Hippolytus (in the Arms of Aphrodite)

"He has no time for love, sex, and marriage! Artemis, the huntress, who is a virgin, she alone honors. Mortal with a goddess? What a mismatched pair. A great insult..”

Hippolytus (in the arms of Aphrodite) is an immersive augmented reality theatre experience, directed by Yolanda Markopoulou. Hippolytus—devoted to Artemis and sworn to chastity—rejects Aphrodite, goddess of love. In revenge, she curses him by making his stepmother, Phaedra, fall frantically in love with him.

The piece blends live performance, spatial audio, and augmented visual layers to construct a hybrid immersive world. As Aphrodite’s fury intensifies, the natural world unravels—trees ignite, landscapes decay, and catastrophe looms. Audiences witness a mythic downfall where divine vengeance reshapes both human fate and the natural environment. In this pilot performance, audience members, wearing AR glasses, become active participants in the goddess Aphrodite’s revenge scheme. An immersive augmented reality experience.

The performance was developed as a pilot evaluation of the Horizon Europe project VOXReality, Voice-driven interaction in XR spaces, supported by the Maggioli Group, to study the technology’s performance, audience interaction with augmented-reality elements, and accessibility through multilingual subtitling. For more details, visit https://voxreality.eu.