Immersive Theatre and Virtual Reality Performance: Embodiment, Presence, and Dramaturgy

Mutoni Uwase N.

Faculty of Business and Management Kampala International University Uganda

                                                                                ABSTRACT
This paper examines the intersections between immersive theatre and virtual reality (VR) performance, focusing on how both practices reconfigure embodiment, presence, and dramaturgy in contemporary performance cultures. It argues that immersive and VR-based works challenge traditional theatrical paradigms by dissolving the proscenium boundary and repositioning the spectator as an embodied participant within the performance environment. Through sensory engagement, spatial mobility, and interactive agency, audiences experience performance as a lived, multisensory encounter rather than a distanced representation. The study further explores how presence is constructed across physical and virtual domains, highlighting VR’s capacity to generate mediated forms of embodiment while maintaining perceptual immersion. It also analyses the shift from linear dramaturgy to nonlinear, spatialized, and participatory narrative structures, where meaning emerges through audience movement, choice, and interaction. Drawing on qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid methodologies, the paper demonstrates how immersive theatre and VR performance converge in their redefinition of audience-performer relations and their expansion of dramaturgical practice. Ultimately, it positions these forms as critical sites forrethinking performance in an era of technological mediation and experiential aesthetics.

Keywords: Immersive theatre, Virtual reality performance, Embodiment, Presence, and Dramaturgy.

CITE AS: Mutoni Uwase N. (2026). Immersive Theatre and Virtual Reality Performance: Embodiment, Presence, and Dramaturgy. IDOSR JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION AND ENGLISH 11(1):10-18. https://doi.org/10.59298/IDOSR/JCE/111.19.1018