Staging Mixed Reality: Arnold Aronson - The Reality of Things

Arnold Aronson – The Reality of Things

Mixed Reality is usually defined as a merging of the real and the virtual. But if we add the concept of “staging” to this definition, with its fundamental elements of performer, spectator, and real space and time, do some elements lose their virtuality and become subsumed into the real?

Arnold Aronson is Emeritus Professor of Theatre at Columbia University. His recent books include: The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (revised 2nd edition), The Routledge Companion to Scenography (editor), and Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design. He is also co-editor, with Jane Collins, of the journal, Theatre and Performance Design.

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Staging Mixed Reality: A Theatre Design Symposium

5 March 2020, 10.00-17.00
Clore Learning Centre: Cottesloe Room
National Theatre, London SE1 9PX

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. Staging Mixed Reality set out to focus on the ever-evolving field of mixed reality performance and examine the new aesthetics being developed through digital possibilities.

The symposium considered how real and virtual worlds have been combined in performance to produce new environments and encounters for audiences, and explored the critical and creative processes involved in the discipline, asking key questions of its practice, such as:

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 theatre design symposium explored how experiments with technology and digital media have shaped and altered the versions of reality represented on stage today.

Contributors: Suzanne Andrade, Arnold Aronson, Steve Jelley, Sophie Jump, Roma Patel, Stewart Pringle and Dick Straker, including a presentation of work by BA Theatre Design students from Wimbledon College of Arts.

Staging Mixed Reality was 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.

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