IJAD Dance‘s Open Online Theatre Festival of live hybrid performing arts: OOTFest25 (UN)SEEN,is taking place at Riverside Studios in London and online on Open Online Theatre until Sunday 8 June 2025. OOTFest25 (UN)SEEN blurs boundaries and mixes realities, merges dimensions, and plays with perception, shifting the dynamic between artist and audience. Artists and creative technologists explore embodiment, touch, and presence—through movement, XR, MR, AI and machine learning.
OOTFest25 (UN)SEEN is a platform for questioning, exploring and bringing continuous evolution in performance, audience engagement, and digital integration. With a carefully curated programme of live hybrid performances, interactive workshops, panel discussions and installations, the festival serves as a catalyst for rethinking and shaping the future of performing arts in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.
A landscape that can connect physical and virtual audiences by being live streamed from Riverside Studios in London to audiences nationally and internationally on IJAD Dance’s Open Online Theatre streaming platform. Joumana Mourad, Artistic Director of IJAD Dance said: “Now is the perfect time to reimagine our performance field and touring model – to understand, embrace, and harness new technologies.”
“At IJAD Dance, we believe in the power of creativity and technology to redefine the future of performance, future-proof the arts, and transform audience engagement. OOTFest25 (UN)SEEN is a space for artists to experiment, innovate, and bring the unseen to life – connecting with audiences in ways never before possible.” Live Hybrid’ is generally used to describe a performance experienced by both live and remote audiences, but IJAD see it more as the potential to interweave a variety of innovative digital options within the creative process.
This offers a huge evolution of the ways narratives and artistic ideas can be developed and shared, leading to new forms and areas of experimentation: audience interaction in VR or by phone app, motion-capture, infrared tracking, with visuals and sound activated by movement, and more. Work with hybridity embedded into it from the outset considers the multitude of possible audience experiences: people using different devices, in different types of location, the level of WiFi connectivity, and the fact that people may be dipping in and out of the performance, behaving in ways unlike traditional theatre viewing.
For more information as to what exciting dance theatre is still on offer, please check out https://openonlinetheatre.org/ or OOTFest25 (UN)SEEN | Riverside Studios
