Shadow Canyon: A Puppeteer’s Tale is a unique blend of VRChat Worldbuilding by nprowler, immersive dance performances by students of the VR Dance Academy founded by Dust Bunny, and then improv actors and immersive theatre staging led by Mycana. Overall, it was such a unique blend of different disciplines that the curators of Raindance Immersive awarded it with a special prize reserved for projects that embody the indie spirit of Raindance.
The project started when nprowler and Dust Bunny saw some shadow effects in VRChat that inspired them to experiment with creating shadow dances with both sheet materials hanging from a line as well as onto the walls of a walking simulator VRChat world called Horse Canyon that premiered last year’s Venice Immersive. Dust Bunny brought in her students from the VR Dance Academy, and then collaborated with theatre director and digital storyteller Mycana to figure out a narrative. The story primarily is motivating a sort of guided tour to different locations on the map that feature different dances that were inspired by different Tarot cards. The main protagonist is watching each of these dances while another Mystic sidekick character helps interpret the meaning leading to breakthroughs of creative inspiration.
For me the strongest part of the piece were the awe-inspiring dance scenes with beautiful shadow effects and getting a chance to explore this latest iteration of nprowler’s vast world of nature-inspired spatial architectures. To get a sense of some of the journey that you’re taken on, then be sure to watch the section of Madame Kana’s Raindance Immersive 2024 documentary featuring clips from Shadow Canyon.
I had a chance to catch up with Dust Bunny, nprowler, and Mycana to unpack their unique creative collaboration and how they fused each of their strengths to put together a very unique and awe-inspiring piece that’s at the intersection of immersive dance, the vastness of walking simulator world building, immersive theatre, improv, and immersive storytelling.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into one of the winners of the Raindance Immersive 2024's Award for the Spirit of Raindance. It's a piece called Shadow Canyon, which was sort of a mix between live dance performance, immersive theater, and kind of like this walking simulator where you're going around to these different locations to see these dance performances. And there's a whole narrative that's so one of the really interesting trends that i'm starting to see within vr chat is artists from around the world who are collaborating together to make art in this case you have dust bunny who was actually featured within joe hunting's we met in virtual reality she was on her way of becoming a full-time dance teacher within the context of vr she went on to then start the VR dance academy where she does these classes. And so a lot of her students were pulled in to be able to do these different dance performances in the context of this world and, you know, have the shadow effect. So they're dancing in front of like these virtual lights that are then projecting back behind them, these shadows, either on the walls or on these pieces of fabric of hanging up on a string. Then Imp Prowler is a world builder who created a number of different walking simulator worlds in the context of VRChat that were featured both in Renate's Immersive as well as Venice Immersive. And then Maikana, who is coming more from a theater background, improv and digital storytelling. And so she's coming in to bring in different improv actors and help to kind of weave together an overall arc of the story for why you're going from place to place in order to see these different dances. Yeah, it was a really striking and alluring and beautiful piece. And yeah, a lot of creative innovations that were done to bring all this piece together. So we're coming all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Dust Bunny and Prowler and Mike Hanna happened on Wednesday, July 12th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:08.581] Dust Bunny: Hello, my name's Dust Bunny, and I am the creator and founder of the VR Dance Academy, and I teach dance classes full-time for my career in VRChat.
[00:02:19.348] NProwler: Hello, I'm nrowler. I'm a world creator in VRChat.
[00:02:23.271] Mycana: And I'm Mycana. I am a VR theater practitioner and assistant professor. I also teach at VRDA with Dust Bunny, and I teach a jazz class and a improv class.
[00:02:35.523] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe each of you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into VR.
[00:02:41.035] Dust Bunny: Sure. I have been a dancer since I was 11 years old, primarily dancing, belly dance and ballroom. I've been dancing throughout my life. And then I was trained in a dance studio, how to teach beginner ballroom. And then I also taught belly dance in studios in real life as well. So I have a lot of experience in dance and dance teaching. And I discovered VR in 2017. 18, the winter of 2018. And I started teaching belly dance classes every Sunday in VRChat. And then when the pandemic hit, I decided to teach more classes and I opened and launched the VR Dance Academy in January 2022.
[00:03:30.040] NProwler: I started my journey in VR at the end of 2017 with the Oculus setup. And I just found it amazing. Absolutely just fascinating. And I started at Oculus Home and started creating in there and seemed to enjoy myself. Someone introduced me to VRChat. I then came over to VRChat and was fascinated with what could be done there. So I decided to try to learn how to create worlds and here we are.
[00:03:59.278] Mycana: So I'm a newbie compared to these folks because I discovered VR probably in 2020, like a lot of other people. I had been practicing theater conventionally in real life, quote unquote, for over 25 years, as well as dance. And that all, you know, came to a stop. And just as we all know in 2020, and I had been working with a friend of mine teaching a class at a community college. We were doing a digital performance of Macbeth. We were one of the few community colleges who actually decided to move forward with performing during the pandemic. And we were just doing the Zoom stuff. And in conversation, she was saying that she was hanging out with one of her friends in Texas. And she was, you know, having coffee with people from all over the world. And I was just so confused about what she was talking about. And it turns out she was hanging out in alt space. And from there, we just had a conversation about what social VR was. And I was hooked the second she said that she saw comedy shows in all space because I was like, well, they're doing comedy shows. They must be doing theater. And, um, from there, I just kind of dove into learning more about VR performance and VR and how to get involved. And I've just, I hit the ground running and didn't look back to normal theater, even though theaters opened up, I stuck with VR performance.
[00:05:30.415] Kent Bye: And just a quick follow on question, you had mentioned that you're also an assistant professor, what kind of classes are you teaching?
[00:05:35.517] Mycana: Yeah, so I'm an assistant professor, and I teach digital storytelling. And my first class was live storytelling in XR. And this next semester, I'm going to be teaching digital diversity, and digital storytelling. And and Language and Technology class. I'm not too clear on the title, but I'm excited to teach it. It's a blend of discussion and philosophy about how technology has changed our ways of communicating.
[00:06:08.072] Kent Bye: Okay, well, this will be a fun conversation because we're covering a lot of ground between both the world-building aspects from Impowler and the dance aspect from Dust Bunny, and then the more theatrical storytelling aspect with Mykana. And so we're going to be talking a lot more as the conversation goes on about the piece that you just actually picked up, the Spirit of Rain Dance Award for The Shadow Canyon, A Puppeteer's Tale. But before we start to dive into that specific experience, I want to get a little bit more of each of your journeys into VR. So Daspani, if we go back to when you first start to get into VR, you clearly have a long background in dance, and then this whole dance scene within virtual reality with full body tracking, and it's a pretty big technological leap to get all the gear together. And so can you walk through a little bit more? What was it that catalyzed you to do this big deep dive into full body tracking and dancing within VR?
[00:07:02.830] Dust Bunny: Sure. So I initially joined VRChat because of a meme. It was the Knuckles meme. I thought they were so funny and I was like, I need to go on desktop and see what this is all about. So I joined via desktop. But while I was like exploring the Great Pug, I saw these images. anime characters moving their full bodies. You know, they weren't just still like I was and I would see people like dancing in front of a mirror sometimes. And I was like, how is this possible? What's going on? And then I found out that the game uses VR headsets. And I'm not a game. I never really gamed. Like the biggest games I ever played was probably The Sims and Grand Theft Auto. So I wasn't really a gamer. I didn't know anything. But they told me they had VR headsets. They could like move their body and it was tracked by a computer. And so lucky for me, my roommate at the time had a, was it Oculus Rift headset? So I jumped in VR with that and was able to my arms. And then I also saw people like lounging around with their legs and like dancing at dance clubs that were around at the time. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool. I could literally be any character I want and dance and explore worlds and like I was like, I need full body. So I purchased full body headset, like everything all in one on Craigslist from someone who was moving and got it all set up. And then from there, I just skyrocketed with dancing and VR. I've also started to do streaming. So like making content and Like the only thing I really knew how to entertain people with dancing. So I started doing dance streams. I joined like a hip hop dance community, but I was kind of like disappointed to see that there wasn't really any other kind of dancing, at least that I was aware of around the community. There was a lot of clubbing. There was a lot of lap dancing. And there was a lot of hip hop, but there wasn't a lot of like the cultural dances that I know. And I was like, why don't I just bring this in here? So when there were like hip hop showcases, I was doing belly dance showcases because I didn't know hip hop at the time. And so just from there, I just brought in what I knew. And now here I am.
[00:09:27.495] Kent Bye: Nice. And for any listeners that may have seen Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality, you're one of the main protagonists in that film, one of the six characters that are followed throughout that. And a little bit of your journey as you're gearing up. And I think that was before the VR Dance Academy was formally launched. Is that correct? You're building up to that?
[00:09:45.206] Dust Bunny: Yes. The VR Dance Academy happened after the film.
[00:09:48.748] Kent Bye: Okay.
[00:09:49.827] Dust Bunny: But I was teaching, I was starting to teach more classes then. I was teaching ballroom classes and belly dance classes at that time.
[00:09:58.272] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Okay. Awesome. And in Prowler, so in terms of the world building, it sounds like you were using Oculus Home, which is very rudimentary and it's a lot different than, you know, having Unity and, you know, getting out Blender and designing all these custom worlds. And so can you talk through a little bit your evolution of your early phases of world building and then discovering eventually VRChat and then what was the catalyst for you to take your own process of creating worlds to the next level?
[00:10:26.209] NProwler: Well, Oculus Home was new to me. I know nothing about graphic design or anything like that, but I was just fascinated that I could grab objects and move them around and create my own space. And... When Oculus allowed us to actually have people able to come over to your space and share the space with you and communicate with you, this brought a whole new level to things. Now we were socializing in this space and we could decorate for other people and showcase what we could do. And this was just amazing to me. There was a point that We were all contained in these little apartments. We couldn't leave. We couldn't do anything really. We could just use objects that they gave us. They opened up so that we could get Sketchfab and download some objects so we could have fresh objects. But me and a few other people, we would gather all the time and we would showcase and show people how to create these spaces. But we also discovered how we could hack out of the space. So we actually found a way to actually leave the confinement of the apartment and actually go out into the wild and now build these big places outside of the contained space. I don't think Facebook enjoyed that very much because they shut us down in a few days after that. And then they'd allow us to upload actual big spaces outside the apartment. And that changed things. I was now downloading, I downloaded a big castle and, and I put characters in there and I tried to figure out how to make animation work. I never heard of Blender before, but I tried using Blender to make FBXs that could have animation. And from that point, I was starting to get a little more familiar with this, but I still didn't really know what I was doing. And I definitely didn't know anything about Unity. Then when Facebook decided to actually push the Facebook logins, I decided I didn't really want much part of this anymore. That's when someone said, come to VRChat. And that's when I came over. I saw what was being done there. And I was just blown away because there was the things that we always wanted, like being able to have our own pickups and being able to change the environment. And that just fascinated me. So I decided to sit down and try to figure out how people were doing this. And that was my first exposure to Unity. And pretty much the first thing I did was kind of make a semi-nature world with a bunch of trees and some ground and some rock. And I thought, this is really cool. I mean, this is a real space that I can hang out. I brought friends over. People enjoyed it. We brought some cars over. We could drive around the space. This was just wild. So at that point, I just carried on and continued making worlds to the point where I am at now. It's been fascinating, actually.
[00:13:11.348] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah, and we'll be diving more into kind of the evolution into what eventually became the piece that I saw last year, Horse Canyon, that was at Venice, also at Ringdance. Yes. But before we dive into that, Makana, when you were first coming into VR, I know that there's certainly a lot of immersive theater things that were happening, especially during the pandemic with COVID. The Under Presents by Tender Claws, they did The Tempest. You know, Kira Binzing was doing like Pandora. A number of different folks that have been experimenting with live immersive theater, as well as storytelling. Maybe you could flesh out a little bit of hearing about Altspace and then your introduction to what was happening within the context of the scene of VRChat and your deep dive into VR.
[00:13:56.826] Mycana: Yeah, for sure. You know, after I was really interested in getting the Oculus, I got the Oculus and then I didn't touch it for about six months because I'm actually kind of a Luddite. I'm not a tech person at all. So I had this headset and I was like, it looks really cool and I don't know how to use it. And so instead I just started going online and looking up a bunch of different digital performances to kind of get me, I don't know, prepared to see what this thing was all about. And so I was actually looking at a couple of things, a couple of things happened. I watched a webcast of Theater Communications Group. They did a workshop or introduction to people who were doing VR theater. And if I remember correctly, Brendan Bradley was there, Gob's Improv Emporium performed and Ari Tarr was there. And I swear. I wrote their names down so I could look them up later, which is funny because I ended up working with them all later down the line. But there was that. And then I was also a part of this community, Columbia Digital Storytelling Lab. And I saw Deirdre Lyons post an introduction to herself. And I was like, oh my gosh, I have to connect with this person. I responded to her introduction and I was like, this person's never going to like respond to me because I'm just a random person. And she did. And she invited me into the Welcome to Respite world to just look around. And then I asked her, how do I get involved with everything? And she gave me quite a few different links and people to connect with. And from there, I just started learning more and seeing more, I think the Tempest. by Tender Claws was the first show I saw. And that was really interesting to me. What I found to be really interesting was that I was sitting in a chair and I was by myself in my basement, but I felt like I was with, I think, six or seven other people. And like we went through the show together and at the end we all hugged. And it was such a weird feeling that I felt, you know, very emotional. during the pandemic. So, you know, I probably cried a little bit. But, you know, so there was something so powerful about the whole thing that I was just like, I need to know more. And so as I talked to more people, I learned about just like Dusty that, you know, what's this full body tracking? What's happening with this? And so I just decided I'm going to go all in. And I got full body tracking and just started experimenting. And part of that was because I was also interested in how comedy translates through movement. Because before the pandemic, I was very much performing improv and sketch comedy a lot. And I realized once I got into VR that a lot of the movements that I would do on stage in the physical world and the facial expressions I made wouldn't translate. And so I got the body tracking in an effort to see how different comedy would translate through my movement. And then I met people who were very much invested in VR and kind of took me under their wing. And they found out I was a dancer in a past life, you know, cause mainly I focused on theater and they were like, oh, there's this thing called VR Dance Academy. And then I showed up and here we are.
[00:17:38.004] Kent Bye: Nice. Well, that's a great segue to learn a little bit more about the Dance Academy. And then we'll talk about some of the worlds that you created in Prowler and then some of the other work that you've done leading up to Shadow Canyon. And so Dusty, so if we go back to after we met in virtual reality, it shows at Sundance. 2022 in January. And then soon after you, you actually make the leap and create the VR dance Academy and eventually are able to go full time. So maybe you could just give a bit more context for the VR dance Academy and to be like a full-time dance instructor within VR. And yeah, you know, how you were able to do the logistics of that. I noticed there's like a co-fi for people to be supporters. And, you know, I know that, you know, for existing models of, let's say yoga or other exercise, you know, there's like pay a monthly fee and you can drop in. And so it sounds like you've been able to really figure out a way to sustain yourself as a full-time professional teacher within the context of VR. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that journey and what you're able to offer there at VR Dance Academy.
[00:18:40.427] Dust Bunny: Sure. So when I started the VR Dance Academy, it was definitely a risk that I had to take. I was teaching dance classes for free while I was also working at a real-life studio. And I discovered a lot of studios were closing down around the world during the pandemic. And also even at my studio, less people were coming at the time because nobody wanted to dance with other people. You know, it was a scary time. And since I had already been teaching dance for fun in VR, I just decided to try offering more classes like choreography classes, Pilates and yoga as well. You know, being able to work out with your friends instead of by yourself. was something that I wanted to bring in as well. So like I had all these different experiences that I thought I could teach others. And so I started to make a schedule of classes that I could offer just like a real life dance studio and made sure that people were aware of it. And when I started making these schedules, a lot of people started coming. And then they'd be like, at the end of class, I was accepting donations. And I said, if you feel like donating, here's my Patreon or my PayPal. And then I noticed people were actually willing to pay for what I was offering because what I offer is just the same as you would find in a real life studio. And so I also always wanted to own my own dance studio, just didn't think it would be a virtual one. So my lifelong dream has always been to run my own business and be an entrepreneur in dance. And so I decided to take the risk and make a Ko-Fi page and put the classes behind a student membership. And it ended up working out. I didn't make a lot enough to survive at first. I still had my other job, but I was getting something for what I was teaching. So I knew that I had something going here because people were willing to pay for my dance knowledge and they love the community as well. At first, you know, it was originally like a business plan, like this is my living. But then it started turning into like a family, a really close knit community. And it was more than just taking dance classes. So I knew that there was something special here and that I should probably grow it a little bit and it was all under my name under dust bunny really when I was just making posters and I was like you know I need to give a name for myself and so I called it the VR Dance Academy. It was pretty general. I probably would have picked something else because it's such a broad term. But my vision was that I'm sure there's other people out there who would be interested in sharing their dance knowledge as well. So I don't want it to just be like Dusty's VR Studio. So I wanted to call it VR Dance Academy because in the future, I had a feeling that I would be able to bring on other people I'm still striving to do that so that it's more like a real life studio. And so, yeah, I ended up launching the Kofi. I brought on some new instructors so that there was a variety of classes to make it more appealing to people, you know, that they could go from the comfort of their own home and learn different styles of dance and get some exercise and, and just be good to their wellbeing while also having fun in VR and meeting people from all over the world. So yeah, that's really how I kind of started the business side. So now currently the VRDA is still doing the Ko-fi membership. So it's $20 a month to join and you can access all of our classes. So it's even cheaper than a real life studio because if you go to a real life studio, it's 20 bucks per class or more just for one class. This is for like 80 classes a month. So yes, that is the history there.
[00:22:47.591] Kent Bye: Yeah, just one quick follow on question, just because I know that there's been a lot of talk about the creator economy within the context of VR, especially in light of the recent VRChat layoffs. And I've heard the discussion around folks who are using these other platforms off the site to monetize. So you have everything from like Patreon and Gumroad and Booth and Ko-Fi. So is the creator economy something that would make sense for the VR Dance Academy? Especially because, you know, you're taking less of a cut, but assuming that there's going to be enough people that are actively engaged so that you would be able to make that up. But yeah, I don't know if that's something you've thought about or looked at in terms of where it's at now and where it could go in the future if it's all tightly integrated into VRChat as a platform.
[00:23:35.117] Dust Bunny: Yeah, I think the creator economy is a great tool for creators in VRChat, especially avatar creators and world makers. However, I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to implement it because you have to somehow get a link in your world. So in our dance studios, we'd have to have a link in there that people could click on to have the membership. Because my membership's already so on the low end of $20 a month, if somebody were to pay $20 a month through the creator economy, it would be a very significant cut where it wouldn't be profitable for me because I do this for my living. I would end up losing money if I use the creator economy, though I think it would bring more eyes to what I do. I just found that the outside platforms were more beneficial because I have to pay my rent and survive. So I did not go through with using the creator economy.
[00:24:35.029] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Yeah. Okay. That helps. That was what I suspected might be the answer, but I feel like there's a broader discussions around how VRChat is going to figure out some of these things. Cause you feel like the perfect type of example of how would this actually be implemented. So. Anyway, let's perhaps a deeper conversation for another time. And I wanted to, to move on to Impowler. So as I look through all the different worlds that you've been able to create, since you really started to build out these worlds, you've had a number of pieces that have been featured at Rain Dance Immersive in 2021 with the Rocky Mountain Park. And then in 2022 with the Lost Valley Lake Retreat, and then in 2023 with Horse Canyon, and then kind of like a sort of a remix of the Horse Canyon world into Shadow Canyon, that there's a lot of similarities in the look and feel. Maybe you could take us back to starting to create these really vast open spaces that have this kind of adventure feel and just talk about your process of what you were trying to create with these different types of worlds that have been featured at Raindance for the last number of years.
[00:25:38.104] NProwler: Well, it's partly because it's what I enjoy about VR. I'm a firm believer that it should be an experience when you put this headset on. You should feel like you're actually going somewhere and you really don't have a lot of limits at this point. When I build these worlds, I build them massive so that you do feel like you're actually somewhere else and that you can go left and you can go right and you can wander for 20 minutes in a direction and still feel like you're somewhere else. So that is the primary reason why I make big, big worlds. And big worlds work well with nature. It's kind of hard to make a big world as a city or as a house or a place like that. So I usually use nature. as a base for what I create from. And I love it because there's so much flexibility. You can have beautiful sceneries. You can have different kind of lighting. You can have waterfalls. You can have just different experiences in this environment. So to me, that's what VR is. And that's why I built that way. As I've moved forward, it seems other people enjoy this. I've found that people really enjoy the peacefulness of being able to get out into nature. A lot of people actually don't have access to nature. I've discovered that I've even met people that have never been to a park. which is quite amazing to me. I've met other people that can't leave their place because they live in a violent part of the world and they may get shot. So for them to be able to hang out with their friends and do outdoor activities, it's something they really want to be able to do. So this gives them a little bit of that taste of what that's like and so they can hang out with their friends. So to me, I found this to be extremely amazing that I could create this. People were getting this kind of experience from this. So that's what's driven me to keep making more of these type of experiences. And I find that a lot of people don't make these kind of experiences too much. So I'm glad I'm here and making it because this is what I like seeing when I go into a world. I also live in a part of the world that I have access to, like the Rocky Mountains. So I'm out there and I'm just gobsmacked every time I'm out there and what I see. And I'm trying to portray a little bit that back to show other people the vision of what I see. I don't make worlds based off of anything, actually. They're all just from my brain and how I'm feeling at the moment. It's an organic build. As I wake up, I have a coffee, I'll move a rock, add some trees, and I really don't know what the end result's going to be. But it's all part of my experiences in nature over time that I portray back into the worlds I create. So that's pretty much in a nutshell.
[00:28:30.563] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah, I definitely get that sense of vastness. And I think VR can deal with scale in a way that is leaning into some of the affordances that I think you're really exploring in some of the worlds that you give that sense of awe and wonder that you can get from seeing a big, vast area of nature that can take your breath away. And I just wanted to ask if you think about in terms of the name of a genre, because there's like landscape painting and painting where you're painting environment, there's like nature documentaries, but I feel like there's kind of like this emerging genre of kind of nature adventures, or maybe even nature chill out zones, or do you have a name for these types of experiences that you've been creating?
[00:29:09.660] NProwler: No, I don't. And it's actually interesting now that you've said that. I should probably think about it. I never got into this thinking about the future. I just did it because I enjoyed it. And it's taken me to this point. It's gotten me to Rain Dance and to the Venice. But I never... built for that i only built just because i was enjoying myself so i've never actually seriously sat down and thought about what i was really doing professionally with an actual name to it i was just having fun and i wanted to share that experience with other people
[00:29:42.549] Kent Bye: And I wanted to ask one other follow-on question, which is that I remember you were giving me a tour last year of horse Kenyan ahead of Venice. And we were talking a little bit about the rumblings of the creator economy within VR chat. And I know you had some thoughts and hesitations, but love to hear some of your latest thoughts of. you're an independent world builder, a creator. And sometimes with the creator economy, it's like you have to transform your world so that's gamified or it makes sense for you to like have access to like a private room. But I don't necessarily see like an intuitive way for how would you create more of a gamified or a tiered level of the types of worlds that you create. But wondering if that's even on your radar, even thinking about some of the monetization or the creator economy for the context for the type of stuff that you're creating.
[00:30:26.334] NProwler: I have put some thought to it. The thing is, I'm not an actual game developer, so trying to figure out what I would do is a little bit tricky for me. Also, I am just working by myself, and some of these experiences can take over seven months to create. And once I actually get it the way I like it, I'm a little bit exhausted at that point to do anything more. Sure, I could probably carry on a little bit later on, but usually by that time I've started something else. I do think in the future there might be something in there that could be useful to me with the creator of economy. Maybe like with my horse world, you could have more selection of the type of horse you want. Do you want it to fly? Do you want it to have colors? Things like that I could probably do a little bit more with. But that just consumes so much of my energy trying to develop that side. It takes away from my creative side of what I'm trying to do. what I am creating is just a gift to everybody. And that's pretty much, I'm not worried about the revenue from it. I'm more giving it as a gift back to everybody that's involved in VR or outside of VR. So that's pretty much where my head space is at the moment.
[00:31:37.045] Kent Bye: Yeah, that totally makes sense. The gift economy and the Burning Man ethos of providing value for other people. I think I see a lot of that and I see the magic of VR is a lot of that gift economy. Like Dusty was talking about, like giving away these dance classes for free, which eventually she was able to transform into like a proper living in a business. But yeah. Yeah. So anyway, thanks for elaborating on that. And I wanted to turn to Mykana to talk a little bit about once you get into VR, you get connected to the VR Dance Academy, you start teaching some classes, but also you said you had some other collaborations that you were working with other folks at the intersection of XR and theater and thinking about digital storytelling. So I'd love to have you kind of elaborate a little bit more of the work that you were doing ahead of working on this project.
[00:32:22.972] Mycana: Yeah, so the first production that I was involved in was with OnboardXR, which was created by Brendan Bradley. And that was a really great introduction to how to basically take the skills from my real world theater experience and transfer them into VR. A lot of theater skills that I had were extremely transferable. And I think I always tell that to theater people who were like, what are you doing? I don't understand. How would I even start? I wouldn't know how to do anything. It's like actually a lot of stuff we do in theater in the physical world is transferable to VR. There's planning, there's writing, there's rehearsing. You know, there's stage managing. There's all of that. So working with Brendan and his team was really, really great, really helpful. And we did it all in six weeks, which was just like insane. So, you know, I built a world with help from other people. And that was in Mozilla Hubs. And I had a monologue that I had written for the stage from a workshop that I had taken. Just a few months earlier, and I just translated it into immersive performance. And that was really interesting because I had never really thought about that particular monologue being an immersive experience. It was a real estate agent who was trying to sell a house that was clearly collapsing into a lake. and it was really fun to build a house collapsing into a lake and then have this person walk around and trying to like you know look at these awful things that were happening to the house and turn it around into a positive so instead of doing it on the stage with props I was actually able to bring people into the house and that was just really amazing and then also just being able to pull it off in I think it was six weeks it was very short it was a quick turnaround and so I I did that and it was just one of those moments where I'm like, if I can pull this off without any experience, I'm just moving forward and I'm just going to learn as much as I can. And then after that, I worked on Offrail with Aritar and his group Raptor XR. And that was an immersive, interactive improv show. That was wild and something I had never done before in regards to, I'd never improvised an interactive show. So a lot of the things that I'm learning in VR are so different from my regular theater experience, because I am not like a lot of VR practitioners in that I never really participated in immersive performance. So I went straight from your proscenium stage show to VR immersive, interactive. And it's been an education. It's been a journey just to learn how to interact with people and to learn, you know, different rules of immersion and, you know, the best practices. And so that's been really interesting. Within the time I've also worked on my own show that I've been working on called Space Holder. And that was also done in Mozilla Hubs. And it was just a one act of kind of a longer show that I hope to one day produce in the VR space. And I've also worked with Skits and Bits, which is a improv community in VRChat. I'm a host there and through that group, it's been really great. I've been able to really fine tune my improv skills and my leadership skills. And I've also brought in a show that we had in my improv community and it's called Indie Night. And it's just a bunch of folks who have improv teams and it's outside of the theater. So, you know, normally you have your theater main stage people, but then you have groups who just kind of practice on their own and rehearse on their own. And this show is really exciting because we get to invite people on stage who, you know, normally either haven't had a chance to perform as a part of Skits and Bits or who have just been working on their own and they have their own improv thing going on and we can highlight them. And so it's a big variety show of different improv acts. And that has been a really, really, I guess, fulfilling production. With the Skits and Bits, we've also worked on the virtual reality show with Thea. We did a murder mystery. wild. That was really, really something that pushed my boundaries and we all learned a lot. But it was a live murder mystery and Fia was streaming and TFM Johnny was the person who was murdered and we led a bunch of people through Fia's studio trying to figure out which character murdered TFM Johnny. So yeah, it's really fun thinking about all these productions actually because, you know, just five years ago I wouldn't have imagined doing any of this. VR has offered me so many opportunities to learn and to explore and to just grow my creativity. It just blows my mind.
[00:37:41.932] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I think that kind of brings us up to speed to each of your journeys into VR and working with it as a medium. And at Raindance, I know that Maria, when she was announcing the Spirit of the Raindance award winner, she had said a legendary world builder, legendary dance instructor, legendary theater maker, all came together to create the Shadow Canyon, a puppeteer's tale. And so, you know, this is quite a unique collaboration that does have a lot of extensive world building. Like I see the spirit of horse Canyon in there kind of transformed into this different topography and a more of a guided tour that you had these different dances. You had a lot of shadows that were involved. There was dancers from the VR dance Academy that were dancing. You had a lot of improv storytelling and theater making that was also happening. And so there was just a lot that was happening to all bring it together. So like, where did this idea begin?
[00:38:35.561] Dust Bunny: Sure. So the idea of Shadow Canyon began in a couple of different ways because we had to join forces. So originally, Npraller and I were at a dance event in VR, and we were admiring how the fire was casting shadows on a wall. It was like casting people around it on the wall. And we were just admiring how cool that lighting looked and how the shadow looked. And me and Mykana have always been interested in shadow puppetry and also dancing with our shadows. And simultaneously, the next week that I saw the shadows on this wall with Endfowler, I hosted a freestyle dance class where I took my dancers to a world that you could play with your shadow. in front of a light. And we did our entire freestyle dance cypher in front of this shadow casting thing. And it just looked really cool. And I think Mykana saw the video and then me and Mykana started talking like, oh, we should do some kind of shadow-based show because we really want to do something with that. And so those were like the two separate events that were happening behind the scenes. And then we... We're asked by Maria if we were going to do anything for Rain Dance. And so then it was like this combination of all of these ideas suddenly. And we're like, okay. And Prowler really wanted to make a shadow, like a canvas. If you were at the show, there's like these canvases and Prowler made the canvas for us to try and dance in front of. It wasn't like particularly for a Rain Dance show. It was just experimenting. You could correct me if I'm wrong, Prowler.
[00:40:25.345] NProwler: No, no, it was for experimenting.
[00:40:26.906] Dust Bunny: It was for experimenting. And we thought like, oh, this is great. We can use this for like a dance circle and dance around the fire and like do something. But then the whole like rain dance thing was happening. And we're like, well, maybe we could make our show, the shadow show that Mike and I were talking about. And then Prowler and I were like, we need to use these canvases somehow. And then it just turned into this entire project where we wanted to do dance show, focus on shadows. And Prowler was going to work on more shadow areas in a map that they were creating. And Mykana and I realized like after talking to the Rain Dance folks that we need to have a narrative as well as a dance show. And then it turned into like, oh, let's do like an old fairy tale, like, you know, Little Red Riding Hood or something. And so we were looking into different old stories that we could tell through dance. And then we saw, well, Mykana saw the Puppet Showman by Hans Christian Andersen. And the puppeteer. Or the puppeteer, sorry, yeah. It was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. And we kind of went with that story about how this puppeteer makes his puppets come to life. And we're like, well, this is perfect because our dancers could be puppets and they can come to life and we've got the shadows. And so it wasn't exactly the same story that we created, but it was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen. I don't know if anyone wants to add anything about that initial.
[00:42:04.759] Mycana: Yeah, you covered it all. And scene. Yeah. So the story is definitely different. from the original Hans Christian Andersen story. The Hans Christian Andersen story is actually about a puppeteer who wants his actors to come to life because he wants to make more money because he thinks that real actors would bring in more money and then so a witch slash mystic slash magical person. And it comes out of the bathroom. It's like, I can do that for you. And then the puppets turn into real actors, but then they turn into these stereotypes of actors that they become very egotistical and bossy and moody. And the puppeteer is like, ah, I should have stuck with puppets. And so when we read it, we're like, that's a little cynical. We wanted to be a little bit more uplifting. And so we took liberties and But the idea of going with fairy tales is it came from the improv show that we wanted to do with shadows because we thought it would be fun to do improvised fairy tales. And so luckily we have been talking about it already. So when it came down to, okay, how do we structure this show? The world is magical. It feels magical. And a fairy tale is just perfect for what we wanted to do.
[00:43:32.580] NProwler: I'd like to add one thing. The world actually was just a test world, as Dust Bunny had mentioned. So I just used one of my worlds, which happened to be Horse Canyon. And I liked that style because it just felt more suited for shadows. It just has a... the type of rocks and the environment it is. It just has a really good vibe for shadows. And then Dust Bunny had also mentioned she wanted a dance camp and she loved the style because where she's from, it has this type of environment and it's a reminder of home. So I said, okay, I guess we're going to stick with this design. And at that point, once there was talk about it becoming something for rain dances, then when I had to start now decorating the place and building the place more as an actual kind of little world for this experience. So that was kind of how that world got twisted into shadow Canyon.
[00:44:33.238] Kent Bye: Gotcha. Yeah. Okay, well, I wanted to ask a question around the narrative architecture of the piece because my experience of it was that I feel like the onboarding was amazing where you're bringing us in and it really felt like the next level of immersive theater where you're bringing folks in and really preparing us, getting us ready. And it's like, I'm on this adventure, going through this world. We start to see these dances and it felt like a series of different dances as we're taking a guided tour through the world and that the narrative elements were in the course of the Q&A so that a lot of it was improvised. And so then I was like, okay, what was that story about? I would have difficulty recounting because I think there's a challenge with like VR and immersive theater and you kind of get overwhelmed or like, I feel like I remember the worlds and the journey and the dances a lot more than I do the beats of the story. And so as you were putting together the story, there's kind of like a character that's guiding us around and he's the protagonist. And then you have these other dancers, but then sometimes I was having difficult understanding how, if the dance was somehow connecting back into the story or if they were just really these independent bits where it was a little bit harder for me to see how everything was cohering together. So it was a little bit more of a fragmented experience, but also like a overwhelm of taking it all in and it's such a powerful visceral visual experience. But in terms of like architecting the story, can you just outline a little bit about what the improv actor was given in terms of like, okay, here's the beat that you need to hit. And then here's how going around this space, you're going to have the dramatic arc all tied together.
[00:46:15.338] Dust Bunny: Mycana, do you want to touch on this?
[00:46:17.259] Mycana: Yeah, sure. So it's improvised in a way that The actors know what beats to hit, but they're allowed to say different lines. So it's not improvising the way like, tell whatever story you want. It's very much like we're telling the story of a puppeteer who is down on his luck and not feeling inspired and becomes inspired through these series of dances. And so what we did was we practiced each section of the story where we would have each beat basically rehearsed so that the different actors would know how to respond to it. We gave them allowance to improvise because we wanted it to feel organic. We wanted it to feel natural. At the beginning of the rehearsal process, we had the actors create their own characters. You know, we gave them homework. So each puppeteer, we have two actors who play puppeteers and both of those actors have different approaches to the puppeteer. And I find that to be really, really interesting. So you could come back to the show and see another actor perform a totally different approach to the puppeteer. And I think that was really fun to see. But our approach to the narrative was that each dance would inform the puppeteer of something in his life that he was lacking. and to recall back to why he started doing art in the first place. And that was something that was really interesting to us. And I have to say that we had gone through this story a few times. So there was about maybe two or three drafts of how we're going to structure the story to make it not just make sense to people who are watching it, but also to connect with all of us. Because we're coming from this interpretation of a fairy tale that was pretty negative and cynical. And so we had to kind of go through the journey of like getting away from that negativity and cynicism. And each draft got more positive. And so the draft that we ended up with was very much that the puppeteer comes to terms with getting back into the seat of being an artist and understanding what that means and why he decided to do it in the first place. It's connected with all of us because we have all personally reached that moment in our lives at different times. And we do have to remember why we started what we're doing. And so working with the actors and the different approaches to improv, improvisation, you know, as a director, I would continually ask them, what would your character do? You know, and a lot of times we would have discussions. Why would they do this? How would they approach this? What would their reaction be? Because there were no lines for them to memorize. It was really on the actors to build these characters and bring them to life. We gave them a beat sheet. You know, in the first part, this is what the puppeteer does. This is what the mystic does. And then in the next scene, this is what the mystic says to the puppeteer. And we would go over and over. The hard part about improvising is that you know, you have good days and bad days. And I've done a lot of scripted work in the theater and it's just really easy to kind of, well, not really easy. If you have a bad day, you take some breaths and you can go out on stage and you can do an okay performance. If you have a bad day in improv, you could really derail everything. And so it's incredibly difficult to do what they did. I think that they all did a magnificent job of really taking a moment and taking a beat to, you know, if they've had a bad day, to bring their all to the performance and tell the story as best they could. But yeah, as for the narrative, it was very much like, how do we tie these things together with tarot and the mystic and how do we get them all? We really wanted the puppeteer to go through a process with a friend and then also, you know, bring in the sidekick as well, leaning on a couple tropes from storytelling. So yeah, Dusty, do you want to bring in anything to our process? We had a lot of meetings.
[00:50:45.128] Kent Bye: Yeah, let me just follow up on that part and then I'll go over to the dance. So as a group, we're all going around, we're watching a dance and then the two characters are kind of reacting and having a conversation with each other. And he's finding deeper inspiration. And then there also seemed to be a thread of like, there was a reason why we needed to go from place to place. And so it was almost like we are being led, but we're also like chasing something. Like what was the catalyst for us to move from place to place?
[00:51:10.906] Mycana: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I mean, we asked that question ourselves. We said, how are we going to get people around this place? It's so massive. And that's the thing is we really wanted to show off Improwler's world. you know, Emperor made a great little campfire for performance, but there was that entire world we really wanted to show off. And so we took inspiration from the original story that the puppets kind of go off and do their own thing and they become egotistical and awful and whatever. And we're like, hmm, I wonder what would happen if a puppet or if anything came to life within this grand space. They'd probably run away once they realized, like, how much freedom they have and so with that we figured well this is a interesting way to show off the world and also you know for the puppeteer to go chase the puppets to get them back these are his assets the puppets are his life he has nothing without them so he has to run after them he promised this audience a show and we figured we might as well encourage the audience to follow And that's where it came from is we really wanted to show off the world and make sure that everybody knew the grandeur of what Edmund Prowler had created.
[00:52:31.219] Kent Bye: Gotcha.
[00:52:33.741] Mycana: Okay. Dusty can talk more about how that was.
[00:52:37.213] Kent Bye: Yeah, Dusty, in terms of from the process perspective, did you really lay out the narrative architecture? And then from there, figuring out what the path was going to be, like, where are you going to go? And then figuring out what the narrative arc was going to be. And then from there, which dancer was going to be at different places and what dances they would be doing with all these things together. So where did you begin, Dusty, with trying to put this puzzle together with all these different pieces?
[00:53:02.847] Dust Bunny: Right. So one thing that we didn't mention was we didn't have a lot of time to make the rain dance show. It was kind of dropped into our lap, but we're like, oh, okay, let's go. We got to make something. So as far as the dances go, we've already been working on some dances for our student showcase that we have every year. And our next one's coming up in August. And some of the dances I felt could be used in this performance because we I didn't have time to choreograph a whole bunch of new ones. And a lot of the dances kind of fit the theme of what our story was. And so we had some of the dances first, and then the story came on. And then I realized we have this mystic character who brings them to life. And we struggled with how does the mystic bring the characters to life? Is it just like a magic spell? Is it like this? And I'm also a tarot card reader. I love tarot. And I was like, wait, some of these dances actually could resemble tarot cards. We've got the lovers, which is like a waltz ballroom. We've got my character, which is like a scary wendigo with a skull mask. That could be death. We've got these belly dancers, kind of like yin and yang. They're the opposites. That could be the cherry. And so I realized like, we could totally make these dances based off tarot cards. And that's how we kind of interweave the dances into the story was that the dances were supposed to resemble the meanings behind the tarot cards that the mystic was like giving to the puppeteer to help them get out of their rut and that they have like realizations just watching a dance being inspired by what they were seeing. And then as far as the world goes, we kind of let the dancers have free roam and figure out where they wanted to perform their dance. And so when we would figure out where they wanted to dance or where their characters would look good, and Prowler would help with like being able to cast the shadows in that area, making a path so that we could go from one dance to the other. There was no reason, really like, this dance goes first, this dance goes second for like the order. It was just kind of like how it would flow in the world where the dancers chose to dance. So like the first dance that we see is the lover's dance. And it was like a flat little area of rock that would be good for like someone to do ballroom. And then you go up above them and there's like this cave kind of looking area that would be good for death, the waterfall. was kind of like a refreshing moment, trying to remind you to be strong, like the river. So one of our dancers chose to be over there. So we just got to play with the shadows a lot and the locations. And then from there, we made the story flow along a path that is what the same path we took you on as the viewer. So we implemented the dances within the world while still trying to build the story at the same time. So it was kind of like just starting to really make sense by the time we had the world, the dancers and the story.
[00:56:08.820] Kent Bye: Yeah. And then Prowler, as you're coming in, it sounds like that you were listening to the feedback for what kind of paths that wanted to take. And then also designing these architectures where you could have different spaces where you can see the shadows. And so were you doing that on your own? Were you taking feedback for like, cause you don't just have one shadow dance. You have a shadow dance amongst a variety of different types of situations and contexts and natural architectures that you're getting a little bit different modulated experiences each time. And so maybe talk through your process of collaborating and figuring out the path and designing all these different dance spaces.
[00:56:46.667] NProwler: Well, I pretty much already had the place designed. I mean, I personally had Shadow Canyon, then I built around it, but I had already kind of built the space. I wanted a grand entry. I wanted us to start up high and I wanted to be kind of contained. And then as you went down the path, the place would open up and you would see the expanse of the area. So it was kind of pre-designed. Now it was tuned. to the dance experience and how we were going to move to the space. And that's where we started to move some rocks and made paths and just made it more fluid to walk around the area as part of the show. But for the most part, it was pretty much already created. That allowed Dasmany and Mekana to actually have a vision of their space so they could figure out where they were going to do things and the actors and the dancers to figure out where they were going to play with. I tried to put enough stuff there that there was choices. So you had waterfalls, you had higher or lower elevations, you have different nooks and crannies, the canvas area. So I tried to provide enough places for events to happen and let people figure out what worked best for them.
[00:57:58.510] Kent Bye: Gotcha. And Dust Bunny, I had a chance to rewatch the dance that you did at New Eden Evergarden because I was there live for the performance last year, the opening for Rain Dance, and then happened to watch that again. And I noticed that your dance was actually reminding me a lot of the Shadow Canyon because as you're dancing, you're actually having like another avatar behind you. with this kind of devil's mask dancing the same exact move. And then at some point it pauses and you, you kind of have like this whole theme where you're, you're almost like dancing with your shadow. And then sometimes it's dancing against yourself, kind of more symmetrical, like more like looking into a mirror rather than a shadow. And so, yeah, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about this process of In VR, you're able to do things like that, like create your own shadow, create mirrors of yourself that are changing ways that people are dancing. But also in this, you're finding ways of having the shadows that you're dancing against, but sometimes there's some partner dancing that you're doing that felt like, you know, not always easy to do to have people synchronize in that way. So yeah, I'd love to hear you elaborate a little bit more on actually creating dances that were specifically tuned to work well with this shadow conceit.
[00:59:09.761] Dust Bunny: When you naturally dance with your shadow, you can't help but look at it. We encourage the dancers to dance for an audience, but also dance at their shadow, dance with their shadow, look at the shadow they're casting. That is the main event right now, your dance and your shadow. It's almost like a canvas, and Prowler's World was a canvas for us to paint these shadows on. All the dancers we encouraged. to really like focus on how the movements look in front of a shadow, like nice and big movements. So like for my dance, for example, sometimes I would face away from the audience and just look at the shadow and it was bigger than me. So it was like an extension of my character. So it was really fun to just experiment with that. And as far as the New Eden dance, that was actually me using a clone. So the nice thing about VRChat is if you don't have a dance partner, you can just make yourself your own dance partner. So my favorite dance partner is myself. but I can like clone myself so my avatar can either mirror me or it can do like the reverse of me, but it's still in sync with me. And there's one thing that in partner dancing, for example, like ballroom, it's really hard to make the dance look synced up because of the latency. Like you have someone from the UK dancing with someone from the US and there's a latency and the IK is not perfect right now. So it kind of doesn't look in sync, but when you have a clone dance, It's perfectly in sync with you because it's just a mirror of your avatar and what you're doing with your body. So it was very fun to experiment with cloning systems here in VRChat and it's made by Dextro Clone System. And It's like a thing you attach to your avatar. A lot of people, when they make a clone, it's like an exact replica of their avatar. So it'd be like two of the same thing. But I like adding another avatar to it. So like my New Eden dance, for example, had a female avatar and the male avatar. And then in Shadow Canyon, there was no use of clones for my dance. But the shadow kind of was like my clone. It was doing exactly what I was doing. And it's just really fun to experiment with that.
[01:01:22.438] Kent Bye: Yeah, actually, when I was watching the Shadow Canyon, I was thinking to myself as I was watching it, oh, wouldn't it be cool if the shadow suddenly froze and stopped moving?
[01:01:30.606] Dust Bunny: We thought about that. Like Peter Pan shadow kind of thing.
[01:01:35.612] Kent Bye: And then when I rewatched your new Eden Evergarden, I was like, oh, wow, like you can actually do that with the clone technology because you actually did that in your dance there.
[01:01:43.014] Dust Bunny: Yes. And everyone loved the little steppy dance that I do with that avatar. So that's why I brought it back to Shadowgate because everyone loves that. Everyone loves, we call it the steppies. It got really popular because of that. So people are like always asking me, do that move, do that move. Or I'm like hunched over and I get my knees really high and I do like little steppies. That's why I kind of brought it back. And it's also just shows like how cool it is that the rain dance event, you know, you can go from one to your own and, and just still kind of have that spirit of the whole event.
[01:02:21.826] Kent Bye: Nice. And to come back to the story element. So what Dust Bunny was saying around the tarot, because I know when you read tarot, usually the divinatory practices, you ask a very specific question. So like there's the intention of your question. What are you asking? And you ask a question and you somehow you get the answer by whatever card you draw. And so then those cards are directly related to the question that you're asking. And so as I was watching the story, I was having a hard time understanding the question that was being asked and then the delineation of the Tarot meaning. I think one of the other things that happens sometimes for me in stories is that if the narrative beats are all coming on the audio channel, so speaking, and then if there's not any direct metaphoric representation of it, sometimes I can forget what was said. And I think that was happening to me a little bit, going to places to places and then having like issue tracking, like what's the larger context and what's happening from moment to moment. And also there was a piece that was by Fran Panetta, it's called Six by Nine. And one of the things that she had said was that you're in a solitary confinement and they had interviews with other people that were in prison. And then you were listening to other people talk about their experiences of what it felt like to be in solitary confinement. And one of the things she said was that they changed it so that it would be your own direct experience of, okay, this is what you are going through. And so the third person versus the second person, where it's like asking the audience to think about that for themselves, each person that was going through that experience was focusing on their own experience. Cause there was so much about this experience where I was totally into my own experience of like witnessing and experience everything. And then I was hearing other people talk about it. And sometimes it was aligning with what I was feeling. Other times it was on a different track, but it reminded me of that third person listening to other people talk about their experience versus the second person where it's like you paying attention to your own experience, especially in an experience like this, where so much of it was my own visceral experience of being immersed in this world. And some of the tension there of having other people talk about their experiences is So yeah, I think there's certainly, as we talk about, you know, the structures and forms of immersive storytelling, these are all open questions that everybody's trying to figure out, but I'd love to hear if you had any thoughts about any of that.
[01:04:32.793] Dust Bunny: Well, I think with our story, especially with the tarot portion, it was more like, let's say, a general reading, not like a puppeteer has a question, mystic has an answer. It was more like, let me use the inspiration of the background of these cards to inspire you to look within and discover where in your life is lacking or needs that extra help. And we struggled with trying to figure out how to get these dances to tell a story and then for the viewer to get it. And so we thought maybe reinforcing the meaning of the dance to the puppeteer via the mystic would help the audience understand that. Because for one, I'm a dancer. I mean, I do storytelling through movement, not through words. So that's why my canon was super helpful in this. And I don't know if my canon you want to add a little more to that. But I just felt that it was a deeper meaning and we wanted it for the audience to interpret it how they wanted to, but also since we had this really strict narrative, we had to make sure you got it as the audience with the mystic re-explaining like what this card means and what you should do to get out of your creator block. So yeah, that's what I think about that. And Mykana?
[01:06:01.106] Mycana: Yeah, I mean, it was certainly a learning experience in storytelling and I learned so much from doing this because thinking of how immersive storytelling translates versus, you know, your, your proscenium stage is so different and it's taken for granted for sure. Well, not from the people who practice it, but from the people who watch it sometimes I think, or the, you know, maybe people who are just like, I'm going to make an immersive show. And it's like, okay, well, that's, you're going to take, you're going to be thinking about a lot of different things. And. you know, it's just going through the story three or four drafts and just it was really, really interesting. And, you know, we we were thinking about how to bring this story to the audience, you know, and early on we decided not to be, say, interactive with the audience because we wanted the story to continue in a way that was a little bit more more structured. And and because Neither of us had really worked in interactive performances before. It was just really out of our wheelhouse. I mean, we were already kind of branching out into this immersive performance and then to bring interactivity into it might have been a little bit over the top baby steps, learning, learning how to, how to do this. But yeah, I mean, what you mentioned about people seeing different things is you know, it's definitely something to consider. And I appreciate hearing that because when we had a beta test, because we're fairly new to this, we didn't really know what to ask. And I think that's a really interesting question that I'm going to ask during the next beta test to see what people are thinking and how it translates to them.
[01:07:52.803] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what each of you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable.
[01:08:01.465] Dust Bunny: Well, for me, I think that VR technology is going to be super useful in the education department. Obviously, I'm teaching dance here and people are still able to learn things that they could learn in the real world. So I'm a firm believer that I think VR tech will be very useful in the educational system, whether that's schooling, learning a language, learning languages. how to move your body. I think it's a very positive place for that, but also it brings a whole new way to socialize and meet people from around the world. Like I met my boyfriend here and now I'm in Canada, you know? So, I mean, it's life-changing for a lot of people. So I think it has a lot of potential for socializing, but as well as like event hosting and performances and entertainment. So it can go so many ways.
[01:08:55.947] NProwler: Well, I think VR touches on everything. There's really much that VR doesn't touch on. I think it's also the great equalizer. I think it brings everybody down to almost the same level. I mean, if you're handicapped, you can still go climbing. If you're bedridden, you can still go out. I think that... Even if you have social issues, I think it allows you to still be social where it may be very awkward or hard for you in real life to do that. I don't see a lot that it can't do. I'd also, it is awesome for mental health. I think for mental health, VR is almost a perfect drug to help you get through that. And it's all natural. So what's better than that?
[01:09:41.235] Mycana: I think I'll, you know, just echo M. Prowler and Dusty's answers of access. For me, I love the fact that people who haven't had access to theater education or theater arts or dance are able to participate in virtual reality. You know, and I know there's a discussion about how it's expensive for some folks and, you know, full body tracking is expensive. But, you know, I've met so many people who kind of live in the middle of nowhere. I don't say nowhere. They live in a distance away from, say, a theater or access to these types of things, access to improv classes or workshops or anything of that nature. And they wouldn't have had this experience without VR. And so I think there's so much potential for the arts to expand, especially when we see arts are being cut from education. You can find arts education in VR. And I think that, I wish that the theater community would embrace VR more and see the potential that it has to access so many people and introduce people to so much work. I know writers who, you know, they, they've written one acts, including myself, where it's just to your little community or your community within the city. And they're able to perform in front of people from all over the world. That is so powerful. And I just, I'm so excited about the future because I think that as people see more and more how much access they can get and how many things they can experience, VR will become more popular.
[01:11:18.475] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[01:11:25.453] Dust Bunny: I guess for me, don't be afraid of really expressing yourself and your creativity, especially in VR, since there's so many possibilities you could go. So don't let anything stop you and just try your best and make something great.
[01:11:42.307] NProwler: I totally agree with what Dusty says there. VR is not as hard as you may think it is, but it is harder than you think it is to get involved. But it is also amazing that, you know, say with VRChat, that you have everything there to just play. You have VRChat, which is free. You have Unity, which is free. You can find free assets. What you don't have is free time. And that's where you have to provide is time and effort. Outside of that, just Go explore, have fun, learn, touch, feel, just enjoy yourself and enjoy the experience you're about to have because it is magical and there's nothing like it that's out there that VR can do. So just enjoy.
[01:12:23.752] Mycana: I would say to the immersive community, let's continue supporting each other. I think I have encountered so many people who are supportive and enthusiastic about this medium that I'm, I'm totally shocked. to tell you the truth and let's continue that. Let's continue building our community and lifting each other up. It's been so exciting to be a part of this community and to see how much creativity is out there and the support that I've seen people give each other is something I've never experienced in all my years of theater. So let's continue doing this. Let's continue building. We're all learning and we're all building new stuff And I'm so proud to be a part of this community. And I thank everybody for their support. And let's continue doing that for each other.
[01:13:17.749] Kent Bye: So if audience members listening to this, will there be any future showings of the Shadow Canyon Puppeteers tale that are upcoming? Do you plan on having more shows and extended run? What's next for this project?
[01:13:31.874] Dust Bunny: Yes, we do. We're in the talks of having some in August, later August. Maria reached out and said some people who didn't get to see it want to see it. And I have a whole bunch of people who haven't seen it who want to see it. So yes, we do want to continue doing shows and maybe changing it up a bit, still using End Prowler's World.
[01:13:51.573] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, and Prowler, Daspani, and Makena, thanks so much for joining me today to break down this real accomplishment of all these different parts that are coming together from the world building and the dance elements and the live immersive theater and immersive storytelling components that are all woven together. I feel like VR is a medium. really allows this level of ambitious experimentation. It's been a long time since I've seen like an immersive theater project that was at this scale, certainly in VR. But even if you tried to do this in physical reality, it would be a much more extensive production. So it's amazing how you're able to have this type of creativity that's really catalyzed to start to play with the forms in new and different ways with this blending of each of these different disciplines of world building and theater and dance. woven together. So yeah, I feel like it's the first step of many more iterations to kind of really refine this new genre, like in Prowler's genre building of this expansive adventure worlds. I feel like combining that with the dance and immersive theater is like new genres and new expectations and the types of experiences that are even possible. So it feels like the beginning of something that's new and exciting. So thanks each of you for joining me today to help break it all down.
[01:15:00.777] Mycana: Thanks for having us. Thank you.
[01:15:03.740] Kent Bye: So that was Dust Bunny, who does the VR Dance Academy, and Prowler, who does world building with a number of different walking simulator worlds and VRChat, and then Mike Hanna, who does immersive theater, digital storytelling, and improv acting. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, Well, this is a piece that just left me with a lot of moments of awe and wonder as I was going around into this piece, because it's really combining a couple of things where you're walking through a space that's really vast and it's got this walking simulator genre, but kind of a twist that has this nature aspect and virtual reality where you're really able to play with scale and vastness that you might see in something like the Grand Canyon. And so you have these canyons that originally was in Horse Canyon that I had a chance to see last year for Venice Immersive. And then that sort of basic architecture of the space was remixed into create what eventually turned into Shadow Canyon. And so sometimes with these different pieces, I really like to get a sense of like, OK, how did this piece come together? And there's usually like a center of gravity. Like, where do things come back to? Like, where are they anchored by? I feel like this is a piece that's really anchored by the world and going in between these different spaces. And then secondly, it's the different dances that you're seeing are really quite beautiful as well as you go to these different locations. And I feel like the story aspect was something that came in at the end. Sometimes when people create experiences, they start with a story and then they build the world around the story and then everything is kind of orbiting around the story and i feel like this is a little bit different where it kind of started with the world then the dance and then okay how do we make it make sense for why we're going through this space and so you know there were certainly moments when i was watching this piece where i got a little lost i didn't know exactly what the context was i think part of the challenge is that they're creating something from a fairy tale with this kind of magical realism part where you've got these puppets they come alive and okay like what are the rules around What are these entities are like? And then they're not the main characters or protagonists. You have this main guy who's speaking throughout and reacting to things, and then the mystic who is explaining things. And so they're having this conversation and dialogue as we're going from place to place. There's a thing that I mentioned from a piece called Six by Nine by Fran Panetta. And in that piece, she had originally had people talking about their experience of what it was like to be in solitary confinement. And then they switched it to be like more of a second person perspective where when you go into the experience, they're like, okay, here's what you're going to experience. Notice the cracks on the wall. And then everything that's being said is getting you more and more present into noticing your own experiences within the context of that experience. And I feel like there's a lot of aspects of this experience that almost were for me, I would really want to have a little bit more of that. Like there was so much of this experience that was filled with awe and wonder and going to these places. And then to put on top of all that, there's like the story, it's a little confusing, it's hard to track. And it was adding a lot of cognitive load in a way that it was not as coherent as with how beautiful the world was and what the dances were making me feel. And so there was a little bit of a disconnect between what the story was versus what my own experiences were. And so I feel like this is a type of piece where it might be worth exploring, okay, what if we were to really focus on how do we create this group experience and then facilitate that? they said they didn't want to make it interactive, but if you were to make it interactive, then more along the lines of like, okay, what are you noticing? What are you feeling? Again, this is something where maybe a whole other version of the story is that nobody's talking at all and you're just going and watching these dances. And so this is a combination of a lot of these different things. You have immersive theater, you have this guided tour aspect, you have this walking simulator, you have these dance performances. And so there's a lot of these different genres that are all being mashed together. And I think part of the thing that happens with immersive storytelling is that this is the first type of experience that I've ever seen like this. So I have no idea what to expect. And as I'm saying all these different things in my feedback, who knows as I continue to iterate, maybe this combination is perfect for some people. And so I think this is sort of a feedback loop between as you have these different types of unique collaborations with like world-class world builders within VRChat who are coming up with like really the cutting edge of what you can do with dance within these full body tracked dancers who are being taught these different moves. And then on top of that, creating a whole site-specific improv acted immersive theater show that's tying it all together. So yeah. Yeah, I think overall, I was really left with this sense of like awe and wonder. And yeah, just some really, really beautiful moments from the piece. I'll actually include a link down below that will go to a section from Madame Kanna's documentary that she did around Rain Dance Immersive. And she has a whole section there that has some clips from that. And I'll give you a little bit of a sense of what the experience was like. And yeah, it sounds like they're going to continue to iterate and figure out how to bring all these different elements together. And I think there's something that's really striking about this piece. And I think it's going to be quite successful for a lot of people. I think, you know, by the end of it, there's a lot of people that were really just blown away with the level of beauty that was contained within the piece. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of promising things for where this could go in the future. So very much excited to see where they take it here. Yeah. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listen-supported podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
