Quills Fest VR World: Panel and Pop-Up at the Park Avenue Armory

Each year, OSF commissions projects by seminal theatre artists and creative technologists from around the world that boldly imagine the future of theatrical storytelling. Quills Fest projects explore an expansive spectrum of Extended Reality (XR) forms, ranging from 360 video to interactive VR narratives to AR games. Quills Fest VR World, a surreal and playful take on OSF’s iconic Elizabethan theatre in Virtual Reality, serves as an ever-evolving artistic home for Quills projects. Quills Fest VR World was created in partnership with OSF's inaugural Creative Technologists in Residence Cyril Tsiboulski & Illya Szilak, and features interactive music composed by Justin Hicks and avatars designed by Selly Raby Kane.

Conceived by Nataki Garrett, Quills Fest is a transmedia playground that radically expands access to the transformational power of storytelling.

On January 15, OSF will present a panel, "The Future of Theater Design in XR", in collaboration with Park Avenue Armory (PAA) at Making Space at the Armory Symposium: Sound & Color—The Future of Race in Design. For more on the panel, see our speakers and panelists below. From January 14-15, a pop-up version of Quills Fest VR World will be part of an ongoing presentation at the Armory. Pop-up works include XR and AR projects in multiple phases of development—from prototypes and works-in-progress to fully completed projects—that boldly explore liveness, interactivity, and immersive storytelling. Find more information at the Armory's website.

ANAKWAD
Director and Performer: Ty Defoe
Director: Dov Heichemer
Developer and Technical Artist: alpha_rats
Motion Capture Produced in Partnership with NYU Tandon at The Yard

Anakwad is a shapeshifter bear ritual from the indigiqueer perspective. Bear medicine is a powerful intentional energy of transformation as part of the human experience and encourages healing through reconnecting to the earth and one’s own nature.


BLOOM
Artist: Nao Bustamante
In Partnership with Park Avenue Armory

Nao Bustamante prototypes a new vision for feminist autonomy in her project BLOOM, an ongoing cross-disciplinary investigation centered around the design of the vaginal speculum and its use in the history of the pelvic examination.


DIAGNOSIA
Artists: Mengtai Zhang & Lemon Guo

In China, internet gaming is described as “electronic heroin” and many parents of suspected internet addicts send them to re-education camps. One of them was the director of this VR experience that places you at the center of his haunting experiences.


GUARDIAN OF THE NIGHT
Artists: Dede Ayite, Michael Joseph McQuilken, and Joel ‘Kachi Benson

Guardian of the Night is a virtual reality experience that immerses the viewer in a forest, where they’re guided by spiritual guardians from West African mythology.


LOOM
Artists: Mengtai Zhang & Lemon Guo

LOOM is a VR opera that ruminates on the emotional and political charge of polyphony and ethnic identities. The project grew out of the artists’ time recording soundscapes, filming, and studying with elder song masters in the villages of the Kam people, an ethnic minority group in the southwest of China with a rich orally transmitted polyphonic singing tradition that has undergone drastic displacement and reconstruction in recent decades.


ORDINARY GESTURE
Artist: Raja Feather Kelly
Creative Technologist: Illya Szilak
Creative Technologist: Cyril Tsiboulski
Composer: Christoph Mateka
Motion Capture Produced in Partnership with NYU Tandon at The Yard

Ordinary Gesture is a Virtual Reality Theatrical experience that intersects theatre, meditation, and movement. The experience seeks to surrealize the experience of empathy by situating the player in 5 scenes that expand from their body to space-time (the universe) and back again.


HABOOB: THE SUBLIME NATURE OF SUDANESE SANDSTORMS
Artist: Nehal El-Hadi
Artist: Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde
In partnership with New York Live Arts
Motion Capture Produced in Partnership with NYU Tandon at The Yard

A Sudanese girl’s experience of a haboob, or sandstorm, in Khartoum leaves a profound and lingering memory. This work-in-progress experiment is the first iteration of a VR experience that combines haptic interactions with sand with virtual experiences of the haboob.


QUEERSKINS: ARK
Artists: Illya Szilak & Cyril Tsiboulski

Reading a diary left by the estranged son, a Catholic mother (Hadley Boyd) finds a way to transcend herself and her grief by imagining him alive and in love. Featuring a pas-de-deux between two male lovers, Queerskins: Ark was shot at Intel Studios on a 30ft diameter volumetric capture stage, the largest studio of its kind in the world.

Facilitated by Scarlett Kim and Mei Ann Teo who head Innovation & Strategy and New Work teams at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, this panel features multihyphenate theatre artists sharing about their journeys into Extended Reality. Trailblazers in envisioning the future of live performance, the artists will offer provocations for the intersection of theatre and XR.

Panelist Biographies:

LaJuné McMillian is a Multidisciplinary Artist, and Educator creating art that integrates performance, extended reality, and physical computing to question our current forms of communication. They are passionate about discovering, learning, manifesting, and stewarding spaces for liberated Black Realities and the Black Imagination. LaJune believes in making by diving into, navigating, critiquing, and breaking systems and technologies that uphold systemic injustices to decommodify our bodies, undo our indoctrination, and make room for different ways of being.

Justin Hicks is a Drama Desk-nominated composer, vocalist, and sound artist who has collaborated with various artists including Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Chris Myers, Meshell Ndegeocello, Hilton Als, Charlotte Brathwaite, Darius Jones, Steffani and Toshi Reagon. His work has been presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Public, Baryshnikov Art Center, Festival steirischer herbst (Graz, AT), Symphony Space, Jack, and The Bushwick Starr. Hicks recently presented his song cycle Outside as part of The Shed's Open Call series and composed music for Clyde's by Lynn Nottage. Hicks was a member of Kara Walker’s 6-8 Months Space and holds a culinary diploma from ICE in New York City.

Dede Ayite is a two-time Tony award nominated costume designer working in theater, opera and film. Her most recent Broadway credits include Topdog Underdog, Ohio State Murders, American Buffalo, Slave Play, A Soldier’s Play, and American Son. Her select Off-Broadway credits include Merry Wives (The Public Theater); Seven Deadly Sins (Tectonic); By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, (Signature); School Girls… (MCC); Bella: An American Tall Tale (Playwrights Horizons). Regionally, Ayite’s work has appeared at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Steppenwolf, Arena Stage and more. She has worked in television with Netflix, Comedy Central, and FOX. Ayite earned her MFA at the Yale School of Drama and has received a TDF/Kitty Leech Young Master Award, Obie, Drama Desk, Henry Hewes, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes, and Jeff Awards.

Ty Defoe (Giizhig), citizen of the Oneida/Ojibwe Nations. A writer, interdisciplinary story artist, and world builder. Ty aspires to an interweaving and glitterizing approach to artistic projects with climate awareness and Indigenous liberation. Works created and authored: River of Stone, Red Pine, The Way They Lived, Ajijaak on Turtle Island, and currently working on VR/XR piece, ANAKWAD (w/ Dov Heichemer and _alpha). Ty is a Grammy Award winner, OSF artistic honoree, a MacDowell and Sundance Fellow, and Kennedy Center’s Next 50! Degrees from CalArts, Goddard College, + NYU Tisch. Lives in NYC. He|We www.allmyrelations.earth/present

Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director, and the Artistic Director of the dance-theatre-media company the feath3r theory–for which Kelly has created 16 premieres, most recently WEDNESDAY. He also choreographed the Broadway musical A Strange Loop (Lyceum Theatre, premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon) winner of two Tony Awards, including Best Musical. He is a frequent Off-Broadway choreographer whose collaborators include Lileana Blain-Cruz, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Sarah Benson, and Michael R. Jackson. Recent works include We're Gonna Die, Macbeth In Stride, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning productions Fairview and A Strange Loop. Current projects include Lempicka, White Girl in Danger, and The Listeners. His accolades include three Princess Grace Awards, an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle honor, a Creative Capital award, and many others.

• Hana Kim
• Sadah Espii Proctor
• Michaela Ternasky Holland
• Sage Ni’Ja Whitson

Part palace, part industrial shed, Park Avenue Armory fills a critical void in the cultural ecology of New York, supporting unconventional works in the performing and visual arts that cannot be fully realized in a traditional proscenium theater, concert hall, or white wall gallery. Learn more about Park Avenue Armory.