Join world leading designers, directors and theatre companies, as well as leading academics for a one-day symposium considering the practical and creative possibilities of mixed reality and virtual worlds in theatre and performance.

Staging Mixed Reality will focus on the ever-evolving field of mixed reality performance and will examine the new aesthetics being developed through digital possibilities. From interactive media to virtual reality, animation to video gaming, technology has enabled theatre practitioners to offer varied perspectives of reality that reimagine theatrical worlds.

Staging Mixed Reality will consider how real and virtual worlds have been combined in performance to produce new environments and encounters for audiences. It will explore the critical and creative processes involved in the discipline and ask key questions of its practice, such as:

What methods do designers, digital designers and directors use to achieve their intended effects and affects in performance? How are the boundaries of performance expanded through mixed reality and virtual worlds? And, to what extent do virtual worlds in theatre reframe or transform how we interact with the real world?

With these questions and more in mind, this theatre design symposium will explore how experiments with technology and digital media have shaped and altered the versions of reality represented on stage today.

Staging Mixed Reality is convened by Dr Matthew McFrederick, Professor Eileen Hogan and Professor Jane Collins as part of a collaboration between Research at Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon’s Public Programme, the National Theatre and the Jocelyn Herbert Archive.

Tickets: £55 / £40 (senior citizens) / £15 (students/U18s/entry pass)

UAL students and staff should use the promo codes when booking tickets. Please contact ccwresearchevents@arts.ac.uk for more info.

Credit: Monostatos threatens Pamina in Barrie Kosky’s The Magic Flute. 1927 Production. Photo ©Scott Masterton.