When immersive theatre works — and I mean really works — it creates a feeling that you’ve sidestepped into a reality that exists just parallel to this one. This uncanny feeling is the polar opposite of Brecht’s alienation effect, which seeks to create an ironic, objective distance between the observer and the observed. No, to immerse is to lose all objectivity. To be in pure subjective space as a method of seeking a transcendent moment.

Keight Leighn’s #bedrUmplaI is a pure, uncut example of this.

Following a similar dream logic of her earlier work Snow Fridge, #bedrUmplaI invites individual seekers into Leighn’s own personal space, where they encounter the artist who assumes a role that is one part psychopomp, one part priestess, and about six parts anime teenage earth fairy Wiccan.

Could there be anything more perfectly Silver Lake summer than dancing around a crystal spiral in a young woman’s bedroom late at night under a waxing Moon?

#bedrUmplaI is aggressively non-narrative, and those who are seeking something like a conventional story will be put off by the twisting poetry and playful magickal rites. But if you set aside what you think you want and let Leighn — well set up by co-conspirator Shayne Eastin who handles the in-world on-boarding — you might just find what you need.

There are few performers in LA’s immersive scene more generous or courageous than Leighn, who in both this piece and in life seems to only co-exist in our consensus reality. #bedrUmplaI, whose title is written in what I’ve come to think of as K8 spk (Keight speak) — an improvised magickal language whose form conceals hidden depths — is a visit to what I call K8 Space. This is a place where synchronicities just flow and the stars are made of the kind of incorruptible emotions that existed before we grew up and the world taught us how things are “supposed” to be.

You’ll notice I haven’t gone into a lot of details in this write up. There’s a simple reason for that. Where magic (as in stage magic) relies on sleight of hand, magick (as in the mystic kind) relies on slight of mind. The less you know about what’s going on, the more effective it’s bound to be. (Well, it’s more complicated than that, but this isn’t a treatise on magick.)

What you find inside the #bedrUmplaI is what you take with you. So clear your mind and prepare to dream.

#bedrUmplaI runs through August 26th at a private residence in Silver Lake. Tickets are $23.

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