to call us back to particular stages, such as the mobile phone ringing on Finch’s stage, and dogs barking on Esme’s stage. Heather’s stage is quiet but magical – a talking diary and an old outside dunny that turns Tardis-like to provide Heather with a secret route to Esme’s stage. Postcards, emails, radio, television, mobile phones, blogs – for all the communication networks these characters have access to, they are isolated in their own little bubbles until Heather appears in Esme’s stage. Grand Uncle never makes a visual appearance but his gravely voice – disembodied yet clearly attached to a complaining body – drives the performance along and holds it all together.

The same networks of communication are also available to the audience: you can call Finch’s mobile phone (a UK number), send Grand Uncle a story and even be interviewed by him, and leave posts on Heather and Esme’s blogs (see http://www.activelayers.net/ for links). This performance continues beyond the confines of the stages and the time of the performance, and the audience is encouraged to engage with the characters. activelayers want to provoke the audience out of their passivity – whether we are stage-hopping, interacting with the characters, or simply pondering over what it might all mean, this is definitely a show to get you out of that comfortable seat in the dark auditorium.

Part 3 will be performed at the 080808 UpStage Festival, taking place online in UpStage on 8-9 August 2008, one of 14 performances created and performed by artists in 14 different time zones. See www.upstage.org.nz for further information about 080808 and the schedule of performances and watch online from anywhere, no log-in required.