This week both New York City and LA jump into action with reviews across the Big Apple (including work that was spotlighted by the Under The Radar festival) and a dance theatre piece with participatory elements in Burbank.
All in all it's a good crop, and the reviews answer some questions we had about experiences like The Haven (NYC) and VULGAR (Burbank) when they first hit our inboxes.
Read on!
NoPro is 100% reader & listener supported. Support our work by becoming a subscriber, which comes with access to our newsletter & Discord, or drop a one-time gift in the Tip Jar of any amount to share your love of immersive experiences.
Want more? Check out our most recent edition and our REVIEWS section.
Check out our How To Get Covered By NoPro guide to submit your events & experiences for review. Want the opportunity to get your work listed in our newsletter & socials? Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.
2021 – NYC
Cole Lewis, Patrick Blenkarn, and Sam Ferguson
$30; MITU580, Jan 9-17
Mixing games and theater is a complex kind of cooking - sometimes it’s a beautiful fusion, sometimes it’s inedible. Under the Radar waded again in this fraught space with the new multimedia work 2021. Unfortunately, while 2021 presented some interesting interactivity, it did not make a successful meal.
This autobiographical work explored the narrator’s relationship with her father through his descent into dementia and terminal illness. This theme is explored through a number of means, including a brief meditation on old photos and a final conversation with an AI replica of the father. But most of the piece was a game in which a single audience member played as the father as he navigated hospitals, driving, family conversations, and delusions. This both told the story of his life and offered his perspective as his daughter tried to get him the medical help he needed.
The theme was compelling and there were moments of powerful interaction, specifically when the narrator was speaking directly to the player and the player responded as the father with dialogue choices, giving them a chance to either be true to his uglier impulses or sanitize the conversation. But the show was hamstrung by two major issues. First, there were too many disparate elements. The photo discussion at the top didn’t connect to anything else in the piece; the muddled Al conversation at the end felt 2 years out-of-date and gave no interesting take on the story. If the game was what the show was about, that’s where it should have stayed.
Unfortunately, the game had issues as well. The gameplay consisted mostly of walking around the hospital solving puzzles (e.g. find the key card for this door) with one long combat section. While as a game that might work, there was no thought at all to how that would work as a theater piece, i.e., the way the vast majority of the audience experienced it. That meant that when the player struggled, the whole show stalled out. The combat section was particularly painful because our player chose hard mode and had to repeat the battle scene many times. That might be entertaining to do, but it wasn’t to watch.
I applaud the show for trying to use games in a new way. But while there were moments in 2021 that were genuinely powerful, in this case games and theater didn’t taste great together.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Drinking Brecht – NYC
Sister Sylvester
$20; Techne Homecoming, Jan 9-18
An interactive installation work hosted by Under the Radar and Onassis/ONX, Drinking Brecht is a meditation on attribution and origin, looked at through the twin lenses of genetic science and revolutionary theater. Sister Sylvester continues to impress with the innovation and execution of this multimedia participatory lecture.
In Drinking Brecht, three audience members sit in a small room set with different scientific displays - posters of genetic lineages, a hat in a glass box, a set of test tubes and petri dishes. A story is told through voice-over and a projected compilation of slides and video footage. The audience is occasionally asked to interact with the chemical equipment to do some DIY genetic retrieval of strawberries. The narrative deals with a hat that the artist was given/stole from the Berliner Ensemble that supposedly was used in the original productions of Brecht’s work. The artist then goes on a deep exploration of the hat, using genetic testing to try to identify the performers who wore it while interrogating what Brecht’s company was and what that tells us about collectivism and action.
Sister Sylvester has done other work in this form, notably the terrific The Eagle and the Tortoise, and her keen narrative skills and amazing art production are just as good in this piece. Drinking Brecht is a good story, weaving an entertaining anecdote into a profound and complex meditation on what survives through history. As a video essay alone, it’s great. But the interactivity is fascinating as well. The audience mixes chemicals in what appears to be a genuine gene extraction exercise and then uses the results in another chemical process. I don’t often do actual science during an immersive show and this experiment was tightly woven into the story, making it a profound moment of wonder and connection. It also should not be overlooked that there was no docent in the room. Making sure we mixed chemicals correctly without someone to answer questions is a small triumph of instruction design.
Interactive documentary remains for me a fascinating way immersive gets used and Sister Sylvester is one of the best in the business of making it. The artist told me that she’s looking to turn the piece into a more lightweight pop-up and if that happens, you should keep an eye out for Drinking Brecht in your town. It’s rare that science and theater make such an interesting concoction.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
The Haven – NYC
Haven Creative Team
$78; 53 Bridge St. Brooklyn; Jan 16-March 16
While I (as all immersonauts) believe fully in the transformational power of immersive work, I have always been skeptical of any piece’s claim to actually solve your problems. As powerful as I think art is, therapy is not its purpose, so when a show says it “integrates evidence-based therapeutic tools and concepts,” all my critical hackles rise. But The Haven works, partly through skillful design and partly by knowing its limits.
The Haven fits in a category of work that features a spiritual-ish ritual where the guide and/or instructions offer to give you insight on your issues. (A number of immersive pieces play at this edge, including some famous ones.) The show asks you to think of a problem in your life and then a character leads you through a series of magic-like steps to metaphorize it and commit you to some action, all enacted with “power” cards, stones, tea, and storytelling. Technology is subtly woven into the piece to reinforce the magic of the setting, such that things can happen around you as if guided by otherworldly forces.
Bad versions of this fail because they promise too much – I can’t explain how condescending it is when an immersive performer pretends they are wiser than you are or can clear up your trauma in 60 minutes. But The Haven succeeds by aiming lower. You are never asked to name your issue and the guide doesn’t offer you a solution. The ritual instead is a framing device you walk through, one that offers a shape to thinking about the problem for you to explore.
Because of that, The Haven works. The performer in my run, McKenna Parsons, did a very good job being supportive but cryptic, running the ritual with intent but without overinflated seriousness. The tech was seamless and effective - I enjoyed both the quality of the effects and the understated way they appeared and were commented on. And the ritual itself was pretty solid. I easily could have faked it, but I used an actual issue from my life and found that this ritual helped me commit to something in a way that I might not have without the piece’s framing.
No immersive show is going to save your life, but The Haven is a well-scoped and properly executed work can give you a bit of insight and magic at the same time.
— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent
Starcadia - NYC
Seeing Humans Productions & Waxwing Productions
$37; ArtxNYC, Jan. 30 - Feb. 2
Starcadia is a hyper-imaginative experience that joins immersive free-roaming exploration with traditional musical theater.
Crafted by Seeing Humans Productions (Toothy’s Treasure, A Fairly Odd Musical, Bee Musical) and Waxwing Productions (Dovecote, Immersive Trilogies, Mercutio: A Musical Concept), Starcadia punches well above its weight.
The experience begins with a thirty minute explorative pre-show. Though to call it a pre-show diminishes the thematic and experiential work that it does to set the stage narratively and tonally. Guests are sent upstairs with flashlights to wander throughout ArtxNYC’s second floor and meet the starpeople.
(As an aside, ArtxNYC has developed a consistent rapport with new immersive works like this one. A broader piece about how ArtxNYC is the modern-day La MaMa for immersive—even though La MaMa is also the modern-day La MaMa for immersive—is required writing for another day. But I digress.)
While upstairs, guests can interact with a cast of characters, acting somewhere between clowns and aliens, with color-changing lights affixed to their bodies.
Some might take you to dance, others might paint insignias on your arms, others might direct you to a found poetry creation station, and still others might marvel at your genuine human hands. With a celestial soundscape scoring it all, the entire experience felt like journeying through an otherworldly carnival. And I loved it.
Next, guests are guided downstairs for the second act, an eighty-five minute musical with immersive staging following the story of celestial bodies at an existentially important galactic meeting. Every scene delivered an imaginative surprise, often in the form of interesting, 360-degree blocking; luminary props; or some untraditionally performative arts moment.
Softly glowing balloons floating about, a ritual painting of a hanging orb, shadow puppets on a long flowing garment, and a giant sun puppet emerging out of nowhere were all especially wonderful standouts.
Overall, I found Starcadia, written and directed by Brayden Martino and composed by John-William Gambrell, to be an inventive delight: scrappy but polished, madcap but zen. See you at the next Syzygy.
–Alec Zbornak, NYC Correspondent
Vulgar — Burbank
Stephanie Mizrahi
$35, EVERYTHING, Jan 31
When VULGAR first popped up on my radar I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. After all, dance theatre is at the heart of what made the immersive renaissance in the first place, but was this going to be an actual immersive experience or a piece that was more of what we sometimes refer to as a “hybrid”: a work that borrows immersive elements to reach beyond a mediums traditional form.
To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with a hybrid. We love them. They definitely have their role to play in the immersive ecosystem, and depending on the material they’re often more appropriate for what an artist is exploring than trying to build out a whole world.
With that said: VULGAR is a hybrid piece — and a very, very funny one at that. Not “funny” as in “odd” but funny as in genuinely hilarious. Which is not something I’ve encountered all that often in my decades of attending dance concerts, which is the form that VULGAR takes.
Mizrahi is a stellar choreographer for dance theatre, who not only knows how to illustrate a text with kinesthetic phrases, but how to play to the strengths of her company both in terms of physicality and temperament. Everyone feels perfectly cast to their parts, as the company satirically illustrates segments from the text of Vernon & Irene Castle’s 1914 book Modern Dancing. To be sure the book bills them as Mr. & Mrs. Vernon Castle, which gives you a clue for where things were at in 1914 when it came to partner dancing.
A dance concert is made or broken on the strength of the individual pieces that make up the whole and, aside from site line issues when the work moves to the standing room only lobby of the Burbank performance space (EVERYTHING, a tidy well-equipped performance studio), there isn’t a dud in the bunch. The evening also builds nicely into zanier and zanier segments, which the cast tackles with increasing frenzy.
An immersive experience is made or broken on the way the whole things flows, and it’s here where VULGAR falls short. This is not something I think is due to lack of talent, but from lack of experience. A video reel that’s played at the top of the show would work better as an installation piece on a loop before “curtain.” The audience, primed to be passive, didn’t pick up on the cue to follow a pair of performers back into the studio space at the end of intermission.
The elements to elevate this to justify the “immersive” part of “immersive dance theatre event” that VULGAR is bulled as are largely there, and with some chiseling it’s evident to me Mizrahi and co can get there if they want to.
Not, mind you, that they need to.
The night culminated in a dance lesson provided by Mr. Castle himself (Ryan Michael Nuss) that had essentially the whole of the audience — the kind of wonderfully diverse all ages group you see in the dance community— on their feet with just the widest smiles I’ve seen on people at any show in ages. This was where the show invited the audience fully into its world, and they were rarin’ to go.
Mizrahi and her troupe are bound to make a name for themselves if they keep making work of any kind, especially if they keep the comic edge. Our immersive community here in LA will be blessed if they choose to go further down that path, and if they so choose I hope they connect with the players here as the melding of LA’s immersive performance and dance scenes is a pathway that could have benefits for all.
–Noah J. Nelson, Publisher
Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!
In addition to the No Proscenium website and our podcast, and you can find NoPro on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and in the Facebook community also named Everything Immersive.
Discussion