VRAL is presenting Kara Gut’s Welcome to my Desert Nexus as part of our Fall 2021 program. Welcome to my Desert Nexus, which will be accessible online until September 30, is a three-act play performed within a video game, focusing on two players within Red Dead Redemption Online as they encounter existential quandaries in the digital desert. Part table-read, part live gaming event, Welcome to My Desert Nexus introduces theatrical forms of expressions, stimulating emotional responses in the audience, in the contexts of video games. The performance, which has a duration of 44’ 50”, is situated at the intersection of different spatialities, temporalities, and media. Among other things, the work is complemented by a script laser printed with custom stamped illustrations, saddle stitched and designed by fellow artist Clara Gatto with Bulk Space which was presented at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fair, 2021. The full script is accessible here in PDF form. Welcome to my Desert Nexus is indicative of the complexity of the video game form, which transcends the boundaries of the screen to engage multiple senses.
The intersection between theatre and digital gaming is becoming more and more prominent. In October 2020, amidst a global pandemic, Canadian playwright Celine Song performed Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull with/in The Sims 4 and broadcast her entire performance in two installments on Twitch, as part of New York Theatre Workshop’s Artistic Instigators program, which was introduced to support both creatively and economically artists unable to perform on stage due to Covid-19 restrictions. Song introduced alternative ways to experience the popular life simulator, blurring the boundaries between the performer’s body and the avatars acting on the screen.
More recently, a selected number of players of the popular post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 76 have begun reenacting scenes from popular movies and play, including A Clockwork Orange, Hamlet, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and West Side Story, and they are currently working on a major production of Macbeth. One of the most popular groups using Bethesda’s game as a stage is The Theatre Company, “operating the Charleston Playhouse Theatre, the Watoga Opera House, Grafton Globe, & Morgantown Moulin Rouge.” In all cases, these performance adopt a calmer, more distanced approach to the bleak themes of the original video game, ignoring its “established narratives”. Here’s an image of the troupe performing at Moulin Rouge theatre via their avatars (source: Twitter)
VRAL will be exploring these hybrid forms - “video game augmented theatre” - that re-imagine the very notions of “performance” and “play” using a variety of platforms, poetic language, and collective practices in the upcoming months.
Matteo Bittanti