An installation and VR performance exploring game culture, community and embodiment.

Digital Folk is an immersive, interdisciplinary performance that asks a simple, urgent question: what is “folk” now-in a century shaped by screens, servers, and shared playlists? Part video game, part costume party, part live music and dance performance, part installation, it re-imagines how communities gather to play, move, and tell stories together. 

Created by dance artist James Gnam with visual artist Natalie Purschwitz, lighting designer James Proudfoot, sound designer Kevin Legere, and an ensemble of 11 dance artists, Digital Folk lives inside a hand-built, scale-model world that is not quite a home and not quite a theatre. It’s an environment of projection, consoles, light, and fabric structures where choreography, sound, and game mechanics braid together. Performers host the room like a party: they sing, play, and dance; they trigger visuals and sound; and they invite audiences into simple, optional actions that can move
from watching, to following, to shared game-play. 

The work treats contemporary digital rituals-Rock Band and Just Dance parties, fandoms, livestreams, memes-as living folk practices. The space behaves like a responsive instrument: choreographic scores interface with sensors and controllers; loops accumulate; patterns jump from bodies to speakers to screens, creating a continuous feedback between virtual and physical worlds. Consent, care, and play anchor the structure: audiences can stay at the edges or step into the centre; either choice completes the piece. 

Since 2015, Digital Folk has evolved through multiple iterations with new collaborators, sites, and communities. Each version keeps the core proposition- dance as a social technology-while adapting its form to the architecture and people in the room. The result is a temporary commons: playful, critical, and communal, where authorship is shared and the measure of skill is not virtuosity, but how well we
pay attention to one another. 

Digital Folk began in 2014 as a research project and has, since its premiere in 2016, been presented 50+ times across Turtle Island. GHOST [DIGITAL FOLK VR edition] is a looping installation that lives in virtual reality and is reflective of plastic orchid factory‘s desire to close this project with the same spirit of innovation and irreverence with which it was conceived.