To conceive and produce a unique live volumetric concert for the British Council Kenya's end-of-season finale: creating an original performance experience that brought together artists from the UK and Kenya in a shared digital space, using the most advanced volumetric capture technology available and delivering something genuinely unprecedented for Nairobi audiences.

The project was developed in partnership with BlackRhino VR and Creatives Garage, CCIXR Portsmouth and 4DViews, and drew directly on the OPUS platform capabilities developed through TGA's ongoing R&D programme with Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Volumetric Performance Production | Narrative Direction | Creative Technology R&D | International Arts Collaboration

Into Protopia combined three distinct performance strands into a single live experience, each one pushing the boundaries of what volumetric and mixed-reality performance can do, and each one bringing a different creative tradition and geographic context into conversation with the others.

Birmingham Royal Ballet principal dancers Momoko Hirata, Tzu-Chao Chou and Miki Mizutani were captured at CCIXR Portsmouth using the 4DViews Holosys volumetric system, producing four-dimensional performances of extraordinary presence and precision, rendered as digital humans within the concert environment.

Nairobi-based performer Zaituni Wambui performed live in the Rokoko motion capture suit, her movements translated into the shared digital space in real time, placing a Kenyan artist at the physical and creative heart of the experience.

Original musical improvisations from electric violinist Sarah Mallock provided the sonic thread running through the whole event.

All three strands were brought together in real time inside a Swahili heritage-inspired dreamscape environment designed by David Njue in Unreal Engine, a visual world that rooted the performance in East African cultural identity while opening it into something entirely new.

The result was a live event that existed simultaneously in the physical space in Nairobi and in a shared digital environment, a performance form that has no direct precedent.

Into Protopia demonstrated something that has driven the OPUS programme from the beginning: that volumetric performance is not a Western technology being applied to other cultural contexts, but a form that becomes genuinely new and different depending on who is making it, where they are making it from, and what creative traditions they bring to it.

The Swahili heritage inspired environment designed by David Njue was an artistic statement about where this performance was rooted and who it was for.

The live Rokoko motion capture element, placing Zaituni Wambui's performance alongside pre-captured BRB dancers in real time, raised the most interesting creative and technical questions of the project.

What does it mean to perform alongside someone who is physically in another country, rendered as a three-dimensional presence in the same space as you?

The answer, in this case, was that it felt like collaboration rather than technology, which is the benchmark every project of this kind should be held to.

International arts collaboration of this kind also surfaces questions about access and infrastructure that remain genuinely unresolved: the gap between what is technically possible and what is practically available to artists and organisations outside the major metropolitan centres of the Global North.

Into Protopia was a proof of concept not just for a new performance form but for a more equitable model of cultural collaboration, one where the creative intelligence and artistic vision come from everywhere, and the technology serves that rather than determining it.

Client: British Council Kenya

TGA: Volumetric Production, Asset Handling, Narrative Development

Partners: Black Rhino VR (Immersive Production), Creatives Garage (Event Management), Zaituni Wambui (Singer), Sarah Mallock (Electric Violin), Birmingham Oryal Ballet (Dancers), 4DViews (Volcap System), CCIXR Portsmouth (Volcap Studios)