Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things to know about Boca Del Lupo's new VR Salon

Tilda Swinton narrates Goliath, while The Man Who Couldn’t Leave travels to a former Taiwanese jail

By Janet Smith

The Man Who Couldn’t Leave takes viewers inside a a re-creation of the infamous prison in 1950s Taiwan.

Boca del Lupo presents VR Salon at the Fishbowl on Granville Island until May 28

AS PART OF ITS ongoing LivePerformance360, Boca del Lupo’s VR Salon is featuring two form-pushing new works that can be experienced with headsets at the company’s Granville Island space.

Artistic director Sherry J Yoon, who has been exploring the theatrical potential of VR technology with collaborators around the world, says the double bill highlights what VR does best.

Narrated by star Tilda Swinton, Goliath: Playing With Reality uses animation to tell the true story of a person with schizophrenia who spent years isolated in psychiatric institutions before finding connection in multiplayer video games. And the digitally altered live-action The Man Who Couldn’t Leave takes audiences behind the walls of Taiwan’s former Green Island prison, where real-life political detainee A-Kuen tells the stories of imprisonment and persecution that happened during the White Terror of the 1950s.

“Why I chose these two is that both have anchors descriptively as documentaries, but it’s really about storytelling,” Yoon tells Stir. “They’ve both taken a creative and unique way of interacting with the viewer. We are theatre folks and we’re trying to find that landscape of that spark of liveness and technology for storytelling.”

Here are five things to know about these two fascinating new works on the frontiers of virtual-reality performance.

#1

In Goliath, Echo (Swinton’s voice-over character) guides you through the many coexisting realities of Goliath, playing with the ideas of what is “real” and “unreal”—and allowing the viewer firsthand insights into what it’s like to have schizophrenia.

Goliath: Playing With Reality tells the story of a man who spent years in psychiatric institutions.

#2

Showing how genre-crossing it is, Goliath won the Grand Jury Prize for Best VR Immersive Work at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021 and was also nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award in the Outstanding Interactive Media Innovation category in 2022.

#3

The White Terror era, recounted in The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, was the a period of political repression of Taiwanese civilians under the Kuomintang government. Martial law was declared in Taiwan on May 19, 1949, leading to the imprisonment of political dissidents on Green Island.

#4

The Taiwanese VR film is narrated from the perspective of four symbolic characters: A-Kuen, who recalls his friend A-Ching—the man who never left Green Island. There is also A-Ching’s wife, who held the secret of her husband’s incarceration for many years; and A-Ching’s daughter, who is determined to keep the story alive. Integrating the stories of numerous political victims of the White Terror, The Man Who Couldn’t Leave is told through the form of an undelivered family letter.

#5

Hyperrealistic yet dreamlike, The Man Who Couldn’t Leave makes cutting-edge use of freeze framing as it travels back to 1950s Taiwan, with actors reprising roles. “In the past, you can see characters up close, but they’re frozen to look like wax figures—and there’s a figure walking through them,” Yoon explains.

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