Wales Millennium Centre announced the opening of a new theatre in Cardiff Bay which will introduce storytelling through immersive digital art.
WMC will open of a 550-capacity space to explore art in the form of digital media and is offering training, rehearsal and production spaces to support the development of theatre .
As an official partner of the ‘Immersive Arts’ consortium, The WMC is granted access to immersive technologies, including motion capture and games engines used to make virtual and augmented reality app.
The new site will be built to work with new and emerging technologies to match the continuously changing trends of the performance industry.
Graeme Farrow, Chief Creative and Content Officer at Wales Millennium Centre, said: “Storytelling is always developing. This new space will continue our work at the intersection of technology and the arts, allowing artists to explore and experiment with multimedia approaches to telling stories.”
The new venue has been inspired by the extended reality venue (XR), BOCS, which has been running in the WMC since 2022 and has attracted over 31,000 visitors across two years.
WMC’s most recent digital performance at BOCS, Invisible Ocean, has been the most attended immersive production to date, attracting 7,500 participants in six weeks. WMC opens a new venue in hope of mirroring the success of BOCS.
The theatre has offered free opportunities to over 4,000 young people yearly. The site will expand on this convention through providing young people with programmes and space to access a new creative voice.
WMC is a major participant in Cardiff’s creative industry and the income of the city, bringing in £70m per year and attracting 1.8 million visitors.
Russell Goodway, Cabinet Member for Investment and Development at Cardiff Council said: “It will epitomise our approach of supporting production as well as performance, providing facilities to develop our own cultural offer as well as our local communities.”