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Through this experience students were introduced
to the interplay of the arts and technology and given
the opportunity to both practice and research the
co-relations between different media.
The Staging of Second Life reflects a growing
trend in performance pedagogy where technology
and new ways of thinking about its applications
are increasingly integrated into the curriculum.
This chapter describes the practical aspects of the
course as well as the emergent theory of interme-
diality underpinning the Staging of Second Life .
participants to enter a space beyond representa-
tion and immersion. Actors and audience are both
'present' in the embodiment of their avatar in the
virtual environment as well as located in a 'real'
space in which they subjectively view their avatar
projected on the screen. In this sense, virtual the-
atre can be described as 'liminal' (from the Latin
word 'limen', meaning threshold), a term Victor
Turner adapted from the work of Anthropologist
Arnold van Gennep to explain the 'in-between
state of mind, in between fact and fiction…and in
between statuses' (Bigger, 2009). Once of Turner's
great legacies was his recognition of the potential
for liminoid performance to be transformative.
Virtual theatre, as the space for aesthetic and
technological innovation and a site of politics and
ethics (Giannachi, 2004), can exploit this potential
in contesting the hyperreality of mediatised culture
(Auslander, 1999).
Thus far we have focused our attention on
performance within a 3D virtual environment,
whereby actors and audience represented by
their avatars controlled via a computer perform
in real-time within a shared place in a 3D virtual
world such as Second Life . Examples of virtual
theatre in Second Life include performances that
are played out in recreations of physical theatre
spaces constructed in Second Life 1 and more
contemporary performances such as the choreo-
graphed aerial acrobatics and dance performed
by the ZeroG SkyDancers 2 , which aim to break
with conventions in exploring the native potential
of the virtual
Joff Chafer, the third author of this chapter, was
one of the performers in the 2008 production of
Hamlet in Second Life (Figure 1). As he explains,
in virtual worlds such as Second Life the audience
are free to move their camera around at will thus
watching a performance can be more akin to doing
a live edit of a film. Such freedom contrasts with
traditional theatre in which the Director seeks
to direct the audience's attention and can result
in the audience missing important parts of the
performance. Various performing companies in
BACkgROUND
Virtual reality, according to Giannachi (2004), is in
a paradoxical relationship with the real since it is
both part of the real and separate from it. A viewer
is therefore at the one time immersed within the
virtual as well as interacting with it. It is through
this juxtaposition of the real and the virtual that
the viewer is exposed to the paradoxes evident
in our everyday life experiences. For this reason
Giannachi (2004) asserts that the virtual is both a
space for aesthetic and technological innovation
as well as the site of politics and ethics.
Traditional conceptualisations of space and
place are challenged by the virtual. As Wyeld,
Prasolova-Førland and Viller (2007) suggest,
cyberspace—the term coined by Gibson (1984)
in his sci-fi novel Neuromancer , has no volume
yet provides a sense of presence for individuals
in the virtual places within which they meet and
interact. They suggest further that presence, the
feeling that we are really 'there', and immersion,
the feeling that transports us to another place, are
preconditions of place in 3D virtual environments.
Virtual theatre parallels traditional theatre in that
it provides a place for the staging of performances
by actors in the presence of audience. However,
as Wyeld, Prasolova-Førland and Viller (2007)
assert, while theatre in a 3D virtual environment
can be experienced as a passive representation
of a particular conception of space, it also allows
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