Throughout the Sunday evening, I was placed in a foreign prison, I joined a folk-rock group for a singing uprising which involved a killer bear and ran several times against masters of selfish and gourmet tasks, once in a comic production in a jazz club and another time in the back room of a shabby dance space.
A scene from “That's Jazz Baby!” Of the immersive team of spies among us. “Our big goal that took place was to make a simple, understandable and funny room and hoping that everything else was being set up after that,” said Spies founder, Prescott Gadd.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
And everything seemed to be freedom, 10 minutes at a time.
The immersive invitational, now in its fourth year, was presented in collaboration with the LGBT center and The theater company after the hoursWith the support of the local group the Institute of immersive experience. Vanity: participating companies have 48 hours to develop a new production of 10 minutes, then carry out it several times on the end of the event. The public is part of the show – the “immersive theater” designates the involvement of the ticket buyer, generally by interacting with or following the distribution. There is stupidity – a production involved a crying Swedish rapper cryogenically – and the general tone is that of joviality, the belief that art at the beginning of the 21st century should be more and more interactive and playable.
In Dr.3am, “Bird is the word” by Dr3am Logikk, the participants were thrown into prison, playing the role of a rock group that made a racket in an unnamed foreign land led by authoritarianism.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
The immersive is a wide term. He includes everything, large-scale land of the theme park-the epic universe of Universal Studios in Florida, which opens on May 22, is perhaps considered as perhaps The biggest immersive event of the year – in wonderland focused on play such as The Sloomoo Slime Museum. The immersive theater tends to lean more niche, but as more generations grow surrounded by games and social media applications that are based on gamification techniques, experimenting means to merge art and game is considered vital.
“(Participants) have an agency,” explains Aaron Vanek, co-founder of Spectacular Disaster Factory, one of the program's troops. “I think it is a stimulating situation when participants are able not only to immers themselves in a world, but really affect this world and, in the current situation today, the simple fact of having a little power to make a significant change for a person, a character or a story is extremely enriching.”
During the invitation of this year, music was given as a broad subject, but the themes have often raised the artistic expression – the void when it took us, the disorder when emotions are involved and power during collaboration with others. The majority of productions have their heads abstract in the world outside the Los Angeles LGBT Center rooms in Hollywood, apparently in broad agreement that life for many in 2025 is full of invisible stressors, and yet many have also found an edifying spirit by allowing public members to join the act of creation.
The immersive annual invitation of the La presented eight theatrical performances of eight minutes, all centered, all centered on a theme of music.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
With the limited time, the participating theater teams must quickly establish a place and a sense of the objective, lending the public, which must immediately distort its role as actors, a call for action. We are, for example, to free ourselves from a prison in an unnamed country or to discover who killed classical music. These are different levels of interactivity, as a show gave us interview prompts, another made us act as puppeteers in a way, and elsewhere, we were invited to make a bad rudimentary street dance. And the immersive theater, when it works, breaks down the barriers, allowing the act of play to know our colleagues member of the public and to explore the stories and emotions with trained actors.
“A season does not exist in immersive theater,” explains Graham Wetterhahn, founding artistic director of After Hours, noting that many productions have short tracks. They can often sell quickly. The immersive invitational is a means, hopefully, to expose the public to various troops to extend their scope.
I literally had to be expelled from “string instruments”, from SpectacularAs the show seemed to continue long after its last beat. Tonally, he differs many at the immersive invitation, hitting a denial and horror sensation while the public explores the locker room of an electronic music dance club. There, two bottle girls were seated before makeup mirrors. Our only instruction was to search for strings with brightly tied bright colors, and these were found after a minute or two on the arms of the actors.
Spectacular Disaster Factory's “rope instruments” took a strange tone, in which the public controlled actors as if they were puppets.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
The slightly dressed artists spoke in monotonous – “lipstick”, “hair brush”, “pencil” – while the public was pretending to turn their arms around their office. On occasion, a superior came and reminded us of the minutes until the opening. It affected. We immediately tried to help the actors at their request, but unable to release them from the handles of the occupation which left them with dead eyes. He looked at the public a sense of the demanding agency, because we could control the show but only up to a point.
A newspaper of one of the actors – flared open to the desk – read that it was crying for the loss of its future. “Corded instruments” was a work that left the public without a moment of end of the realization of wishes. There was no uprising, no fusion, and this empty future seemed to follow. And yet, there was a feeling of comfort in his monotony, the simple fact of looking for articles on an desk and directing an actor creating a feeling of calm that sought to raise questions surrounding the ways that we will unjustly agree.
“We arrive at the immersive theater from an opposite edge,” explains Kirsten Hageleit, co -founder of Spectacular Disaster Factory. “Many people come from traditional theater. There are people from the escape rooms. We come from live role -playing games and a type of role -playing game where it is not scripted. ”
The members of the Public of the immersive Invitational play a piano in “That's Jazz Baby!” Spies among us.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
“It's baby jazz!” Since Spies among usThe team behind a long race Little tokyo tale of spyingFound similar without life in the corporate chore, this time in a jazz nightclub. It was only here, the objective was lighter and the public managed to release the artists from the claws of an excessively maniac owner. The public had to release a group of hypnosis musicians and do it by concocting scenarios in which the owner of the club was continuously forced to leave the room. We put on wigs and played instruments while we are fighting for equity in a show that argued that the attraction of music was not perfectionism or talent but the community.
Classical music, the genre, was murdered in “Settling The Score” of Epring Size … NetProv Studio.
(Chiara Alexa / For time)
Spy brunch I found the inspiration in the era of the 60s protesting music in its “Ursa Major and the Blue Mountain Hex”, transforming public members into a playful musicians in his playful program on the release of a government agent. History has taken on a metaphorically magic curvature, focusing on the power of music to unite – and potentially invoke a bear. “Bird is the word” of Dr3am Logikk had similar messages, but did it via a frame in which rock 'n' roll was prohibited and its musicians inspired by the confrontation were imprisoned for having racket in a foreign country. To combat authoritarianism, we had to develop an inspiring song using no instrument and no animal noises. The two were shows that inspired connections and vulnerability, part of the exaltation of common art.
Emotional volatility was discussed in “Frog and Toad: Live in Concert!” Since Last call theaterone of more prolific companies On the immersive scene. He played the group's forces who choose your adventure, twinning the members of the public to an actor to try to prevent a group from breaking. The secular tension between artistic originality and trade has been explored, and our team failed to find a compromise. Queen's fools I went a slightly more traditional path with “Devil on My Bauve”, in which we were fed for actors in a show that argued that even more passive productions can find ways to bring the public to look.
There is sometimes absurdity in interactive fiction. Cherry Poppins'”Ismusik” and In the meantime … NetProv Studio“Settling the score” has each focused on comic improvisation, the first presenting mini-defects when we saved Swedish hip-hop and the second trying to us with interviews of personified musical genres in order to resolve a murder, in this case, classical music. However, there were each of the subtle statements on the creation of fame in our commodity age.
Big messages can easily fall – or even slightly disguised – in immersive entertainment. It's because we play, and when we play, we are in the moment. We are also slightly out of the head space and ready to buy in worlds of wonder or even conflicts. And at the immersive invitation, where the productions went from the clumsy to the heavy, there was an underlying common denominator, and it is that the immersive game can inspire radical joy.
