Xanadu

It’s a timeless tale: a Greek muse travels to Venice Beach, CA in 1980 to inspire a depressed painter to embark on the pinnacle of all artistic endeavors: building the fist roller disco! Now, imagine that the audience is invited to participate in this creative ritual. Then, imagine that this ritual is aided by emerging technologies such as generative AI, virtual environments built in Unreal Engine, and markerless motion capture. That, my friends, is Xanadu.

Xanadu was an immersive musical theater project developed as part of UCLA’s Center for Research in Engineering, Media, and Performance (REMAP), in which the audience was led through a “ritual of creativity” by the Greek muses and their loyal “acolytes.” Guests were invited to leave the outside world and their creative inhibitions behind and become fully immersed in collaboratively creating Xanadu, through what UCLA professor Ray Knapp calls “musical enhanced reality mode,”  the special suspension of disbelief we have while watching musicals, where the act of breaking out into song helps audiences more immediately accept the implausible as possible, including their own participation in the story itself.