Meet the UTM alum redefining performance through virtual reality

“[EOL]. End of Life” at the 2025 Berliner Festspiele in the Gropius Bau. Photo by Fabian Schellhorn – Berliner Festspiele.

Audience members don’t just watch the action in “[EOL]. End of Life,” they inhabit it. Wearing VR headsets, they move through abandoned virtual landscapes, deciding for a fictitious corporation which digital traces of past lives to preserve or delete. 

Created by University of Toronto Mississauga theatre and drama studies alum Victoria Halper (BA 2010 UTM), the immersive production reimagines theatre as a space where audiences become active agents inside the story.

“Theatre isn't just one classical thing, there's so many different ways to go about it,” says Halper, who also directs the show put on by her Vienna-based experimental theatre company DARUM.

Legacy in a digital world

The idea for EOL was born several years ago. While researching a previous show, Halper and her DARUM partner Kai Krösche attended a series of “pauper’s funerals” in Austria, state-sponsored burials for those without means.

“There's just a very basic coffin with two flowers, and a ceremony at 8 in the morning,” says Halper who moved to her parents’ native Austria after graduating from UTM in 2010. “For these five people, we were the only people at their funeral.”

With the small amount of information available – birth date, death date and name – they attempted to find out who the deceased were in life.

“It was fascinating; one women had a Google Maps account that was basically all these dots of reviews close to where she lived,” she says. “The only picture of her was a reflection in the window of a McDonald's.”

Tracking the others through long abandoned Facebook accounts, Halper says they began to see patterns.

“There was a lot of similarity in these versions of yourself you leave behind on the Internet,” she says.  “And, with just these online traces, we were trying to remember this person we had never met. The idea of legacy in a digital world struck a nerve for us artistically.”

New ways to experience theatre

As the idea for a new show developed, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and put a hold on in-person gatherings. For DARUM, that meant brainstorming new ways to allow audiences to experience theatre performances.  

“We started thinking, how do we share our stories in different ways?” says Halper. “We were already starting to experiment with digital media and AI, but corona definitely accelerated it.” 

The situation had the unexpected bonus of aligning with the local theatre scene’s mandate of creative innovation.

“There is such an openness to arts funding in Vienna, as they're trying to show the city isn’t just an opera place ... and, apparently, nobody was in digital theater,” says Halper.  “It was right concept, right time.”

In VR, she adds, creative limits disappear: “It’s anything you want.”

Beyond just learning the VR medium, Halper says creating the show allowed her to draw on many aspects of her theatre training.

“I directed EOL, but I also created the story,” she says. “All the stuff that I learned in UTM drama studies has influenced how I tell stories. How do I write text, build plot points, create characters – I learned all of that at U of T.”

EOL, which has been touring festivals, has been nominated for Berlin's prestigious Theatertreffen and is the winner of the 2025 Nestroy Special Prize. But Halper says one of the biggest rewards is seeing audiences’ reactions.

“When they come out of the VR world, they're so happy to see you again as a human connection with a real person after an intense virtual experience.”

Originally published by U of T Mississauga