Cuarta Pared VR * 2021-2023
Medialab Prado/Medialab Matadero (Madrid, Spain)
Cuarta Pared VR (Fourth Wall VR) was an experimental XR theatre collective founded in 2021 at Medialab Prado (now Medialab Matadero, Madrid) by António Baía Reis, Jorge Esteban Blein, Roger Serra, Ima Peña, and Estefany Fonseca. Conceived from the outset as an arts-based research initiative, it set out to test a question that traditional stages could not contain: what becomes of theatre when “liveness” is rebuilt through avatars, co-presence, and real-time interaction inside virtual worlds?
Supported by a Medialab Prado grant that enabled early experimentation with this emergent format, the collective developed custom worlds inside VRChat from scratch, engineered not as scenery but as performative systems, spaces with interactive triggers, choreographed pathways, and narrative affordances designed for live dramaturgy. The performances were staged for small groups, typically 10 to 15 participants in VR headsets, who entered not as spectators but as participants, co-producing the unfolding of the work through proximity, decision-making, and the social chemistry of shared virtual presence.
Within that laboratory, António Baía Reis operated across multiple layers of authorship: as co-founder, stage director, and VR performer, while also serving as the project’s academic cartographer, mapping methods, documenting processes, and framing the collective’s practice within wider debates on attention, presence, agency, and co-authorship in social VR. Cuarta Pared VR functioned, in this sense, as both a performance project and a research instrument: a live field site where dramaturgy could be prototyped under the conditions of networked embodiment.
The collective’s trajectory also opened into technology-transfer contexts. Cuarta Pared VR was recognized by Vodafone as one of the 20 most innovative XR projects in Spain, and was subsequently incubated at Vodafone’s 5G Lab Innova (Vodafone España) in 2022, supporting the development of an XR prototype for performing arts and reinforcing bridges between creative R&D, academia, and industry-facing innovation.
Its most refined work, El cónclave de los titanes [The council of titans], co-directed by António Baía Reis and Jorge Esteban Blein, with Reis also serving as stage director and VR performer, was a finalist for the INMERSIVA XR Award 2023 in “Best Creative Concept” (Spanish Association of Extended Reality), recognized within VR Day – DescubreXR 2023 at ETOPIA Centro de Arte y Tecnología (Zaragoza).
Cuarta Pared VR no longer exists as an active collective, but its legacy remains as a concentrated prototype of what early XR theatre in Spain could be: a short-lived but rigorous attempt to treat virtual worlds not as a novelty layer, but as a serious performance medium, one where theatre is rebuilt from the ground up as a choreography of bodies, interfaces, and shared attention.
MEDIA:
https://distritoxr.com/cuarta-pared-vr/
https://inmersivaxr.com/actividad/premiere-cuarta-pared-vr