Mandy Canales

    It’s only been a year since I put my headset on and really focused on participating in the VR performance community and since then I’ve managed to find my inner Max Fischer, signing up and participating in all things VR. First, I joined XR Social Club and continued to show up to meetings even though I didn’t understand the tech talk. Once I felt a little comfortable, I managed to talk my way into helping out on a Ferryman Collective show. Then, I volunteered to be the team leader of the theatre project in Educators in VR. I upgraded my tech and invested in full body tracking and started taking dance classes. After that, I wrote and performed in my first VR production with OnBoardXR and built my first digital world. Going high level and without getting into too many details right now, I’ve also designed my own avatar with a growing wardrobe, reignited my interest in performing improv, and have also gone to raves. Because of VR, I now rave.

    While all of this is rainbows and glitter, I can’t ignore that this new theatrical direction has been an uphill battle that I didn’t expect. I’ve tried to convince other theatre professionals to try out this medium and was told that they trained “for the stage” in a tone that communicates the feelings of disgust toward me for even suggesting they try performing in a way that isn’t a thousand years old. I was told by a person that their wife who is a game designer hates theatre people moving into VR because we don’t know what we’re doing and, apparently, have no capacity to learn. Then there are all the “robots are going to take our jobs” people, the people who think that virtual reality will make everyone who uses it into a pervert, the people who hate The Zuck and therefore hate everything VR, and I’m sure I’m missing some folks but they are out there just waiting to piss on the parade. 

All of this is pretty exhausting and in real life, one would say that after non-stop work and focus on a topic while also defending that topic would make one want to “crash” at the end of the day. In VR, we say we’re “crashing” when we know we’re losing connectivity in some way, a sort of FYI/SOS to those around us that our avatar will probably freeze and shortly disappear into the ether. I have crashed from IRL exhaustion of being an unsuccessful VR evangelical and from hardware woes of using a wireless headset; I am familiar with existential defeat. What gives me hope, though, is that I’ve come to understand that the act of crashing, of moving in a direction so swiftly that things go off the rails, isn’t always negative. I may have crashed from exhaustion but started to recognize my personal limitations of giving my VR sermons on the mount. I am not a fan of crashing my hardware but it does give me an idea of the various troubleshooting steps I would have to take during a performance to make things right in a way that doesn’t cause a mental meltdown. I’ve pushed past my social anxiety to crash meetings in VR that I have no business being at and conversations that are over my Luddite head all in the name of gathering more information. I’ve realized that over this past year I’ve crashed pretty much every day in some way but if crashing every day is what it takes to push the marker of exploration, to test the capacity, the strength, and the assumptions to help make VR performance be seen as a legitimate art form then I will always, for all of future time, for forever, be crashing.