Digital Liveness or Technodramaturgy: V- SENSE’s Virtual Reality

This article aims to offer expanded reflections on paradoxical ways in which theatre engages technology, focusing on remediation of drama into digital media. As a part of V-SENSE XR Play trilogy, an interdepartmental practice-as-research (PaR) collaboration project centered around Samuel Beckett's Play at Trinity College in 2017, Virtual Play reinterpreted the play for virtual reality, evoking a renewed sense of presence, perception, and theatricality in a digital context. Tracing the historical contingencies of the concept of liveness within performance discourse, this article demonstrates that the intervention of technology in digital spaces does not undermine liveness as an ontological essence of theatre and performance but that liveness is facilitated and enhanced in digital performance through technologies that induce immersive and interactive environments. While reflecting how the VR immersive-interactive paradigm allows the audience dislocated from interaction by the proscenium to actively explore, discover, and decode the original work, I also argue that the interpretive latitude acquired particularly through the interactive dramaturgy in VR theatre can only be a 'programmed' one, paradoxically confronting the dead end named authorship in any way. However, this paper ultimately considers the digital virtual, which makes such paradoxical freedom possible, as a space that awakens and reminds us of fundamental questions about theatricality, reconceiving theatricality in the digital era. Immersion in VR theatre does not just refer to an absorption in simulated reality but involves a deeper engagement across the virtual and the real, playing with the gaps in between and virtual reality is erected within this theatricality as a state of continuous transformation. Digital liveness finally refers to the user's continual state of transition in VR theatre, moving between absorption and transport, and oscillating between pure sensory experiences of presence and metatheatrical cognitive acts. By donning the VR head-mounted display, the digital era's transparent eyeball, the user/audience navigates a paradoxical state of digital liveness, in which theatricality encounters virtuality that disrupts reality as posited by Antonin Artaud.