Students will perform their play to a public audience, including the local history association,
immersive theater actors and producers, and 200 other community members.
They'll have their textbook to work with throughout the course of the term, and they'll also watch speeches, documentaries, and listen to
immersive theater experts speak in class.
The premise of the «mid-season»
immersive theater show in December — which costs $ 150 — is that guests are invited to visit OSDM headquarters for a better understanding of how the group actually operates.
The recently released Ready Player One movie did not include some of the «story - living» live action role playing scenes that were included within the novel, but Ernest Cline was definitely attuned to the trends towards immersive narratives when his novel came out in 2011, which is the year that the Punchdrunk
immersive theater production Sleep No More opened up in New York City.
But it was also shaped by the work
of immersive theater company Third Rail Projects, whose best - known work Then She Fell lets 15 audience members explore a Lewis Carroll - inspired world.
Artistic Director Kira Hawkridge will discuss the upcoming new season at the area's premiere experimental and
immersive theater company, OUT LOUD Theater.
But after discussing
immersive theater with producer Gordon Bijelonic, Bousman hatched the idea to create an actual immersive production as a precursor to the film.
The Oculus - produced Wolves in the Walls
used immersive theater actors from the production Then She Fell in order to do the motion capture, and to help tell the spatial story using the body language of an embodied character in the story.
She's also been finding a lot of inspiration and innovation of the future of storytelling
from immersive theater, where actors are able to use their body language to communicate unconsciously with the audience and use their bodies moving through space in order to drive specific behaviors.
Awards from $ 2,000 to $ 10,000 were made to support artists that reflect a diversity of talent and creativity for projects
including immersive theater, interactive media experiences, documentary film and musical composition.
It's all a lead - up to a 90 - minute
immersive theater event in December, dubbed The Lust Experience: Anointment, with another show serving as the story's blow - out finale sometime in 2018.
Functionally, the Sweetwater activation was strikingly similar to Sleep No More, the
groundbreaking immersive theater production, wrapped in Westworld clothing.
People aren't cheap, and for that reason more than anything else I imagine this kind of thing will only be the domain of high - end, one - off promotions or
dedicated immersive theater productions.
As for the
next immersive theater production itself, Bousman and Sears are clearly hoping to keep Lust under wraps for as long as possible, but they do admit a few things.
«One thing that I've learned is that the only thing that's different
between immersive theater and any kind of good storytelling is that you can be a little more on - the - nose,» explains Sears, noting that the medium's «live» nature adds an extra layer of verisimilitude.
This aspect of Pandora —
merging immersive theater with the big - budget theme park world — points to impressive possibilities, particularly if Disney decides to push things further on the narrative front.
In recent years, spectacular special effects, high - tech scenography, and the rise
of immersive theater, among other innovations, have all contributed to an evolution in the proscenium theatrical experience.
How do we
use immersive theater — where the audience becomes part of the play — to tell a story within the French or Russian Revolution?
«I think in every sense the fans made it better,» Bousman says, and there is no better example of that influence than in Tension's
immersive theater production itself.
In Year 9, 13 - and 14 - year - old students wrote plays about the French and Russian Revolutions and performed
immersive theater to a public audience of over 200 people, including members of their local history association and immersive theater actors and producers.
Together, they planned how they could teach about
both immersive theater and the French and Russian Revolutions.
This program is presented in partnership with Little Cinema,
an immersive theater company blending cinema and live performance in new and creative ways.
With more than 200 galleries from around the world exhibiting at this year's The Armory Show, there was a plethora of works large and small to consider, and simply finding one's way through the morass of booths, gallerists, fairgoers, collectors, performance artists and photographers felt like
an immersive theater experience.
The long - running New York production Sleep No More, which gives audience members masks and asks them to explore a creepy hotel while a production of Macbeth unfolds around them, is a classic example of
immersive theater.
For all its immersive pleasures (and terrors), The Lust Experience alternate reality game represents an enormous investment of time and attention into something that is ultimately word - of - mouth marketing for the ticketed events — though the creative team is quick to point out that
the immersive theater shows are also designed as stand - alone experiences that can be enjoyed by anyone.
Last year director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw 2 - 4), writer Clint Sears, and producer Gordon Bijelonic debuted The Tension Experience, a nearly year - long project that combined an elaborate alternate reality game about a fictional cult in Los Angeles with
an immersive theater production that ran during Halloween season.
So if you live in New York and can't get out to LA [for
the immersive theater show], then you miss that part of the storyline — but you can pick up where the movie is, you can pick up in the ARG.
On my second trip, the narrative folded in on itself, as Addison took me behind the scenes to reveal that The Tension Experience was actually just a front;
an immersive theater show designed to introduce the cult's message to the masses.
The story of a heist that happens in the middle of
an immersive theater production, the script Tension was Bousman's original way of bringing attention to a medium he'd fallen in love with after seeing productions like Sleep No More and Then She Fell.
That running feedback turned the ARG portion of Tension — and, later, sections of
the immersive theater show — into a piece of constant, on - the - fly improvisation.
A dramatically engaging, layered story experience that breathed new life into the ideas of transmedia storytelling, it raised the bar for the kind of emotional experiences that people can expect from the world of
immersive theater — and it pulled it all off by making the audience part of the storytelling itself.
It essentially amounts to taking the kinds of interactive, real - world interactions we currently see in
immersive theater or haunted houses, mixing them with the Star Wars mythology, and letting the whole thing play out in a massive, all - encompassing sandbox built for that express purpose from the ground up.
So I'm pretty sure Sweetwater was just what it seemed to be: a remarkable piece of
immersive theater.