El cónclave de los titanes * 2022
Online/VR (Madrid, Spain)
El cónclave de los titanes (The council of titans) is a live, interactive XR theatre work staged in virtual reality, where participants do not merely watch a story unfold, they are sworn in as members of the Council itself. Inside a whimsical fantasy tribunal, the audience is invited to deliberate and decide the fate of three archetypal figures, Bela the sorceress, Warlock the warrior, and Darkmon the necromancer, turning judgement into dramaturgy and participation into narrative force. The piece treats VR not as a screen-based illusion but as a social stage: a space where presence, voice, proximity, and collective decision-making become the raw materials of theatre.
The work was created by Cuarta Pared VR (Fourth Wall VR), an XR theatre collective founded in 2021 at Medialab Prado (today Medialab Matadero, Madrid) by António Baía Reis, Jorge Esteban Blein, Roger Serra, Ima Peña, and Estefany Fonseca. Born as an experimental live performance in VR, the project evolved into an ongoing collective laboratory - part theatre company, part research platform - dedicated to investigating what happens when theatrical liveness is rebuilt through avatars, networked co-presence, and real-time audience agency. The council of titans stands as the collective’s most refined work to date, consolidating its formal language and curatorial ambition.
In this production, António Baía Reis co-directed the experience with Jorge Esteban Blein, and also served as stage director and VR performer, embodying one of the main characters while orchestrating the live flow of the piece from inside the world. His role sits at the intersection of direction, dramaturgy, and embodied performance, coordinating performer timing, audience interaction, and spatial blocking in a medium where “stagecraft” is simultaneously theatrical and computational. The result is a work where the aesthetic experience emerges from a delicate calibration: scripted narrative arcs held open by improvisation, world-building held together by social chemistry, and theatrical tension generated through the audience’s responsibility to choose.
From a research and curatorial perspective, The council of titans functions as a case study in post-dramatic theatre for social VR: it asks how authority, empathy, and ethics transform when judgement is enacted collectively in immersive space. It foregrounds questions central to contemporary XR discourse - presence, agency, spectatorship, and co-authorship - while insisting on theatre’s oldest technology: the charged encounter between bodies (here, avatar-bodies) sharing time, risk, and decision.
The project received national recognition as a finalist of the INMERSIVA XR Award 2023 in the category “Best Creative Concept.”
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INMERSIVA XR Award 2023 - Finalist, Best Creative Concept (El Cónclave de los Titanes, Cuarta Pared VR)
Awarding body: INMERSIVA XR – Spanish Association of Extended Reality; Scope: National (Spain); Significance & impact: Recognition at the 5th Spanish edition of VR Day – DescubreXR 2023, a national reference event in extended reality held at ETOPIA Centro de Arte y Tecnología (Zaragoza).
As an artwork, The council of titans proposes VR theatre as a form of participatory world-making, a space where storytelling is not delivered but negotiated, and where the audience leaves not with a plot “consumed,” but with the aftertaste of having co-authored a fate.