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With the project ‘We Are In This Together – New Sensations for Remote Audiences in VR and Dance Performances,’ choreographer Anna-Carolin Weber and interaction designer Tobias Kopka, together with VR Dance Club, are exploring the (im)possibility of digitally integrating visitors into a hybrid and transmedial performance practice. They explore how gaming principles can mobilise the audience and successfully integrate them into the performance practice – interactive means are used to allow viewers to intervene in the course and movement dynamics and actively shape the performance. The aim is for collaborative participation to integrate the remote audience into the artistic performance on an equal footing.
The start of ‘We Are In This Together – New Sensations for Remote Audiences in VR and Dance Performances’ is the sub-project ‘Press X to Push Dancers Off Stage’ (funded by the NRW KULTURsekretariat), in which five actors test how spatially separated visitors can experience and help shape the stage action in a sensually intense way through the use of virtual technologies.
‘We Are In This Together – New Sensations for Remote Audiences in VR and Dance Performances’ is funded by the Kunststiftung NRW and cooperates with the Academy for Theatre and Digitality (Dortmund), the Cologne Game Lab of the Technical University of Cologne and the TanzFaktur Cologne performance and production venue. The artistic research was designed.
As part of the project, Elisa Smeraldo is conducting an embedded research residency in close collaboration with the VR Dance Club during the group’s residency at the Academy for Theater and Digitality in Dortmund. Elisa Smeraldo’s research supports the project “We Are In This Together – New Sensations for Remote Audiences in VR and Dance Performances” using a practice-oriented and ethnographically grounded methodology.
The approach combines regular dialogue with the artists with targeted observations of rehearsals and development phases. The study focuses on the iterative development of the project and examines how artistic intentions and technical constraints are negotiated across successive prototypes. Rather than analyzing a finished work, the research tracks the process as it unfolds and treats artistic practice itself as a form of inquiry. The resulting perspective emerges from an ongoing dialogue between artistic experimentation and theoretical reflection and positions the research as a co-epistemic endeavor.