The Wolf and The Tahr

Mixed Reality with Live Performance

A Mixed Reality (MR) experience commissioned by ALAN in collaboration with The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, 2026

Artwork Description

Virtual Reality has matured into a widely recognized immersive medium, often transporting audiences into fully simulated worlds. Mixed Reality, however, remains an evolving frontier — one that does not replace the physical environment, but expands it.

The Wolf and The Tahr explores the potential of integrating spatial Mixed Reality into live performance, using AR-based digital layers to redefine stage, proximity and presence. Rather than separating audience from performer, MR becomes part of the dramaturgy — embedding digital terrain directly into shared physical space. The stage is no longer fixed; it is mapped, responsive and co-inhabited.

Through MR headsets, audiences witness shifting alpine landscapes unfold around live performers. Virtual cliffs rise, snowfields fracture, and unseen forces reshape the environment in real time. Performers move within both physical and digital terrains, navigating layers that are simultaneously tangible and intangible.

At the heart of the work is a simple but charged premise: a wolf and a tahr — predator and prey — trapped within the same destabilizing crisis. As their mountain habitat transforms, instinct collides with necessity. Separation becomes vulnerability. Opposition becomes interdependence.

The encounter unfolds not as spectacle, but as shared tension. Viewers stand within the same fragile ecosystem, experiencing conflict at intimate range.

In this space, MR is not decorative technology. It becomes environment, pressure and possibility — reshaping how theatre can be staged, inhabited and experienced.