NOW PLAYING: I Am, Other

We’ve been following the development of Adipat Virdi’s I Am, Other for a while now, having featured the creator in episode 443 of our podcast series.

Now his show, a family drama which explodes out a moment of intergenerational crisis and invites the audience to interrogate their own biases, is running at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival through August 25th.

We reached out to Virdi to get the lowdown on the current run of the production.

This is No Proscenium’s NOW PLAYING, a look at ongoing immersive experiences & events. To learn more about how your event could be considered for the feature check out How To Get Covered By NoPro.

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NO PROSCENIUM: Tell us a little bit about your experience! What’s it about? What makes it immersive?

Adipat Virdi: This immersive family drama, about an older relative’s act of aggression towards a biracial child, actively investigates white privilege, judgement, identity and bias. I Am, Other invites the audience, through interactive engagement, to explore why it is not okay to be different. Spectators become participants in shaping the lens through which they see the world. At the beginning they are presented with a scenario and a point of view, then guided through gamified scenes, and asked to reflect on the event’s repercussions. After a replay of the initial scenario, has their viewpoint changed? Q&A after performance.

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What makes it immersive is that we are exploring how we can build a thoroughfare between the experience, audience engagement and social impact. The core themes and storytelling methods are being used to make the audiences the main character and this to be about their emotional resonance with their lens on the world. The ‘drama’ is a conduit for, rather than a destination to, the impact that is happening all around them. You get to inhabit the ‘empathic’ space.

NP: What was the inspiration for your upcoming experience?

AV: This is based on a true incident, which was used as inspiration for the wider issues that are being experienced by POC (people of colour) around the world. The core question was around how immersive storytelling can create opportunities for real world social impact. As a brown man in a white world it matters to me that subjects such as bias, othering, racism and white privilege be addressed in a safe space where we could ask difficult questions in a gamified way.

NP: What do you think fans of immersive will find most interesting about this latest experience?

AV: Immersive in I Am, Other is devoid of tech. We are filming this in 360 but the experience has been set up as ‘playable’ theatre where the immersion is about breaking the barriers between the story being told and how the audiences engage with it, emotionally.

NP: Once you started designing and testing what did you discover about this experience that was unexpected?

AV: The four main lessons we learned were:

• Tech is not the core of what defines immersive
• The audience are happy to be taken on an empathy-driven story as long as they are given agency in the story they are being told
• POC have a completely different emotional journey through this experiences than non-POC audiences
• This story is not a complete entity in of itself. It is one touchpoint is a bigger ecosystem that needs to be iterative and co-created. People wanted to keep talking and sharing.

NP: What can fans who are coming to this, or thinking about coming to this, do to get into the mood of the experience?

AV: There are two questions at the core of this experience that would be good for audiences to think about

• Why is it not okay to be different?
• What does difference mean to them?

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, home of NoPro’s show listings.

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