This paper was submitted to the Degenerative Times and Generative Places: Performance and VR Working Group at ASTR, which took place on the 31st of October 2025.

Abstract

In these times of technological profligacy and societal disarray, Japan’s shōgekijō theatre persists as a site for rethinking community, intimacy, and testimony. This paper traces the migration of shōgekijō (Little Theatre), born amid Japan’s socio-political upheavals of the 1960s, into the virtual architectures of social VR platforms.

With reference to recent VR productions including Koken no Tsuki (Moon of the Lone Sword) and Omnibus Performance Vol.1 at Mashiro Small Theater (a 50-seat black box in VRChat), as well as VR Hamlet and a hip-hop adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by the Meta Art Theater group, I approach VR theatres as affective ruins: community spaces whose intimacy is forged through rekindling rubble from the conveyor belt of history into new digital objects. Narratives of past traumas and dystopian futures unfold in these plays through unsynced anime-inflected avatars, filmic montage, para-real glitches, uncanny behaviors, and procedural seams.

While these visual and auditory gaps (which occur in-between objects) can unsettle the fetishism of spectacle that looms large in immersive technologies, they also call back past questions of authenticity (Benjamin), alienation (Brecht), and resistance (Weiss). By foregrounding generative textures (community of affect, hybrid scenographies, mixed-modal performance) and degenerative residues (negated agency, shallow narrative closure),

I argue that Japanese VR shōgekijō should not simply be read as next-gen immersive spectacle, but as a contradictory practice that brings the location of theatre (culture) into question. VR theatre introduces a third term to the subject-object (audience-actor) relationship in traditional performance: the traject (Virilio). The digital objects that populate VR theatres are marks of trajectories between worlds, placing the onus on movement more than psyche. What can be gleaned from these ruins? What might be lost?