Pop-Up Magazine Hits The Streets With the ‘Sidewalk Issue’ (Q&A)

You know that here at NoPro we’re fans of everything immersive, it’s right in our tag line after all. Yet that comes from a place of being fans of experimental, unconventional ways to tell stories.

Which is why I’ve always been a fan of Pop-Up Magazine, which took the concept of a magazine and contextualized it as a live stage show complete with a house band, essays, features, and newsmaker interviews. Pop-Up got its start in the Bay Area, but has since grown to include tours and residencies in New York and Los Angeles.

Like so many other live events, the live magazine was on pause during 2020, with the team behind it all pivoting to material that could be enjoyed at home. Now that things are opening back up here in the United States, Pop-Up Magazine is getting experimental and is playing in our sandbox.

The Sidewalk Issue will run starting today — June 4th through the 20th — in the three cities that Pop-Up magazine calls home: SF, Brooklyn, and LA. As the name of the issue suggests, the stories will unfold in the streets all around the usual venues for the live show, with a map marking the way. In our parlance we’d call this “a site-adaptive non-fiction promenade,” but the Sidewalk Issue has a much better ring to it.

We asked Pop-Up Magazine’s Chas Edwards ( Co-Founder, President and Publisher) and Derek Fagerstrom (Co-Founder and Executive Editor, Special Projects) about how this most unusual edition of Pop-Up Magazine, popped up.

No Proscenium: How integral is being in the space for these stories? Is this all just accessible via the internet or do you really have to be there?

CHAS EDWARDS: We miss our audiences and our live shows! While we hope to return to theaters this fall, we wanted to make something new, something magical, that our audiences could experience outside, in small groups or by themselves. We’ve developed a collection of Pop-Up Magazine stories that invite us all out to re-engage with our neighborhoods and public spaces.

All of the stories in the Sidewalk Issue — which opens in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Downtown LA on Friday, June 4, and runs through June 20 — are produced in new formats, and are designed to be experienced in-person as a treasure hunt of sorts, with a beautifully illustrated map as your table of contents. There’s a jellyfish hiding in plain sight, a graphic novel unfolds at epic scale, tabloids spill over with meditations on love, and much more. The stories exist on exterior walls, behind storefront windows, in newsracks and vending machines, with multimedia assistance from your phone. We’ll share online versions or bonus content with audiences online, but the experience is built to be enjoyed in person, wandering the sidewalks of our cities. Our sponsor, Google, helped support a variety of bonus accessibility features. It’s an experience we created for everyone.

Get Noah J Nelson’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

NP: While it seems obvious that the pandemic had something to do with the Sidewalk Issue, Pop-Up Magazine has been innovating from the start — could you talk a bit about what led to this edition taking the form of a map full of stories?

DEREK FAGERSTROM: Pop-Up Magazine started as an experiment — what would happen if we gathered in a theater for an evening of live, non-fiction, multimedia storytelling? And it’s continued to be an experiment ever since. We’ve done shows involving musicians, magicians, dancers, food, scents… But yes, the pandemic forced us to think even harder about how we can tell stories in unique and unforgettable ways.

In 2020, we produced two issues entirely online, did an email-based series of stories, and a physical Issue-in-a-box where the stories were embedded in custom made objects. But as time went on and things started to open up a bit, we felt like people wanted to get off their screens and out into the world. We knew we wouldn’t be able to gather thousands of people in a theater yet, but getting people out in the streets in a way that was safe and responsible, and re-engaging with their neighborhoods through storytelling was an exciting proposition to us.

NP: What was the brief to the contributors? Did they know about the context of the Issue and made things from scratch, or were they asked to adapt existing work?

DF: We’re always encouraging our contributors to try something different, and I’m always amazed at how game they are. These are all new stories, and they’re definitely being presented in ways that none of us have ever tried before. And even though the approach and presentation is experimental, the core of our storytelling remains the same. We want to make people think and feel, we want to surprise and delight them, and we’re happy to take risks in order to do that. Our contributors felt the same way, and really embraced the unique opportunities and challenges that embedding stories in a neighborhood presents. And we all had a lot of fun with it. We made the stories both very big, and very small. We made things super high tech (syncing a film and audio via mobile devices), and super low tech (designing a magazine story as a take-out menu). We also wanted the stories to feel native to the environment, which is why we created a printed tabloid paper that you get from a newspaper box ($1), and art prints that come out of a vending machine ($.50).

NP: How did the team go about casting locations for the different stories?

DF: We are very lucky to have such amazing partners in each of these neighborhoods. Over the years, we’ve built fantastic relationships with BAM in Fort Greene, the ACE Hotel in downtown LA, and locally in the Bay Area with Proxy in Hayes Valley which is where Davies Symphony Hall and the Sidney Goldstein theater are, and where we’ve done our shows for years. Each of those institutions was key to connecting us to local residents and merchants. It was important for us that the people in the neighborhood felt invested, so we also worked with some merchant’s associations and several community partners to find the right locations for each piece.

Pop-Up Magazine’s Sidewalk Issue drops today in SF, Brooklyn, and LA. It’s recommenced you bring headphones or earbuds and a handful of quarters.

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

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!

In addition to the No Proscenium website, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Discord.