Looking Back at You
First pass on Summer Upcomings and Reviews from NYC, LA, and the UK
Hi there, immersonauts! Summer is here with heat and thunderstorms and a new crop of immersive to experience. I’ve been pretty active seeing things despite a bunch of life stuff hitting me and even I’ve been missing stuff. Given what COVID did to our field, I’ve been really heartened by how immersive has been thriving recently in NYC.
I’ve been a few places since I last checked in, including LA for the Immersive Invitational, London for a great LARP, and Miami/Orlando for some design work as well as the Miami Immersive Intensive. I’ll discuss the works below, but the Intensive was quite good with interesting talks by Jennifer Bascom about Disney's history with immersive, Asher Young talking about the design of Masquerade (which you should still see if you can), and Heidi Boisvert on the frankly mind-blowing tech stack she created to run Theater of the Mind. Meet-ups in the industry are always great for meeting fellow practitioners and hearing what work people are up to, so if you’re interested in immersive and find out one is happening where you are, go.
In other news, I had a quick conversation with my friend Susan Gold at the Global Game Jam Podcast about my career and approach to game making and criticism if you’re curious about a different hat I wear. In a similar vein, if you’re in New York City July 21st, you could catch me speaking at Games for Change. More news on that soon.
More upcoming is on the way as summer starts to shape up, but I’m seeing everything I’m listing below except Growing Takes Time (I have conflict with a concert), so just drop me a line to coordinate. And as always, let me know what you’re seeing and doing so I can check it out and promote.
Upcoming Immersive
Where there are dates, that’s when I’m going. Where there aren’t, message me if you want to join.
The Circuit - A silent disco ballet experience inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde. The audience follows the performance around Dumbo, hearing the dialogue through their headphones and occasionally being invited to dance. This basically a play told through roving silent disco, but as a fan of the dance-party-in-headset, I am willing to give this a try. I’m seeing it at 7:30pm on June 18th if you want a buddy. June 18th-29th, Dumbo, $70
The Black Mirror Experience - A hybrid VR-real world experience in which you are protagonist in a Black Mirror episode. I don’t know much more that that, but it got a special mention at Cannes’s Immersive Festival, for what that’s worth. Heads-up that the show uses biometric data, which is troubling, but it’s Black Mirror — you get what you pay for there. Speaking of which, I’m reviewing this one so I’m seeing it for free, but you can go in groups of up to 6, so if you’re interested in seeing it with others, I’m going on Tuesday, June 23rd at 3pm. The Shed, June 23rd to September 6th, $55
The City Speaks - A piece of street theater disguised as a walking tour, a performer guides the audience around the Lower East Side in a 2 hour exploration of accents and slang. The audience interacts with the host through improvised mini-scenes of scavenger hunts, art projects, and dance parties. I’m traveling this day, so I can’t guarantee attendance, but I’m trying to make it. June 28th, $30.
Clinamen - A showing of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s immersive audio-visual installation in its largest implementation yet. A set of ceramic bowls are adrift in large contained pools of water and an emergent score is formed as they naturally collide. You’re not going to find any deep narrative here, but as an art piece, it sounds interesting enough to check out at scale. I’m dropping into this one on some random day. Armory, $30, June 10th - August 2nd.
Big Feelings - A new production at The Cell by the team that brought you the interestingly-weird interactive performance Dirt. An audience-integrated experience taking place in the last day of a 1st grade as Mrs. Joy wants to tell you about something that hurt her feelings. I can’t vouch for it, but if it’s Dirt-level experimental, I’m there for it. My ticket is for Monday, July 6th if you want to join. $45-65, depending on the week, June 29th - July 23rd
Growing Takes Time - This is the one I can’t make. It’s a life-size arcade dance piece in which the performers are PIKMII, creatures whose collective survival depends on collaboration with the audience. Attendees join in partner activities with the dancers to try help them evolve the piece to a higher level. If I were in NY, this is exactly the kind of weird thing I would check out. June 20th, $52
Proof as if Proof Were Needed - An interactive installation at the Museum of the Moving Image where visitors walk through floor plan of a Taiwanese house and as they do, projections activate telling the story of the space. This one is curated by Michaela Ternasky-Holland who has a great track record of interesting VR and installation art. It runs through early September, so I’ll just head to the museum sometime during the summer.
Immersive Reviews
This is a bit of a clean-up run from around the country. Several of these will be appearing on No Proscenium as well in the next couple of weeks as well.
Valour Manor - A LARP by the UK group Omen Star set in a dark superhero universe in which you play the flawed powered subjects of a pharmaceutical treatment designed to make superhumans, all forced to attend a school to train them for corporate careers. The theme of the LARP is the way oppression hurts both the victim and the perpetrator, and in that regard, Omen Star delivered. The location was perfect, the workshops were tight and on theme, and the game was constructed such that players had a lot of freedom in what they could do but the theme was still driven home in a powerful conclusion. Omen Star is doing a third run of Valour Manor in 2027, and if you’re able to get to Shaffordshire for a live-action game, it’s a terrific example of delivering a message with roleplaying.
This is not a Cult - Part of Theaterlab’s inaugural Meltingplot immersive festival, Christopher Lewis Dawkins hosted a one-night introduction to spiritual leader Eleon the 1st. In this essentially one-person show, Dawkins played Eleon as he guided us through silly games as a way of leading exercises around things we need to be forgiven for and things others have done we should forgive. The show works because Dawkins has a very good sense of the Eleon role — they walk the character on a tightrope of self-aware comedy, uncomfortable cultist charisma, and genuine pain and healing. This piece felt like a work-in-progress of a bigger project, but I would continue to watch Dawkins’s work because there’s an interesting aesthetic at the heart of it.
Chalk Portal Outline - Welcome to Campfire presented this game-show/dance performance in which the audience could at times control the two performers as they moved around stage. The tone of the piece was boisterous with lots of over-the-top bravado and sexual innuendo, but at the heart was a sense of loss embodied in the dancers tracing outlines around their partner’s still form and trying to climb into it. An impressionistic piece, Chalk Portal Outline seemed to be exploring conflict in creative processes and Welcome to Campfire is as always quite good at creating and executing interesting choreography of struggle and pain. However, the interactivity didn’t work here. The gameplay of manipulating the dancers with game controllers was pointless. That pointlessness was on theme with the content (i.e. you can’t control your way out of loss), but the ability to play the game was an extra on the ticket price, and that meaningless interaction did not feel justified by the additional cost. There were interesting ideas in Chalk Portal Outline, but Welcome to Campfire has stronger work.
Lucky Shot - Olivia Behr created this short 1-on-1 phone piece exploring an encounter with a stranger. You get a call from an unknown number and quickly realize that the person you’re talking to got your number wrongly. The following conversation gives you a chance to meet that character before the piece moves to its conclusion. I’m being deliberately vague about content here, because the revelation of the piece is important, but I can say that I found Behr’s piece intriguing in form. It’s a vehicle to do a character study in a way that gives emotional impact. And while I found the twist in the plot a bit confusing and somewhat unpleasant, I thought the frame of this phone conversation had potential. It’s an interesting piece of work that you should check out if you have a chance.
Motion Picture House - This is the Radiohead immersive piece around Kid A/Amnesiac. Overall, it was good but not worth the $70 price tag. The experience was a gallery of paintings and digital artifacts themed around the two albums and then an impressionistic film set to a recomposition of music. The film itself was pretty good — the music was terrific (unsurprisingly) and the associated imagery was strong — although I wish it had been a single huge dome rather than 4 screens showing the same content. I certainly enjoyed it, but given what you got, it’s hard to justify an above $40 price tag. If money’s not an object, see it.
Tea Party at the End of the World - An interactive tea-focused experience by Jessica Creane (friend of the show), Tea Party is a lesson about tea and conversation about holding space exploring loss and how we understand others. The theme here is not tidy; Creane brings in climate change, family secrets, and personal self-improvement during the discussion and while it’s all vaguely related, there’s no simple through-line. But I felt that Tea Party hit all its aesthetic beats well. It was funny and poignant and personal. Tea here is a loose metaphor for an emotional time capsule, something that stores a complex experience until you unlock it with appropriate care. That’s what Creane has created, and you should try to check it out if it runs again near you.
Help Me!!!! - This clowning meets puzzle game piece has creator Leo Lion enlist you in an attempt to help him recover from a botched ritual he did by helping his dead ancestors complete unfinished business. It’s called a “mime” show, which to me was a stretch, as Lion is doing something less technically artistic than that. The show is more of a charades game as Lion pulls audience members to solve puzzles using props he can only gesture and make noises at. However, Lion manages this show terrifically. He’s funny and well-versed in the affordances of his charades game, which means he controls the room well and keeps it moving. And the story even has a little bit of emotional punch to it. I liked Help Me!!!! It’s a nice little family-friendly clown show with a simple but effective interactivity.
Immersive Invitational L.A. - A great event hosted by the Immersive Experience Institute and After Hours Theatre Company. Four companies put up immersive work that had been devised less than 48 hours prior. Dear readers, you know me to be uncompromising as a critic in my reviews, so please believe me when I say that all four companies involved (New Forms LA, Rogue Artist Ensemble, The Speakeasy Society, and Spies Among Us) did at the very least interesting and in some cases rigorous and innovative work in this format. This event is a terrific chance to see creators at work — I will happily check out other pieces by all four of these groups in the future. This is also a good place to mention that NYC is getting its own Immersive Invitational in August, so we locals will have a chance to catch the immersive sampling as well soon. More on that as it’s available.
There you go. A crowded start to summer and it’s only June. See you out there!