Social VR and the continuing reinvention of local in theatre and performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the emergent performance context of social virtual reality (social VR) as the latest manifestation of the continuing disruption of theatre as axiomatically local. Against the backdrop of Double Eye Studio’s 2020 adaptation of the Pandora mythos, Finding Pandora X, analysis centers on the ways in which social VR simultaneously expands and contracts theatre’s ‘localness’, a reconfiguration with pragmatic and theoretical implications for practice and scholarship in the twenty-first century.