The City, Burned: Immersive in a Era of Radical Change (Op-Ed)

The first full day of summer here in the northern hemisphere brought with it some very wintery news: Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, after 18 months of performances and some 200,000 tickets having been sold, will be closing up shop at the famed immersive company’s London headquarters this September.

This will mark the end of the run for what company co-founder Felix Barrett is calling Punchdrunk’s “last new mask show,” meaning that going forward they will be leaving behind a signature element of their work and exploring new ways of connecting with the audience.

This is coming about a month after the surprise announcement that Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcrusier, the $1500–2000 a person two-night adventure custom built alongside Walt Disney World’s version of the Star Wars theme park land, would be coming to a close around the same time.

Some will look to this, along with the ongoing churn in the digital immersive world post-Metaverse hype and Apple’s steadfast avoidance of the words “virtual reality” as it announced the Vision Pro headset, as an omen that immersive has run its course. That a decade-ish fad is now over and we can get back to the regular rhythm of Broadway shows, blockbuster motion pictures, and binge watching streaming series.

Only those days are gone or going too.

Indeed in the performing arts world the bigger shock this month, and I saw this reaching outside of Los Angeles’ own theatre sphere, was the word that Center Theatre Group would be “pausing” production in the Mark Taper Forum this coming season. The Taper has long been the home of new plays, and the timing on this is particularly heartrending as Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse, the Sicangu Lakota playwright and 2020 MacArthur fellow who has developed immersive work as part of her own growing oeuvre, was just about to have her latest play go into rehearsals. FastHorse writes elegantly, and painfully, about the work getting cut off before it can even begin in the LA Times this week.

Meanwhile: Pixar is failing to put up the kinds of numbers they once expected to clear easily. The streaming services are scaling back their spends on creating new work as flooding the market proves to be a poor strategy, the creative guilds are fighting to get new contracts that protect their members, and the overall feeling in arts & entertainment is like the seemingly endless June weather here in LA: gloomy AF.

In other words, immersive heads, it’s not just us.

Here’s where I’m going to say something weird for someone who makes their living as part of the arts & entertainment ecosystem: part of the problem is that the vast amount of commercial cultural production just isn’t sustainable. Unless you make this stuff, or make your living in the shadow of this stuff, it’s not supposed to be the center of your life. Seasoning, dessert, and the occasional fancy meal? Sure. The be all and end all? Not unless you’re in it, cousin.

We’ve gone from big movies, albums, plays, and games being events to them being the very air we breathe. Available on demand anywhere in the world at anytime and thus, increasingly, meaningless. There’s a reason why “content” is such a damning word.

Sure, there’s always been “filler art” throughout a culture, but never quite at this volume and never distributed the way you would laundry soap. Fun fact: you know why there are so many different versions of Tide? It’s to keep other brands off the shelves. It’s like when a Marvel movie would hit the multiplex and shove out all the other movies off the screens. Only the studios can’t even count on that gambit anymore.

In so many ways we, both audiences and and creators, have gotten complacent. We thought that the big shows would always be around, on demand, just like Stranger Things is on Netflix. Of course, we’ve also watched the streaming services shove whole series into the vaults and take tax write-offs on programming, sealing them off outside of pirate sites. Only we can’t pirate a Corellian MPO-1400 Purgill-class star cruiser or the Fall of Troy. (Maybe someone will try. Call me.)

That big creative swings are ephemeral was once an expected part of the natural rhythm of culture. It’s only the relentless demands of capital that entertainment scale to colonize every waking moment of people’s lives in order to squeeze out more profit which makes these productions “failures.”

According to Punchdrunk, more tickets were sold to The Burnt City than any of its other London productions. Disney is quite open that Starcruiser was the highest rated (and yes, most expensive) experience they’ve produced yet. The latter sold out in a day when its final run was announced. I’d not be surprised to see The Burnt City do something similar.

Here’s how I’m going to judge the legacy of these productions: by how many others they inspire. By how much small scale work gets ginned up by the creatives who worked on them and the fans who fell passionately in love with them.

By how much of the culture as a whole is made to see that a piece of art or entertainment’s impact is far more than return on investment. It is in how it alters the way we see the world. By the possibilities that are planted in the dreams of the generation to come, and the bag of tools & tricks that make their way out of these productions and into the wider world.

Because we all know that things have to change, and that if we just let our global society go on autopilot, the rampant A.I.s that will soon be dictating corporate policy and cultural production are going to do just as bad of job as the people in power have for the last few centuries. None of this is working, from the failure to fight climate change to the rising tide of nationalism that makes tackling our universal problems that much harder.

Why should the arts be any different? I think that lays with the sense that it is their job to offer up an alternative: a legacy of counterculture currents. To be an optimist for a minute: perhaps this is the riptide, and a new wave is readying just off-shore.

We weirdos who love this stuff have become enmeshed in an art form that works best when it is connecting people together. That excels at bringing each of us into the very moment we are in, not holding out for the promise of the tease at the end of the credits, but wholly present. Right. Now.

One that draws on every artistic, scientific, technical, and literary discipline as needed to create moments greater than the sum of their parts. Whether those are delivered in a puzzle-filled room in a suburban strip mall, or in a billion dollar theme park expansion, or all the many forms it can take in between.

I’m sure some will take these sentiments to be Pollyanna-ish or see self interest lurking behind them; although, truth be told, if I wanted to make more money in modern media I’d do better running a YouTube channel about hating whatever pop culture thing was just released. People eat that up readily.

Instead I’ll confess to finding myself sometimes going months between encountering work that brings the spark of joy and wonder that seeing Then She Fell or donning an Oculus for the first time engendered. Yet when I do find one it’s like opening a door back on to the infinite again. When I stop to think about it, the same has always been true for me of films, music, television, and comics. Plays were always even tougher in this regard, and I’m a theatre kid through and through.

While it’s always been tricky making a living at all this, something that’s never been hard is how it has made a LIFE.

I got reminded of this earlier this month when we convened The Next Stage Immersive Summit in LA after three years of pandemic-related delays. So many of the people in those rooms worked on the very projects that are sunsetting. Yet the mood was one not one of exhaustion but exuberance. A sense that the opportunities to create a path towards sustainable careers are in front of us, but so too is the chance to change the wider art & entertainment field as well.

It won’t happen by chasing trends and market forecasts but by staying true to the power of the work itself. To the way it makes community, of artists and audiences alike. The way it opens those doors to the infinite in unexpected ways. How an invitation to living a little fiction lets us steal some of that magic and bring it back to others.

The city may have burned, but the cycle goes on. Let’s not mourn the turning of an age, but rejoice that we got to be part of it, and took part in setting the stage for what comes next.

Noah J. Nelson is the publisher and founder of No Proscenium, its sister site Everything Immersive, and parent organization The Immersive Experience Institute. He holds a bachelor’s in Theatre Arts from San Francisco State University. His reporting has been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and APM’s Marketplace.

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