It’s been almost a decade since we heard from Director and Choreographer
Sophia Stoller, whose Iris Company was creating robust dance theatre works of the immersive persuasion in Los Angeles. 2017’s The Other Side impressed us and made us hungry for more.
We’ve had to wait a while — making large scale performing art pieces isn’t exactly easy in America these days — and the company has moved to San Francisco, home to some of our other favorite dance companies that experiment in the immersive fashion, but finally Stoller and company are back with The Still Point.
70-minutes long, taking place over multiple rooms, the performance will combine dance, theater, interactive projection, scenic installation, and an original score, with a cavalcade of talent that’s worked for Punchdrunk, Ceaseless Fun, Third Rial Projects, and even the WWE.
Here’s how the company describes the show:
Four fractured worlds exist in parallel, each inhabited by figures trapped within unresolved memories. As audience members move through the space, the boundaries between these worlds begin to break down, setting in motion an exploration of identity, disconnection, and the need to reconnect with oneself and community. The show pulls inspiration from the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the Bardo, a threshold between death and rebirth, and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.
Of course, we had to know more about the production — whose tickets go on sale today for the run of July 16-25 — and Stoller was generous with her time to help us with the details.
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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?
Sophia Stoller: The Still Point is a large-scale immersive dance-theater experience that transforms SOMArts in San Francisco into a liminal world suspended between memory, identity, and transformation. Audiences move through four interconnected environments inhabited by characters trapped inside unresolved versions of themselves. Through live dance-theater, large-scale projections, original music, and scenic design, the experience explores what happens when we finally confront the parts of ourselves we’ve left behind.
Audience members begin the experience in a guided exploration of the world, and are later given agency to explore, choosing where to go and how to experience the unfolding world around them. Prior to the audience’s arrival, the characters are trapped within isolated worlds outside of time, disconnected from one another and from the truths they have forgotten. The audience coming into these worlds acts as a catalyst for memory and awareness, sparking their journeys.
NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?
SS: I have always been fascinated by liminal spaces– moments of transition when the familiar falls away and we're suspended between what was and what comes next. These moments can feel unsettling, disorienting, even frightening, but they can also be openings into entirely new possibilities. Much of my work over the past decade has explored liminality, fractured identities, memory, and shadow, and The Still Point became an opportunity to bring those long-running interests together into a single immersive world.
The more immediate inspiration came from my own dreams. For the past year, I have found myself returning to versions of this world night after night, waking up with fragments of images, places, and experiences that felt intensely real but slipped away as soon as I tried to hold onto them. That experience led me to imagine characters caught in a similar state. People trying to remember a world, a life, or a truth that feels just beyond reach. In many ways, The Still Point is an attempt to recreate the feeling of being inside a dream: a place that feels familiar and meaningful, even as it remains elusive.
This is Iris Company’s most ambitious project to date, and is also our Bay Area debut! It is exciting to be bringing this work to San Francisco and putting down roots as a company in the area where I was born and raised.
NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?
SS: In The Still Point, the audience isn't simply exploring a world, they are an active part of it. The structure of the experience and the way audiences move through the space mirror the journey that the performers are on.
I also think immersive fans will be excited by the way the piece uses dance as its primary storytelling language and by the extraordinary artists bringing the world to life. The cast includes performers whose credits span Sleep No More, Then She Fell, Life & Trust, and Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway. The visual landscape is being created by Aron Altmark, founder of Visual Endeavors, whose work includes large-scale projection and visual design for artists including the Backstreet Boys and No Doubt at Sphere in Las Vegas. Rather than centering dialogue or exposition, The Still Point builds meaning through movement, feeling, imagery, sound, and environment. There are mysteries to uncover and connections to make, but ultimately the experience is designed less as a puzzle to solve and more as a world to inhabit and be immersed in.
NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?
SS: One of the most exciting discoveries has been how much the world expanded through collaboration. I came into the process with a strong vision for the themes and structure of the piece, but every collaborator brought ideas that pushed the work in unexpected directions. It's also been one of those rare projects that feels like it wants to be made. I have encountered plenty of roadblocks on other productions, but this piece has had a momentum of its own. The right collaborators kept appearing, ideas kept connecting, and opportunities kept opening up at exactly the right moments. That sense of collective creative energy has been both unexpected and incredibly rewarding.
NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?
SS: As you prepare to enter a threshold where time folds in on itself, memory exists as a living space, and parallel versions of self can co-exist simultaneously, I encourage you to pay attention to the fragments of dreams that linger after you wake up. Think about places that feel familiar but just slightly out of reach. Consider the shadow parts of yourself that you prefer to keep hidden. The Still Point lives somewhere in that space, between memory and forgetting, between endings and beginnings, between the worlds we inhabit and the ones we can almost remember.
The work draws upon the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the Bardo, a threshold between death and rebirth, as well as T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton in Four Quartets. Having some idea of the themes of death, transition, surrender, and acceptance in the Bardo teachings, and themes of memory and transcendence in Four Quartets could deepen the experience and help enable you to uncover clues in our abstract world.
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