The research explores how emerging technologies can become native to performance-making. It focuses on interactive mixed-reality environments in which sensing, AI decision engines, and robotic or kinetic elements are treated as creative materials shaped through rehearsal practice. The aim is to strengthen somatic design processes for immersive performance by integrating technological development into the rehearsal process.

The central problem addressed is a mismatch of tempos and assumptions. While AI, robotics, and sensing systems can enable new forms of immersive and interactive performance, dominant development practices often rely on tight specification and engineering-centric validation. These approaches frequently clash with how rehearsal works: rapid, exploratory, improvisational, and somatic, where meaning emerges through doing and productive ambiguity is part of the process. As a result, interactive technologies may become fragile, opaque, or too slow to configure, interrupting creative flow.

In response, the research studies processes and tools that make technologically rich interactive environments compatible with rehearsal-based creation. Across a series of practice-led studies with professional theatre-makers, it investigates how devising, Viewpoints, and method acting can support rehearsal-tempo authoring of interactive behaviour, and how performers learn to compose with systems that sense and act. The outcomes include performance-led methods for somatic interaction design, design principles for interactive built environments, and prototype toolkits ranging from modular authoring interfaces to AI and LLM-driven dramaturgical collaborators. Collectively, these contributions support early-stage creative exploration that remains distinctly theatrical while enabling innovative forms of immersive performance, and offer practical guidance for theatre-makers, creative technologists, and HCI researchers designing rehearsal-ready tools and workflows.