Virtual Realisms: Dramatic Forays into the Future

"3 This ideal spectator, experiencing a crushed and hypnotized sensibility, bears a striking resemblance to the young (often male) gamers described in hyperbolic news articles about the dangers of video games, such as the BBc's 2005 coverage of a South Korean man who died of heart failure after playing an immersive role-playing video game for fifty hours with limited breaks.4 Not surprisingly, theatre's engagement with what charlie Gere refers to as "digital culture" has most often been realized in experimental, largely nonnarrative, and often individualized performances.5 mediated performances in art installations like Wafaa Bilal's Domestic Tension (2007) and performance lectures like rabih mroué's Pixelated Revolution (2012) highlight the eroding distinctions between reality and mediated representation, while Belgian artist Kris Verdonck has staged both humans displayed as objects in performances like In (2003), where an actor stands motionless in a transparent water tank, and the humanity of robots who elicit sympathy through their failures in his Dancer series (2010).