Review Rundown: They’re On The Endless Treadmills Just Past Room 101

Somehow we’ve hit a full cyberpunk dystopia without even one working flying car. Which is both unjust and absurd.

Speaking of dystopias, injustice, and absurdities: the topics abound this week with a production of 1984 in London (that’s your dystopia and injustice) and Burnout Paradise in NYC (which mixes the dystopian and the absurd).

The third piece of this week’s Rundown doesn’t perfectly fit the rubric, as Katrina didn’t mention Toronto’s Return from Unreality being absurd, dystopic, or dealing with injustice. Yet I have to note that Unreality implies a little bit of absurdity. If it doesn’t, there truly is no justice.

All right, I’ll stuff it, you’ve got reviews to read…

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Burnout Paradise — Pony Cam
$49, NYC, Run concluded

Burnout Paradise is a participatory performance created by Australian theatre collective Pony Cam that takes place pretty much entirely on treadmills. The piece comes to New York as a cult favorite hot off the festival circuit, and it’s immediately clear why: Burnout Paradise is ridiculous. It’s absurd and campy and just downright stupid, but it’s also so, so smart.

The structure of the experience is clever — four performers take turns on treadmills dedicated to a specific subset of tasks which they must complete while running more miles than they did last night or the audience gets their money back. The areas are divided into survival, admin, performance, and leisure, and all the tasks must be balanced with the neverending demand of running the treadmill. In other words, it’s a cognitive overload nightmare that any freelance artist is deeply familiar with. What results is essentially what I would describe as my last four brain cells clawing their way through late stage capitalism as an artist — fun!

Burnout Paradise also really nails the audience-participant to performer dynamic. The piece begins with an explicit invitation to the audience from the performers to participate by stepping in to assist them at any point. While this kind of blanket permission can lead audience to become a bit too comfortable, clear formatting and some semblance of theatrical convention kept folks from getting overly wild with their participatory imaginations. Audience participants have real agency in this world, from helping performers cook and complete self care tasks to lending a performer the belt off their hips or even pledging support for the collective in a real grant application written and submitted live (apologies to my day job, but it seems SOMEONE agreed to match contributions…). What’s important here is that all the decisions are made of the audience’s own accord and that they actually matter. This is how Pony Cam expertly lets the true spirit of participatory performance shine: the audience are not only included, but they are integral to the success of the piece.

Burnout Paradise is a celebration of indie artists and is just an overall joyful and fun performance. Although the current run is concluded, my fingers are crossed that it may pop up in a city near you, especially if their live grant submissions have anything to do with it!

— Allie Marotta, NYC Curator

Escape Box Episode 1: Return from Unreality
$49.99 CAD; Toronto, Canada; Ongoing

Return from Unreality, the first episode in Escape Box’s new Toronto-based experience, transforms a three block stretch in the Queen West neighborhood into its stage. By combining elements of site specific storytelling and escape room style puzzles, the experience tells the story of a special mission, a twisted shadow organization, and a mysterious parallel realm known as the “Unreality.”

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The experience does a great job incorporating the city into the adventure. Local landmarks, urban art, and unassuming places one might otherwise walk right past are transformed into an integral part of the story. Whether you’ve walked this busy stretch of Toronto a thousand times, or are using Escape Box as a means of exploring a new neighborhood, the experience encourages participants to pay closer attention to details that might otherwise go unnoticed.

In addition to these location-based elements, physical and digital puzzle pieces were used as well. At the start of our adventure we were directed to local board game rental shop, BoardGame2Go, where we were handed a colorful, locked briefcase containing items to aid us on our quest. In addition, a webapp was introduced as a means to communicate with our contact stuck in “Unreality”, who briefed us on their plight and provided additional directions and clues.

The puzzle design was at its best when making clever usage of our surroundings. However, some puzzles felt unclear and could have benefitted from additional direction on where participants should begin their search.

Though I appreciated how Return from Unreality set up a more narrative-driven experience than your typical urban scavenger hunt fare, the story was at times confusing and underdeveloped. The narrative pieces in which puzzles were directly incorporated were the most engaging sections, but a large portion of the storytelling occurred through long strings of text that often presented new issues without fully resolving existing arcs. The narrative struggled to establish a cohesive thread, serving more as a backdrop to the puzzles rather than a compelling driver in itself.

Overall, thanks to its excellent use of its physical surroundings, Return from Unreality was an enjoyable 1.5hr experience. I’m curious to see what Episode 2 of the Escape Box series has in store.

— Katrina Lat, Toronto Curator

George Orwell’s 1984 — Immersive 1984
From £24.50; London UK; through 22 December 2024

Within the venerated walls of Hackney Town Hall, the Ministry of Truth is recruiting. And we, with fascism lurking casually in our 2024 side-view mirrors, are lining up to enlist.

Orwell’s work is ever-suitable for re-mounting and reinvention, and the ingredients within this immersive production of 1984 feel like a winning combination: a gorgeous historic venue allowing imaginative processional staging, impressive and violent choreography, ample tech toys including live camera feed & projection, and a worrisome external geopolitical landscape which in the same breath as our invitation to play warns us that in the not-so-distant future, it might be for keeps.

So why am I left feeling a bit unfulfilled?

The 75 minute production starts strong: we’re welcomed into an expansive courtyard with live music and light interactions with in-world characters who encourage audience buy-in, fanning our suspicions or collecting data on us for the Ministry to review. Some guests are sporting Anti-Sex League pamphlets, seemingly chosen for something special. But while we’re broken into smaller groups to travel into the next space, it seems like we all end up in the same room: no separate show tracks, just comfier tiers of seating. Here we’re further inducted into the MoT, encouraged to display our party armbands and salute while some of the data collected on us is shared with the group — soft interaction but no tangible effect on story.

We’re moved back in the courtyard again for the remainder and lion’s share of the performance: effectively a straight stage play in a nontraditional space. There is a bit of engagement with us at the end inviting us to participate in an extermination; my wonder is whether they actually picked an audience member or a planted agent: the stunt seems too dangerous to leave up to the public…

Generally I feel a bit let down; the building does most of the immersive heavy lifting for this site-responsive production and I wish that the buy-in that I offer as an audience member would have more done with it than just a callout. I wish there were stakes and rewards for participating; the design goes through all the effort of gaining audience trust but then does little with it.

With massive potential, begging for less proscenium staging and more free rein, this one is good for folks just stepping out of the West End, dipping their toes in the shallower end of immersive practice.

— Shelley Snyder, London Curator

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