More Art, Less Matter
So Many Reviews and a Meetup for Immersive Creators
Ah, time does fly when you’re knee-deep in research. Since last I checked in, I have been to London and back, done stage combat in front of a live audience for the first time, and seen more immersive pieces in one go than a human could reasonably expect to. This is one of those catch-up posts where I fill you in on many things you can no longer see and with luck a few you still can.
In upcomings this month, there’s a lot of promise but little data. I’ll update when I know more, but things seem to be more in the space of potential right now than actual, with one very notable exception that will make your scroll to Upcoming Events worth it. Oh, and there’s a meetup happening if you want to have a casual conversation with some creative immersive folk.
Also, the Next Stage Immersive Summit is going on August 1st through 3rd in Pasadena, California. Next Stage is the premier meeting place for immersive creators and a great chance to connect with the artists and critics of our field. I’m going to be there and if this is a field that interests you as a practitioner, there’s no better event in the world.
As always, drop me a line about things you hear coming that are in my wheelhouse (shout outs to Andrew and Ida for heroic duty on this front lately) and let me know what you’re planning to check out if immersive buddies are welcome.
Immersive Reviews
Voidspace Live - Voidspace Live is a two-day festival for interactive performances hosted by Voidspace, an organization promoting interactive writing. The festival was a chance to see a bunch of immersive works-in-progress and hang out with the creators. The work is what you expect from this kind of testing event — a mixed bag of interesting ideas and not great implementation in places — but the conference itself was a wonderful chance to meet some very creative, very smart, and very friendly designers and actors in the London scene. If you’re in London, you should check it out if you want to see up and coming work and teams.
Since the pieces were in progress, I don’t generally feel comfortable reviewing them; I’ll plug anything I saw there that was particularly good if it goes fully live. However, there were two pieces that were complete and solid and I’ll review those here.
Hamlet (an experience) - Longer review here. Emily Carding’s one person interactive take on Hamlet casts them as the title character and select members of the audience as the other personae in the Shakespearean tragedy. Emily is one of the greats of immersive acting and they carry the show with enormous presence and complexity, but the structure is just as good. Audience members given roles are handed short scripts and then singled out for scenes before the whole audience, largely to be Hamlet’s verbal punching bags (it is Hamlet, after all) but occasionally to deliver some lines, reenact some moments, or in one lucky case, fake a sword fight and tragic death in a duel that ends the play. (See the above photo for your boy Laertes in action.) Both in form and execution, the piece is incredible and I highly recommend catching anything Carding is making if you have the chance.
Where We Meet - This interactive dance show by Unwired Dance Company gives you a headset and invites you to watch three dancers standing in their own circles performing individual choreographies. As you approach a dancer, the headset plays the interior monologue of that character and at certain points, the dancer leads any observers through a simple set of physical mirroring exercises as the soundtrack offers a meditation. I thought the use of spacial audio here was quite good and the dances were compelling. I do feel like the piece could have a bit more of an arc making it last longer, but nonetheless Unwired has made a fascinating fusion of gaming technology and dance. This piece will also run at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, so you can see it if you can make it to the Berkshires this summer.
The Waiting Room - This piece of AI driven group instructional art felt like a prototype, so I want to go more easy on it. When you arrive you have a text conversation with an AI where it asks you questions and then it processes those questions into a personalized audio track. You start that audio track at the same time as the rest of the audience and watch slides that tell you a story and then manipulate props in the space when prompted. It’s an interesting idea that didn’t really work. The audio needed polish — it had a clear skip in the soundscape when it switched between content everyone was getting and content that was personalized to your answers. The AI customization was quite crude as it really felt like it was just plugging your direct answers into a Mad Lib and if your answers didn’t fit, it all became a bit disconnected. And the story itself was, because this Mad Lib structure, too generic to be meaningful. That said, I like the idea of hearing a personalized audio story while participating in a single group event, so I think there’s potential in the form. It just needs another polish pass to deepen the story and smooth out the production.
Secrets Bar - You can find my longer review here, but the short version is Secrets is a good structural idea with some good performers stuck in a bad story. The concept is that you “overhear” a narrative in a bar by having spotlights and mics focus on actors embedded in the space around you. The production pulled off the tech of this perfectly, and the actors were generally very good at being in the space and talking to the crowd in character. The problem was the story was very broken. It was trying to be naturalistic, in the sense that it was the kind of stuff you would actually overhear, but that meant that scenes ended without any resolution, tone switched wildly, and there was no center to hang everything on. I left really not sure why I would care about what I saw. It’s a shame — there are very good ideas in Secrets, but the show needs a story worth telling.
Riven - A better-than-expected docu-play about waste pickers in Brazil, the people who sort recycling to keep that sustainability engine running, longer review here. I was worried this was going to be really didactic, but the playwright wisely choose to cut between naturalistic conversations about the lives of two women working in the plant and some magically real moments of spiritualism and plastic and aluminum outerworldly beings. On top of that, Sure We Can is a beautiful and resonant setting, reflecting the ambiguity of the piece: both artistic and industrial, reflecting art and poverty. You can still catch it this week if a well-told story about real people who toil in this industry is interesting to you.
Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy - Longer review here. I cannot say I had high hopes for this immersive music parody of Pokemon and Nintendo, but I am so happy I was wrong about this one. Balls is an excellent show. It is exactly what it promises on the label — a juvenile riff on the ethical and taste issues of the catch-em-all franchise — but the execution is so good that it’s a joy to behold. The performers are just terrific, great singers and improvisers who deliver on the music and the gags. The writing is sharp giving you both the 10-year humor you hope for but also some genuine character development and morals. And you get to make up dumb attack names at one point. I can say enough positive things about this show. It’s like Avenue Q for gamers. Balls desperately needs to be in a bigger venue for larger audiences, but you can see it now at Caveat during July and August. Adventure awaits, immersonauts. Don’t sleep on this one.
Privy Privy - A short installation and performance art piece, Privy Privy creates a gloryhole simulation by having you enter a bathroom stall and eat an ice-cream cone a human has extended through a hole in the wall. That’s the whole thing. It takes maybe 10 minutes. That said, I think it’s an interesting piece of art. Donna Oblongata and Patrick Costello have created an interactive commentary on desire and sexual power without anything really explicit happening. I like art like this that can in a single gesture capture a lot of complex thinking in a silly and approachable way. Again, it’s ten minutes of your life, but it’s an experience that will make you think and you get ice cream, so live a little.
Amplified - Again, my longer review is here. Amplified is the projection mapped immersive experience of the history of The Rolling Stone Magazine photos and videos. Like many of these projection mapped things, I’m not sure why this was the medium for this piece. The shame of it is that the photo archive of the magazine is pretty incredible and perusing the covers and historic stills was a fascinating snapshot of earlier cultural moments. But tying it together with a vapid narrative frame and flashing the photos by too quickly while spreading a digital wallpaper around me added exactly zero to that photo appreciation. Skip this show and wait until there’s a good retrospective in a museum that knows how to curate and display it.
Man’s Search for Meaning - I went to a table reading of this quasi-autobiographic show about the narrator struggling with the ramifications of Frankl’s great work on logotherapy and finding mental health through meaning. It’s interactive in that the narrator talks and improvises with the audience throughout the show, reflecting Frankl’s belief that connection to other people is a critical part of well-being. The show is an interesting conversation on this topic and the weaving of the biographical complexities of the narrator’s understanding of Austria and Judaism with Frankl’s life and trauma is rich and though-provoking. This is going to come back in a full theatrical run in the future, and I for one am interested in seeing it.
Tribeca Immersive - As part of the Tribeca Film Festival each year, a group of immersive works in VR, MR, and other technologies are brought together into a showcase. This can be a mixed bag depending on curation, but I found this year particularly interesting with a number of works which, while not all perfect, I saw interesting ideas in. You can still catch the festival this weekend and it’s 100% worth your $20, but be sure to sign up for the VR/MR things when you arrive because you need to book a timeslot to see them. The pieces I would recommend are A Father’s Lullaby, Fragile Home, In the Current of Being, and The Innocence of Unknowing (try to catch that piece during a documentary time — full disclosure that I know the artist Ryat Yezbick.)
Upcoming Immersive
I’m going to spare you the stuff I don’t have dates for yet just for brevity, but expect another post soon with more upcoming. Keep in mind there are a few good shows above you can still see if you want:
Riven (through June 27th)
Tribeca Immersive (through June 29th)
Privy Privy (through June 28th)
Balls: The Monster-Catching Musical Comedy (July 18th and 19th, August 5th)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha - You have seen this already, right? Yes? Congratulations, true immersonaut! No? Why are you reading this newsletter if you don’t go and see the thing I have told you is amazing?!? You still have a chance until June 29th.
Immersive Phantom - Tickets to this immersive version of the classic musical go on sale on June 30th. The show starts at $195; you are required to wear elegant entire in white, grey, or black; and you have to either bring your own mask or buy one ON TOP OF your ticket price. So yeah, this is overpriced and pretentious. But we’re kind of without big masked immersive in NY right now with Life & Trust losing both and you know me well enough to realize overpriced tickets won’t stop me from seeing something. If it won’t stop you either, tell me and we can try to coordinate. I’m going for my tickets on the day they drop.
Campfire Stories - There are at times immersive meetups in NYC to let creators talk to each other, but lo, it’s been some time since that has happened. A few of us have decided to rectify that. We’re having a little salon to get some practitioner-style immersonauts together to talk shop. It’s a limited space, but feel free to RSVP if you want to hang out. But please RSVP if you want to come — space is truly limited. This is a first stab; more events will be coming in the future.
As I said, lots of promising things on the horizon so keep an eye out and give a shout if you want to see something or you learn about something I missed. And may a flight of angels sing thee to thy rest from this torrential post.