Immersive Theatre in the Metaverse Navigating Liveness in Virtual Spaces

Abstract

The emergence of the metaverse as a performative arena has unsettled foundational assumptions about what makes theatre live, present, and real. This paper investigates how immersive theatre staged within virtual reality platforms—VRChat, Horizon Worlds, and bespoke social VR environments—reconfigures the concept of liveness that has historically anchored performance theory. Drawing on Philip Auslander's foundational scepticism toward mediatized presence and extending it through recent scholarship on digital embodiment, the study argues that metaverse theatre does not erode liveness but multiplies it across entangled human and technological bodies. Three productions serve as case studies: Ferryman Collective's Uncanny Alley: A New Day (2024), the collaborative VR adventure Hummingbird (2022), and The MetaMovie's Alien Rescue (2023–2024). Through performance analysis, practitioner interviews drawn from trade documentation, and theoretical synthesis, the research identifies emergent dramaturgical forms—distributed presence, avatar-mediated intimacy, and glitch-as-aesthetic—that define virtual immersive performance. The paper further addresses persistent tensions: the economic precarity of low-audience-ratio VR productions, platform dependency on corporate-owned infrastructure, and the unresolved question of whether a headset-mediated encounter can deliver the somatic weight of shared physical space. In framing metaverse theatre as neither replacement for nor degradation of physical performance but as an ontologically distinct form with its own affective grammar, the study contributes to ongoing debates in digital performance studies, posthumanist theatre theory, and the evolving practice of live performance in computationally generated worlds.

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