Paper given at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) conference as part of the Intermediality and Performance working group at the University of Koln, on 11 June 2025.

Abstract

This paper questions the ethics of audience-performer spatial relations in two VR dance works by Berlin based choreographer, Yui Kawaguchi: Be thou still with me (2022) and Shirokage (lit. pale shadow, 2022). I examine the potential (and limitations) in these works for radically alternative performer-audience perspectives of real and imagined spatial relationships; of an ethics of hybridity that Homi Bhabha has termed “third space.” The third space is a synthesis of real lived materiality (first space) and its interpretation through imagined representations of that materiality (second space); it is “a process of [cultural] hybridity” that “gives rise to […] something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (Bhabha in Rutherford, 1998).

In Be thou still with me the audience follows Kawaguchi’s avatar through a series of physical transformations structured around the notion of phantom limb. The audience’s viewpoint shifts from external spectator of the avatar to its internal inhabitant. Shirokage is an interesting counterpoint in that it contains no avatars at all. Instead, the audience observes the morphology of a winter landscape, like the boy peeping at the forest procession in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams.

Neither piece was performed live. Audiences could access the works as streamed recordings through VR headsets. As such, what is the ontological and ethical basis of a relationship between a spectator, who is there in the performative moment, and a performer who is elsewhere, but archivally present as phantom other? And since both pieces offer experiences of intimacy (touch, recognition, shared interiority), to what extent to intimacy with a phantom/virtual other constitute a third space in Bhabha’s sense?