www.timeout.com: When Sleep No More first arrived in New York City in 2011, it spawned a boom of immersive theater productions not just in the city, but spanning the globe. The murky lines between performer and audience member are blurred during these immersive experiences, making each performance truly unique and muddling the audience’s perception of reality. While Sleep No More certainly isn’t the only popular immersive theater experience around these days, it certainly opened to the most fanfare, and with the impending closing of the decade-long show, many wonder if a new up-and-comer will rise to take its place.
4 comments:
Just like plot, acting, or design, Immersion is a wonderful tool to use to share a story, which is fundamentally what theater is. Immersion can be remarkably effective but it can be difficult to get right. The first challenge of immersion is that it is a lot more difficult to control your audience. Every audience member’s experience relies on everyone around them acting as expected. If one audience member makes a scene, then that will affect everybody's experience of the work. In some ways this is beneficial but it can also lead to other people not being able to experience what they want. It is also possible that audience members will break the set as they walk through it. Working on lighting and sound for an immersive performance such as this also sounds very interesting, because you have to design and control related events in a large number of separate spaces. I would be curious how the AV systems for a production like this were set up. You can either have connected control systems for each room, or have one master control.
I love reading about the new immersive experiences that are popping up. This seems like a really neat exploration of how we experience human connection, and a cool environmental design for that. Exploration of different environments in order to advance conversations and deepen the connections the participants of the conversation have with each other is a fascinating concept. When looking at the design as a whole, the set dressing and scenic elements of the design seem very specific and detailed, making the environments seem tighter and warmer, facilitating more open conversation. I also really appreciate how this venue has other locations for folks to connect after the fact of the experience - it adds a sense of grounding and permanence to the experience, suggesting that they are maybe creating lasting connections for times to come. This seems like a place I’d love to visit in the future, and a place I hope stays open and facilitating conversations for a while!
Immersive experiences are so exciting to read about. I’d love to see Dead Letter No. 9 – I think it’s the first immersive production that I’ve really wanted to see. I’m so intrigued by the themes of connections. It would be really interesting to be able to have these meaningful conversations about hot topics like AI and Covid, without a phone to distract you. Certainly, immersive experiences are able to get much closer to their audience; the fact that Dead Letter No. 9 has a bar and restaurant built in speaks to that. It’s also a pretty good money move on their part. I think that this type of performance has a lot of potential for truly meaningful pieces. I can’t imagine the design work that has to go into making an immersive piece; unlike theater, the audience is able to see everything from all sides, up close. I’d be interested to hear more about the design team’s process and how different departments interacted with each other to build a more powerful story.
I love immersive theatre! And the thought of an immersive theatre cocktail party seems like such a very big slay. I also love that “Sleep No More” seems to have acted as a catalyst for a lot of these immersive theatre experiences and that is really cool. I sadly never got to see “Sleep No More” but I really wanted to! I did, however, get to see Punchdrunk’s “The Burnt City.” Punchdrunk is the company that put on “Sleep No More” so it was really cool to see a different one of their shows and can I just say it was fucking incredible! The level of detail and planning that it must have taken to get such a beautiful and smooth running show was incredible. I was in awe the entire time. All this to say I love immersive theatre and this idea of an immersive theatre cocktail party is actually so much fun.
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