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Mark Hopkins, Co-Artistic Director of Calgary’s Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, reflects on the company’s attempts to create an immersive theatre production, Gargantuan, focused on individual and collective complicity in existential global challenges like climate change, social and economic inequities, resource depletion, etc. The article outlines Gargantuan’s development from 2015 to 2016, and the many difficulties that Swallow-a-Bicycle encountered in creating immersive theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single Thread Theatre Company continues to exploring how best to create participatory, site-specific theatre. This article briefly summarizes the evolution of their process since their inception fifteen years ago, using second person singular narrative to bookend the examination of their current artistic trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julie Tepperman and Mitchell Cushman, co-creators, playwrights, and directors of Brantwood, write about the process of creating the largest site-specific immersive musical in Canada. Originally commissioned by Associate Dean Michael Rubinoff and Sheridan College’s Musical Theatre Program, Brantwood was designed for and performed in a 90-year-old school in Oakville, Ontario that had been closed down due to low enrolment. The piece consisted of 40 original songs (composed by Anika Johnson, Britta Johnson, and Bram Gielen) imbedded in 11 one-hour scripted storylines, each set during a different decade in the history of this imaginary high school. The 15 hours of total material unfolded simultaneously over the course of each three-hour performance, and the audience had free rein to roam everywhere in the building and to follow whichever character they chose in the 42 person cast. Julie and Mitchell write about the challenges of creating theatre on such a large scale, and immersing the audience in an environment that gives them freedom to roam and explore, and engage with the show in both direct and indirect ways, and to push the boundaries of intimacy between performer and audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘The Making of Nightmare Dream’ reflects on the process of creating and producing a site-specific, immersive theatre experience within Toronto’s Historic Campbell House. In this conversation, director/creator Mumbi Tindyebwa and playwright Motion reflect on the origins of their collaboration, and key aspects of their immersive work—from concept to page to production. Before the creation of Nightmare Dream, the two theatre artists met while participants in artist development programs at Obsidian Theatre Company in Toronto. Discovering a mutual interest in multi-disciplinary arts, they set out to create an inter-disciplinary theatre production to be presented at Summerworks, which emerged into an exploration of the African’s experience with “the other.” Through this process, they explored themes such as immigration, Diaspora history, identity, race, colonialism, cultural legacy and reinvention, intergenerational conflicts, and the complex stories where these intersect. The site-specific nature of Nightmare Dream grew out of the concept of creating a story to counter the historical use of space within the Campbell House—one of the oldest remaining Upper Canada Georgian-era homes in Toronto. Inspired by an actual dream, the work developed into a series of haunting installations, which inhabited the whole house, requiring the audience to move with the narrative. From the workshop, rehearsal and production phases, the authors revisit the collaborative process of creating with a team to achieve the immersive experience. They discuss the functionality of sound, costume, performance, movement, and text, and the challenges of creating, performance, and producing within an existing space. They have continued to collaborate and develop new immersive theatre projects, including Motherland and Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theatre Yes is award-winning boutique theatre company that responds to national and international cultural conversations with programming that invites audiences to become a vital part of each performance. Artistic Producer Heather Inglis tells the story of the company’s latest immersive, pan-Canadian work Anxiety from inception to completion. A meditation on the creative process and how big-picture questions about our times impact how we engage with the world and make theatre. The article examines the groundbreaking creation methods used to facilitate a national collaboration between six small-scale experimental theatre companies from across Canada to create a found-space, immersive theatre production in Edmonton in 2016. In the context of pandemics of anxiety, the supremacy digital media and our increasing need for real-time connectivity, Theatre Yes’s Anxiety provided paradigm-shifting response to theatre creation, modelling the new possibilities for collaboartion, audience interactivity, and immersion in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal account of the development of the place-based wilderness theatre aesthetic of The Only Animal, by artistic director, Kendra Fanconi. Based on the far west coast of Canada, in a ferry-isolated community of ten thousand in a town of three hundred, The Only Animal makes immersive, elemental theatre that seeks to connect the community to local treasures, like the Mt Elphinstone forest that is being incrementally logged. This driving effort to preserve the natural world extends to urban wilds in Vancouver, and also across to threatened wilderness across the country. The article contains an account of the 2016 production of Tinkers, based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel by Paul Harding, and a new theatrical experiment that will encompass the next cycle, Year of the typewriter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will look at the immersive work that I’ve collaborated on, and attempt to articulate how sound plays into the construction and mechanics of each piece. I want to share the notions that I brought into each process, how they played out and fed into the next project, and the ways that sound supports and becomes integral to immersive, site-specific work. The two pieces that I will refer to most, Podplays and Landline, are locative works set in the city space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three Zuppa Theatre Co. collaborators consider the creation of the company’s recent work, The Archive of Missing Things. They discuss the creative process, the tenuous relationship between intention and accident, and the relationship of the performance to a previous work, Pop-Up Love Party. The discussion hinges on the notion of ‘ambient drama,’ which situates the performance event discreetly within an environment, functioning as it regularly does, in an attempt to facilitate interaction between the theatrical and the ordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]