LUCIA_VR is a performance artwork for live voice and immersive virtual reality that destabilises the sensory environment, inviting audiences to encounter altered states of perception, consciousness and embodied experience.
 

Drawing on Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and its iconic “mad scene”, the work reimagines operatic performance through virtual reality, positioning the audience within a shifting sensory environment where perception itself becomes unstable. Rather than presenting madness as spectacle, LUCIA_VR explores the lived experience of psychological fragmentation, inviting audiences into a world shaped by memory, emotion and altered states of consciousness.
 

As contemporary society becomes increasingly mediated by digital technologies, the boundaries between physical and virtual experience continue to erode. Immersive technologies offer new possibilities not only for storytelling, but for encountering states of mind that resist conventional representation. LUCIA_VR uses virtual reality not as a tool of simulation, but as a medium through which internal psychological experiences can be externalised and shared.
 

Developed through the UKRI Immersive Opera Research Programme, the work combines live operatic performance, virtual reality and spatial experience to investigate the relationship between body, voice and perception. Through the convergence of physical presence and digital immersion, LUCIA_VR examines how trauma, emotion and psychosomatic experience are embodied, remembered and transformed.
 

Positioned between opera, performance art and immersive installation, the work proposes new forms of audience encounter that move beyond observation towards participation. In doing so, it seeks to create a space in which inner experience becomes tangible, and where technology functions not as spectacle, but as a means of engaging deeper layers of psyche, memory and the nervous system.