Anna Borou Yu & Peter Torpey & Jay Scheib
A Dream Like A Dream 如夢之夢, 2025
A Dream Like a Dream is a live-media artwork developed by Prof. Jay Scheib, section head of MIT Music and Theater Arts, and his 2025 staging of Stan Lai’s epic play of memory, illness, migration, love, and diaspora. The production places the audience inside a 360-degree stage and a seamless cylindrical projection environment, where live camera work and panoramic projection form a continuous image field. AI-generated scenic worlds extend the physical set into a virtual spatial system shaped by narrative, emotion, and movement. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion were used to generate scene imagery from the script’s semantic structure and dramaturgical logic. These visual environments were further developed with Marble, a multimodal world model from World Labs, to produce panoramic 360-degree backgrounds with spatial continuity.
Live feeds from handheld cameras and ceiling-mounted PTZ cameras entered a real-time computer-vision pipeline. Deep-learning segmentation and background extraction isolated actors and props from the stage, and composited them into generated environments during performance. Large language models were used within the visual workflow to organize prompt systems and support scene-specific labeling, segmentation, and visual effects design. The work stages theatre as live virtual production, where generated space, machine vision, and embodied performance operate as one image system. Presented in English with a cross-cultural ensemble and a broad student collaboration, it also treats AI-mediated imaging as part of a larger project of translation, civic discourse, and collective attention in a fractured political moment.
Anna Borou Yu is a new media artist, interdisciplinary researcher, and performer whose work bridges cultural heritage, media arts, performance, technology, and cognitive science. She is currently a Guest Lecturer at the MIT Media Lab, a Visiting Artist and PhD Researcher with MIT Music and Theater Arts, Co-Chair of the MIT AI Film Hack, and the Cofounder and Creative Director of MYStudio. She is pursuing her PhD in Media Arts and Technology with an Emphasis in Cognitive Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Yu’s artistic and scholarly practice investigates embodied cognition, multisensory dramaturgy, and technologically mediated cultural expression. Her works have been recognized internationally with honors such as the Lumen Prize Longlist, Arte Laguna Prize, and the ACM Multimedia Best Interactive Art Award. Her installations and performances have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Ars Electronica Art Gallery, ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, CVPR Art Gallery, IEEE AIART Gallery, MIT Artfinity Art Festival, Common Senses Festival, and numerous international art and film festivals.
Peter Torpey explores the nexus of theater, music, interaction design, cognition, and storytelling. He works as an independent contractor, delivering his unique expertise in performance design and technologies to a broad range of clients in theatre, the arts, and music. Drawing on his experience with film and video production, computer science, theatrical lighting, and scenic design, he creates systems for interactive media, arts, and performance. He addresses both the technological and control infrastructure needs of complex works and the design of visual and experiential languages for each piece through his research into translating expressive representations across modalities. Peter received his doctorate from the MIT Media Lab, where he has collaborated with international and interdisciplinary teams in the design and implementation of groundbreaking works.
Jay Scheib is Professor and Head of Music and Theater Arts at MIT. His work combines physical performance, live cinema, opera, AI, VR, and technology-driven stage design. Recent productions include Parsifal for the Bayreuth Festival, Sensorium Ex, an AI and disability-focused opera, and Valis, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel. His projects have been presented internationally at venues including BAM, English National Opera, Royal Opera House London, LA Opera/REDCAT, Festival d’Automne Paris, Volksbühne Berlin, The Kitchen, ICA Boston, and the Athens Epidaurus Festival. Scheib’s West End staging of Bat Out of Hell won the 2018 Evening Standard Award for Best Musical and has toured to more than 45 cities. He received an OBIE Award for Best Director, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named one of American Theatre Magazine’s 25 artists likely to shape the future of American theater.
A Dream Like A Dream 如夢之夢
A play by Stan Lai
Directed by Jay Scheib with Xinyu Xu
MIT Theater Presents it's Fall 2025 Student Production
Performed by MIT Students and members of the MIT community
Performers: Mustafa Al-Obaidi, Daina August, Katrina Chan, Andy Emmel, Rian Flynn, Jue Gong, Maggie Graseck, Jolie Han, Yike (Coco) Huang, Becky Lin, Sophie Liu, Yi Liu, Joy Ma, Alice Shao, Chong (Julia) Tan, Chuyan Wang, Angela Wu, Vera Wu, Yan Xiao, Kevin Zimmer, Audrey Zhu.
Assistant Directors: Xinyu Xu, Alice Shao and Siyu He, Set Design and Technical Direction: Joseph Lark-Riley, Assistant Set Design: KatrinaChan, Lighting Design: Xinyu Xu , Video Design: Anna Borou Yu, Peter Torpey, Live Camera: Yanyi Liu, Yiner Xu , and Tina Wang, Sound Design: Christian Frederickson, Sound Assistant: Sigal Minsky-Primus and Fang Lui, Master Electrician: Kevin Fulton, Video System Engineer: Peter Torpey and Josh Higgason, Costume Stylist: Shanise DeSilva with Margalit Kelsey and Jonathan Fajors, Documentary Director: Fang Liu, Assistant Documentary Director: Hanxiang Zhang, Director of Production: Maggie Moore, Stage Management: Deb Acquavella,Assistant Stage Management: Joanna Su, Graphics and Poster Design: DanPecci, Photography: Benjamin Rose & Fang Lui, Front of House & ProgramCoordination: Yi Tu, Subtitles created and operated by: Siyu He, Alice Shao, and Yihan Ling, Light board Operator: Theresa Qin, QLAB operator:Fang Liu, Dramaturg: Yihan Ling