Overlapping Streams

Wayfinding: Taxonomy > Virtual Reality Theatre > Multiple Forms of Digital Hybridity > Overlapping Streams

Clemence Debaig’s project Discordance, produced by Unwired Dance, is a flexible hybrid dance performance that can be experienced entirely through livestreaming, through in-person/streaming hybrid, and potentially through VR:

Discordance is a live piece that takes place with one dancer in London, one in New York, both wearing full motion capture and performing in VR. It also is inviting audiences to join in the virtual space in real-time, either in VR or on a computer, and the piece can be performed either in-person, remotely, hybrid, wherever we want. ... I wanted to experiment with what would be a relevant VR interaction for this piece. So, still keeping a video feed, but changing the way people are interacting.

The Unwired Dance website describes four levels of potential experience: physically co-present in a theatre space; in-person in VR (though this is limited to only four participants); at home with your personal VR headset; or from any device that can access the livestream video. The most important component is that the dancers engage each other as avatars, not as physical bodies. This suggests that the audience is a more traditional passive viewership, while the performers’ experience of embodiment is central; the complexity of embodiment and togetherness are dramaturgically reflected in the knowledge of the virtual-ness and physical distance between the performers, who strive for a sense of each other. This is also, from the audience’s perspective, dramaturgically different from Debaig’s earlier work, Strings, in which the audience engages a web-app to trigger haptic buzzers on a dancer’s body, directing their movements.