In contemporary theatre, scenography is expected to offer more than a realistic setting. Shaped by digital technology, diverse cultural perspectives, and accessibility practices, the theatre of the future calls for immersive environments that invite participation, provoke reflection, and transform the relationship between performer, audience, and space.



Margarita Syrocheva belongs to a new generation of designers embracing that shift. Working across traditional stagecraft, architecture, visual art, and interactive technologies, she creates sculptural environments that actively shape how audiences experience performance. At the core of her practice is an understanding of scenography as “moving architecture,” a form that, unlike a building, is meant to transform across the span of a single performance.

Currently based in the Washington metropolitan area, Syrocheva maintains an international practice spanning theatre, film, installation, and interdisciplinary performance.

Where Architecture Met Theatre

Her sense of space was formed early and on two tracks at once. From the age of five she studied composition, color, and spatial design at a children's school affiliated with the Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering, while training as a young performer in a youth theatre studio founded through Konstantin Khabensky's nationally recognized creative development program. Though she began onstage, she was increasingly drawn to the visual and spatial language of theatre, to how every element of a production came together. The turning point came when a mentor encouraged her to consider scenography, resolving a choice she had long wrestled with. The field brought together the permanence of architecture, the immediacy of theatre, and the visual composition she loved in painting, exchanging the stillness of the canvas for the living space of the stage.



Syrocheva trained first in stage technology and then in scenic design, completing a Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Design at the University of Maryland in 2025. Her training left her fluent across the full arc of production. She conceives a visual world, translates it into technical drawings, leads its fabrication, and supervises props and paint, while also designing interactive environments and installations that extend her practice beyond traditional scenic design.

Designing for Human-Technology Interaction
Dance² (2025 and 2026)


Scenic and installation design. Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, Oregon State University, and Festival d'Avignon.

Nowhere is that ambition clearer than in DANCE², an interdisciplinary performance exploring the evolving relationship between humans and autonomous technologies through dance, robotics, and audience participation. Audiences use their smartphones to interact with the performance, determining what happens next, and each decision becomes part of a larger exploration of how humans collectively shape a future increasingly influenced by intelligent systems. After several years of development and presentations in the United States, the project was selected for the 2026 Festival d'Avignon, marking a new stage in its international life.

Since joining the project as scenic and installation designer in 2023, Syrocheva has worked alongside engineers, computer scientists, projection designers, choreographers, and performers, helping translate complex technological systems into spatial experiences audiences can see, navigate, and question. She describes the show's technical core with disarming candor: “Everything is a miracle to me.” Approaching the work through a designer's questions, how should technology feel, how can invisible systems become tangible, she gathered from her colleagues how each system worked until the mystery gave way to a familiar language of material, scale, movement, and composition, and she could build the environment that gave the technology physical presence.

The 2025 run at Oregon State University showed what that translation could look like at full scale. The production sold out all four performances and welcomed 462 audience members, many from the university's College of Engineering. It also marked a turning point in the project and in Syrocheva's contribution. While earlier iterations, from 2022 to 2024, focused primarily on the performance itself, the 2025 version extended the experience beyond the theatre. Syrocheva designed and built a laboratory-style installation that transformed the project's research into a physical environment, inviting visitors to examine previous generations of the robots and their tracks, the costumes, and the digital systems that run the performance.

The installation also made visible DANCE²'s ongoing research into public attitudes toward emerging technologies. Since 2022 the project has collected audience responses to questions about artificial intelligence and robotics, allowing visitors to compare how those perceptions have evolved. The findings carry a quiet drama of their own. Audiences almost never choose the male AI voice to narrate the performance, consistently imagine a future in which intelligent machines appear friendly rather than hostile, and overwhelmingly report spending more time online than offline.

The 2026 Festival d'Avignon version presented both a creative opportunity and a design challenge. A set originally built for a fully equipped black box theatre had to be redesigned almost from scratch for international touring, transforming a build Syrocheva estimates at around $10,000 into a compact portable system without sacrificing its visual impact or conceptual clarity. At the same time, as the creative team expanded the ways audiences interact with the performance, she reimagined the scenic design to give those interactions tangible form. Among the new pathways an audience can now set in motion, three robots serve as live voting indicators, moving in real time to reflect the room's collective decisions. For the first time, the performance also unfolds in either French or English, with the language itself determined collectively by the audience.

The collaborative process between scenic design and projection design that shaped DANCE² would continue into another project, this time addressing a very different design challenge. If DANCE² asked how scenography could give physical form to invisible technological systems, Hip Hop Anansi explored how accessibility itself could become part of a production's visual language. Projection designer Timothy Kelly, who collaborated with Syrocheva on both productions, describes what makes that partnership work.

“I absolutely love working with Rita; she is such a generous collaborator who deeply integrates getting the other team members' ideas, thoughts and needs into her process from day one. This is so important when scenic designers work with a video designer to ensure projection becomes an organic part of the whole visual story and not just slapped on the top. She also has a knack for finding interesting and meaningful abstractions that give her set designs a sculptural quality and keeps them constantly surprising.”

Timothy Kelly, projection designer
Accessibility as Scenic Language

Hip Hop Anansi (2025)
Scenic design. School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of Maryland.



Written by playwright Eisa Davis and inspired by the traditional Ghanaian stories of Anansi the Spider, Hip Hop Anansi became the University of Maryland's first production designed specifically for young audiences and, according to Maryland Today, among the first in the Washington region to treat captioning as an artistic design element rather than a technical accommodation. Developed by projection designer Timothy Kelly, the captions translated each character's personality into a distinct typographic language through custom fonts, color palettes, and choreographed movement that corresponded with the action onstage.

Syrocheva's task was to build a world those captions could inhabit. She drew on comic book language, on bold outlines and panel compositions, and settled on speech bubbles as the surfaces the words would occupy within a skatepark-inspired set the young cast could climb and move across. Preserving legibility, while integrating caption surfaces into the set, became one of the project's central design challenges. “One of the most interesting parts of the process was finding the right level of color saturation for the projection zones,” Syrocheva recalls. “It also meant deliberately restraining the textures of an otherwise bold landscape of skate ramps, graphic forms, exaggerated perspectives, and comic book-inspired compositions that my design was heavily driven by.”

As the design evolved, Kelly's projection animations were brought into Syrocheva's 3D set model, allowing the two designers to evaluate sightlines, refine the size and placement of caption surfaces, and make informed design decisions before technical rehearsals, where the final adjustments were completed.

Directed by Paige Hernandez, now associate artistic director of Everyman Theatre in Baltimore, and produced under the leadership of Jill Bradbury, the first Deaf head of the university's School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, the production treated accessibility as a fundamental design principle rather than a technical accommodation.

Working on Hip Hop Anansi deepened Syrocheva’s interest in accessibility as a scenographic question, reinforcing her belief that inclusive design is most successful when embedded in the creative process from the earliest stages of collaboration. “Some of the most rewarding design decisions happen after the first concept is finished,” she reflects. “I think it’s important to leave enough openness in the scenic design for other disciplines to genuinely shape it. The best solutions often emerge through that iterative conversation.”

A Practice Across Institutions and Scales

Syrocheva's recent credits map a designer trusted across markedly different institutions and scales.

● The Dragon (2025), Spooky Action Theater, Washington. As scenic designer she shaped the visual identity of a production nominated for a 2026 Helen Hayes Award (director Elizabeth Dinkova).

● The Sea Beyond the Ocean (2026), John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Assistant scenic designer on a world premiere commission for young audiences (scenic designer Shartoya Jn. Baptiste, director KenYatta Rogers).

● My Mama and The Full-Scale Invasion (2026), Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. Assistant scenic designer at one of Washington's most established theatres (scenic designer Misha Kachman, director Yury Urnov).

● A Midsummer Night's Dream (2021), Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia. Scenic designer on a movement performance created for the ArtMasters championship, covered by national outlets including Channel One and TASS (director Rostislav Protasov).

● ArtMasters (2021), a major creative-industries championship, where she was named among the top five in scenic design.

● USITT Emerging Creatives Showcase (2026), selected by a professional jury to present her work at the institute's national conference.

Alongside her professional design practice, Syrocheva teaches scenic design to young students across the Washington region, introducing many to theatre design for the first time through programs that expand access to professional arts education.

A Widening Geography

Taken together, Syrocheva's work traces a widening geography. From early projects abroad to professional and academic stages across the American East Coast and Pacific Northwest, and now to France, her practice has continued to evolve across cultures, audiences, and performance contexts. This trajectory mirrors the range of the work itself, spanning professional theatre, film, interactive performance, installation, and arts education while resisting the boundaries of any single discipline.

Moving Architecture

What connects these projects is not a particular medium, but a consistent approach to design. In every production, Syrocheva begins by searching for the visual language that best expresses a central design question. From that starting point, her work grows by translating the question into space, whether making technology tangible, embedding accessibility into the scenic design, or creating environments that invite audiences to participate rather than simply observe.

She often describes her process as designing with the people who bring a production to life rather than simply designing for a production. That distinction has become a defining characteristic of her practice, placing collaboration at the center of her creative process.

For Syrocheva, however, collaboration is only the beginning. Space is never simply a backdrop. It is an active participant in the performance and a sculptural medium that carries emotion, reveals relationships, and transforms alongside the people who inhabit it. This understanding lies at the heart of what she describes as “moving architecture”: environments that evolve through movement, light, interaction, and time rather than existing as static scenic compositions.

Across her work, scenography becomes more than the design of scenery. It becomes a way of shaping relationships: between performers and audiences, technology and humanity, accessibility and storytelling, architecture and movement. In a theatre increasingly shaped by emerging technologies and interdisciplinary collaboration, Syrocheva's work demonstrates how space itself can become an active participant in performance, giving form to ideas that might otherwise remain invisible.