Everything Immersive This Week (8/1/20)
And we’re back after an accidental one week hiatus.
Look: life happens.
So you’re getting double the W in this week’s EITW. That’s a lot of show listings, reviews, features, and news. Some of the latter of which is disconcerting as some long whispered issues with a seminal immersive project are starting to come to the surface.
Yet the overall thrust of Pandemic Era immersive and experiential remains surprisingly strong.
Let’s get into it.
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ON THE PODCAST THIS WEEK
Sean Stewart has been a lot of things in his storied career in telling stories. Novelist, LARPwright, actor, theatre tech, and most famously of all: one of the creators of the modern Alternate Reality Game.
Now add “internationally produced playwright” to the list.
Sean and Noah talk about his upcoming interactive play Roundabout, which will be performed by students of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art via Twitch, and the evolving nature of theatre (yes with the “re”) in the Pandemic Age.
Show Notes
Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Art production of Roundabout
Swings And Roundabouts: Theater Strikes Back — Sean Stewart
NoPro Episode 156 — Sean Stewart & The Birth of the ARG
FROM THE WIRE: SHOWS, EVENTS, & EXPERIENCES
We’re still running the Newswire here at NoPro while the public beta of Everything Immersive shakes out. To get your work on the Newswire, submit at EverythingImmersive.com
The House That Slipped
An online immersive show from Teatro Vivo
each and every
“to the makers of music”
Greenfield, MA: Under the Stars
A Covid-friendly drive-in theatre experience
England Expects
Command a Royal Navy Warship in the Mediterranean during WW2… over Zoom.
Instructions for a Habitat Inventory
An on-demand examination of the place where you are
The Wizards of Oakwood Drive
A La Jolla Playhouse Digital Without Walls (WOW) Production
The Officially Licensed Evil Dead 2™ Live Remote Escape Room
You have 70 minutes to save the world in this Groovy game via Zoom
Four Lovers
A game that is (not?) about love.
Agent Venture Mission 1: The Heist
Bond has Q-Branch, Jack Bauer has CTU, Inspector Gadget has Penny & Brain, Agent Venture has… you
Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets
be clever. be quick. be disobedient.
LA/Remote: C(ovell) in the C(loud)
The Game Goes Virtual
Electric Dreams Online Festival
Celebrating the best of cyberspace storytelling
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REVIEWS
Pandemic Age immersive is taking making forms, and the past two week’s worth of reviews shows off some of that breadth.
We kick things off with Definitely Not Clue, which completed its run on Twitch last month. A musical from the gang at Pixel Playhouse, who, in their IRL incarnation as After Hours Theatre Company, have had no small measure of success with immersive experimentation.
Definitely Not Clue plays with the chat feature of Twitch to create a dynamic audience experience that influences the way the show is received. This notion of the audiences’ experience as being a distinct element that can be designed and developed is the lodestone by which NoPro as a whole navigates, and its what sets Definitely Not Clue and the upcoming Roundabout (see the Podcast) apart from your basic livestreamed play.
Suffice it to say, we’re thinking a lot about this topic these days.
Spoilers on the review: Blake loved it.
KlaxAlterian Sequester is a podplay that lives up to the experiential potential of the form, and delivers a fantastically polished production right onto the smartphone of your choice for the low low price of nada.
Our reviewer, NoPro publisher and third person writing enthusiast Noah Nelson, found the meta-frame of the largely meditative experience a tad depressing as the whole thing is meant to be a transmission from an even darker future, but there’s so many textual layers baked into the production that you might find yourself drawing some hope from what’s sandwiched in between the darker vibes.
One way or another: this one is worth the time for the production values alone.
Allie gets to be part of an anarchic audience experience as performer Brian Feldman gives himself over to their control in the improvised #txtshow, which sounds like a blast and the platonic ideal of all those improv shows you went to back in college.
Maybe stack the deck with your friends, yeah?
Laura writes up the team’s experience with B.O.W.L.I.N.G. Night, which they were granted a preview of by creator Brett Jackson.
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I think this sums it up:
I laugh so hard my notes are simply: “lick sauce hole.”
Honestly, if I can’t get you to read this based on that there’s no hope for any of us.
Finally this week, Asya takes at look at The Delegation from London’s Coney, which dives into pandemic capitalism via a game-like simulation of a diplomatic summit. Multiple platforms — Zoom, Whereby, and the web — get used to create an evening-long version of a multi-day conference.
There’s a lot of ideas packed into this show.
Food For Thought
This week our executive editor Kathryn Yu published a feature looking at how creators are devising new ways to set the tone for experiences in the Pandemic Age.
With so many of the tools of immersive and experiential taken away from us at present, this is a fascinating look at how people are doing more than just “making do” in this digital focused era.
Look, I’m a broken record at this point, but Sean Stewart’s essay Swings And Roundabouts: Theater Strikes Back, is a must read about the role of the audience in the theatre of now. Not just immersive theatre, but theatre in general. Expect more on this anon.
News From around the Immersiverse — Part One: Nonchalance
Earlier this week, the NoPro Twitter account was tagged in a tweet by the account of Nonchalance, the production company behind the seminal alternate reality game The Jejune Institute which was the subject of the film The Institute and inspiration of the AMC series Dispatches From Elsewhere.
When Nonchalance’s follow up experience The Latitude ended, there was a fracture in the community that had built up around the show. In short: there was a lot of bad blood in the wake of that one, and people weren’t always up for talking on the record. While in private conversations it was obvious that wounds had never fully healed, in public bygones were largely being allowed to be bygones.
In the past year, the arrival of Dispatches From Elsewhere and a second film about Nonchalance — developed with their cooperation and focused on The Latitude — called In Bright Axiom stirred up the past. At least one screening of In Bright Axiom appears to have been pulled because of objections from somewhere in the community. That right there is important as the “who” and “why” drives some of what follows.
The Nonchalance tweet was followed by a response from Michelle Krasowski, who both challenged Nonchalance’s premise and then proceeded to recount parts of her own experience of Latitude, its creators and the aftermath.
Krasowski also made reference to her partner Uriah Findley’s experience as one of the producers of The Latitude. Findley has long since parted ways with Nonchalance, and indeed already had at the time that we interviewed him on our podcast back in 2016.
The Nonchalance account and Krasowski had a back and forth, and in the wake of it Nonchalance posted a call to get the stories out in the open.
(According to Krasowski, the Nonchalance account would end up blocking her at some point in this window of time.)
This call prompted a response from Findley, who released a lengthy thread about his interactions with the director of In Bright Axiom, Spencer McCall, and the head of Nonchalance, Jeff Hull, on Friday night.
Findley goes into exhaustive detail on one particular exchange around the time of the festival circuit screenings of In Bright Axiom. As of this writing the Nonchalance account has yet to respond publicly to the thread.
So why are we posting this here since Twitter drama isn’t something we normally cover?
Well, for one, “Twitter drama” isn’t what this is about. This is a look — messy as it is — at how one of the more controversial projects of the past five years was made and the fallout of the way in which it ended. The Latitude was heavily buzzed about at the time, and the initial fallout was the subject of a feature article at Vice.
We’ve been tagged in this, so we were asked to bear witness. The timing of the initial tweet may or may not have to do with the release of In Bright Axiom on VOD, and if there had been no follow ups we likely wouldn’t have had responded, since tagging us isn’t a great way to get our attention for PR purposes. Since there is a dialogue — of sorts — and things that have been talked about on background in the past have started to be surfaced, we have an obligation to draw what meager spotlight we have on to the exchange.
Getting to the bottom of all this would take a level of resources that we just don’t have. However, addressing the pains of the past — and, from the outside looking in, there seems to be a lot of pain to go around — is a much needed process. From our previous looks at The Latitude, we know that there are those who have been reluctant to go on the record, so where their stance is at present remains to be seen.
We will continue to follow this story as it develops.
News From around the Immersiverse — Part Two: Everything Else
Hey! Who wants some fun?
I do! I do!
Great!
Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge is is coming home in the form of Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge by way of the Oculus Quest. The experience is still under development, but who knows: we might just be able to go to the digital version of Black Spire Outpost before we can go to the real one.
No I will NOT put quotes on “real one.” And I’m sorry but Batuu East is a myth. ;-)
44 immersive projects have been selected for the Venice Biennale, greatly expanding the festival’s VR footprint. And the whole thing will be ONLINE. The Venice VR Expanded projects hail from 24 different countries and the jury includes of Celine Tricart (USA), Asif Kapadia (BG), Hideo Kojima (Japan).
The online platform is supported by HTC VIVEPORT, Facebook’s Oculus, VRChat and VRrOOm.
Oh, how we hope our Quests work for this! It all starts September 2nd.
In case you’re not tired of hearing about Roundabout yet, the UK’s Guardian wrote up how Australia’s NIDA is managing the pandemic. No word yet on the secret classes where they teach Australians how to have better accents than any American or British person. Only Canadian actors can stop their plot for global cinematic domination!
Immerse has this deep dive with the one and only Nonny De La Peña, whose work set the table for the VR renaissance we are currently living in.
Film Independant interviewed the creative forces behind The Under Presents: Tempest, including one of our favorite immersive actors in any reality: Dasha Kittredge.
Annnnd just because we can’t have only good news: London’s VAULT festival postpones until 2022.
It sucks. But is obviously for the best.
Opportunities: Professional & Educational
Oculus Lauch Pad Scholarships — 2020 Applications Open
Oculus, the Facebook owned VR company that makes the popular Quest headset, has announced the winners of its 2019 Launch Pad Scholarship program and that applications for 2020 are now open:
Our fourth annual Oculus Launch Pad program has come to a close! Last year, we welcomed 100 new developers from diverse backgrounds to join us for two days of hands-on learning and invited them to continue that momentum through Oculus Connect. At boot camp, we spent two days sharing best practices, unique perspectives, and inspiring ideas. Launch Pad attendees then had four months to build a prototype that could be submitted for consideration as part of our Launch Pad Scholarship program. Today, we’re excited to introduce the 2019 Launch Pad Scholarship recipients and their VR projects that are helping to push the industry in exciting new directions.
Oculus Launch Pad 2020 applications are open through August 20. Click here to apply.
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