‘The Mortality Machine’ to Combine Dance, Live Action Role-Playing, and Immersive Theatre (Q&A)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
September 19, 2018
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8 min read

Sinking Ship Creations talks about their most ambitious project ever

You might know Sinking Ship Creations (run by co-owners Ryan Hart and Jason Knox) as the folks who put on the two day live action role-playing experience Project Ascension earlier this year. Project Ascension was a LARP experience where participants were fast forwarded into a dystopian version of New York City fifteen minutes into the future.

Well, as of today, they’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $9,000 for their latest experience, The Mortality Machine, the story of an illegal medical laboratory near Chinatown that’s been sealed for years after five mysterious deaths—until now.

The project also happens to be a cross-country collaboration between Sinking Ship Creations, choreographer Lara Marcin, and game/interactive designer Tommy Honton (Stash House, Museum of Selfies).

We spoke to co-owner Ryan Hart via email about the crossover between dance and LARP, the goals for the production, and their Kickstarter campaign.

No Proscenium (NP): Can you describe your style of live-action role play (LARP) and how it relates to immersive theatre?

Sinking Ship Creations (SSC): LARP has been around for a long-time, but in the United States, we’ve never been really sure how to treat it. Is it a game? A performance? Our goal is to establish LARP as an artistic medium: our approach is creative and intentional, and we craft experiences that focus on particular themes that we want to resonate with our audiences.

To this end, we do focus on two elements: freeform narrative and the 360-degree illusion. “Freeform narrative” means that we give our participants context for the story, and let them determine the course from there. Then it’s theirs, and they can do what they want with it. Their choices matter. The “360-degree illusion” is the idea that you can turn around in a circle, and never see anything that breaks your immersion. These two elements are key to all our large-scale designs.

We don’t see LARP as different from immersive theatre, but rather as a sub-genre, like site-specific dance. Our particular medium allows a tremendous amount of freedom to people who come see our shows, but we still maintain the same sort of environment as other shows.

NP: How did your new project, The Mortality Machine, come about?

SSC: We’re working a big project for November 2019, and as part of our preparation for that, we knew we wanted to expand the medium we called “live-action roleplay.” We incorporated music into Project Ascension in the form of a live synth band, and we wanted to really figure out how to give people both a spectacle that engaged their senses while still allowing them full agency. Just like “theatre” includes plays that only have acting, as well as plays that have singing and dance, we wanted to create a new type of event that integrated other forms of performance. We started listing what we wanted to accomplish as part of the project, and we came up with “we want to have dancers.

…Which turns out to be really complicated! Dance is a form that typically requires rehearsal, training and education. The process of creating a dance work is different from creating a LARP. So, The Mortality Machine started off as a project to learn how to combine site-specific dance and live-action roleplay. And from there, it took on a life of its own.

It was supposed to be a one night project for about 20 to 30 people. However, as we realized the depth of the story we could tell, we realized we could really tackle some amazing subjects that wouldn’t really work unless we used a medium as evocative as dance is. As we developed the world and the narrative structure, we realized we were making something special that we wanted more people to experience, and started expanding the scope of the project.

Now, we’re planning a three-week run in January. No LARP has ever had a show run like this, but the disciplines were collaborating with, including dance and escape room design, are making it possible for participants to have a unique experience night after night.

NP: LARP and site-specific dance-theatre are usually at different ends of the immersive spectrum, how are you planning on bringing those together?

SSC: There seems like there’s a lot of difference, right? Dance is rehearsed, LARP is improvised. Dance is typically experienced as a spectacle, but participants are part of the show in a LARP. Typically, dance requires years of training, while LARP is usually walking around and talking to people. But both are fundamentally the same: we’re using our bodies to tell a story. Once we make it participatory, a person who lacks dance training can still participate, just like someone can roleplay even if they’re not a professionally-trained actor.

To do it, we’re approaching dance as not only a demonstrative but a communicative medium. Our design calls for the dance elements to be interactive… when one of our participants encounters a dancer, they should be able to change what the dancer is doing, learn something new, or be transported somewhere else. To do this, there has to be a conversation of sorts… the participant has to give inputs, the dancer has to provide a response, and vice versa. And just like you don’t use the same words in an academic paper as you do in the New York Times, the movements themselves have to be accessible to both sides of the conversation. By adding this element of conversation and improvisation, live-action roleplay and dance play very well with each other. Now we’re collaboratively telling a story with dance, as opposed to telling a story, then stopping to watch the dance elements.

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NP: Who are your collaborators and how did they get involved in the project?

SSC: We have two designers we really need to talk about, because we’re so excited to be working with them.

First, we have our choreographer, Lara Marcin. We met Lara through the Everything Immersive meet-up and she immediately clicked with the team. This project requires more than just a choreographer: we needed a collaborator who understood the core concept of the design, and could develop it artistically and make it their own. The Mortality Machine was born through conversations with Lara during which we realized how it would be possible to bring LARP and dance together.

Second, we’re working with Tommy Honton, a game and experience designer in Los Angeles, on the totality of the event… We wanted our story to develop as the participants uncovered it. The participants would be presented with problems, and we wanted to embed information throughout the space to help them solve the problems. We had talked to Tommy earlier in the year about possible collaborations, Tommy and Lara knew each other through LA, so we were extremely lucky to get a designer with Tommy’s ability. He’s creating an experience that integrates not just the live-action roleplay and dance elements, but everything you see, hear, or feel.

NP: How are you approaching designing around audience agency? What should the audience be expecting in that regard?

SSC: We don’t design around audience agency… we design directly to it. The important thing we tell everyone who works with us is “we don’t know how any of this ends.” The participants (we don’t use the word “audience”) can make any choice they want, as long as they stick to two or three safety rules (sorry, you can’t actually hit anyone in the face). So once the participants enter the world of The Mortality Machine, there’s no scripts to follow.

That’s not to say you’re on your own; we’ve been designing live-action roleplay experiences for a decade and a half. Without pulling back the curtain too much, we’ll use the metaphor of a crossroads: we lay out a number paths you can follow, and mark them with signs, and you can be sure that you’ll be able to reach the end of the path you choose. However, if you want to go off-roading, we’ve fleshed out the world in all directions and hidden rewards for you to find if that’s your thing. So if you think outside the box, you might find nothing… or you might find a hidden secret that we put there in case you’re the type of person that likes going off the beaten path.

Most important, however, is we wanted to make sure you could do as much or as little as you please. There’s going to be participants who open every drawer, press every button, and explore as much as possible. Others will be deep into the roleplay and experience the psychological elements we’ve crafted. Someone else might just want to watch. We want all three to be able to take something away from The Mortality Machine, so we need to make sure it’s engaging, emotional, and interesting in and of itself.

NP: You’re Kickstarting the show, what challenges are you expecting with the campaign?

SSC: Since no one has attempted a show like this before, we have to spend a lot of time explaining what we’re doing.There’s a lot of questions for which we have to invent answers… for example, we had to create an entire new way of “diagramming” this experience. So there’s a lot of information to communicate!

It’s also our first Kickstarter, so we’ve been working hard and seek advice from people more experienced with crowdfunding. It’s frightening to do this for the first time, but we believe in the project, and we’re doing our homework to make it as successful as possible.

NP: What aspect of the experience are you most excited about?

SSC: We’re excited by the potential of combining our disciplines. When a medium is new, creators can tell basic, primal stories in a new light. We couldn’t do The Mortality Machine in twenty years… it would have already been done before.

This opportunity only comes around once, and we can’t wait to bring it to New York City.

The Kickstarter campaign for The Mortality Machine continues through October 19. The show is expected to run January 15 — February 3, 2019 at Wildrence in Manhattan.

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