South by Southwest 2023 in Austin, Texas: A Dramaturg Reflects

by Caili Crow

How do we categorize the dramaturgical landscapes of immersive XR storytelling, or of international festivals? What follows are my musings on these questions based upon my experience volunteering at one of the largest festivals and conferences for film, music, tech, education, and culture in the world.

Despite years growing up in San Antonio, Texas — soon to be part of the Austin-San Antonio metroplex if recent talk is to be believed — the “festivalization¹” of Austin every March as the famous SXSW (“South by Southwest”) takes over the city has always been a mystery to me. However, after falling in love year after year with the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, while attending university in Scotland, then moving back to Texas in 2020, I have grown increasingly nostalgic for a similar kind of large — in a sense, international festival. As a result, I seized the opportunity to dive headfirst this year as a conference volunteer at SXSW, an annual festival and conference bringing together innovative leaders in music, film, tech, education, and culture. After experiencing SXSW for the first time this past March, I have to admit its mystery still remains. Countless panels and international music showcases have already begun to blur together and memory can only do its best to construct a mental narrative of the experience. But what stands out to me is the way “immersive storytelling” and XR (extended reality — a term that encompasses virtual reality, augmented reality, and everything in between) is starting to reshape our imaginative landscape — and how the liminality of XR and the metaverse echoes the sense of wonder, play, and altered reality created by events and festivals like SXSW. 

The Edinburgh Fringe and SXSW are Wonderland-esque: like stepping through a portal that transforms a city you once knew into a strange and otherworldly realm of endless possibilities. You encounter strangers from far-off places, and serendipitous encounters with the unknown; before returning home, your memories but a blur. This sustained displacement from reality and sense of enchantment during the course of the festival, invites you to experience a new state of being: one of play, openness, curiosity, and discovery that can lead to the synthesis of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural connections, greater creativity, and, ultimately, innovation. The convergence of cultures, people, and ideas creates a ripe environment for cultural diplomacy. There were over 112 countries represented at SXSW in 2022². 

Edinburgh at Fringe time is definitely a different Edinburgh than the rest of the year, as is Austin during SXSW — a different Austin. I remember my shock the first time I saw my university lecture hall and favorite study space transformed into a hip bar and theater venue for Fringe. In Austin during SXSW, the streets are peppered with international cultural hubs. Names like “Australia House” or “German Haus” that showcase industry leaders from these respective countries through panels on tech and culture mix with live music showcases. Walking the streets of a familiar city and seeing bars and restaurants turned into theater venues for Fringe, or themed experiences and activations for SXSW is almost its own form of augmented reality and immersive storytelling that shifts a local landscape into a gamified or storied world. (Here I’m referencing experiences such as “The Lodge: A Paramount+ Experience,” a three-story immersive bar, photo, and game experience inspired by shows streaming on Paramount+.)

XR storytelling promises to take our desire for immersive experiences and events that form community, entertain, and challenge our view of the world to a whole new level, while offering fascinating creative tools for storytellers and new dramaturgical landscapes. “Dolby House” was a big feature at this year’s SXSW, showcasing dolby.io live performance streaming technology that allows remote audiences to immerse in live events in real time from the comfort of a VR headset. The idea of “liveness” for theater in this digital world was explored on multiple panels, from experiences of live performances enhanced with augmented reality to immersive productions staged in the metaverse. Global business consultancy Ernst & Young (EY) is working to maintain “Humans at [the] Center of the Metaverse” (you can listen to a recording of the panel here) through an artist-in-residence program and metaverse lab. It includes a presentation of a physical, interactive multimedia art experience called “Ancestral Archives,” where audiences chat with a chatbot whose knowledge dataset is populated with the works of historically significant Black American poets and authors. Meanwhile, SXSW attendees were invited to explore the XR Experience, an exhibition of XR stories, videos, productions, and experiences from across the globe, ranging from the playful to the profound.
 

A selection of theater or theater-adjacent projects discussed or presented at SXSW 2023 follows below: 

• Arts and Games Studio Tender Claws, led by Samantha Gorman, and their Virtual Reality Immersive Theatre productions,The Under Presents (2019-2022) and Tempest (2020). Listen to a recording of SXSW panel “Live Performance in the Metaverse” featuring Samantha Gorman here. 
• Odeon Theatrical, led by CEO Stephanie Riggs, and their emerging collaborations with groups such as the Shubert Organization to bring augmented reality experiences into Broadway venues — the example mentioned was an augmented reality Genie character in a performance of Aladdin. Listen to the panel with Stephanie Riggs, alongside Alex Coulombe of Agile Lens , Creative Technologist, and Theater Collaborator Louise Lessel, and artist podcaster Emmy Schwab on “Is This Really Live? Performance in the Age of XR” here.
• Playlines, a UK-based AR studio and consultancy founded by digital dramaturge Rob Morgan and produced by Muki Kulhan, and their collaboration with grime/rap artist Harry Shotta on an immersive, site-specific, choose-your-own-adventure AR Grime Opera called “Consequences” (2019).
• Immersive Futures Lab, a showcase of immersive experiences from the UK for sectors ranging from gaming to heritage. At SXSW 2022, the UK presented the Audience of the Future Live program, a collaborative R&D project into the future of live performance and emerging XR technologies. The project involved a consortium of 15 organizations, led by the Royal Shakespeare Company in collaboration with organizations such as Punchdrunk and the Manchester International Festival.
  

A list of projects from the SXSW XR Experience program can be found here. Projects included:

• The Invited, a physical pop-up book tells the story of Dracula as AR characters begin to materialize across the pages. 
• Stay Alive, My Son , an exploration into a father’s painful memories as he relives his choice to leave his son behind in Cambodia during the Cambodian genocide, using XR to cast the audience into the role of the father. 
• SXSW XR Experience Competition Winner “Consensus Gentium,” using facial detection to create an interactive film exploring the possible consequences of AI technology. 
• XR Experience Audience Award Winners JFK Memento and MLK: Now Is the Time, immersive explorations of the legacies of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., respectively, through first-hand accounts ( MLK: Now Is the Time ) and narration by living witnesses ( JFK Memento ).

At first glance, SXSW might not seem to an obvious pick for the theater-minded. However, as the dramaturgical landscape continues to shift and merge with other disciplines and technology, I look forward to see what portals we might fall through and what stories we might carry back with us. 

¹ For some fascinating books on the theatricality of festivals and the “festivalization” of experience, see: The Festivalization of Culture (2014) by Andy Bennet, Jodie aylor, and Ian Woodward, Festivalising! Theatrical Events, Politics and Culture (2007) , edited by Temple Hauptfleisch et al., and International Theatre Festivals and 21 st Century Interculturalism (2021) by Richard Paul Knowles.

² SXSW 2022 event statistics can be found here.