VR-BANIA is the first stage of the musical theatre series European Kitchen Encounters, which aims to create performances from a period of residence and in dialogue with local communities. The performances are then presented together with those created in a different community to encourage understanding and solidarity across Europe based on an everyday theme such as cooking.

VR-BANIA investigates the relationship between a community and its favourite dish through the creation of an immersive multimedia performance, involving choreographic action and musical composition in a VR video experience. The artists aim to highlight the different aspects that intertwine cooking, culinary tradition and the meal as a social moment in an open dialogue with the community, creating an immersive space within which the gestures and sounds of cooking are transfigured into dance, song and music. VR-BANIA was born from a series of interviews and dialogues with the citizens of Verbania: invited to talk about their favourite dish (or typical of the place), describing its preparation in detail, the people involved found themselves evoking their relationship with cooking in a more general sense. The audio, video and poetic material was then reworked by the artists: together with the interviews, the live cooking of a yellow risotto with sausage forms the basis of a new piece of theatre-music that the spectators enjoy in Virtual Reality. This immersive performance experience allows the audience to enter into a musical and communal exploration of a shared identity.