Incandescent Edges of the Future: Performance Creation with Virtual, Augmented and Carbon Realities

PubDate: Sep 2020

Teams: University of Calgary

Writers: Kates, Beth

PDF: Incandescent Edges of the Future: Performance Creation with Virtual, Augmented and Carbon Realities

Abstract

The emerging technologies of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality provide the potential to change the traditional forms of theatre in unprecedented ways – fundamentally changing methods of designing, making, and performing theatrical storytelling. These emerging technologies offer new modes of audience interactivity and engagement. In the face of a changing world, these digital portals provide means of profound human connection and ways to transcend time, digital space and physical place. These are ways to overcome limitations on our physical movement due to the current pandemic and the restrictions that (can and should) come from the effects of climate change. Through these technologies we expand the practice of collaboration and the nature of human connection. Uninhibited by real-world physics we are liberated from the historical boundaries of storytelling and world building, better able to explore different world-views and expand notions of creation, performance and spectatorship. This thesis is an examination of audience experience, creative collaboration, devised and collective creation in the spaces where it intersects with technology and design. It examines how that space can be kept fluid and creative, and how the combined elements can impact each other. My desire for this fluidity drives my curiosity around what we theatre-makers need to know about VR and AR that will allow for creative collisions. How can we create the conditions necessary for this alchemy, growth and symbiosis to occur? I argue that there are new methods to be found when approaching these emerging tools; that there are practical, tangible ways to begin to adapt our practices to allow for their integration, and that we are at the inception of a new form of performance—another phase of the “theatre that survived the theatre” (Kiesler).