In collaboration with Riverbank Arts Centre and Kildare Youth Theatre, this project explored how social virtual reality can be used as a space for youth performance-making, creative experimentation and participatory storytelling. Working with a group of young theatre-makers, we designed and facilitated a series of workshops that used VRChat as a platform for devising and staging an immersive live performance.
The project introduced participants (spanning the ages of 14 – 17) to key aspects of performance-making in VR, including avatar creation, digital embodiment, world-building, spatial dramaturgy and interactive narrative design. Rather than treating VR as a novelty or simply as a technical tool, the workshops approached it as a creative performance environment with its own dramaturgical possibilities and constraints. Participants were encouraged to think critically about presence, identity, audience interaction and the relationship between performer, character and virtual space.
A central aim of the project was to examine how youth theatre practices might be expanded through XR technologies while remaining rooted in collaboration, play and ensemble-based creation. Over the course of the workshops, participants developed confidence in navigating social VR and gradually moved from experimentation to authorship, creating characters, scenarios and audience encounters within a shared virtual world. This process culminated in a live immersive VR performance in which performers occupied multiple roles and audiences were invited into a spatialised, participatory narrative.
The project also firmly grounded in the domain of practice-as-research, because the overarching goal was to generate insights into the pedagogical and artistic potential of VR for youth arts contexts. It demonstrated how social VR can support new modes of co-creation, allowing young people to experiment with and rehearse identity, test fictional worlds and collaboratively build performance experiences that are at once theatrical, playful and technologically mediated. At the same time, the work highlighted important questions around access, facilitation, online safety, digital literacy and the ethics of participation in networked environments.
Overall, the collaboration showed that VR can offer youth theatre not just a new delivery platform, but a genuinely new creative and dramaturgical space – one that invites experimentation, shared authorship and fresh ways of thinking about liveness, performance and audience engagement.