Roma Patel
Roma Patel is a scenographer and artist that make work for site-specific performance, theatre and interactive installations in UK and Europe. She develops performances that extend and explores the audience relationship to scenography.
Her work lies at the intersection of theatre and interactivity. She has designed several site-specific performances for Irish Theatre Company, Corcadora, one of which was acquired for the permanent collections by Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum in 2008. Her work frequently included experimenting with technology for projection design, 3D modelling, VR and AR. She is currently a Visiting Artist at the Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham, and is involved in artistic research that explores the potential of interactive scenography for Theatre for Young Audiences. Since 1998 she has designed installation, sets and worked in partnership with several arts organisation and Museums, Nottingham City Museums and Art Galleries, City Arts, Theatre Hullabaloo, London International Festival of Theatre, Theatre Centre, and Manchester Library Theatre.
Featured Work
The Enchanted Forest
The Enchanted Forest is designed for children age under 8 years and their grownups. It prioritises children’s engagement by weaving together children’s ideas with fairy folklore, myths and interactive technologies, to create a sensory scenographic space for playful imaginings, tangible interactions, performance and storytelling.
It consists of five main interactive areas- the musical lily pads, the frog’s lair, the story tree, the heart of the forest and the fairy lagoon. This mixed reality environment is merging the physical world of theatre with the computational (open source hardware, sensors, wearable technologies) to extend the audience agency through active participation. It draws from total and immersive theatre to create a ‘performative installation’ where performers, storytellers and ‘enchanted’ scenography performs live alongside young audiences. I believe that embedded tangible and electronic scenography can enable new forms of interactivity and play a dynamic role in enhancing the audience experience while still serving its purpose as a scenographic element.
