We're in the post-Spooky Season, pre-Holiday lull at the moment, which means this edition we owe entirely to London curator Shelley Snyder who has been holding it down in the heart of Britain for us for years.
Not that the lull will last long. I'm already busy playing {REDACTED} and there are openings galore across the map this month. Given the state of the economy in our two biggest territories you'd think things would slow down but noooooo.
Which, frankly, I love from a cultural point of view as well as a "we gotta survive here" pov: the arts don't stop. They won't stop. They cannot stop because if they do then we know humanity is truly cooked.
Oh, look, I found a way to sound pessimistic. It's my superpower!
While you're here: kick the tires on the new website, and go see what's cooking on the front page of Everything Immersive – now the front page for immersive & experiential art & entertainment for the whole planet. Yeah, I said it. 'Cuz it's true.
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1884 (London)
Rhianna Ilube, Coney, Koro
Free, Oct. 22-25
Imagine an elaborate board game, played concurrently and overlapping with eight other teams, for ever-expanding stakes, while being actively oppressed by yet another team in a different room which you can’t interact with (or stop) no matter how hard you try.
So runs 1884, an anticolonial game-theatre show about the Berlin Conference which systematically disrupted and dismantled power structures across the African continent. It’s an incredibly heavy premise but 1884 delivers surprisingly accessible messaging and content over the course of 2.5 hours.
Welcoming audiences with low-stakes bonding exercises and seemingly trite tabletop choices as performers/facilitators wander and drive progress, things take a turn for the ominous as some groups begin to be rewarded or punished for their behaviour. Some are made an example of. Some are given secret tasks and some begin to rebel — the rumblings of an uprising whisper between teams. Someone defaces public property. People are disappearing. The community upheaves…
I was sincerely surprised at how 1884 subverted my expectations throughout the experience. I find tabletop games a challenging medium to be properly immersed within, particularly when playing with strangers. Because 1884 does indeed spill out beyond the borders of the playing surface, this is much less a tabletop game and more of a room-wide dollhouse, an adult version of the imaginary-city games we play in childhood. Though the onboarding to the experience does include a seemingly long-winded warning from the producers not to abuse the performers, later I absolutely appreciate the evident need for this given that there are moments where the audience gets incensed with the injustice of it all.
2025 is not a great year for positive international relations; rhetoric emerging across the US and the UK has a show like 1884 opening challenging conversations around what happens when one culture storms in and steamrolls another in its own home. Shades of fascism are gamified, and what we chuckle about in a playroom as we hurl our paper missiles at balsa wood effigies gets carried out into the world afterwards. We experience, through a very condensed lens, the reality that our neighbors have faced, are facing, will continue to face — and what we may one day face ourselves.
1884 offers an excellent show for the eager gamer, the switched-on and politically-minded, and the hands-on historian.
No Proscenium previously covered 1884 in April 2024; the current iteration is produced by Koro and has had content & staging updates since last publishing.
— Shelley Snyder, London & UK Curator
The Map and the Echo (London)
Seth Kreibel
£25, The British Library
28 October-2 December 2025
Disclaimer: I experienced this piece while it was featured as part of VPN at Colab Tower, rather than in situ at its intentional and curational home of the British Library. With the consent of the artist NoPro is covering it as an essentially-complete production.
I am sitting in a featureless storage tunnel with about fifteen other people under a bridge, and we are building a library with our words.
We’ve been split into two teams: turn by turn each side of the room is invited to give our host a direction for our group to move through the ever-widening scope of an imaginary library we’re wandering. Moving nowhere in reality but spanning mental miles we “explore” the realm of a building Kreibel describes for us, room by room as we move through it, often to groans of exasperation as we hit dead ends or giddy giggles as we chance upon the opportunity to make him repeat himself over and over as we re-enter favoured spaces.
The Map and the Echo is essentially a verbal text-adventure exploration game from the early days of computer entertainment. There is a goal to discover in the narrative; the two sides of the room quickly realise we’re in fact working in parallel and should be paying attention to the other’s path so as not to waste time when our individual turn comes. While there is no costume or set or moving about the space for the audience, our agency and obligation to others’ experience is palpable: we’re building the pathway together and wasting a turn feels like a betrayal to the collective. As the mental palace expands so too do the stakes — we only have so much time to explore and there’s every chance we may not reach the end of the story if we don’t move with purpose.
Fans of The Telelibrary and similar works will enjoy the familiar charm of a live performer delivering pre-determined descriptive text as often as we demand it of them, fighting past cheek-biting grins as the group, yet again, chooses a path we’ve already been down either because we’ve collectively forgotten the imaginary architecture or because we just want to see our host’s eyes roll with suppressed laughter as he has to describe a traversed room for the umpteenth time (it’s really his own fault for making some pathways essentially a railroad).
Engaging and benign, The Map and the Echo is a lovely piece of short-form performance accessible to any audience, but particularly to those who are imaginative and have a good sense of mental direction.
— Shelley Snyder, London & UK Curator
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