South African artist Rick Treweek and Ferryman Collective win Emmy for VR theatre Uncanny Alley - A New Day

A win for home

The immersive theatre production is performed live inside VRChat, a social VR platform, and is set in Uncanny Alley, an original virtual universe created by South African artist and worldbuilder Rick Treweek.

Treweek was in the audience at Los Angeles’ Peacock Theater to collect the Emmy on stage with the Ferryman Collective team.

“This one is for home,” says Treweek, who is known in virtual reality as MetaRick. “South Africa does not wait for perfect conditions. We build under load-shedding skies and still send a city across the ocean.”

Uncanny Alley: A New Day held off stiff competition from Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout.

In Uncanny Alley: A New Day, audiences become escaped detainees fleeing Adaptive Learning Industries, a corporation preparing to erase its citizens’ memories.

Alongside a pair of professional actors playing 15 characters in real time, audience members must escape imprisonment, evade capture and ultimately decide whether to abandon Uncanny Alley or stay and fight for their home.

No two performances are the same.

Talent and creativity

Treweek lives in Kommetjie, so one of his Emmy highlights was meeting Marcus Hebbelmann, a fellow Deep South local, who was part of Survivor's Emmy-nominated camera team for the third year in a row.

“The whole event was remarkable, especially the Governors Gala afterwards,” he says. “It was incredible just being in the room with so much talent and creativity.”

His mom was the first person he told about the win, in the middle of the night in South Africa. “And then everyone in Kokstad knew,” he laughs.

Treweek created Uncanny Alley in 2020, while living in a flat in Johannesburg during South Africa’s strict initial Covid-19 lockdowns. Unable to gather in person, he built a place where people could stand next to one another again - a cyberpunk back alley of the internet.

The universe’s first narrative experience, The Search for Gh0st, was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022.

In 2024, Treweek and Ferryman Collective, a non-profit VR theatre company, started discussing the idea of a live theatrical performance inside the universe.

Rather than stage the show in the existing world, Virtual Worlds Company built an entirely new one for the production: more than 30 environments, engineered to run on standalone Meta Quest headsets.

Ferryman founders Stephen Butchko and Deirdre V. Lyons wrote and directed the immersive theatre experience. Ferryman technical director Christopher Lane Davis, who works as Screaming Color, contributed original visual effects and music, as well as helping to control the live show.

Uncanny Alley: A New Day premiered in competition at Venice Immersive 2024, where it won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award. It has since been presented at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, NewImages Festival, Augmented World Expo and SIGGRAPH, winning the XR Immersive Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan and Gold at the XRMust Awards, among other accolades.

Its Emmy win capped a remarkable week for Treweek, who was also exhibiting at Continuum ‘26, which opened two nights before in Saudi Arabia. As a mentor-artist for the exhibition, he presented Gh0st Out The Shell, which combined sculpture and virtual reality to explore the relationship between physical and virtual identity.

“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,” says Treweek.