Review Rundown: A Set Of Daringly Different Immersive Experiences

The Crew had a LOT to say about this week’s crop of shows, which includes new work from Punchdrunk, The Catamounts, and Blue 13 Dance Company. There’s surprises galore, and everything but XR is in the mix this week. (You can check our most recent preview if you need that fix.)

Let’s stop wasting time and get into the Rundown!

Check out last week’s edition for more!

Are you a creator who looks upon these reviews with envy? Okay, the positive ones, at least? Then you might want to check out our UPDATED How To Get Covered By NoPro guide.

Want to get listed in our newsletter and have your event shared with our social media following? Submit a listing to Everything Immersive.

Get the NoPro Newsletter and access to our Discord by becoming a Patreon backer today!

The Banksy Museum
$30; New York, NY; Through July 2024

Banksy is back, baby!

Okay, alliterative hook aside, unfortunately, this isn’t quite correct. The infamous, anonymous street art darling never really left the spotlight, and the newest Canal Street exhibition isn’t his.

The New York opening of The Banksy Museum, a hefty collection of over 160 recreated Bansky pieces spanning the artist’s decades-long, global career shocking the art world, has been greeted with controversy.

Banksy did not greenlight this experience. To the credit of the Banksy Museum, however, they do express this clearly on their website’s homepage in bright red: “Unauthorized Exhibition.”

Other publications have meditated on what it means to have a Banksy-less Banksy Museum. While I won’t add much to this dialogue, I will suggest that the inherent reproducibility of Bansky’s signature stencil method and the artist’s proclivity for parody and rule-breaking, measured against Banksy’s general contempt for the art market and aversion to capitalism, make for an interestingly conflicting read. Not to mention, that the exhibit is located on Canal Street, New York’s capital of counterfeit.

In this sense, the unauthorized exhibition almost reads like a Banksy-style commentary on the over-commercialization of the art market.

As far as I could tell, however, The Banksy Museum isn’t a meta-parody of a Banksy Museum.

But it is a quite wonderfully curated and smartly laid-out homage to Banksy, clearly made with a deep knowledge of and love for the artist.

The brilliance of the museum lies in its central exhibitory concept: The pieces are recreated in full-scale on walls designed to look like the original walls on which they were created. With an attention to everything from texture to coloring to imperfections, these backdrops each portray real places around the world where Banksy created street art — from New York to France to Ukraine.

According to Director of Production Manu Deros, “We invite visitors to go back in time” and “travel from one city to another,” all in one building. Considering some of the originals have been vandalized, stolen, or sold, this is not just a retrospective exhibition; it’s an act of cultural and curatorial preservation.

In addition to the recreated walls, there are other placemaking details that support this endeavor. Stickers of manhole covers serve as smart and subtle wayfinding guides that orient guests to the pieces’ origin cities, while speakers play cityscape noises corresponding to different regions.

Unsurprisingly, the exhibit is a feast for the eyes and certainly delivers on its promise of letting guests experience Banksy artworks — in all their snarky, biting, and surreal genius — as they were originally experienced. If you’re a Banksy fan, it’s a must.

And before you ask, no, the exhibit doesn’t reveal who Banksy really is. But what fun would that be?

— Alec Zbornak, NYC Art Correspondent

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha — Julia Masli
Soho Playhouse, NYC; $51, Until June 8th

Julia Masli’s ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is a hard show for criticism in that the best way to see it is to go in knowing nothing. So let’s start there. Just go see it. It’s a brilliant piece of absurdist interactive comedy. I will proceed to spoil it below, but again, you should click the link to the show in a new tab and skip to the next review. It’s worth it.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha is a highly interactive one-woman comedy show where Julia Masli asks the audience to offer their problems and then provides absurd solutions to them using props on stage. So that you have a picture, Masli is dressed in an angler-fish-like costume holding a microphone on a mannequin leg. What follows is a wildly dynamic set of conversations and moments of alternatingly ridiculous and poignant quasi-solutions to audience-suggested issues. At least a third of the show is done by random attendees answering Masli’s questions, getting on stage, and following her bizarre directions. It’s a full hour of that — Masli living in the moment with the props and outs she’s created, making hilarious gold out of audience straw.

Masli is a master at weaving their random audience responses into her specific comic lanes. I spoke to two other friends who saw it on different days, and none of us saw exactly the same material in each show. Her presence is both powerful and unshakeable as a naive but demanding problem-solver who desperately wants to help in her very specific ways. It’s very funny, but the humor comes from how risky it all feels. You might have to say something in front of a group of people. You might encounter a stranger. You might lose something permanently. You might miss part of the show. (All of these things happened in the show I saw.) The piece most resembles the performance art of self sacrifice of Marina Abromovic in its daring, but at the same time, the audience was laughing basically non-stop.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha was first performed in Edinburgh Fringe in this August, and it’s buzzing so strongly that there are already die-hards showing up trying to stump Masli and break the show. This is a phenomenon, and it’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Let Masli solve your problem when you can.

Get No Proscenium’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Impossible Things — The Catamounts
$40 — $50; Denver, CO; Through June 16

A few days before I was scheduled to attend Alex’s graduation party, I received an email from A Touch of Barb, the party planner who Alex’s mom had hired to organize the event. Barb’s email laid out all the relevant details for the evening, like dress code and weather plans, since the party would be outdoors.

When I arrived, Barb was there to greet me with her trusty clipboard in hand. I’d failed to bring a gift for Alex, but Barb even had that covered and handed me an envelope to add to the growing pile of gifts. I grabbed a drink, signed the guestbook, and mingled with Alex’s guests.

The evening began with a round of speeches from the family, wishing Alex good luck as they began the next chapter of their life. It quickly became apparent that Alex had no idea what that next chapter would look like, despite strong opinions from their family about what it should look like.

With that context established, a mysterious shift occurred that sent everyone back in time to an hour before the party began, and to an alternate, fairytale-like plane where everyone dresses oddly and has peculiar views of the world. Barb split us into smaller groups and sent us on our way to spend the next hour exploring this alternate plane and (hopefully) helping Alex figure out what their first step into adulthood will look like.

We proceeded to meet five different characters at five different stations setup around the beautiful and whimsical Museum of Outdoor Arts, including one scene inside Lonnie Hanzon’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Impossibilities. Each vignette was obviously relevant to the character (a series of puppet shows by Mr. Grimm, all ending in wolf attacks, for example) but their connection to Alex’s journey was less apparent at first glance. But, much like Mr. Grimm’s own stories, there was always a relevant lesson to be extracted from each engagement — one that provided some insight or wisdom on navigating life while remaining playful, and becoming comfortable and confident in our own skin.

While the audience had only surface-level agency in the show (which follows the classic immersive “egg beater” format of shuffling groups between vignettes, bookended by opening and closing scenes with the full group) the audience engagement was still quite original, varied and authentic to the story. Perfect for immersive n00bs and veterans alike, Impossible Things was a delightfully eccentric evening full of laughter and play!

— Danielle Riha, Denver Correspondent

Soliloquy — Blue 13 Dance Company
$10 — $100, LA, Run Concluded

The latest from the company behind 2021’s sparkling Shaadi, which transformed LA’s Heritage Square Museum into a Bollywood Wedding venue, Soliloquy works as a kind of distributed site-specific dance concert across the Heritage Square campus of landmark Victorian-era houses and other historic LA buildings.

As individual site-specific dance pieces Soliloquy proves out that choreographer Achinta S. McDaniel’s company of dancers is not to be trifled with. In the track I was on this past Saturday soloist Ryley Clement delivered a kinetic, tortured performance in the third location we had followed her to that cracked open the heart. There’s a special power to setting dancers up close to the audience, with only the space we make for them separating us.

Crowd flow and capacity issues muddled parts of the first half of the show, with the group size I was in being too much to get a a view in the first space and an “invite to dinner” that was handed out along with another marker causing some guest confusion as to whom to follow at the start. The structural moves to give audience some agency could have used clearer onboarding or held off until later in the show to give audience time to acclimate. A logistical issue on Saturday night also cut short the back half of the show, which meant missing one scene before the finale.

That said: the back half proved to be more confident in the way it both addressed the audience and in how the choreography incorporated us into the show. Turns out that telling us to stand in the window and look outside isn’t a horrible thing at all, and it feels good to know that your dance partners are leading you to an optimal experience. (A sequence where we were invited to learn dance steps was less interesting for many in my group, which in part could have been that in our instance it wasn’t clear that learning now would pay off later, if we so chose.)

By the finale the show had found its stride, with the last sequences inside the Square’s chapel reaching both the greatest spectacle and the most organic interactions of the night. Dancers brought guests in to lead them through some jazzy partner moves, and the last solo found many of us on the ground providing a percussive beat for the final soloist. That wasn’t even the whole of it, with the whole sequence really being a grand finale. Indeed from the moment we stepped into the chapel there was an ecstatic electricity in the air that melted away whatever frustrations we had encountered in the time before. A testament to sticking the landing, and McDaniel’s knack for creating dynamic social spaces to be sure.

Even though not all of the tactics used to expand guest agency panned out in this three night stand Blue 13 Dance Company still has my complete attention for whatever direction they head in next.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

Viola’s Room — Punchdrunk
£34.50; London UK; through 18 August 2024

The heavily anticipated Viola’s Room opened to a frantic enough scramble for tickets that Punchdrunk’s already released an extension. While early runs of the piece have reportedly experienced some technical glitches, my visit feels as polished as the production itself intends to present, justifying a review:

Formatted as a processional dark-ride, Viola’s Room offers a barefoot journey through the imagination of an early-teenage girl: the sensation of varying textures beneath our feet serving as a tactile and immediate grounding in Viola’s world. Punchdrunk’s signature standards of light, sound, and set design present the ephemera of an impressionable youth spent listening to alternative radio and dreaming of being pulled into the magic world just beyond reach. But the intention of Viola’s Room seems not escapist fantasy so much as a cautionary tale: there are plenty of little girls who go courting the supernatural, and it may find you.

And you’re unlikely to make it back.

The pre-show briefing’s promise that there are no jump scares is a comfort, because there are points where my body is convinced it’s about to happen — so sharp is the sound and darkness quality. I’m further soothed by the drifting strains of the iconic “looping” music drifting through the soundscape; personal headsets ensure no audience talking or other interruptions bleed through.

My one grumble is that though the audience size is reduced to a maximum of 6, the endemic pinch points of a Punchdrunk show aren’t really solved: the scale of the show is also reduced to single-breadth hallways and pathways, so bottlenecking is still present and sightlines can become an issue. One member of our party is skittish and regularly bumps into others; at times it’s due to their hesitation to move forward that we almost lose sight of the light (and therefore the intended pacing of the show).

With a short playthrough of 40 minutes, the scale of the production is bite-size; an admittedly filling mouthful of that good old PD-quality edge of tension. My advice to passionate fans is to splurge on a private time slot (for that deeply personal experience). Barring that, band together and split a session for just two or three.

A love story to tweens of the 80s/90s who dreamt of escaping to the Labyrinth but never accounting for a sinister Goblin King, Viola’s Room is currently only available in London but is rumored to pack up and travel particularly well…

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

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

NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today and get access to our Newsletter and Discord!

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