A virtual tour above of the ‘Madame X Storyplex’ where theatre practitioners and colleagues from WashU and the University of York hosted an immersive live musical theatre performance in web-based VR in January 2024 about the infamous Madame X portrait that hangs in the Met. It ruined the life of a Louisiana socialite from Paris named Madame Gautreau, but also made her immortal. Now every woman wants to be the fabulous Madame X.
Setting: We land in the Storyplex – a circular cluster of rooms in VR. The central hub has five doors which lead to individual scenes in the drama. They may be blank, or contain a few objects. These rooms will change over time, and multiple scenes can be staged in each space. Each room is connected to the next and to the central hub. The audience can choose (or will be guided) as to the sequence in which the rooms can be viewed.
‘Sondheim in the Storyplex’ is an international collaboration on staging scenes from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in virtual reality with a live audience with the added advantage of doing a side-by-side comparison with a real-life production at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
MT Space Project with Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York
Colleagues and I are working on two VR pieces that center around the story of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X painting (above) and an underwater themed Nautilus environment (below) utilizing FrameVR and environments built in Sketchup and Blender.
Proof of Concept for 3D model import into FrameVR
XR Theatre Experiment
Nov 2020:
Two Washington University in St. Louis Drama students perform a scene from a Pinter play to an invited audience of colleagues and collaborators on FrameVR followed by a talkback.
Students in Scenic Design course view pinup of design research in VR.
GeoXplorer App allows for students to model in AR
Fall 2020 Scenic Design students built models in Sketchup and were able to view them in augmented reality (AR) as if it was an actual scale model.
Mozilla Hubs as space for VR Theatre
In this example, I use an existing design for a Cleveland Play House production of
All the Way as a proof of concept for doing the same show in VR.