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Photo: Ivy Corbin Sleepwalk Immersive have confirmed that Bacchanalia, their immersive production of The Bacchae by Euripides, will return to London in March 2025, taking over Hoxton Hall. Set in a psychedelic 1960s rendition of the city of Thebes, Bacchanalia is a free-roam performance that sees audience members able to follow a range of characters, including the captivating and horrifying Greek god of wine and pleasure, as Thebes falls from order into madness and debauchery. According to Sleepwalk Immersive, the new staging of the show will expand upon previous performances, with new content. Past performances saw a cast replete with performers renowned in the immersive world, as well as exciting newcomers. This upcoming run at Hoxton Hall promises to build on the well-received core of the show’s past runs, while further expanding the company’s vision for Bacchanalia. Photo: Ivy Corbin Speaking on the announcement via the Sleepwalk Immersive blog , Artistic Director Sebastian Huang said: When Hoxton approached us with the rare opportunity to take over not just their iconic auditorium, but also the rest of the building, we knew Bacchanalia had found its new home. The ready-made atmosphere that such a space provides, will allow us to further expand the vision that we have for Thebes and Bacchanalia as a whole. Stuart Cox, CEO of Hoxton Hall also said the following: We saw Bacchanalia at The Crypt and were so impressed. We so wanted to meet the Sleepwalk team and we are delighted it has led to this collaboration. We can’t wait for all Hoxton Hall’s spaces to be filled with the full vision of Sebastian Huang’s thrilling production and the exquisite choreography of Ruth Howard. Audiences are in for a real treat. Photo: Ivy Corbin Bacchanalia was previously staged at Crypt in Bethnal Green in November 2023, and enjoyed a sold-out run. The show later returned to the same venue in February and March 2024 after receiving overwhelmingly positive word-of-mouth from audiences. Critical praise for the show was equally strong, with The Stage highlighting it as one of the Top 50 Shows of 2023, and Broadway World describing Bacchanalia as a '"fascinating piece of immersive theatre". In our review of the show, we called it "one of the best new immersive shows of the year”. The show will run from 11th March to 6th April 2025, with tickets on sale 2nd November 2024. Those who sign up to become Friends of Sleepwalk can get early access to tickets , exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and a physical memento. Sleepwalk Immersive has also confirmed the return of enhanced tickets that grant access to unique experiences prior to entering Thebes in full. These experiences have been specially devised for the show's new venue, and are limited to just two tickets per performance. Photos: Ivy Corbin Talk of the show’s return and expansion had long been a possibility, with Sleepwalk Immersive’s Artistic Director Sebastian Huang and Associate Director Maya McQueen hinting at future versions of the show in an interview with Immersive Rumours  prior to the show's initial 2023 opening.  Sleepwalk Immersive is Sebastian Huang (Artistic Director), Ruth Howard (Movement Director), Maya McQueen (Associate Director/Producer), Peter Broughton (Co-Creator, Bacchanalia 23/24) and Madeleine Houghton (Producer/General Manager). Bacchanalia will run at Hoxton Hall from 11th March to 6th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £54.00 and can be purchased here . For more information about the show, visit sleepwalkimmersive.com

Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin Later this month, Sleepwalk Immersive’s Bacchanalia returns to London after two sold-out runs in 2023 and 2024. Set in a psychedelic 1960s reimagining of Thebes, the free-roam immersive experience invites audiences to follow a diverse cast of characters - including Dionysus, the mesmerising yet terrifying Greek god of wine and pleasure - as Thebes descends from order into chaos. The show's upcoming run, which will take over multiple floors of Hoxton Hall, expands on previous iterations of Bacchanalia with a longer run time, additional content, and more experiences for individual audience members. As rehearsals for the show got underway, we spoke with Sleepwalk Immersive’s Artistic Director, Sebastian Huang, about previously staging the show at CRYPT in Bethnal Green, how they came to secure Hoxton Hall for its return, and what audiences can expect from this expanded version of their 1960s-inspired Greek tragedy. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin Immersive Rumours: Hi Sebastian. Thanks for speaking to us today! Can you tell us a bit about Sleepwalk Immersive and your role within the company? Sebastian Huang: I'm Sebastian Huang, and I'm the Artistic Director at Sleepwalk Immersive. It's basically my job to oversee the creative output of the company and to keep it all to a certain standard. Sleepwalk Immersive launched in 2023 specifically to grow Bacchanalia, which I had devised as a one-man show for an Extended Project Qualification when I was 16. The company mission has been to focus on storytelling and audience experience. We feel that we're part of the first generation making immersive theatre who have grown up with the form, and we're now on our third version of Bacchanalia but have also previously made some bespoke experiences for events. Pete Broughton and Maya McQueen, who were co-creatives for the earlier versions, are concentrating on performance this time around. Ruth Howard, our Movement Director, is my right hand and has been a real force for this 2025 iteration. The same goes for Joel Moffett, who has always run lighting and sound and has been a behind-the-scenes hero in every respect. For this run, we are also joined by Amy Warren as Company Stage Manager. She’s incredibly experienced and has worked for some of the biggest names in the sector. IR: Bacchanalia previously ran at CRYPT in 2023 and 2024, but for those who didn't attend those shows, do you mind giving us an overview of what it's all about? Sebastian:  Bacchanalia is an adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides, and we’ve set it in this 60s America-inspired world. We focus mainly on narrative and storytelling, but we try to use lots of different theatrical mediums such as dance, spoken word, puppetry, physical theatre, all of that. It's a fully free-roam immersive experience, and this time, we're going to be spanning multiple floors at Hoxton Hall. As an audience member, you can freely move as you wish throughout the space. You can follow a character, or follow a prop, or follow the music, and it's really all about giving the audience agency within the space to experience the story of the Greek god Dionysus coming to Thebes to avenge his mother and mess up the Theban family. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it. IR: You first had the idea to adapt The Bacchae into an immersive show when you were in college, and all these years later, it's still something you've continued to work on. What is it about The Bacchae that’s kept you coming back to it for so long? Sebastian:  I think from quite an early age, I loved the classical pantheons, the idea of multiple gods and their interactions with mortals. I think that always really intrigued me as a kid. When I studied The Bacchae as an A-Level text, it just clicked. I've always loved the Greek tragedies in theatre, and I was lucky enough to be exposed to some really phenomenal immersive theatre from quite an early age. It felt like a natural merge of two of my favourite passions. The reason I've been able to do it for seven years or so now is because I really love it. I love the story. I love the context of the myths, and I love immersive theatre. Luckily, I've been given the opportunity to create my own work, and I think that out of everything, what I've loved the most is being able to creatively voice my passions and what inspires me. I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it. I just find it the most fun thing ever.  IR: Bacchanalia is back next month at Hoxton Hall, but I’d love to chat about the show’s previous outing at CRYPT in Bethnal Green. What was it like getting the show mounted previously? Sebastian: I mean, obviously, it's not necessarily an easy endeavour. It took a lot of people working very hard and really putting themselves into the project. It was very stressful, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. No matter how stressful it was though, we're very, very proud of what we created.  With hindsight, if it wasn't for those two runs [at CRYPT] and the R&D's before, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing now. It's really nice to think about where it came from. To know that our hard work and all the blood, sweat, and tears we put into those first two runs hopefully have paid off now and have got us to where we are now is amazing. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin IR: Looking back to 2023/2024, the critical response was really positive, and there was a lot of love for the show from audiences. How was it being on the receiving end of that as a new company mounting a new project? Sebastian: It was a bit of a whirlwind. I think the first run sold out in 16 days, which was obviously really cool, but at the time, we didn’t have much of a perception of that. We were a young team wanting to put on a show, and the stars kind of aligned. When you say it's a new project, it was a new project and a new team, but you know, I was the director, and I'm by far the least experienced on the team. If you look at the cast we got and the creative team we had, there was a lot of experience and a lot of combined years in the industry. For a lot of people, that 2023 run was the birth of Bacchanalia, but for me, I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. It didn't necessarily feel like a new project to me at all. It just felt like the next steps of the project that I'd been working on for a while. IR: Following the second run of Bacchanalia, Sleepwalk Immersive was part of the book launch for Anne Corlett's The Theatre of Glass and Shadows , which has an immersive theatre production at the core of its story. How did that collaboration come out? Sebastian:  Anne - who’s an amazing, talented, lovely individual - came to see the first run of Bacchanalia and then later introduced herself during the second run. My first memories of that project were meeting Anne in a café in Putney  and talking about the book, talking about the launch, and just being really, really excited by it. It was quite nice personally as well to do something like that because my brain has just been stuck in the Sixties for the last seven years. It was really cool to be inspired by such a great piece of new writing. It felt really fresh. We'd be keen to do more of that if anyone has any books coming out soon... Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT. IR: Let's discuss the upcoming run of Bacchanalia at Hoxton Hall. How did you settle on that venue being the right space for the show’s return? Sebastian: When it came to the March 2024 run at CRYPT, one of our main objectives was to try and get a bigger venue out of it. We were brainstorming different venues and concluded that because of some of the themes present throughout Bacchanalia, and with Dionysus also being the god of theatre, a conventional theatre space would actually work. I don't know if you remember, but quite a while ago, there was an immersive show at Hoxton Hall based around Hammer Horror. I was too young to go at the time, but my parents went and really enjoyed it. My parents reminded us of that show, so we invited Sam and Stu, who are the Head of Programming and the CEO of Hoxton Hall, down to the second run of the show. They later reached out and said, ‘Hey, come and look at our space.’ I think even upon first impressions, we knew that Bacchanalia would fit very well into the venue. The kind of expansion we were looking to do also fit pretty perfectly with the number of rooms available at Hoxton Hall, and the team has been absolutely amazing. They were so keen to get this kind of work in their building and also came on to co-produce it, which is amazing. They’ve been lovely to work with, and they've been really great at guiding us through lots of stuff that we're less familiar with. It's felt like a very natural fit. IR: Given the expanded space you've got to work with this time, that's going to have an impact on basically every part of how the 2023/2024 show was structured and timed. When planning and rehearsing for this Hoxton Hall run, does it feel like an expansion of the previous versions of the show or a complete do-over? Sebastian: I think, to me, it's an expansion. There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT. It's still those themes; it’s still those characters. What we’re finding really exciting and almost freeing is that because of the nature of the space being bigger with separate rooms, we're going to have multiple soundtracks and different things playing in different rooms. It means we don't have to compromise as much on the overall vision. A space like CRYPT, where you're limited by the sound capabilities, meant we only have one soundtrack. If one character had a sad scene, but these three other characters had a happy scene, we had to prioritise the happy scene, and you’d get happy music in this sad scene. It's been really great to be able to compromise less on the individual characters' arcs too. Hopefully, people will feel like these characters have more time to develop their own story as well as the overall narrative. In particular, the Maenads  have been fleshed out more, and it's really given us the freedom and space to dive a bit deeper into these characters. Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect? IR: Something that came up last time we spoke was that the CRYPT version of the show was a scaled-back version of what you’d originally written years prior. Is staging the show at Hoxton Hall going to allow you to realise the full scope of the script? Sebastian:   I think the thing to bear in mind is when I first wrote the show, I was just a teenager who had no perception of what it takes to put on a show or how much money, hard work, and time it actually takes to create. The 100% full Bacchanalia would require so many resources; it’s probably not particularly doable at this stage. I'd say the show has definitely expanded, though. It's closer to that vision. We'd love to keep expanding the show forever and ever, but the way we've done it for this venue feels appropriate and achievable, given the time and resources we have. IR: One element of the previous staging of Bacchanalia that I think people loved was the intimacy and smaller moments with audiences. Is that still the case with the 2025 version? Sebastian:  We’re doing our very best to maintain that sense of intimacy, but I personally believe that sometimes it's easy to mistake intimacy for proximity. It really helps to build that into a setting if you are very close physically to the performance, but it needs to be embedded in the writing and the creation of the show. Our aims are definitely to maintain that sense of intimacy, but with a bigger space and bigger rooms, we can explore how we carry that intimacy through to a larger space. Can we have epic moments as well as these intimate moments and explore the relationship between the two? It sounds really cheesy, but it comes from an audience's point of view. This has only been my job for a couple of years, and before that, I was an audience member. That's something I'm really keen for our creatives to hold on to. This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect? When we say ‘the audience’, we don't mean the 90 people; we mean this one person. We like to think of them very much as individuals. Photo: Ivy Corbin IR: The pedigree of the people involved in 2023/2024’s Bacchanalia was incredibly high, and it’s only gotten better this time around with an expanded cast. What’s it been like welcoming these new faces into the Sleepwalk family? Sebastian:  For us, casting is such an important thing. Getting the right people in the room is one of the most important parts of doing this. We're just really lucky to get these people. It’s insane. All the new cast members have come in with a really great attitude. With the wealth of experience that we've gotten, especially with the new cast coming in, there are years and years of immersive work behind them. It's invaluable to get those creative minds in the room, working on a show like this. I've been watching Rob [McNeill] and Oli [Towse] work since I was little, and I wanted to work with them all that time. Luckily, because of the connections we made and through some of our team, we have some ins with that world and those kinds of cast members. This show wouldn't be nearly what it is if it weren't for the brilliant cast attached to it. It's also been really good to have the gang back together. It's lovely to see Pete doing Dionysus again. Over the last two days [of rehearsals], it's been great to see them do their thing. I'm really looking forward to diving into these characters more in rehearsals and seeing where that takes us. IR: Finally, with just a couple of weeks to go until the Hoxton Hall run begins, what are your feelings towards getting audiences back in to experience the show? Sebastian:   We can't wait to welcome everyone back to the new Thebes! This run, out of all of them, is really audience-led. Hopefully, if we’ve done our job right, there will be some really interesting stuff for people who've seen the show before to enjoy, and we'll be taking care of and respecting the people who are new to the show as well. Rehearsals for Bacchanalia (2025) Photos: James Lawson Bacchanalia will run at Hoxton Hall from 11th March to 6th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £54.00 and can be purchased here . For more information about the show, visit sleepwalkimmersive.com

Photo: Virtually Opera Immersive Rumours: Hi Leo. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about Virtually Opera? Leo Doulton: Hi, I'm Leo. I'm Artistic Director of Virtually Opera and creator of the Uncanny Things Trilogy. I have been working in immersive/interactive theatre since 2019 and in the arts more generally for over a decade now, which is a terrifying thought. I've been experimenting within interactive/immersive theatre, particularly through my work as Associate Creative Director of The Key of Dreams , and in my own work with Virtually Opera. With the latter, we've been experimenting with interactive, immersive opera. That is to say, a fusion of the two forms. Virtually Opera's mission statement is to create beautiful entertainment through fusion opera. I love going to something and having a good time, but also being devastatingly moved, and that's what Virtually Opera exists to try and do. Virtually Opera's own little history is that in 2017, it was set up initially making cinematically filmed opera that we’d put on YouTube. No one watched it because who watches anything that's on YouTube? In 2019, I had a catalogue of, I think, just under a hundred different cinematically filmed operas where the makers weren't filming it like a stage show - they'd sat down and made a bloody movie. Around the same time, I'd started doing these experiments in interactive/immersive opera. That ended up being a really interesting and rewarding strand of work. It started off with a weird little show called ‘We Sing I Sang’. The audience is a hive mind, essentially, deciding what a collective unconscious does as it flees its dying home world. A big part of what Virtually Opera’s interactive work is about is the sense that humans care about stuff and, generally speaking, want to at least try to be decent. Trusting that if you give a group of people the chance to build a community together, they're going to take it seriously, as long as you ask them to, is generally something we found pays off.  IR: We’re speaking today about The Uncanny Things trilogy, which is coming to COLAB Tower next month. Can you give us an overview of what all three of those shows entail? Leo: The Uncanny Things Trilogy is a set of shows all taking place in the same world, a world much like our own, except that the supernatural is real and it's a presence. When you hear a voice just on the edge of hearing, when you see something out of the corner of your eye, maybe it's not an Uncanny Thing, but it possibly is. Each show works as a standalone piece, and in all of them, you are negotiating with these Uncanny Things to try and serve your community and yourself.  They're all variants on a theme of ritual, but it might be that this is a very solemn ritual, it might be that it’s an ecstatic ritual, and then some of them are much darker, more intense rituals, and if you don't handle it well, consequences can happen. You don't have to sing, incidentally. People often ask that. Singing is very much not required, although a remarkable number of people do choose to, which is charming when you have someone joining in that way. Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: What was the inspiration for the first show in the trilogy, Come Bargain With Uncanny Things? Leo: It came from various places. I'd been working in contemporary opera for about five years at that point. There are things I love about contemporary opera, but there are things I find frustrating, such as the tradition of being a form for specialist audiences, which leads to a lot of it being fairly difficult for outsiders to come into. As a result, if you don't know the tradition, maybe you don't want to come. I sometimes use the parallel of if you are giving advice to a young person who’s going, ‘Why doesn't anyone I want to date like me?’ You don't go, ‘Keep doing the same thing, but louder!’ You say, ‘Maybe you need to go and brush your teeth.’ Similarly, I fell in love with interactive/immersive theatre with Parabolic Theatre's Crisis, What Crisis? The agency and use of dramatic structures to tell stories were really interesting to me. I learnt a lot from how Parabolic put on shows.  I also have a deep interest in epic stories from around the world and the different narrative structures that you might find in them. The Kalevala,  for example, has one narrative structure, which is, you have three different characters, and their stories are basically kind of separate, then occasionally they hang out together. You see that in The Lord of the Rings - the Fellowship is together, and then Frodo and Sam do their thing, and Aragorn goes and does their thing. Sometimes they reunite, and sometimes they go away. Tolkien is obviously influenced by that structure. How do you take a story structure and make it do something ritualistic? Well, you take a story structure that's not designed to be about winning. It's about relating to things. IR: Come Bargain With Uncanny Things had a two-week run at COLAB Tavern back in 2022. How was it having an audience come in and live in that world? Leo: That’s kind of why we're bringing it back. Because it was really fun. In that version of the show, we got to really understand the different things people wanted to do. People would come in, and they'd really care about it, to the extent that people started coming back. Which we were delighted by, but also we weren't necessarily expecting that. We discovered ways that the world would tend to grow around what different people suggested and how flexible we could be. We discovered how creative people could be in this space and how open they would be to the invitation of ‘Would you like to come and help your neighbours?’ That's the basic question Come Bargain asks you. It's just small local problems. You're not here to save the world, and people did want that. They didn't care about winning. They just cared about relating. Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: It's interesting that you focused on creating a relatively low-stakes environment for the show to exist in. That seems to go against what most other experiences do. Leo: I think for certain genres, it's absolutely the right thing to do. If you're doing a show about war, your stakes are life and death. I would say, however, the audience generally speaking assumes you're not going to murder one of your performers, which makes it quite hard to make those stakes believable. The stakes of ‘I am worried about my neighbour who’s sick’ are small. It's much easier to play that. I don't know you well enough to go, ‘Do you have a member of your family who is maybe elderly or vulnerable?’ but I suspect the answer is yes, because you're a human being. You and I have both reached an age where we are aware that we are mortal. Therefore, if you make the scales ‘I'm a human being and that's sometimes hard’, it means something to people. IR: Following on from Come Bargain, there was Come Worship Our Uncanny King, which was performed at Voidspace Live in 2024. Did you want to start working on that show as soon as you finished the run of Come Bargain? Leo: Initially after Come Bargain, I thought, ‘Well, that's done. I'd like to bring Come Bargain back someday, and maybe we can have a show where you see the community develop based on what the previous show did’. I thought we'd just do it nice and straightforward and easily. This would have been sensible. I ended up having other work come up, which was delightful. Thank you to everyone who did that, but it meant the show sat in the back of my head for a little while. We took a lot of what we had seen in Come Bargain’s audience, where there were some people who were weirdly enthusiastic about doing what the Uncanny Thing wanted. Come Worship is a show for those people. It came out of that sense of people being invested in this world. The entire world-building of Come Bargain is designed to support this question of ‘How do we relate to the Uncanny Thing?’ Metaphorically, how do we relate to the world , our community, and each other in this space? In that show, you do that as equals. In Come Worship Our Uncanny King, you do that from a position of grotesquely less power because you have the Uncanny King there. That's an interesting situation to put people in. Photo: Claire Shovelton IR: Come Murder An Uncanny Thing is being performed for the first time in front of an audience at COLAB Tower. Does that give you any trepidation? Leo: You are more than experienced enough to know that if I said anything other than yes, I'd be lying. Obviously, it causes trepidation. A lot of the individual mechanics, if you have been to the weird little Fringe shows I've done over the past few years, will be familiar. There's one mechanic of the audience shaping how a certain conversation plays out between the Uncanny Thing and the audience through very light touch musical elements, which people may have seen remarkably well at Into The Dreamlands last year at the London Lovecraft Festival. There's another mechanic for how do you punish the Uncanny Thing? This is the show where you have power over it, after all, which was something I developed in residency at Theatre Deli in 2023. The overall structure is, I think, solid. There is, of course, trepidation because maybe all of these things come together, and they go clunk. This is probably where it's worth mentioning the performance team. Fundamentally, this is a show about humans being human together. The mechanics are only a means to that end. I have absolute confidence that the ensemble we have is going to be able to bring something beautiful to that of ‘Here's a group of people who've got together to decide to murder a supernatural creature'. There are mechanics around it, and there are specific ways you're doing that, but really, the interesting thing is how are you going to occupy the space where you have agreed to murder something. IR: Across all three shows, there’s a shifting power balance between the audience and the Uncanny Thing.  What about that idea is so appealing to you as a creator? Leo: I have to credit Katy Naylor of Voidspace for the insight of me being interested in power as a theme. She's been following my work for a while and just said that very casually. It explains a lot of things. I have a background in History, and a lot of my education was by Marxian historians who are not Marxists, but they are interested in similar ideas of class dynamics, economic dynamics, and who holds power in a society and why. We live in an age of climate change. We live in a world where you turn on the news, and basically every day, the world is more powerful than you. You cannot individually do anything about climate change. You have to live with it. Similarly, for many people, the government is more powerful than you in ways you can't necessarily understand. It just is. How do you live with that? You and I have just had a coffee and green tea. We live in a world where, by virtue of the fact we have a fairly small amount of capital by the standards of our society, there is someone on the other side of the world who has picked those things, put them in a cup, and I can just get them to do that by spending £3. I have power over my world. What do I do with it? That's an interesting set of questions for those metaphors of how do you relate to the world, the community, and each other? We have no power against the climate, but we also do have power over nature. We have no power against humans with power, but we also do have power over other humans. I will say, you don't have to think about any of those things at the show. Just come and beat the shit out of an Uncanny Thing... Photo: Charley Ipsen IR: How does opera fit within all three of the shows? Leo: As with immersive, there are competing definitions of what is opera. This show goes, ‘This is a world of constant music. The music is improvised to reflect that world's story ’. We know that there are certain motifs, certain melodies, and certain harmonies that are associated with different things. If, for example, you make the worlds more Uncanny, more supernatural, you might notice that the music suddenly gets a bit more crunchy and weird because that's one of the things we've got in the vocabulary of music for the show. That's all in response to how the audience changed the world. It's a way of expressing there's magic happening and showing the world shifting. This is drama about the community and their world, not about the characters.. In the fiction of the world, the Uncanny Things don't like human voices, but they respond really well to singing. If you are one of the Bargainers, your job professionally is to control these things and to negotiate with them. You sing to it, and you sing while you're conducting this ritual. The community doesn't have to sing because why would they? They're not professional Bargainers, and also because I'm not an arsehole. IR: What were the audience reactions to Come Bargain With Uncanny Things like from those who were previously unfamiliar with opera? Leo: I think they preferred it to the opera people. I think for them, they were able to understand the idea of ‘I’m meant to be a person in this world, and I'm acting as a human being with agency because we have free will.’ They just got that. For them, the music was just like, ‘Oh, that's super cool, there's this person who is professionally singing’. Weirdly, some of the opera people got super into it and were like, ‘Oh, I'm actually allowed to be a human being while being in the show. That's super cool. I've never had that before.’ There were other people who sat down and just went, ‘Well, I just want to watch it. I know I came to this interactive, immersive opera, but I'm confused by both the fact that I'm in the world and I'm being expected to do stuff.’ Some people came and, admittedly, they said that this isn't opera because they felt the role of the music was not sufficiently expressing the drama of the story. Which was interesting. There are definitely some operas that don't fit within this definition , and that's a conversation that I can have until the cows come home. Photo: Virtually Opera IR: So those elements of the Uncanny Things Trilogy shouldn’t be a turn-off to those intimidated about going to anything labelled ‘opera’? Leo: For the specific thing we're trying to make, the world is told through music, the world is supernatural, and the supernatural is achieved through music. But we're doing all of that work for you. The music is designed for that purpose, which means it is easy and welcoming. If the main thing you listen to is Chappell Roan, great! Come along. You don't need to know shit about opera to come. It ' s an unreasonable expectation fundamentally. The opera is a tool towards telling the story and creating the experience. It's not designed as a test of ‘Are you opera enough?’. Let's say you have a relative who goes to church, or you've been to church for Christmas. In that environment, it makes total sense that at some point a guy comes out and does a hymn. But you don't have to know about it to understand that when you do rituals, people sing . There is something weird that happens with music, and we all recognise that, whatever music we listen to. IR: If there's one takeaway you'd want people to take from attending The Uncanny Things Trilogy, what would it be? Leo: I want them to walk away feeling like they've been welcomed and that they've been human. I want people to come away feeling like they've been in a community and they've done something important. Whether that is you having worshipped the King, you have Bargained, or you have Murdered.  Ultimately, the title says Uncanny Things, but that is only because by relating to the Uncanny Things, hopefully you do something deeply human. Also, I hope they've genuinely had a good time. The shows should be fun in the proper sense of the word. It's not just ‘I've engaged with content and it was fun’, but ‘I got to be a human being and be entertained, and that's just really fucking important sometimes.’ Photo: Claire Shovelton The Uncanny Things Trilogy runs from 4th March to 30th March 2025 at COLAB Tower near London Bridge. Standard tickets for each show are priced at £45, and tickets are available for all three shows as a bundle for £105. For more info and to book tickets, visit designmynight.com

A trilogy of immersive operas, directed by Leo Doulton (Associate Creative Director, The Key of Dreams), is coming to COLAB Tower this Spring for a month-long run. The Uncanny Things Trilogy, which is made up of Come Bargain With Uncanny Things, Come Worship Our Uncanny King, and Come Murder An Uncanny Thing, has been created by Virtually Opera, and will take over the newly-opened South Bank venue from 4th to 30th March 2025. All three shows in The Uncanny Things Trilogy take place in the same setting; one where supernatural creatures still flicker in the corner of your eye, giving gifts and sickness, able to bind and be bound. The audience-community will decide how to change their lives by mastering rituals, crafting offerings, and negotiating with these beings. Photo: Charley Ipsen In Come Bargain With Uncanny Things, a ritualistic gathering tries to solve local problems. In the comedic Come Worship Our Uncanny King, people brought into an Uncanny Thing’s court try to win favour. The trilogy closes with the tragic Come Murder An Uncanny Thing, which sees the community deciding what justice looks like for a captive, dangerous being. This trilogy of shows is the world’s only interactive, immersive operas, and each contains rich lore, total audience freedom, and a commitment to creating communities with their audiences. Each audience’s choices will develop the ongoing world of the show, forming a uniquely growing experience, and the show's fully improvised music shifts and adapts as the audience changes the world, making their magic feel real. Photo: Claire Shovelton Speaking on The Uncanny Things Trilogy, creator Leo Doulton comments: Combining interactive theatre’s invitation to serious play with opera’s ability to conjure worlds beyond our own has made something special: the chance to enter a world where being a human in a community matters deeply (and also feel like you’re doing magic, which is just fun). Virtually Opera is a fusion opera company and has spent the past six years creating a unique system for interactive immersive opera. Their goal is to create work that feels truly live: for the audience as a particular community, there and then. Work on parts of The Uncanny Things Trilogy has been supported by a Britten Pears Foundation Creative Retreat, the International Opera Awards Foundation Bursary, Tête à Tête, Voidspace, and the generous support of crowdfunder backers. Photo: Charley Ipsen The Uncanny Things Trilogy has been created by Leo Doulton, a writer and director working in opera and interactive theatre. Leo founded Virtually Opera in 2017, and continues as its Artistic Director. In 2023, Leo became Associate Creative Director of the critically-acclaimed overnight immersive experience The Key of Dreams , and in 2024 became Creative Consultant to Voidspace . Their interactive novel Rites of Angels will be published by Voidspace Press this summer. Photos: Virtually Opera Cast & Creative Team: CN Lester: Guildmaster McCall ( Come Bargain )/Adorer ( Come Worship ) Sarah Griffin: Carol Schuster ( Come Bargain )/Silent ( Come Worship )/Local ( Come Murder ) Amy Kearsley: The Wyrd Gazer ( Come Bargain )/Vigilante ( Come Murder ) Hestor Dart:  The Master of Processionals ( Come Worship )/Lawful ( Come Murder ) Maggie Vaz Neto: Cover/Assistant Producer Leo Doulton: Creator ( The Uncanny Things Trilogy )/Uncanny Things Charley Ipsen: Designer ( The Uncanny Things Trilogy ) Erika Gundesen: Musical Adviser ( The Uncanny Things Trilogy ) The Uncanny Things Trilogy runs from 4th March to 30th March 2025 at COLAB Tower near London Bridge. Standard tickets for each show are priced at £45, and tickets are available for all three shows as a bundle for £105. For more info, and to book tickets visit designmynight.com

Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Coinciding with the release of  A Minecraft Movie  in cinemas on 4th April 2025, Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue will open its doors on the same day at Corner Corner, London’s newest exhibition venue in Canada Water, marking the highly anticipated UK and European debut of this immersive Minecraft adventure. In collaboration with Experience MOD, Mojang Studios, and Microsoft, fans can dive into a groundbreaking experience that combines innovative game design, captivating storytelling, and cutting-edge multimedia. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue The experience invites long-time Minecrafters, new players, and families of all ages to step into the world of Minecraft and become real-life heroes on an interactive quest, with visitors entering seven different Minecraft rooms to help rescue villagers under siege from a zombie attack. Taking on the role of heroes, they must work to gather the essential ingredients to cure them before time runs out. Armed with only their wits and a handheld Orb, known as the Orb of Interaction, players will embark on a journey through breathtaking biomes in search of the resources needed to craft a life-saving potion.  Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold, with players from around the world adventuring and creating together in their Minecraft worlds. Now, with Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue spawning in London, they can take part in this rescue mission experience where iconic places and mobs from the game are brought to life before their eyes. Photos: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Visitors begin their 45-minute journey by entering the forest. Guided by two unique characters—Tobin and Dayo—they will learn to use the Orb of Interaction, a glowing interactive handheld device which guides the user from room to room. Moving into the village, they will receive their quest and embark on a rescue mission with a team of fellow Minecrafters. On this interactive scavenger hunt, adventurers will journey through multiple Minecraft biomes while collecting resources and interacting with iconic mobs – some more friendly than others. Minecrafters can gush over pandas and dolphins as well as face skeletons, spiders, and – of course – creepers. Once they complete their quest, they can celebrate their heroic feat at the Minecraft Experience Trading Post with a crafty memento from the adventure. Photo: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue is designed to welcome families, parents, children, players, and non-players alike, and no prior knowledge of Minecraft is required to enjoy the experience. Kayleen Walters, Head of Franchise Development at Mojang Studios comments: After a successful debut in Dallas, TX this past autumn, we’re excited to bring our first-ever immersive touring Minecraft Experience to its next stop in London! We are thrilled to offer players and fans new ways to engage with the Minecraft brand starting this April. Finding ways for our community to express their love for Minecraft both in-game and out is always top of mind for us, and we can’t wait for more of our global community to attend the Minecraft Experience. Photos: Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue Minecraft Experience: Villager Rescue opens at Corner Corner in Canada Water on 4th April 2025. The waitlist for tickets is now live at  www.minecraftexperience.com will offer access to a presale starting on 12th February, with tickets going on sale to the general public on 14th February at 10am. The experience is priced from £20 for children and £24 for adults (16+).

Later this month Crypt in Bethnal Green will be taken over by Sleepwalk Immersive for their debut show - Bacchanalia. Based on The Bacchae by Euripides, the show will see audience members enter the city of Thebes and be immersed in the story of Dionysus as they seek revenge on the family who have denied their divinity. It's set to be an intense and intimate immersive production, with just 40 audience members per performance. Ahead of the beginning of rehearsals for the show, we spoke to Sebastian Huang (Artistic Director) and Maya McQueen (Associate Director) from Sleepwalk Immersive to discuss the shows conception, their approach to creating immersive work and what audience members can expect from their 1960s-infused Greek tragedy. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive What inspired the creation of Sleepwalk Immersive? How did it come to be with the team you’ve got in place? Sebastian: Work on the show Bacchanalia actually started before we founded the company. I've been working on the show for about four and a half years now. We started with a tiny little experience in Brixton, and from that the show has developed, but I think about two years ago a lot of us started working in the bar team at The Great Gatsby Immersive. We met doing that and obviously, we all got on very well. So we started throwing around these ideas about The Bacchae and how we'd work with that. We did a couple of little R&Ds and from that, I think we all just had so much fun and loved it so much that we just decided to form the company. Maya: Yeah, it's been a slow-growing thing. Pretty much this time last year we started our first R&D where it was the first version with a smaller team. We made a 20 to 25 minute version of the show, which we shared with friends and a couple of people from the industry to get feedback, which was really, really useful. And then with Ruth (Howard - Movement Director), we approached her and presented the show to her and she really liked it and was happy to come on board to further out the team. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive Bacchanalia is based on The Bacchae by Euripides. Can you speak to what drew you to wanting to tell that story specifically? Sebastian: I love the play. I remember reading it for the first time and thinking 'How I never heard of any of this?' A lot of the great tragedies get a bit more attention than The Bacchae, so we were really keen to do it. A lot of the themes that come from Euripides, they're very translatable into immersive. It's all about the madness, it's about loss, it's about power dynamics. That's something we felt very confident in conveying in an immersive setting. Maya: Especially Greek theatre, so much of it is about justice in this huge wide world. It feels like a great place to bring an audience into, where you've got these two sides in these two towns and nothing can be fully concluded because that's what a lot of Greek theatre is about. You've got these different points of view and this person believes so strongly in this way of living and this person believes in that. It's presented to you and you think about it afterwards and I think that's a nice type of play to throw audiences into. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive You held a workshop for Bacchanalia last year. Can you share how that experience was and the biggest takeaways from putting that workshop on? Sebastian: There are a million things! We did two workshops and then an official R&D. I think every time we were learning, it was getting bigger and bigger each time as well. Every time we do something new, there's a million different things that we now have to think about. I'd say every day we work on this show we're learning something new, which is just a really lovely, privileged position to be in because we get to do what we love and we get to learn about what we love every day. Maya: I feel like with immersive in particular, one thing we've learned is it's really important that it feels really collaborative with the performers because they're the ones at the end of the day who are having that specific connection and contact with the audience member. So they're going to be fully on their own and it's important that they feel empowered in what they're doing, that their ideas are heard and they feel 100% confident that they can bring themselves and their ideas to the table because they are going to be alone in a room with a bunch of people and they have to feel confident in that. Sebastian: We're just so excited to get these cast in as well because they're all at the top of their game, you know? From the last things we've done, we've really been able to get the best cast we can, and to work with them very closely. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive You had a successful Kickstart campaign for the show, which exceeded the goal. How was it seeing that kind of response for a show that’s from a new company and is an unknown entity for most backers? Sebastian: We were incredibly fortunate that people were willing to give and willing to support us. So really, we wanted to give something back. We spoke to a lot of immersive superfans over the last few months and something they felt was missing from the scene is that some of these people who spend loads of money and loads of time coming to see these shows, they don't really feel like they ever get much back or recognition for their support of the industry. So it was very important to us that the people who come and support, they get something back. So that was kind of the idea around the Kickstarter. Putting something like a picture of their loved one or their name in the set, something like that - we want to show that we're here to work with the community, with the fan base, with the scene, not just tell them 'This is the work. Go enjoy it'. We want to include them in our work. Maya Particularly because they are so included within the form. A lot of creating this work was us looking at what do we as superfans of this work love. What do we come out of and go 'That was my favourite experience'? Often it's the little easter eggs and the tiny little details that you come out with that nobody else has noticed. And so, especially with the set, it's so fun for someone to be going around and seeing how we've personalised these details. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive It feels like a comparison that could be drawn between yourselves and the work of Punchdrunk. Would you say they've been one of the inspirations behind your approach to immersive storytelling? Sebastian: I think that we definitely take a lot of inspiration from them. The company is made up of quite young people, so we're really one of the first generations to be able to grow up with immersive. Maya and I have been seeing Punchdrunk since we were quite young, we're big fans, but there are also a lot of other companies that we really respect and draw inspiration from - Third Rail, Parabolic, Immersive Everywhere - all these amazing companies that we've managed to experience. There's been a lot of talk and comparisons with Punchdrunk, but I would say in terms of the work we make there are quite a few differences. Their shows are very cinematic, almost. It's supposed to be like you're walking through a movie and I'd say the work we make is a bit more theatrical, a bit more focused on the live performance aspect of it. Maya: One thing we're really interested in is different mediums and how they blend together. Bacchanalia is going to be a mix between dance, physical theatre, music and puppetry. We want to see how these different things blend. And it works narratively within the play because of these two characters you meet who are polar opposites of each other. So we're exploring that artistically, but we're definitely interested in drawing, from other mediums and as well as inspirations like Punchdrunk and how they can blend together. The show is taking place within Crypt in Bethnal Green. It’s a very intimate and atmospheric venue. How much does the space inform the show and vice versa? Maya: I think completely. We wrote Bacchanalia as a bigger version of this show. So what people are going to see in a few weeks is about 30% of what we'd originally written. But what we did when we got the venue was go 'Okay, how does this show best work for this space?' Because it has to - there has to be that site-specific element within immersive theatre. Otherwise, it just feels like you're inserting something in and that's not fully breathable in that space. So we're definitely looking at the atmosphere as well as the rooms and how we can adapt different scenes to that. We definitely feel like we've then adapted what we'd written to build it for this space. Do you think there's a future version of this show that is 100% of what was originally written? Sebastian: Absolutely. 100%. We're not going to stop until it is as big as we want it. Photo: Sleepwalk Immersive Bacchanalia seems like it'll be a very intimate experience - with six performers to forty audience members. What do you anticipate that'll be like for the guests? Sebastian: One of the things we really love about immersive theatre is the human-to-human connection, that real intimate personal level of performance. I think this show, in our dream world, would be for one audience member and they would go in by themselves and all this crazy stuff would happen just for them, you know? Obviously, we can't do that, so we try to replicate that sense of intimacy in that sense of being very personal with the performer. And we're quite lucky that Crypt as a venue does really help that - low ceilings, all the corridors. It's a very intimate space. So we're really looking forward to getting the audience in and seeing how that works and seeing how far we can push that. I think we always want to be dealing with quite a small audience - just because we believe that that makes for a nicer viewing of our work. We really want to just make sure that people who do come have a good time and they don't get pushed around, it doesn't feel super crowded. Maya: I think that's definitely the best kind of experience for performers and audience members as well. People will really feel like there's a full connection for an hour and a half with these one or two characters; because even for the performers they've got a small group of people in front of them that they can remember and have this whole experience with. I think that's really, really important to us. The show is set in a 1960's version of Thebes. What was it about that period that spoke to you when devising this version of the show? Sebastian: I think we just read the play and I was like 'Okay, well, obviously this needs to be in the sixties'. I think there are a lot of things in Euripides's play that lends itself very much to the hippie culture around that time, and we're big fans of the music as well so it's great that we can use some of that. I think it was really just the natural place to set it. Our first version of the show was quite abstract as to when and where it was set. I think as we explored the show more we started unpacking these themes. It just made sense to set in the sixties. Maya: A lot of the play is about this divide in culture where you have two completely different sides who live in completely different ways and see freedom as something completely different. The sixties just immediately jumped out to us with that. I think even it shows that during the time it was a very popular play that was revived and put on, which I think speaks to how people within the Sixties kind of felt quite akin to that. Finally, how are you feeling about opening the show to the public in the coming weeks? Sebastian: We're just really, really excited to get audiences in and to show people what we've been doing and hopefully start building a little community organised around this style of immersive. Every decision we make is to enhance the audience experience. It all comes from a love for the audience really. Sleepwalk Immersive's Bacchanalia runs from 12th to 31st November in Bethnal Green. You can find out more about Sleepwalk Immersive via their website and Instagram .

Immersive Rumours received complimentary tickets to this experience and as such, are disclosing this information before our review. They have had no input in the below and all thoughts are our own. This review was originally written in August 2022. For more up-to-date reviews of Phantom Peak's current seasons, click here. Photo: Phantom Peak Sitting in the shadow of the former Harmsworth Quays printworks in Canada Water is Phantom Peak, a new immersive experience from the people behind TimeRun and Sherlock: The Game Is Now. Blending elements of escape rooms, immersive theatre and text-based role playing games, Phantom Peak is a different style of immersive event, and it stands on its own within the London immersive theatre scene. It's an experience that flips a lot of immersive theatre conventions on their head - from making your phone an essential element of the experience, to creating an environment in which the pace is entirely controlled by your own actions - not the world around you. If you're a fan of escape rooms, puzzles and trying to complete storylines and quests when at immersive events, Phantom Peak is a must-do experience. Photo: Phantom Peak We visited Phantom Peak on a weekday evening in August, just a few weeks after it first opened. Speaking to Nick Moran, one of the creators of the experience while there, he described the current state of Phantom Peak as it being in the first stage of a multi-year plan that will see the town expand, the storylines change and develop, and the time period in which it's set in progress and move forward. It will be an always growing experience than changes over time, getting bigger and better. When you first step foot into the town of Phantom Peak you're instructed by one of the towns-folk to log-on to JonAssist, the events companion website on your mobile phone. JonAssist operates like a text-based guide to the town - you'll be referring to it a lot as the website takes you through story trails and tracks your progress as you complete each trail. We were told that there's too many trails to complete in one night, but a healthy amount for those motivated to explore the town and uncover as much as possible is between 5-6 trails in an evening. Using the website is essential to your experience, so make sure you've come with a fully charged phone! Photo: Phantom Peak As you first walk in and around the set for Phantom Peak, it's easy to be taken aback by the level of detail. Everything in the world feels like it has a storytelling purpose. From the Videomatic machines that play archive recordings of the towns history and lore when you enter specific four-digit codes, to the robotic doctor that can diagnose patients based on their symptoms, or the Jonagraph devices that allow you to communicate with those living outside the confines of Phantom Peak, every single piece of technology within the steampunk town is there to move the story trails forward. One of the first things we were prompted to do by the JonAssist was find the Town Noticeboard and try to find out which of the town residents is best to speak to about trying to get to the bottom of a recent scandal that occurred at the annual Fiesta of Friendliness party. The noticeboard was full of different posters and notices, nearly all of which had valuable information for any one of the 16+ story trails currently on offer at Phantom Peak. Without giving away where this story trail goes, it quickly develops into a story of mistaken identities and we spent the next half hour trying to get to the bottom of it, following every twist and turn along the way. Photo: Phantom Peak One of Phantom Peaks greatest strengths is just how deep the storytelling goes. Nothing feels thrown together or there just for decoration, and basically every element of the experience - from the character interactions, to the posters and signs, to newspaper cuttings on tables and desks around town feed into the overall interconnected story of the town, which only gets more complex and engaging the more time you invest into it. Every resident we spoke to had their own views and opinions on the towns mysterious leader Jonas (either positive or negative), other residents, or their own position in the town. The place feels like a real, all be it heightened version of a town with people going about their day to day lives. The most radical difference between Phantom Peak and every other immersive experience currently running is how the show handles big story moments. The moment in time we as guests experience at Phantom Peak isn't the most dramatic or exciting in the towns history, it's just an average day. In typical immersive shows every character is going through their own personal storyline that unfolds over the course of the event whether you are there to witness it or not. Because of this, you could be at the bar or the toilet or just not in the right place at the right time and miss out of a key moment at a Punchdrunk or Secret Cinema show, and there's nothing you can do to stop that. Photo: Phantom Peak At Phantom Peak, that isn't possible because all of the key moments at Phantom Peak only happen when you interact with either one of the robots in the town, or talk to one of the residents about something specific. It's an incredibly refreshing thing to experience as it removes the sense of FOMO that you otherwise get in other immersive experiences. It's impossible to miss key moments because you're the one creating and initiating them. It's storytelling on a personal level, and it makes your visit feel unique and intimate - as if you're the only one witnessing it. During our visit, we completed 8 of the story trails on offer. When you complete one, the resident who wraps up that story thanks you for your help by rewarding you with a small tarot-style card.. Each is numbered and serves as a great memento to remember the experience by. If you're a completionist, it's also a great motivator to keep doing the trails and hopefully collect all the cards across multiple visits. Speaking to the creative team behind Phantom Peak at the end of our visit, they laid out the future plans for the experience - with expansions to the set currently being developed (with hopes to have them completed by October), the experience will have different 'seasons' where the storylines all jumps forward in time and the residents of the town progress with their lives. Residents who are running for Mayor in the current version of Phantom Peak may well win the election in the next season for example, and new quests will be added along with more characters. This should give Phantom Peak an extra level of enjoyment for repeat visitors who can see what the residents of the town have gone on to do as time has passed. Phantom Peak is an amazing experience for those who are fans of immersive theatre. It's been designed to allow guests to have an intimate, personalised experience where they are in control of the narrative and allows for a huge amount of fun to be had exploring everything the town has to offer. With future expansions to the experience planned, Phantom Peak is only going to build and improve upon an incredibly impressive start. We can't wait to revisit and uncover more of the mysteries the town has to offer. ★★★★½ ----- Phantom Peak is located in Canada Water, London. Tickets are available through phantompeak.com with prices starting from £34 per person.Check out our other reviews from Phantom Peak here . Thank you to the team at Phantom Peak for inviting us to experience the show.

Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre Immersive Rumours: Hi Clemence! Thanks for speaking with us today. Do you mind introducing yourself and telling us a bit about our Unwired Dance Theatre? Clemence Debaig: My name is Clemence Debaig. I’m a bit of a weird mix between a dance artist, a technologist, and I also have a background as a UX designer. That leads me to making work at the intersection of dance and technology with a strong focus on immersive and participatory experiences, which is what I do with  Unwired Dance Theatre . The company was created in 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, because I needed an umbrella for my work that was beyond me as a person. I do a lot of work with collaborators, and I wanted to celebrate that rather than having things under my own name. We work across all sorts of tech - from VR and motion capture to haptics and spatial audio - anything that goes bleep bloop will usually trigger our curiosity. A lot of the common themes in our work are around empathy, sense of control, and how those two things sometimes are related. We’re questioning how technology affects us as humans and as a way of connecting with each other. Sometimes we have this illusion that technology is everywhere and we can communicate very easily, but we tend to forget how to empathise and connect with other humans. IR: In 2020, when the company started, I imagine a lot of the work at that time was online? Clemence:  It was very remote in the work we were doing. Thankfully I have the technical skills to make work happen online - that was beyond just a Zoom performance. I’ve done quite a lot of work with telematics and having performers in different locations performing together. The first piece of work we did as Unwired as a company was called  Remote Intimacy , where I had a dancer in London and one in New York, and I made these capacitive, haptic jackets where the dancers could touch and feel each other in real time from a distance. I made a whole performance around that. That was taking place remotely for the audience, but also remotely for the performers. Remote Intimacy (2021) Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Your latest show, Where We Meet, is at The Cockpit in Marylebone later this month. Can you tell us a bit about the ideas behind that show and what audiences who are attending can expect? Clemence: Absolutely. The show started from this idea that we can never really know what's happening in someone's mind. Everyone's putting up a mask, and getting to the core of someone's inner world is very difficult. We wanted to use technology to give access to that and see if people could connect more easily when they had access to those inner thoughts.  For an audience, we like to say that we've invented telepathy. As people roam around the room, you have three dancers in the space, and the audience is invited to be part of the same space and wander around. It's very much a choose-your-own-adventure piece of work where you can decide to approach any of the three characters at any time. When you get close to them, you enter this sound bubble, and it gives you the feeling of entering their inner thoughts. As the work progresses, the dancers also have the ability to decide what they want to share through a device they're wearing on their arm. Through that, we then evolve the work to invite audiences into gentle moments of interaction, so that can be a little bit of gesture mirroring or meditation. We're not forcing anyone to dance! It's more about using your body as a human to interact, and that turns into this joyful, euphoric, communal experience. IR: Across 2024, Where We Met was staged in a few different spaces around London. How has the show changed over the past 12 months? Clemence:  I'm going to go back a little bit because the work started in 2021. The concept was born out of an event called the   Dansathon , which is a dance hackathon organised by   Sadler's Wells ,  Maison de la Danse de Lyon , and   Theatre de Liege  in Belgium. People with different backgrounds would come in, but it was really about the idea of technologists and dancers coming together. We won the Grand Prize of the event, which gave us a little grant to start. We wanted to figure out a couple of things, both what we could do from a tech point of view, but also where we wanted to go from a dramaturgy point of view, and what other stories we wanted to tell with this set-up. The original three-day prototype we had was very much to show the mechanics more than dramaturgy. We wanted to develop the dramaturgy through the exploration of the tech and what it is enabling us to do. We had several little R&Ds, then we got to present the first version at Maison de la Danse de Lyo in January 2023. That was only a two-character version of the show. We were using in-ear monitors to stream the audio from a central computer. We learnt a lot from that event and quickly realised that basically, we were never going to be able to tour the work if we carried on with that tech due to the cost of hiring equipment. In 2024, I injected a little bit of funding into this from our own savings, and we started to re-engineer the work completely. We really wanted to own as much of the tech as possible so we could work more easily in rehearsal spaces. We're now working with very cheap tech, like secondhand Android devices rather than really expensive Sennheiser in-ear monitor systems. Based on that, it really allowed us to go back into the studio and work more with the material and go much further. We started by reworking the two characters we had from a choreographic point of view, led by Livia Massarelli, our co-director and choreographer. The writing by Emma Nuttall and music by Christina Karpodini were already absolutely gorgeous, so we started from that, but choreographically we needed more time in the studio.  We had an R&D with   Rambert School of Dance , where we worked with an in-house psychologist, Kio Tomiyama, and we worked on the third character who focused a lot on perfectionism. Our third character is also male, so we needed to understand what the male perspective on perfectionism was too.  We first presented the three-character version of the show at Theatre Deli’s SHIFT+SPACE in June last year. We were particularly interested in revising our onboarding and outboarding of the work. Before that, we were onboarding people outside of the space, and it was very practical. It was very much like, ‘Do this, put this on your head.’. Now we've made it part of the work; it’s part of the audio, and there's a proper theatrical dramatic entrance with lights and all of that as you would expect. We also integrated a post-show section where we built a little decompression room where people can reflect after the show and come back to reality rather than being spat out of the space, and we're like, ‘Okay, go and take the tube again.’ Camden Fringe was the first time we had a seated observer version. So alongside the active participants, who can move around the space and get close to the dancers, the seated observers are given a tablet where they basically see a top-down view of the three dancers with circles. They can then virtually, with their fingers, move themselves around in the space. We were already very keen to explore and really just started scratching the surface of accessibility, especially from a mobility point of view. Could we offer an option for people who do not want or cannot stand in the space and move around the space for 30 minutes? After that, we did City Fringe  at Theatre Deli, Voila! Festival  at The Questors Theatre and the Digital Body Festival  that was in London as well, which is where we introduced a durational version of the work - which is an interesting one for festivals - especially in a more arts context where there might be other things happening in parallel and it's much harder to do small time slots. You need to have a lot of people coming through, so we’re experimenting with that, but we know it works.  We're always trying to figure out what's the best format/business model/conversation we can have with a potential venue or potential festival because touring very tech-enabled work is very difficult, so it’s a lot of learnings. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: I'd love to dig a little bit more into the three characters in the show. Do you mind telling us a bit about what's going on beneath the surface in all three of them, and the commonality between them? Clemence: All three characters have a big duality of what is affecting them and the journey they're on to cope with it. They’re all sharing what they're struggling with, but also they're sharing how they're coping with it. Faith is someone who is struggling with body image and has had issues with seeing herself in the mirror for years, looking at what genetics has brought in terms of the shape of her nose and the shape of her body. It's something she adores in her family, so she’d be looking at her Mum and adore her Mum’s nose but hate it on her. She has that kind of weird relationship with her body. In that journey of healing, she really takes the time to thank the body for allowing her to breathe and live to experience the world. A lot of the interactions that Faith offers to the audience are grounded meditation with a lot of visualisation exercises. There's one where you visualise yourself as a tree to retake ownership of the body, but not necessarily with an image of a body needing to have those properties. It's a way to experience the world around you and feel the air around your skin and so on. Then we have Becki… Becki is seemingly a social butterfly. Very much someone who's going to suffer from FOMO. She appears to be a party girl, but inside suffers a lot from loneliness and really struggles to connect deeply with people. To fight that, she keeps surrounding herself with a lot of people and being the life of the party but is struggling a lot with a sense of loneliness, even when surrounded by others. The interactions she offers are about reconnecting with others and then taking time to really see each other. Finally, we have Adam, who is kind of an executive machine. He comes from a family environment that expects a lot from him and for things to be done a certain way. He’s very much in this work-sleep-work-sleep pattern of trying to be the best and pushing boundaries but really is working towards letting go. There's a lot of interactions with Adam that are brushing off shoulders, shedding all that stress and anxiety, and then relearning to be present. Even though those descriptions sound dark and intense, a lot of the characters are really on a journey of taking those struggles and coping, turning them into a positive outcome. The whole experience is actually really joyful and looks at how those challenges are just the vulnerabilities that are going to help us connect and turning it into a big celebration of each other. IR: What have the audience reactions to the work been like in the previous outings of the show? I can imagine these topics being quite close to home for a lot of people. Clemence:  People are usually really touched in a joyful way, which sounds like a bit of a weird description, but people leave the space saying that they almost feel a bit hopeful for humanity and excited to then connect. We had people telling us that they were then on the tube afterwards and started talking to strangers. We had people coming back as well, wanting to do the next show straight away because they’d related so much to one of the characters; they realised they hadn't given enough attention to the others, so they wanted to then spend a bit more time there. People who have resonated a lot with one specific character on a personal level say, ‘This is literally my story,’ but also say that while the other two might not be exactly what they're going through, they still empathised with them because they might know someone who is similar. There are always those points of connection.  A lot of the time people just stay afterwards to talk to the people who are in the room, which I think is quite beautiful. There's a lot of strangers in the space, and they're like, ‘I've done this interaction with you. I've been waving my hand in front of your face, so let's have a quick chat.’ It's quite nice. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: As you mentioned, the addition of the seated observer tickets is a recent change. Would you say that the audience takeaways from the experience are the same regardless of which ticket type you get or is it going to be a different experience if you were to go from the seated observer role over the active participant role? Clemence:  As a seated observer, you have a view on everything that's happening on stage. Sometimes you can see the three dancers dancing at the same time, which you might not see once you're in the action, so it's a different experience. We've had people be a bit nervous about participating and select seated observer first, and then once they see how much fun everyone is having, they’re like, ‘Oh, I wish I was in there,’ and then come back to be an active participant.  While the active participants might feel like they’ve got people observing them because they’ve got an audience, that's not what happens in reality because, thanks to our interactive projections, you're always in the dark. As you get closer to the dancers, the light comes into the dancer. You are always kept in the dark, and you're never stepping in the spotlight. As an active participant, you never become the point of attention for people who are observing. That's a nice way of protecting that level of intimacy and making sure that no one feels like they’ve become the show. IR: That actually segues quite nicely into what I was about to ask, which is about the technology that is used in the show. Originally the lighting was very different and the audience would be more in the spotlight, right? Clemence:  Our original intention was to surround the group with the light. We have this squiggly line that's being projected onto the floor, and we wanted it to represent that level of intimacy and embracing people through the visuals. We realised that people, as soon as they noticed they were in the light, then thought they were doing something wrong. They thought they were getting too close to the dancers, and there was this feeling of, ‘Oh no, dancer, I'm not getting in the way. I'm not the show.’ So people were not getting close enough, and they were not hearing the monologues. There's a lot of happy mistakes in the work, which I love. We were in a space that was a bit too small, and our projections were not as big as usual because we didn't have the ceiling height to get an image big enough. We ended up having that line landing between the audience and the performer and suddenly it worked so much better. We realised, talking to the audience afterwards, that for them, it was very natural that it becomes this flexible boundary.  The second happy mistake, we were in a space that was too small, but originally we had the performers really quite far from each other. You had to exit one thought and then enter the other one. When we were in that space that was too small, we had to put those sound zones a little bit closer to each other with a little bit of overlap. That's the thing that everyone absolutely adores - being able to stand in the middle of two characters. Because the sound is directional, you can hear one character in one ear and another character in another ear. I can see them from a distance when I'm managing the show; people are just standing in the middle and then listening to two monologues. There's something quite magical about that. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Do you mind telling us a bit more about how audiences are tracked as they move around the space and how that impacts what they hear? Clemence:  So basically, we’re using a very similar system to what a VR system would use. We have a virtual scene with sound zones. Imagine in a game, let's say there's a little radio playing, and then you're hearing it very faintly from a distance, but as you approach, it gets louder. We can actually track that data; we can track people in that space as every audience member is wearing a tracker on their head, and we're feeding that back into the central system and into a virtual scene that goes back out to the phones hidden into the pouches audiences wear around their neck. It's like you are virtually moving into that scene and getting closer to those positions. So we're leveraging a lot of the game engine and XR technologies. The whole product is running in Unity, and everything is kept in real time through this massive spaghetti of network messages, pretty much. As well as affecting the audio, it also affects the lighting and projection. That data is going to be grabbed as it comes through the stage management system so that if you are getting closer to a dancer, the light will be affected. The dancers are also using phones - that's the device they have on their arms - and their decision is coming back to the stage management system and being broadcast to all the other devices. If they make a change, then everyone is affected in real time. [Read more about the technology used in Where We Meet here .] IR: What do you think the main takeaway is that you would want audiences to have from the show? Clemence:  I want them to remember that connecting with others is a proactive kind of activity. We're going to connect more through vulnerabilities than through whatever superstar mask we're putting on and through pretending that we are pretty awesome. Basically the opposite of what we're doing on social media.  I want them to feel a bit hopeful about humanity and others. I think we are living in a complex, international, media-infused world at the moment, and having this little bubble of time where we can reconnect with others and have a bit of faith in reconnecting with other humans and the beauty of our differences. I know it sounds a bit cheesy when I describe it this way, but this is really what we're trying to do. Photo: Unwired Dance Theatre IR: Finally, what does the future hold for both Where We Meet, and Unwired Dance Theatre? Clemence:  We just got a bit of Arts Council funding, which has never happened before. The phase of the project is dedicated to accessibility. Due to the format of the show, there are a lot of traditional theatre guidelines that just don't apply. We want to really take the next six months as a big R&D to figure out how we do accessibility right for new immersive and XR formats.  We’re working with several accessibility consultants and also involving disabled participants in co-creation sessions where we'll be setting up the show and then doing some rapid prototyping in the space. I'm quite excited to maybe explore, I don't know, AR glasses for live captioning, which we've been talking to our Deaf consultant about the other day. Beyond just the minimum of sharing the words, how do you share the feeling of the beautiful composition, maybe through haptic vests? There's a lot of additional visuals we can imagine. That's going to be really interesting. As part of that, we also want to collect our findings and then publish a white paper at the end of the process so we can expand this to the wider community. To give you a quick example, we were trying to follow a relaxed performance format just to cater to people who might have sensorial needs. In our work, the darkness is what protects the audience, so we had put the lights a little bit up - as per traditional theatre approach for relaxed performances - and then suddenly everyone was super self-conscious and everyone hated it. It was just weird. Everyone was like, ‘I'm not going to move,’ and then no one was participating. We were like, ‘OK, we can't just take those guidelines. We're going to have to reinvent those a little bit and then see how it works’.  The Cockpit is our first milestone of research. We're going to have one performance that’ll be fully BSL interpreted. Because it's a choose-your-own-adventure, we're going to have one BSL interpreter per dancer so the participants can really switch around and then decide which character they want to engage with. This has already been really interesting because the interpreters need to sign in 360. They're in close proximity with the dancers, so suddenly the BSL best practices don’t work, and we have to go into the rehearsal space and try to figure this out together because it’s all new.  We’re also inviting participants into the space to then have a discussion with them afterwards to see if they've experienced it in a certain way and what are the new modalities we can imagine, and that will lead to a bit more prototyping. We have a partnership with the University of Kent in Chatham and then PROTO in Gateshead, who will host our upcoming workshops and sessions, so that's quite exciting. That's what we’ll be embarking on for the next few months. Photos: Unwired Dance Theatre Where We Meet runs at The Cockpit in Marylebone from 28th February to 2nd March 2025. Tickets are priced at £21.60 for active participants and £16.45 for seated observers. Accessibility information for Where We Meet is available here . To find out more, and book tickets visit thecockpit.org.uk

The Shop for Mortals and Fools, a site-responsive and immersive production from multidisciplinary artist Vinicius Salles, is set to open its door next month at Stanley Arts in South London. Audiences will be immersed in a carefully designed world, where every corner of the shop holds a fragment of a larger story. Old relics, unique finds, hidden trinkets, and heirlooms await discovery – treasures that whisper forgotten stories and hold secrets to be unearthed. Photo: Stanley Arts/Vinicius Salles From physical performance to detailed set design, the production creates a multisensory journey that invites participants to question their perceptions of reality, memory, and the human condition. Audiences of up to 10 people per performance are invited to explore the shop's collection, in which every object has a tale to tell. One audience member may unlock a hidden mystery by participating in a game woven into the experience, with the winner getting the chance to play a special scene, reveal the mystery, and if successful, receive a gift from the gods to take home. The production reimagines The Bacchae by Euripides, weaving an original narrative that explores power, revenge, and the fragility of the human spirit. Salles’ vision invites audiences to delve into a narrative as captivating as it is deeply human, where ancient myths collide with contemporary themes. As an artist known for his interdisciplinary approach and immersive storytelling, Vinicius Salles continues to push the boundaries of theatre and performance. Drawing from a 35-year career collaborating with companies such as Punchdrunk , Gecko , and Jasmin Vardimon Company , Salles combines his expertise in physical theatre, narrative, and multimedia to create unique experiences. With The Shop for Mortals and Fools, he explores the power of environment and interactivity, crafting a performance that is as much an exploration as it is an experience. Blurring the boundaries of immersion, the experience will also feature an exhibition of artworks by artists such as Anita Wadsworth, Alberto Pavan, Leah German, and Daisy Young, with these works available for purchase. The Shop for Mortals and Fools runs at Stanley Arts in South Norwood from 14th February to 1st March 2025. Tickets are priced at £20.00, with VIP tickets available for shows on the 28th February and 1st March. To find out more and book tickets, visit stanleyarts.org

Hush Collective's ethereal performances offer up an alternative way to engage with live music for a blindfolded audience in the dark. Photo: Ian Olsson Seeing live music in London is an experience often made up of small annoyances. Your sightline of the stage will be interrupted by phones being raised into the air. People will constantly squeeze past you, trying to find their friends or get to the bar. The music may be drowned out by people talking nearby. It's a dice roll every time you go to a gig, and the behaviour of the audience around you can have a big impact, ultimately distracting you from what's on stage and pulling you out of the experience. We accept all of this to connect with music in a live environment. There is, however, an alternative where none of that are an issue... In The Dark by Hush Collective is a tightly controlled 'immersive' experience that's been designed to ensure there are no barriers or distractions between the audience and what's most important - the music. Performed in dimly-lit venues, with the audience wearing sleep masks throughout, anything that could pull you out of the experience has been removed, and everything else - from what you're going to hear to who exactly is performing - remains a secret until the performance. Photo: Ian Olsson During our visit, a collection of 11 tracks was performed by the 26-person-strong Hush Collective, who roam the venue barefoot during the performance at St. Bartholomew the Great near Farringdon . Bookended by Sigur Rós' Festival, every song performed had an ethereal, other-worldly feeling. Lesser-known songs from the likes of Colplay and Mumford and Sons sit alongside hauntingly beautiful renditions of songs by Mree, Garth Stevenson and Ane Brun to create the kind of soundscape fitting for within the walls of the 900-year-old building. Over the course of the 60-minute performance, it gently moves you into a zen-like meditative state, with no external stimuli besides the music to hold your attention. With no central stage for the members of Hush Collective to be situated on, the performance takes place with the musicians and vocalists spread around the venue, creating an analogue 360° listening experience. Depending on where in the room you're sitting, you'll likely pick up on different details, with some voices and instruments standing out from the rest as they all echo through the space. The sound of certain instrumentals will become louder as the performers approach you, then recede into the background as they pass by. Everyone's experience of the performance will differ, purely based on where they're seated. Photo: Ian Olsson Being blindfolded for the duration allows your other senses to become heightened. Those seated on the aisles likely picked up on the movement of air as the performers walked up and down, the rustling of coats and squeak of chairs was more pronounced, and the familiar smell of the building became more noticeable as the evening progressed. We're capable of picking up on all of these things in our day-to-day lives, but how often are we allowed to sit and notice them without distraction? It's an eerily beautiful and emotional experience for those who attend. In The Dark is unlike any performance we've ever attended, and if it encourages people to focus on the music when at gigs in the future without distracting those around them, it'll have changed live music for the better. We'll certainly be keeping our phones in our pockets going forward... Photos: Ian Olsson ★★★★ In The Dark is playing at St Bartholomew the Great near Farringdon and Trinity Buoy Wharf near Canning Town on various dates across March 2025. Tickets are priced from £35. To find out more visit in-the-dark.com

You Me Bum Bum Train, The legendary immersive theatre show, returned to London's west end in November after an eight-year absence Photo: Kirk Newmann Update: This article has been amended to reflect the new, extended closing date of the ballot, which is now 9th February 2025. You Me Bum Bum Train (YMBBT), the legendary, boundary-pushing immersive show which returned to London's West End in November 2024, has opened its ticket ballot for 2025 shows. The show was founded by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd. You Me Bum Bum Train was previously named as one of The Times' 25 best plays of the century, won the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at The Evening Standard Awards in 2010, was nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre at the Olivier Awards in 2013 and was the Barbican's fastest ever selling show. The show is a surreal, exhilarating, euphoric and mind-bending participatory experience that sends its audience, or ‘Passengers’, through a dream-like carousel of scenes, fantasies, and, in some cases, life-altering experiences. Loved by hundreds of thousands, yet shrouded in near-total secrecy, since 2004, YMBBT   has redefined what it means to be part of an audience. For the last show in 2015, there were over 120,000 people applying for tickets in the first minute of release. Photo: Kirk Newmann The show’s impact depends largely on Passengers having no idea what they are about to experience so they react authentically. Secrecy is therefore an integral aspect of You Me Bum Bum Train, with no details about the production released whatsoever. This ensures the show is experienced at its best, with the proven power to change lives and perspectives. All passengers sign NDAs, which prevents them from sharing what they have experienced. The ballot will close on 9th February at midnight .  Each ballot entry will allow passengers to book a maximum of two tickets which are priced at £99.99 + booking fee. Successful participants will receive an email or SMS from 11th February with a link to purchase their tickets. There is a concessionary ballot ticket price for those on job seeker’s allowance. Photo: Kirk Newmann In addition to experiencing the show as a Passenger, You Me Bum Bum Train relies on a community of volunteers who come together and contribute their time, resources and skills to make a special, meaningful experience for audience members. Without this community, the project would not be affordable and would simply not exist. YMBBT offers free training and certification across production, stage management and performance. Many of the volunteers have gained newfound confidence and skills, and more come on board with each show, many of them ex-passengers who want to contribute to the next show themselves. The ticket ballot for You Me Bum Bum Train is open now via bumbumtrain.com , and closes at midnight on 9th February. Successful applicants will be informed from the 11th February.

Photo: DARKFIELD Acclaimed immersive theatre producers DARKFIELD will take up residency in Shoreditch Town Hall basement The Ditch this April, bringing their latest critically acclaimed experience ARCADE to the venue alongside three additional experiences. ARCADE first premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 and later enjoyed a sell-out run at BFI London Film Festival. For the first time, DARKFIELD will present one of their experiences outside their trademark shipping container, with ARCADE transposed into the untouched basement of iconic Grade II listed Shoreditch Town Hall. Photo: Kate Edwards Using the nostalgic 8-bit aesthetic of 1980’s video games, ARCADE’s interactive narrative explores the evolving relationship between players and avatars. Over 30 minutes, audiences will choose their own path through the story whilst experiencing DARKFIELD’s signature 360-degree binaural sound and sensory effects for a fully immersive experience.  Each at their own individual arcade machine, players will guide their avatar through a world ravaged by endless war: you can choose a side, win or lose the war, search for a peaceful route, or join a cult promising a better version of reality. Players will ask themselves difficult questions, as they navigate a world where some will win and others will lose. No two journeys through the experience will be the same. Photos: Kate Edwards As part of the residency, audiences can expect a purpose-built bar, and also experience a trio of additional shows - DOUBLE, VISITORS and ETERNAL - all of which were originally part of the online-only DARKFIELD Radio Season One in 2020, and are being presented as physical installations for the first time. Speaking on their upcoming residency, DARKFIELD said: We are so excited to be coming to Shoreditch Town Hall for a residency this April, especially bringing ARCADE - our most ambitious show to date - into such a unique space as The Ditch. This will be the first time that we have transposed one of our shipping container shows into a new environment and it just feels like the perfect fit. We can’t wait to see DARKFIELD AT THE DITCH fully realised and really hope our audiences enjoy exploring the world they are immersed in. Ellie Browning, Head of Cultural Programme at Shoreditch Town Hall, commented: Our atmospheric basement space The Ditch is perfect for populating with pioneering immersive experiences, and so we are thrilled to host a DARKFIELD takeover this Spring. Their seriously clever use of tech, coupled with interactive narratives transports players to other worlds and promises experiences that our audiences won't forget. DARKFIELD at The Ditch runs at Shoreditch Town Hall from 1st April to 12th April 2025. Tickets to ARCADE are priced from £14.00, with DOUBLES, VISITORS and ETERNALS all priced at £8.00, or £6.00 when booked alongside ARCADE. For more information, and to book visit shoreditchtownhall.com