South African Artist Wins Emmy Award for Virtual Reality Theatre Production
- South African artist Rick Treweek won an Emmy for Outstanding Emerging Media Program at the 78th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles
- Treweek's immersive VR theatre production, Uncanny Alley: A New Day, beat tough competitors including Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema
- The Emmy win capped a remarkable week for Treweek, who also exhibited a major new work in Saudi Arabia days earlier
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South African creator Rick Treweek made history on Saturday when his virtual reality theatre production took home a prestigious Emmy award in Los Angeles, a moment he immediately shared with his mother back home in the middle of the night.
Uncanny Alley: A New Day claimed the trophy for Outstanding Emerging Media Program at the 78th Emmy Awards, beating out competition from Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout. Treweek accepted the award alongside the Ferryman Collective team, his Los Angeles-based collaborators on the production. Treweek, who goes by MetaRick in virtual reality spaces, told The Citizen:
"This one is for home. South Africa does not wait for perfect conditions. We build under load-shedding skies and still send a city across the ocean."
His mother was the first to hear the news. He laughed:
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"And then everyone in Kokstad knew."
From Joburg lockdown to Emmy winner
Rick Treweek originally built the Uncanny Alley universe in 2020, during South Africa's strict initial Covid-19 lockdown, while living in a flat in Johannesburg. Unable to gather physically, he constructed a cyberpunk virtual back alley where people could stand beside one another again.
The production is staged live inside VRChat, a social VR platform, within the original Uncanny Alley universe he designed. Audience members take on the role of escaped detainees fleeing a corporation called Adaptive Learning Industries, which intends to erase their memories. Working alongside professional actors playing 15 characters in real time, participants must evade capture and ultimately decide whether to abandon Uncanny Alley or stay and fight.
Ferryman Collective founders Stephen Butchko and Deirdre V. Lyons wrote and directed the experience. For the production, the Virtual Worlds Company built an entirely new environment: more than 30 distinct spaces engineered to run on standalone Meta Quest headsets.
A week of milestones
The Emmy win crowned a remarkable few days for Treweek. Just two nights before the ceremony, he exhibited at Continuum '26 in Saudi Arabia, presenting Gh0st Out The Shell, a work combining sculpture and virtual reality to examine the relationship between physical and virtual identity. Treweek said:
"I cast Gh0st in bronze for the exhibition, so she arrived in the real world at the same time she was up for awards at the Emmys, which is quite cool.”
Uncanny Alley: A New Day has had a decorated festival run since premiering at Venice Immersive 2024, where it won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award. It has since appeared at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, the NewImages Festival, and SIGGRAPH, picking up the XR Immersive Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan and Gold at the XRMust Awards along the way. The universe's earlier experience, The Search for Gh0st, was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022.
Maskandi singer won iconic award
Maskandi singer Khuzani Mpungose received a Cultural Icon in Maskandi Music honour at a prestigious international summit.
The Nelson Mandela Leadership Awards & Diplomatic Summit 2026 took place at the University of Oxford, drawing guests from over 30 nations.
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Source: Briefly News
