Balancing light across multiple realities: interrogating the potential of light within mixed reality scenography
Tessa Rixon · International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media · 2024
The increasing adoption of extended reality technologies within theatre and performance complicates our understanding and creation of scenography. As designers seeking to create spaces within the blurred boundaries between “real” and “virtual”, we must simultaneously consider a complex set of perspectives on and through which our work is experienced. This paper interrogates the role of light within mixed reality (MR) performance to understand how light creates and contributes to a multiplicity of blended spaces. In critically reflecting on the design of light across three levels – augmented reality, spatial, and projected – in the mixed reality dance work, The Guest House, I explore how porous and fluid scenographic boundaries, simultaneously created and permeated by light, serve a number of key world-building, scenographic, and dramaturgical functions within MR scenography. My argument weaves existing notions from across a range of XR performance forms, including doubled scenographies, expanded notions of space, and lighting’s established role within scenography to propose three potentials of light within MR performance. Light is proposed as an essential medium in creating mixed reality performance, allowing us to perceive both the physical and the virtual, while simultaneously permeating the porous boundaries between spaces to complicate our perception of the performance environment/s.