Same locations, new team
By 2022, the partnership was working under different circumstances. Members of the original Tampere team had moved into other roles, and both institutions were adapting to changes in personnel as well as the continuing effects of the pandemic. Although the project was described as a resumption of the earlier collaboration, it also involved establishing a new working relationship.
The two teams brought slightly different expectations to the course, but these were not discussed fully enough during the planning. Coventry expected to continue the shared teaching model developed during the earlier projects, while the new collaboration took a more directed and research-focused form. In retrospect, we had assumed that the project’s established working practices would continue and did not explain clearly enough why co-teaching, informal student contact and shared decision-making had previously been important.
As rehearsals developed, sessions became more directed from one location, with Coventry staff taking a supporting role. This gave the course a different character from earlier iterations, in which teaching and artistic decisions had moved more regularly between the two studios. Neither approach was necessarily invalid, but the change had not been fully anticipated or negotiated before the students began working together.
The students also had fewer opportunities to meet informally outside the main telepresence sessions. Earlier projects had used online social spaces as breakout rooms to help the two groups become comfortable with one another. Without that additional contact, relationships developed more slowly and remained largely connected to the scheduled rehearsals.
At one point, the Coventry students questioned a particular performance approach because they were unsure what it was intended to achieve. Staff on both sides could have done more to explain and discuss the reasoning behind the work before asking the students to pursue it. The moment did not prevent the project from continuing, but it showed how easily instructions can be misunderstood when they cross a screen without an established relationship or shared context.
Lessons learned
Despite these challenges, the students remained engaged and generated several strong theatrical ideas. Their experiments with camera proximity, scale, mirrors and handheld lighting demonstrated that the telepresence space could still support inventive performance. The final production was coherent and artistically successful, even though the two groups did not develop the same depth of connection achieved by some earlier casts.
The experience was therefore less a failure than a useful change of perspective. It showed that different staff teams will approach the same technology and material in different ways, and that the project could not rely upon its working principles being understood without discussion. Shared expectations, informal student contact and clear explanations of artistic purpose would need to be deliberately rebuilt whenever a new partnership or teaching team became involved.
Tampere