SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted performing artists, compelling them to rethink how to create and present works. Many artists turned to digital technologies, maintaining a connection with audiences despite physical distancing. Virtual events emerged as a crucial platform, where performers engaged with audiences through video-sharing platforms and telecommunication services. However, this shift to digital performance lacked the human closeness that characterises in-person experiences. To bridge this gap and recreate the intimate connection between artists and audiences, virtual reality (VR) offers a promising solution to preserve the sense of intimacy and allows for reimagining the concept of “technoculture”, placing the audience in the performer’s perspective and fostering a deeper immersive engagement. This perspective paper explores VR’s potential to transform theatrical experiences, focusing on the adaptation of the play The Dark Master by the Japanese psychiatrist-turned-director/playwright Kuro Tanino. The paper will argue how VR can create a symbiotic relationship between the audience and the artist, enabling a fluid shift in perspective through the lens of posthuman practices. By analysing this performance, the paper seeks to underscore how integrating technology into the performing arts can offer fresh insights into societal and individual conditions. In updating the 1960s-70s immersive performances of Terayama Shūji and Kara Jūrō interpreted as political statements about the people’s need to reconnect with their senses and disconsolate unresolved feelings, Kuro connects to them by creating a cultural geography where the disfiguration is a main concern with its sensibility leading to sense irruption that plays with the senses to generate a psychic disturbance.