Augmented Reality as Techno-Scenography: Artistic Innovation and Infrastructural Constraint in Nigerian Theatre

This paper interrogates the emergent but uneven integration of augmented reality (AR) within contemporary Nigerian theatre as a symptomatic site where digital aesthetics, cultural performance, and infrastructural precarity collide. Centring on live performance rather than screen media, the study asks how AR reconfigures spatial design, spectatorship, and narrative world-building in the Nigerian theatre space, and why its uptake remains fragile despite widespread digital culture. Arguing that AR functions as a form of ``techno-scenography'' that extends but also destabilises inherited stage conventions, the paper examines both artistic opportunities, expanded immersion, dynamic scenographic layering, and transmedial storytelling, and practical challenges, including capital costs, technical expertise, unreliable power and internet, and culturally specific reservations about virtual mediation. The analysis is framed through performance studies, postcolonial media theory, and affordance theory, and is informed by a close reading of Nigerian scholarly discourse on digital theatre, practitioner testimonies, and international work on AR performance. The paper contends that AR in Nigerian theatre is best understood as a field of contested experimentation shaped by globalised digital imaginaries and local material constraints. It concludes that sustainable AR practice will depend less on technological novelty than on institution-building, practitioner training, and critical frameworks that foreground African performance epistemologies rather than simply importing Euro-American paradigms of "immersive" media.