WITHOUT WALLS 2022 — FESTIVAL DIARY

La Jolla Playhouse’s now annual celebration of site-responsive, interactive theatre and public performance returned to full strength this past week at San Diego’s ARTS DISTRICT Liberty Station for four days and nights of work ranging from theatrical games for kids to meditations on identity staged inside functioning pop-up bars.

The festival has the distinction of being the largest institutional arts platform to showcase immersive work, although that is not the whole of the festival’s brief.

What follows are capsule reviews of a portion, but by no means all, of the programming at this year’s festival. For a deeper dive into some specifics, check out this week’s Review Crew podcast, dropping later in the week. (We’ll update with the link when it is ready.)

ANTS

So I’m a little too old for Polygot Theatre’s Ants, wherein three actors dressed up as ants lead a lawn full of children on a “landscaping project” involving little bundles (“breadcrumbs” in the fiction of the game) that they amass and then lay out around the grass.

Of course, give a couple score kids some pillowy sacks and a field and they will go into a frenzy. Piling up the bags. Picking them up by the armful. Throwing them at adults who, one has to hope, brought them to the game in the first place. Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is when it is hurling a non-lethal object at your head.

At first glance the theatrical game seems to be pure chaos, and let’s be clear: it’s MOSTLY chaos. But as the ants persist on their quest to create a trail of breadcrumbs — now you get it — and some of the kids start to get the whole vibe without being told what to do. Maybe even most, if the evidence after ten minutes was to be believed.

Still: it was fascinating to see all of society’s ills and hopes on display in a very simple game. Like the way some kids, thinking they were helping, would hoard more breadcrumbs than they could carry and then dump them into big piles that just had to be redistributed by the diligent, un-thanked ants. Or when someone plopped their baby down in the middle of the trail so they could get some Instagram photos of the baby meekly throwing the bags out of their way because the baby didn’t care one bit about what was going on. That kid is destined to be a billionaire.

BLACK SÉANCE

Writer-director Richard Allen’s piece about a young man seeking a deeper connection to his past through a magical connection to potent figures of Black American history is nothing short of deeply ambitious. Not only does it call upon performer Nathan Nonhof to channel a couple dozen historical figures from across a couple of centuries, but to sing and perform acts of prestidigitation as well.

The deeply performative nature of the piece, however, clashes with the intimacy of the setting. Blindspot Collective have done a fantastic job transforming one of Liberty Station’s many random rooms into a believable speakeasy, creating not just a space but a vibe. Black Séance, the fictional bar that is the setting of Black Séance the show, does feel like a real place.

Yet I’m not sure that effort meshes well with the material.

To be certain, there are powerful passages amongst the monologues Nonhof is tasked to deliver and it is clear writer Allen has much to say that deserves to be heard. Maybe more than one piece can sustain. So much is packed in that director Allen doesn’t craft moments of transition that either guide or challenge the audience. As the edit is to film, the transition is to the stage: a critical part of the storytelling tool belt. Instead Nonhof is more often left to switch in and out with nary a glimmer of magic. To make too much of a shift would risk the piece becoming corny, but a lack of friction around these transitions feels lacking.

Look: it’s not easy being called upon to inhabit this many characters, to channel this many voices — there’s a reason why a talent like Anna Deavere Smith’s is rare — it’s effectively a nine on the difficultly scale. Up close like this is particularly unforgiving, whether bringing to life a beloved figure or one better known to serious students of history.

I went into Black Séance primed for magic, and left wishing I had found some. Nearly all the ingredients are there, but truth be told I think this belongs on a stage where some additional artifice and tight dramaturgy could give it the frame it needs to shine.

LA BULLE

All day long at WOW the titular bubble of La Bulle stands ready for its role that night. When the sun has set, the clown Pierrot enters the bubble and the magic begins to stir.

La Bulle is WOW in full on public performance mode, and it is a captivating one indeed. Here is a little life on full display, separated from the rest of us by transparent plastic yet seeking connection through the medium by the means at hand. Pierrot beckons audience members to approach the bubble: he draws their outlines, dances with them while they both touch the surface from either side. There is the futile yearning for connection in the age of social media given physical form.

La Bulle is so polished as to appear to have emerged from the realm of ideas as a finished whole, dancing on a tightrope balanced between joy and melancholy. Which made the sonic clash with the nearby wedding reception (just a scant 15 yards away) more than a little annoying. In spite of the obstacles that producing in the middle of an arts & shopping district can bring the team at Canada’s CORPUS still manages to cast a spell that left the assembled enthralled, with a final visual as beautiful as theatre can get.

MONUMENTS

This projection mapped art installation is simply stunning.

For this edition, three local figures were selected by Australian artist Craig Walsh to have their faces grace three of the trees on the southern side of Liberty Station. Projected onto the trees the filmed images are animated. Not in a hyperkinetic sense, but gently. The faces looking the way someone who is sitting for a portrait or who is looking off in the distance and composing their thoughts would.

It is simple. It is breathtaking. It makes you just want to be.

Get Noah J Nelson’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

SubscribeSubscribe

Three placards were posted nearby, giving details of the subject’s lives. Yet while these are the routes to the specific, the work itself creates a universal moment. The superimposition of a human face onto the enduring form of a tree opens up dimensions for contemplation. Okay, that may sound a little corny, but there’s just something about this piece.

ON HER SHOULDERS WE STAND

Quonset huts and wall tents are no stranger sight on military bases, although it’s been a minute since Liberty Station served duty as a training ground. This piece by TuYo Theatre evokes the silhouettes of the site’s past to tell a story of promises made and broken to the Latina women whose labor fueled the war effort in San Diego.

Audience members progress through a series of vignettes — most in English, one in Spanish — that set up scenes from lives of Latinas during the war effort in WWII. These slice of life moments don’t tell the tale of one life, but rather get at a gestalt of the pressures facing the women in whose shoulders the war effort stood.

One little technical twist: the performers were largely mic’d up and each audience member wore a headset tuned to a specific channel shared by their whole group. This appeared to be set up to both combat the occasional roar of a plane overhead — we’ll get into that later — and to cut down on audio bleed from one scene to the next. Although showings seemed to be staggered enough that I’m not sure if that would have been a real issue.

The headsets create a distance between the audience and the actors, even if the space itself does not, and I can’t help but think that it adds to the stylized nature of the performances throughout the piece. While TuYo Theatre proves to have a clear voice, and a knack for placemaking, that stylization keeps the work at a mental distance that the belie the physical closeness of the piece.

THE BOX SHOW

So this is a bit awkward, but I’m not entirely sure what this was doing in a festival called Without Walls.

Which isn’t to say writer-performer Dominique Salerno isn’t good: a virtuoso performer, really, mixing broad comedy, pathos, and a silly sweetness across a couple dozen vignettes all performed from inside a rather small box placed on stage. Salerno takes us through a rapid fire series of sketches that aren’t really thematically linked, but use the versatility of the box — lit from within and without and featuring four panels that fold outward and can be used in any combination of open or closed to create different spaces — as the show’s organizing thread.

There’s a lot of sketches, with an extended bit about the Trojan War, and another about a pair of teenagers practicing for a dance that is told entirely by us watching their feet which are particularly stand out. Honestly, I could probably just go on about most of the sketches. Salerno is great, full stop. At 90 minutes, however, it’s a bit long for a festival piece although if you’re not cramming six shows into a day you might not notice the length.

Still: as inventive as Salerno’s use of the box is — really, really inventive — I’m just not sure how it fits the brief of the festival. It doesn’t seem like the box setup would work particularly well outside (this performance was in a theater) and while I can kind of see an argument about the box being a specific site that the show could not work without what is a theatre but a box? Or a great wooden “O” if you’re lucky.

In any case, that’s not on Salerno. The show? Fun stuff!

40 WATTS FROM NOWHERE

Immersive theatre, as an art form, is a great shapeshifter. As a discipline it is a magpie, borrowing from everything and anything that has come before it. When you’re in one of those shows that will be a touchstone of the genre, you’re left struggling to describe it by writing inane things like “it was kinda like a podcast mixed with an escape room, only it wasn’t so much a puzzle as just like, being in someone’s shoes, you know?”

40 Watts From Nowhere, the latest from Mister and Mischief (Jeff and Andy Crocker) puts participants into the role of Sue Carpenter, a real-life pirate radio station operator in LA in the 1990’s.

It is kinda like a podcast mixed with an escape room, only it wasn’t so much a puzzle as just like, being in someone’s shoes, you know?

Only you probably don’t know, unless you’ve done the show. So let’s break it down a little.

Five guests — and it needs five to work — are met by a woman in a red backpack and told that they are now Sue Carpenter, founder of pirate radio station KBLT in Silver Lake. You’re going to head in for a shift at the studio, which is a closet in the back of your apartment. The cans (headphones) are both costume piece and essential kit for the show: you can’t hear KBLT, or the narrator, without them.

Once inside the performance space you find an apartment setup with, yes, a closet that has been converted into a radio booth. I’ve been in a fair number of DJ booths over the years, and this is pretty much just the setup. The show is set in motion by the collective group of Sue’s playing tracks on the CD and record turntable, cueing the narrator to push Sue’s story forward like a kind of internal monologue shared amongst five brains.

While there are not multiple endings to the story — this is a documentary piece, at the end of the day — the how of the telling comes down to the interplay of the audience and the narrator, who feels omnipresent in ways that while subtle are too delicious to spoil.

Like their previous work, Escape From Godot, the Crockers use the logic of escape games and their deep knowledge of themed entertainment practices (both are professionals in that field and have worked on the highest profile projects imaginable) to create something that defies simple classification and manages to be both joyous and deeply, deeply human. It’s a triumph, and I can’t wait for it to pop-up again somewhere so I can send more people to it.

A NOTE ON LIBERTY STATION

This marks the third go-round for the Without Walls Festival at Arts District Liberty Station after there 2019 festival and the pop-up in 2021. While there’s a good amount to love about the space — the walkability and the ready access to parking and dining options — it’s a relief to know that the Festival will be moving on to a new location in 2023.

The combo of Liberty Station being in the flight path of San Diego International Airport and the prevalence of multiple wedding parties flooding the space over the weekend made for rough festival going at times. While it was definitely easier to share the venue with the weddings than the jumbo jets, both meant that the outdoor performances, of which there are many, had to compete in ways that were often frustrating. La Bulle in particular had the misfortune of having its music overlaid with a wedding DJ, as noted above.

I’ll miss being able to nip into the Stone Brewery at the end of the evening or grab eats at the Public Market or Breakfast Republic, but I’m really ready for a venue that at night doesn’t require you to pause every five minutes for the roar of jet engines.

Don’t worry Liberty Station: we’ll still come visit.

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.