Emperor 101 takes a virtual-reality trip into the mind of a conspiracy theorist, with actors as avatars
Brought here by Boca del Lupo Theatre, Ireland’s The Performance Corporation tries to unpack why people get drawn down online rabbit holes
Catriona Ni Murchu in Emperor 101. Photo by Mark Stedman
Boca del Lupo presents Emperor 101 at The Fishbowl on Granville Island from April 20 to 23
CHANCES ARE THAT you know someone—a friend, a family member—who has disappeared down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Some may have planted their flag firmly with the anti-vaxxers online; others may have be drawn into a web of COVID, 9-11, anti-immigration, or QAnon conspiracies. That’s left many with the question: What happened to this person I thought I knew?
Now a trailblazing troupe from Ireland is trying to unpack that complex question through a virtual-reality theatre work that’s coming here as part of Boca del Lupo’s four-part LivePerformance360 series. In Emperor 101, viewers meet a conspiracy theorist who’s been deplatformed everywhere but this unique virtual space (seen through a Quest headset), and you’ll come to, if not fully empathize, at least start to unpack what’s happening.
“It’s really hard to not just be angry about it, and it’s really hard to just not turn away from them completely—to, you know, cut that person off,” explains theatremaker and The Performance Corporation artistic director/CEO Jo Mangan over a call from Dublin. “How do they get sucked into these rabbit holes and believe whatever nonsense is being put online and whatever thread they follow?...So having some proximity to people like that, and wanting to know what on earth is making them believe this nonsense was our motivation. And God, it's hard to find empathy with racists and bigots, and with lunatic conspiracy theorists, and I don't want to find empathy with them, personally. But I want to explore what it feels like to have a glimpse into what has caused them to go this way. Because people aren’t born bigoted, with those awful ideas embedded in them. They pick them up along the way.”
Mangan is speaking to Stir from the Dublin digital hub where live actors are rehearsing the show—and from where they’ll perform Emperor 101 for Vancouverites. The Performance Corporation shares Boca del Lupo’s interest in VR as an exciting new medium for theatre. Mangan has met and worked with its artistic directors Jay Dodge and Sherry J Yoon over 15 years, including at the digitally focused Carlow Arts Festival in Dublin. Her company coproduced the short, climate-change-themed pieces in Expedition: the movement, with Boca del Lupo at Dublin Theatre Festival, Magnetic North Theatre Festival, and in an iteration here at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s FUSE event.
For Mangan, a lot of the draw toward the burgeoning and highly collaborative field of VR theatre is the infinite potential for “world-building”.
“My general interest has always been in the creation of theatre in non-theatre spaces,” says the artist. Referring to VR and image-generating platforms, she adds: “It’s all just accelerating at such a pace now, but actually, I think we have amazing opportunities to create opportunities for audiences and performers to exist in realms that are way beyond our imagination. So, to me it’s about site—this other amazing site we can work in.”
She says the other benefit is that virtual theatre reduces the need for artists to fly across the world—and is therefore kinder to an ever-warming Earth.
Emperor 101 is more about the experience and story than video-game-grade high-def graphics. Mangan explains the creation of high-definition motion capture and world building for a wireless headset poses “ridiculous challenges”.
“So we worked with our designer, Leon Butler, to create worlds for separate rooms that have a very particular aesthetic which is quite simple,” she says. “And the avatars are quite simply created. We're not trying to be realistic….The avatars themselves are more like chess pieces than, you know, real people.”
In their discussions creating the show, Mangan’s collaborators noticed that a lot of the conspiracy theorists they came across in research, as well as among their own friends or family, had usually experienced something traumatic that triggered a distrust in conventional journalistic sources and a digression into the fringe. So the show focuses on a female character who has a drastic shift in attitude after a car crash and family tragedy, sending her down that rabbit hole of conspiracy—and eventual being deplatformed (blocked from social-media, forums, and websites for her offensive views).
The immersive experience—in which audience members will be given headsets at Boca’s The Fishbowl on Granville Island, watching the actors perform from Ireland via VR—is described as a sort of journey into the mind and motivations of a conspiracy theorist, with a few nods to ancient mythology and Alice in Wonderland. An opening short “film” is the context setter, Mangan allows. From there, she prefers to keep the details of the rest of it a surprise.
The Performance Corporation’s Jo Mangan will be on hand for the conversations that inevitably grow out of the show. Photo by Martin Maguire
Mangan hopes that local viewers will come out assured that whatever they’re dealing with here is being replicated around the world. Even in Ireland.
“We're all going through this nonsense,” Mangan asserts. “We're all going through this horrific surge of misinformation and deep conservatism—you know, espousing things and attaching them to the flag of your country….What these people have done is they've moved in and they've invaded space that the majority of us, I think, are horrified by.
“I do maybe want people to think about: 'Can we reach out to these people?'” she adds. “It doesn't seem like it, but I do feel for people that have been on a particular path for a particular period of time, it doesn't necessarily mean they're going to stay on that path forever, and they could be persuaded off. So I think, hopefully, we can maybe encourage people to consider having conversations with people—painful and all as they are. I expect some big conversations after the performance and I'll be around after all the performances to meet with people….So I'm interested in conversations about technology, in conversations about conspiracy theories, and in climate change and climate justice. And I think it's a conversation opener. That's my hope, first off: it's a conversation opener.”
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