PANEL: BUILDING VIRTUAL STAGES - XR IN PERFORMANCE

Date: 

Saturday, April 30, 2022, 9:30am

Location: 

Online

TRANSMEDIA ARTS

SPEAKERS: Sarah Ellis, Royal Shakespeare Company; Tina Lorenz, Staatstheater Augsburg; Björn Lengers, Cyberräuber; Chris Ziegler, movingimages.de

Which new prominence have virtual theatres and experimentation with XR (Extended Reality) gained through the pandemic theatre closures? This panel will showcase specific XR performance projects and explore the potential and challenges of building virtual stages.

This event is part of the Symposium Viral Theatres: Pandemic Past/Hybrid Futures, which is taking place at the Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin and online from April 28- April 30, 2022.

Sarah Ellis is an award-winning producer currently working as Director of Digital Development for the Royal Shakespeare Company to explore new artistic initiatives and partnerships. The latest partnership for the RSC is the Audience of the Future Live Performance Demonstrator funded by Innovate UK - a consortium consisting of arts organisations, research partners and technology companies to explore the future of performances and real-time immersive experiences. Shecommits to the development of the arts and technology sector by being a mentor and advisor to programmes such as the Sundance Institute's New Frontier Labs, Creative XR programme supported by Arts Council England and Digital Catapult and CPH:LABS and is has been appointed Chair of Digital Agency, The Space, established by Arts Council England and the BBC to help promote digital engagement across the arts.

Tina Lorenz is the Head of Digital Development at the Staatstheater Augsburg, where she has been part of developing a series of VR theatre experiences (including plays by David Mamet, that have been a focal point during the pandemic lockdowns. She is a founding member of the hackspaces metlab Vienna and Binary Kitchen Regensburg and is part of the Fellowship Jury at the Dortmund Academy for Theatre and Digitality.

Björn Lengers forms, together with Marcel Karnapke, the independent performance collective "CyberRäuber". Their work focuses on combining digital realities with theatre and they have been developing interdisciplinary performance formats since 2016 that have been shown across German state theatres and internationally.

Chris Ziegler is a director, performer, artist and architect working in the performing and digital arts. From 2013 - 2021 he held a position as Professor of Interactive Media at Arizona State University (USA). In May 2021 he returned to Europe to work in digital theatre productions. As a member of the European Theater Lab of the European Theater Convention (ETC), he developed „Stage your City“, a participatory digital theatre production at Théâtre de la Manufacture Nancy (France), Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (Germany), Kote Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre Tbilisi (Georgia) and Det Norske Teatret Oslo (Norway) in 2016 - 2018. He is currently developing a virtual play introduction at the Staatstheater Kassel using augmented reality and motion tracking.

How To Join

Please add your name and email address to this registration page

If you have any questions, please contact Magda Romanska at magda@metalab.harvard.edu

The Viral Theatres-Research Project, a collaboration of the Free University, the Humboldt University and Bard College Berlin, is funded by the VolkswagenFoundation. The Opening Events are co-financed by the research project “Extended Audiences” in the Research Area “Travelling Matters” at the EXC2020 “Temporal Communities” and take place with kind support from the metaLAB (at) Harvard & FU Berlin, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard’s Transmedia Arts Seminar, and the Open Society University Networks.