“A {room} of one’s own” is an XR solo theatre performance exploring the recursive relationship between confinement and creation. Through live audio-visual manipulation of an ever-morphing digital environment projected into space, this piece excavates the desperate and absurd acts of making art within enclosed places - whether physical, cultural, or psychological.

Drawing from a decade of unfinished projects and abandoned stories, this autobiographical work follows an unnamed protagonist through multiple iterations of isolation: a hospital room in China, a pandemic apartment in New York, and the liminal spaces between languages and identities. Artist-performer Viola He examines the compulsion to turn trauma into stories via its fundamental tension: the desperate need to transform experiences into meaning, and the void that this very transformation creates. As the performer manipulates their surroundings in real time, the boundaries between life and story begin to dissolve, catalyzing an ethereal place where reality and fantasy bleed together.

A playful nod to Virginia Woolfe’s famous feminist text “a {room} of one’s own”, this project digs into the joy of independence and the horror of being with oneself, when the residency is also a confinement of their own mind. We follow three distinct voices of the self locked in constant struggle: the Creative Self, a desperate storyteller who needs you to believe in the meaning they’re manufacturing; the Sick/Chinese Self, who speaks in multilingual conversations, navigating illness in a culture stripped of its mythological frameworks for processing mortality; and the Internal Self, emerging in repetitive voice loops - all while being in conversation with the characters, real and fictional, in the stories they tell.

This piece, in turn, becomes a battle for narrative and creative control. It weaponizes the tools of creative technology - projection mapping, motion capture, real-time computer graphics, live voice processing - with a self-aware irony. The digital artifacts become the room, the medium and the message: these constructed scenes reflect fragments of past spaces, moving, morphing and reforming as every gesture leaves its trace. Like any good creative technologist, the creator-protagonist builds this elaborate system to contain, present, and operate their existence - in which the writer-performer frantically types and curates, terrified of the silence that might emerge if they stop performing. But in the moments when their grip loosens, we glimpse other truths perhaps creative transformation cannot fully capture or contain.

Performed at:

• Under the Radar Festival 2025
• Onassis ONX Summer Showcase 2024