What advantages are there to a transmedia approach to theatre-making over the more conventional approach?

When using a transmedia approach to creating a piece of theatre it allows you to look at a lot of different aspects that conventional theatre-making wouldn’t usually allow for. One of the main differences is the idea that you have the ability to use multiple different types of media which include the likes of Theatre, Television, Audio (Radio), Newspapers and Real World (RW), which includes the use of QR codes that would then take the audience to a certain social media page that gives them updates on the story. By using all of these different pieces of media it helps to make a more engaging performance by constantly keeping the audience on their toes by giving them more and more things to search for. A good example of the use of transmedia was the Swedish TV Show ‘The Truth About Marika’ in which the producers used a lot of different media to keep the audience engaged to a point where a lot of the show was deemed as being real. There have also been many more examples of these types of things as of recently that have been introduced through the internet platform ‘YouTube’ in which we’ve followed YouTubers trying to unmask stories of kidnap that they thought were genuinely real. Another thing that transmedia performance introduces is the idea of world building which lets us see the stories of characters that we may not necessarily always get to see and it allows us to see how things would differ in the performance from the introduction of these character stories.

To summarise, I feel as though transmedia is something that will only get bigger and I believe that it gives a massive advantage to theatre based work as it allows for the audience to be involved in completely new ways that keeps them fixated on the performance.