There Ought to be Clowns

2024 final reviews and lists, and more than you expect coming stuff in 2025

Wow, did 2024 just end with a multi-car pile up of world and personal catastrophes; there is so much I’m not looking forward to in 2025. But fear not, fellow immersonauts! The immersive scene is something you can be hopeful about. There’s a ton happening in NYC in the first couple of months of this new year, so keep heart that the art will feed your soul if nothing else does.

(By the way, “immersonaut” is a new term Kathryn Yu and I are trying out. What do you think? Correction: This was a preexisting term from Noah Nelson of No Proscenium. Kathryn and I are just kicking it back into use. But still, let’s use it. We need a term for this.)

So, with that, I’m launching into my clean-up reviews of 2024 and my coming list for 2025. I’ve already written my best immersive shows of 2024 for NoPro, so I’ll forgo that here, but I’ll also throw in some music and book recs while I have your attention. I was also part of a podcast about reflections on last year and trends in next if you want to hear me and NoPro people talk for an hour plus about it.

I was really good at hitting my targets of immersive in December, so let’s check out the rest of last year to start and the coming of next below.

Luna Luna, The Shed, photo by writer

Show Reviews

Doris - A quite interesting immersive performance, Doris put you on couches and chairs inside a small apartment set as a performer dances and lip-syncs to a collaged audio-video track of 80s commercials and television content. It’s a meditation on trying to get entertainment success in NYC and falling into addiction. That’s obviously not the most original theme and the piece flounders a bit when it’s taken on literally, but the staging is magical. The apartment is very thoroughly realized and it comes to life at moments with hidden projectors, disguised screens, and other deft magic tricks. Couple that with the lead performer timing a tight lip-synced dance for about an hour straight and you get an impressive show. It’s not perfect, but Doris was absolutely worth seeing to witness such virtuosity in execution of a tight idea in a small venue.

Truth and Magic - If you squinted, you could see what Gentlemen Brawlers was going for with this poor man’s Meow Wolf/concert, but they tried so hard to tell us to have fun that they missed the ball on giving it to us. The set at CultureLab was actually pretty good in terms of striking whimsy, but the interactions ranged from incomprehensible (there was a game in a ball pit the designer needed to talk me through because I didn’t even realize it was a game) to pointless (a phone instruction told me to run around in a circle without telling me when to stop) to embarrassing (one exhibit was a theremin — that’s it, just a theremin you could play with). You were also in there for FAR too long. The exhibits exhausted themselves in about 30 minutes, but it was an hour before the band went on, and over 20 minutes of that was spent with no performers at all; we were literally just waiting for the next thing to happen. When the band finally arrived, they started well with some skillful original music and choreography, but the dancers did not know how to control the crowd (they literally pushed people out of the way in moments) and about halfway through the set, the experience became what I can only compare to a wedding band — cover songs, a conga line, and ::shudder:: a literal parachute game. Gentlemen Brawlers are saying they are looking forward to the next iteration of this, and if they actually mean it, I hope they find some real interactions, some training in steering the audience, and an actual director to pace the show correctly. If nothing else, stop telling us to become children and instead make an experience that invites us to willingly let go.

True Love Forever - I’m not sure what happened here, but whatever experiment Third Rail was doing in this piece did not come together. It’s sold as a 90s themed concert experience where you sit and watch the band as the dancers perform an interactive story of romance. Coyle Girelli plays the score as a concert quite well, although it’s less 90s generally than purely Roy Orbison. Still, that part of the experience worked for me. Everything else was uneven. The dances were reflections on different aspects of dating and relationships. Some were interesting — a dance about making profile images for dating apps, a piece about being in love doing activities together — but nothing had any specific context or characters that persisted, so it all felt really generic. And some dances (e.g. the climbing on and off chairs) were hard misses. The interactive moments were similarly thin. You were allowed to wander a set and see the characters before the show started, but since the performers had no consistent characters, it just felt pointless once the show started. And the two moments of interactivity (a polling of the audience about their relationship history and a small group collaboration to write a break-up letter) were just not integrated into the work at all. They basically stopped the show and told you to do things, either voting and creating together, with no continuity to the rest of the piece. Jason (who came with me to this show) called True Love Forever “forgettable” and I think that’s the best descriptor of it. There are some good ideas here and I respect Third Rail for trying something, but this work is just a bunch of separate parts that don’t hang together.

Squid Game: The Experience - A surprisingly good branded experience if you have any interest in the phenomenon of Squid Game. (I don’t, but this is the price of immersive research.) You know what this is going to be when you walk in — you’re going to play some versions of the iconic games of the show in oversize sets. That’s essentially what you get, but what impressed me was that care was taken in the execution. The docents were great, enthusiastic and staying in character from start to finish. Given what you generally find a Color Factory-like spaces, it’s incredible how much staff dedication can do to improve the experience. And the games that you’re looking for deliver. There are some duds — a variant of the marble game that’s not really interesting — but the memory game on the mirrored floor is a cool set and playing red light/green light with a giant doll is exactly what you hope. This is not Shakespeare, but if you’re looking for something goofy and physical to do about an IP you may love, this is a solid experience to check out.

Luna Luna - The Shed is hosting an exhibition of an amusement park designed by André Heller and featuring bunch of famous artists of the 1980s. Hats off to the Shed for staging the exhibition correctly. Life-sized rides surround you in a big, wander-able space while loud music plays and performers occasionally appear for light interactions. While you can’t ride most of the rides and the ones you can enter are pretty weak, the experience of strolling around the park is terrific. The music in particular is great - the experience commissioned a bunch of interesting new pieces that play continuously and that curation is very strong. And the space activates at times as a light show that’s striking. Nothing huge is happening in terms of performance, but the simple clowning and puppetry that occasionally appear are appropriate, correctly whimsical, and worth seeing. Overall, I think you should check it out. It could have been yet another crappy Instagram trap, but instead the Shed truly lets you stroll through a weird art carnival.

The Dead, 1904 - The Dead, 1904 is an older immersive piece from 2016/17 in which James Joyce’s classic novella The Dead is recreated as a bit of intimate theater at the American Irish Historic Society. It was not cheap ($400 for the dinner seat, and that was not the most expensive), but your humble writer can tell you it did not slouch in any way. The piece follows the text of the story very closely, only adding elements that provide context and reinforcement of the themes, and that’s a great thing; we’re talking about Joyce here. The performers are quite good, especially given that almost all of them both act and either sing or play an instrument during the show. The dinner is solid — it’s hard to compete with NYC dining but the show at least clears the bar that the price point demands. And it’s genuinely immersive in a way that would have been striking in 2016. The actors engage with you and incorporate you into the story in minor ways that make sense. The whole thing is very diegetically consistent in that it allows you to move from watching a duet of piano and singer to overhearing a fight about Irish history to watching a court dance in a way that keeps you entertained and never strays from Joyce’s reality. It’s a little triumph, frankly. At its price point, it’s not something I would recommend for everyone, but if you’ve read and loved the story, it’s a beautiful immersive tribute to it.

Speakeasy, Die Softly - Yes, I (and Ellena) have done the Carmine’s immersive thing. It is EXACTLY what you expect it to be, in essentially a good way. It’s Times Square, so it’s a room full of tourists who are game for anything and have not one jaded bone about immersive in their bodies. It’s Carmine’s, so you get a lot of not-bad Italian food. I’m going to put the food list in a footnote¹, but see if you can guess sight unseen what a Carmine’s murder mystery would serve you in three courses, because I bet you can. And the game part is a pretty straight murder mystery where members of the audience are randomly selected as suspects and clues are revealed during the evening about who the murderer was. Which is to say it’s unplayable. There are like 80-100 players crowding around the 8 people who have information and the plot is too convoluted to follow unless your team is a puzzle solving machine (which, see Times Square above, they are not.) But it really doesn’t matter. The performers clown around in the narrative during the eating interludes and they are great at it, being silly and using totally random audience input to make story jokes. Again, this is not high art, but if you come in with your expectations set correctly, you’ll laugh, you’ll wander around aimlessly when you’re supposed to be investigating, you’ll say a random thing into a microphone, and you’ll have your tourist Italian food. What’sa madda wid dat?

Other Best of 2024

Music

So I do plug music to you from time to time, and thus, hope springing eternal, I give you what I enjoyed from 2024.

St. Vincent, All Born Screaming - In my opinion, the best St. Vincent album yet, combining her early song writing chops with her modern guitar abstractions. Like every song is great.

Cloud Nothings, Final Summer - Cloud Nothings just keep hitting it out of the park, and the new album is no exception. More of the slightly more mellow stuff of recent, but hard enough still to win my heart.

Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk - I was so sure this band would whiff on their sophomore album by losing their weird, and I was SO wrong.

DIIV, Frog in Boiling Water - DIIV at their bleakest, in what at least for me is the best way.

Fontaines D.C., Romance - A growth album for the band, with one of my favorite bangers of the year.

Camera Obscura, Look to the East, Look to the West - Wait, you say. You told us new music of 2024. Yes, I did.Camera Obscura is back, friends, with all the charm you remember.

Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee - Probably the best album of the year, the drag identity of the lead singer of Women gave us as stunningly beautiful retro dream-pop collection.

Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven - But the winner of the year for me was Mannequin Pussy, who somehow made an even better punk album than the great one they made previously. What more could I ask for?

Books

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a book club, and we rank things, snobs that we are. Of this year so far (we’re reading Everett’s James right now), I would recommend (details on the site):

• Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

• Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

• North Woods by Daniel Mason

Coming Immersive Shows

Get ready because since a couple of the bigger experimental theater festivals in New York going hard on immersive, there’s a lot coming in January. A few of these things I can’t do because I’m going to be at the immersive conference Next Stage in LA, but I’m going to try and catch as much as I can around that.

Techne - A series of large-scale digital experiences at BAM, each one running for about 3 days, from January 4th to 19th. Each is $10 and the package of all 4 is $35. I’m not sure which ones I’m going to catch, but I can try to see some except the last one, Manifold Garden, which I’ve seen before and despite liking Stephanie Dinkin’s work generally, I think has weak interactivity. If you’re planning on going, let me know and I’ll try to coordinate.

Prisoncore - A multimedia show as part of the Exponential Festival where the audience is placed in a panopticon to follow the story of Lucky, a new prison guard overlooking the monitors. Exponential Fest is one of the curators to watch, so I’m trying to check out their stuff this year. This one runs from Jan 3rd and 4th at the Brick for $25. I might try to catch the early show on the 3rd, but I’m still figuring that out.

AMA/Gilda/Winter Solstice - Three short interactive pieces running together as part of Exponential Fest. The only artist I know here is Kenneth Keng with AMA, who has done interesting work I’ve discussed before. The only day I can see this is on the 17th, and even that’s iffy (see the show below), but you should check it out. It’s $23 for all three.

Nothing Doing - A Dadaist clowning performance by Alex Tatarsky, the description reflects the (unhelpful) Dada ideals of being about everything and nothing at the same time, but given it’s $25, it’s part of Under the Radar (which I respect), and I’ve had good luck with clowning lately, I’m going to see it on January 15th.

To Bridge Ten Millennia - Another Exponential Festival piece, the Concrete Aggregate Ritual of Life group meets to demonstrate the Atomic Priesthood, a commissioned solution to the problem of how to communicate the dangers of radioactive waste to humans 10,000 years in the future. No, I don’t know what that means either, but I’m seeing it on January 16th. Tickets around $25.

The Search for Power - Another UTRFest piece, this live performance/lecture covers the topic of electricity in Lebanon and how power (in the infrastructure sense) relates to colonialism and acts of resistance. This one sounds really interesting to me, so I really want to catch it, even though the remaining dates suck for me. It’s running with open tickets the 16th to the 19th at Invisible Dog in Brooklyn for $20.

There’s also this restaurant I’ve heard is kind of an immersive experience, so I’ve been thinking about doing that as well, if getting an crazy price tasting menu from a celebrity chef in an over-the-top way is up your alley. This one I need at least one friend for, so let me know.

By the way, you have seen Marclay’s The Clock, haven’t you? If not, get thee to MOMA before it’s gone. A mindblowingly rigorous piece of work. Right around noon is a nice block to catch, as I imagine leading up to 5pm would be.

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That’s it for now, fellow immersonauts. I’ll have more at the end of January including highlights from one of the big conferences in the field. Stay safe out there.

1. The dinner: 1st course: Caesar Salad and Garlic Bread, 2nd course: Penne a la Vodka and Chicken Parm, Dessert: Tiramisu and Canoli