Review Rundown: Of Dionysus & Ambient Audio Alchemy

After weeks and weeks of big Rundowns we come to a calm oasis, but one that packs an impact as all three of this week’s pieces have impressed the crew.

Let’s get into this tryptch from London, LA, and NYC.

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Bacchanalia — Sleepwalk Immersive
From £30; London, UK; through November 25th

Immersive theatre in London so often happens in the shadow of a single company, one whose influence is so prevalent that I hardly need to name them here. For younger companies, like

Sleepwalk Immersive (formed in late 2022), standing on the shoulder of giants is a sensible strategy. Taking promenade narrative paths, prominent physical storytelling and the occasional one to one for the lucky (or scrapy) punter, then applying this to the ritualistic carnage of Euripides’ Bacchae is a prudent combination.

But just as that same immersive theatre company (who does not need to be named) has taught makers how to create, it’s also taught audiences how to consume. In the compact space of the Crypt under St. Peter’s church, forty hooded figures scurried and crowded and were often shooed away from furniture by the action of the piece. Even in the three parallel passageways of curving brick, the FOMO seemed to excite the crowd into a vibrational state in which their numbers seemed to triple. This was brought into stark relief for this writer, who was treated to a solo pre-show experience. Being plied with drugs and alcohol (only some of which were placebos) then bouncing from consecration to cross-examination and back out into the world of the play, primed me exceptionally well. It also reminded me what it feels like to be immersed, a feeling that dwindles when all the other flies on the wall take up the majority of your vision.

This is the nature of the beast and the economics of this kind of work is unyielding. And despite those restrictions artistic director Sebastian Huang should be commended for his take on the established formula. Stripping the Grecian tragedy back to the bare bones, and providing dialogue that slips away from the characters, as their sanity does, sets up clear stakes. The space is also delineated between the tribe of Thebes and the cohort of Dionysus, with movement between these areas and the central corridor giving additional insight into the character’s slant as the story progresses. There is a committed turn out from the whole cast, but it’s hard not to spend time seeking out Peter Broughton’s god of wine and madness. His Charles Manson charm and psycho sexual clowning brings a necessary sense of danger.

— Roderick Morgan, London Correspondent

Pew Pew’s Fundraiser — Pew Pew
New York, NY; Run Concluded

As a critic for No Proscenium, I see a lot of weird and surreal immersive theatre. Even the most commercial experiences — like long-running immersive shopping mall Showfields or the bizarro Chick-fil-A Christmas pop-up of 2019 — have strange, artistic little souls. But a new dinner party experience by New York-based art collective Pew Pew might take the cake for the weirdest — and wonderful — immersive show I’ve seen so far.

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A fundraiser and proof-of-concept for Pew Pew’s plans for a permanent space for their work, the limited-run dinner party was a taste of what the company has to offer in future experiences. Pew Pew describes itself as a “home for those looking for creative connections,” and the dinner party’s main purpose was providing a way for participants to connect with both themselves and the people around them.

Even though the show’s run is over, I remain reluctant to over-explain the show just in case Pew Pew decides to remount it for a wider audience — but also because attempting to explain surreal art is sort of like trying to explain a joke. Devoid of context, it will inevitably fall flat.

Here’s the basic gist of the show: participants are invited to visit a 60s time-warp hotel in Bushwick(naturally) for a dinner party. You gain entrance with a secret, jotted down on a piece of paper. You’re blindfolded, led through a maze (Conga-line style), and sat at a table next to a person you do not know and cannot see. You and this person, who you know only by voice, will tell each other stories of your life, compose poems together, and eat unknown foods together all before you ever see their face.

When the blindfolds come off, you find yourself sitting around a giant table set with beautiful and fragrant flower arrangements and baskets of fruit. Over several hours, you eat a variety of foods — some good, some purposefully awful (I think) — while you are prompted with conversation topics to discuss with the people around you.

And while you talk and eat, a cast of strange characters weaves through the room — a dancer climbs on top of the table and feeds you strawberries, someone plays violin beside your ear, a bellhop with a rotary phone strapped to his head offers you the chance to make a phone call (but instead of a dial tone you only hear the dulcet tones of Rick Astley letting you know you’ve been rickrolled). Even the space of the “hotel” itself changes, moves, surprises you throughout the night.

Pew Pew’s dinner party was, at its core, about allowing participants to confront their own expectations — from something as simple as what any given food will taste like to the more profound experience of meeting someone without first judging them by their outward appearance — in a space that was endlessly surprising and delightfully weird.

The impending closure of Sleep No More has been a big blow to the New York City immersive theatre scene, but shows like Pew Pew’s dinner party are a reminder that wonderful and exciting art continues to be made.

–Cheyenne Ligon, NYC Correspondent

Vox — Jónsi
Free; Los Angeles, CA; Closes Feb 3, 2024

I was unprepared.

The curtain was standard theatre: black, velvet, heavy. I first heard the shrouded sounds from across the room, but the vocalizations had no recognizable shape or meaning; from the outside there was nothing exactly identifiable. I pushed through the fabric and my mind went blank.

Inside was Vox. It’s one of three installations by Jónsi, best known as the lead singer of the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós. Vox is the anchor piece of his latest show of the same name at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. All three installations are hybrid works of sound and vibrational sculpture, with the addition of light and scent for Vox. Similar to Jónsi’s previous show in Los Angeles, these artworks apply visceral pressure. Vox in particular emerges as a raw, compressed hallucination somehow both primordial and preternatural. Sitting inside I rode waves of elation and rage. It was a sensory montage of a place beyond cognition.

The gallery describes Jónsi’s work as “immersive installations that reconfigure the act of listening by means of sight, smell, taste, and touch.” That reconfiguring is a tactile event; it’s a palpable rearrangement of the senses. I felt as though I could hear through my mouth and smell through my skin. The artworks’ tonal palettes include “ambient sounds, mechanically generated frequencies, samples from nature, as well as [Jónsi’s] own voice.” Vox also employs a “perfume organ.” The scents are subtle and have a familiarity that’s just out of reach, like the phantom pain of an unrecallable dream.

When I left the gallery I felt incredible, overwhelming… relief. Not relief from the art, but because of it. The experience of expertly crafted, utter sensation — without the deadweight of overintellectualization — was a complete respite. Vox is pure alchemy.

— Laura Hess, Arts Editor

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