Staging Mixed Reality

Staging Mixed Reality considered the ever-evolving field of mixed reality performance.

5 March 2020, National Theatre

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.

This theatre design symposium considered how real and virtual worlds have been combined in performance to produce new environments and encounters for audiences. It explored the critical and creative processes involved in the discipline and asked key questions of its practice, including:

• 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 symposium set-out to explore how experiments with technology and digital media have shaped and altered the versions of reality represented on stage today.

Speakers:

• Suzanne Andrade - Co-Artistic Director of 1927
• Sophie Jump - Co-Artistic Director of Seven Sisters Group and Senior Lecturer in Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Arts
• Roma Patel - Scenographer and Installation Artist at Digital Set Design and Founder at Makers of Imaginary Worlds
• Dick Straker - Video and Projection Designer at Mesmer and BA Theatre Design Lecturer at Wimbledon College of Arts

Mixed Reality Panel with:

• Stewart Pringle - Immersive Storytelling Studio at National Theatre
• Steve Jelley - Dimension Studio

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, the National Theatre and the Jocelyn Herbert Archive.

Watch the full playlist from the day on YouTube.