Antonia Levay spoke to David Massey, the Creative Technology & Storytelling Senior Producer at Wales Millennium Centre, about Evolver – an immersive show narrated by Cate Blanchett, which takes audiences on a journey through the human body, and is on in the WMC until the end of August – and the bigger picture as regards immersive technology advances in this venue, Wales and the world at large.
The WMC has announced plans for what will be the UK’s first dedicated immersive performance space. What are you hoping Wales will be known for, in five or 10 years’ time, because of this investment?
I’d want Wales to be somewhere artists come to make creative work using new technologies, not just be known as a receiving venue. There are spaces across the UK and Europe that programme this brilliantly, but very few set up to develop it from the ground up – to give an artist a room, time, expertise, technical support and a route to an audience.
We’ve been building towards that with Annwn Immersive and the Annwn Prize, which is an investment in an emerging practice. A couple of co-productions in our 2027 season came out of exactly that commitment; a dedicated space makes that permanent rather than opportunistic. The VR Cinema, which is part of the Llais festival, is about providing a permanent home for many titles that don’t see the light of day past the film festival circuit.
Most of what we programme we receive rather than make; that’s the gap the investment is meant to close. You build the audience and the appetite first – you can’t commission into a vacuum – but the ambition is to be making work here, not only hosting it.
Where do you think immersive storytelling is heading over the next decade?
I think we may see a shift from VR to more scalable, agentic formats that will use alternative forms of technology. Making work is still cost-prohibitive; I’d like to see a world in which we can democratise how we make work, and that it becomes cheaper and more accessible, for artists and makers. This will be a good thing, people will resist big tech, and it will produce a lot of experimentation, some of it extraordinary and new.
Ten years ago, you could put someone in a headset and the novelty carried the piece: that’s gone. Audiences now arrive with expectations, and rightly so. What we’re seeing – and what Evolver demonstrates – is immersive work being held to the same standard as any other art form. Is the script good? Is the sound design good? Does it emotionally move you? The next decade is about immersive work stopping being a category and just becoming part of how artists work. Nobody describes a play as “a lighting experience”; eventually we’ll stop putting ‘immersive’ in front of everything too.
Is attracting new audiences who may not consider themselves ‘theatre people’ a big opportunity here?
The single biggest one, and we can see it in the data – a significant proportion of people who book an immersive experience are booking with the venue for the first time. Part of it is the form – there’s no prior knowledge required, no sense that you should have read something first. Part of it is price, and keeping it accessible – if you’re trying to reach people who’ve never walked through our doors, the ticket price cannot be the thing that stops them. Another is demystifying what immersive can be – our docents are brilliant at doing some of that before audiences enter an experience.
The harder work is the second visit. Getting someone in once is a marketing task; getting them to come back is a programming one. That’s what we’re really focused on this season.
AI, VR and immersive technology are evolving incredibly quickly. Do you see them changing how stories are told, or simply giving artists new tools to tell timeless human stories?
Both – and I’d resist the idea that it’s a binary. New tools made Evolver possible, but the reason it lands isn’t the technology. It’s that it’s about being alive in a body, which in essence is human and what connects us all as an audience. Technology in this field is most interesting when you stop noticing it. The pieces that fail are usually the ones where the tech is the point; the pieces that work are the ones where an artist had something they urgently needed to say and this happened to be the only way to say it.
Do you think immersive experiences have the potential to create deeper emotional connections than traditional performance?
Different, rather than deeper: I’d be wary of setting up a hierarchy. A great play in a full auditorium does something immersive work can’t, yet – put 1,000 people in a room having the same experience at the same time. Immersive work removes the distance: you’re not watching a thing happen to someone else, it’s happening to you, and often you’re alone inside it. Soul Paint, which we’re programming in February, is experienced three people at a time, which serves the integrity of the artwork.
The thing that brings people together isn’t only what happens during the piece, it’s the conversation afterwards. We think a lot about the space people step back into, and who they’re with when they do.
Evolver, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff Bay, until Sun 30 Aug.
Tickets: £12.50/£10. Info: here
words ANTONIA LEVAY
