♪♪ Wright: When we started making the most work, we were just bored of sitting in the theater, watching boring things happen and be ignored for a long time.

It's far more exciting to feel like you're having a live experience.

♪♪ Nauta: We just started working without knowing that this would become a whole movement what you're seeing today.

♪♪ You can open up people's minds, start a conversation, plant a seed, a new idea.

♪♪ Eccles: How do you create works that are kind of uniquely scaled to this place, that create a kind of experience that really couldn't have anywhere else?

♪♪ Dockery: It's exciting to have it all swirling around you.

You're not just sitting in one direction, looking in one direction.

You're being swept along by a current in a theatrical river.

♪♪ Wright: Suddenly, the walls fall down and you can create whole new rules for yourselves, and that's really quite thrilling as an artist.

And it's exciting when you go and see a piece of work and go, "Oh, you're allowed to do that?"

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Gordijn: Drift is a collective, and we create performative artworks that basically question the balance between nature, humanity, and technology.

♪♪ Drift, it's a studio whereby we work on the relationship between nature and technology.

We create our own technologies to immerse our audiences in sculptures that reconnect us back to our natural environments.

♪♪ I think there is a reason that we don't really respond to climate change.

We built environments that are still and we don't have to react to.

We want to show how it feels like if your environment is changing.

We are going into a phase of change.

We all know it, and we need to get used to it.

And at what moment does this change feel comfortable, and at what moment it starts to feel invasive?

So we are kind of trying to get ready for this change and trying to see how the changing environment will influence us.

♪♪ But when you enter an exhibition, you come into a dark space, and the first work is called Fragile Future, which is the same name as the title of the whole exhibition, where you see real dandelions that are glued on LED lights by our team and handpicked in the Netherlands.

And these dandelions, they glow and they are connected to an electrical circuit, and the circuit is growing through the space.

And it shows a connection between nature and technology, where two to help each other instead of fight each other.

♪♪ I want people to walk away with a feeling of reconnection to the physical world, the value of the tangible, just the world that's made around us.

♪♪ So the next room you enter is called "Coded Coincidence."

It's an installation whereby we filled hundreds of seeds with an LED light that fly through the space, controlled by fans that we -- that we steer with a computer program to create vortexes of light moving around through the space.

♪♪ It's based on the movements of elm seeds that we see in the fall running through Amsterdam, and it has always been a big inspiration source of us, about how reproductive organs of nature, how they move and try to place and find new spots to create life.

♪♪ For us, a work has only succeeded if we feel it time after time after time we come in.

It shouldn't just be a one-moment thing and that you think, "Ah, I got it."

Every time, you have to get that same feeling again.

So this is how we -- how we work.

It needs to give us the right feeling and the feeling that we want also to give other people.

♪♪ You turn another corner and you enter in the big space which shows the artwork "Ego," and "Ego" is a massive woven block, and this block is a symbol of the human mind.

The human mind is very control freak, I would say.

That's why we made it into a square.

It's very clear.

You know exactly what you get.

But the rigid block can become completely fluid.

It can fall on the ground.

It can stretch out.

♪♪ For us, the block is the symbol of the human construct, and we believe that a human construct needs to adapt and change.

And this is what we try to show, how rigid structures can become fluid.

♪♪ ♪♪ The last space that you enter is the Mint court, which is the massive space here in the sheds.

And there you come in and you see five massive blocks of concrete floating in midair.

♪♪ They perform a choreography which is sometimes free, and sometimes you see the blocks gather and then coming down.

And it's very fascinating what happens, because people in a space, they feel sucked into what's happening.

It's like two different species coming together.

♪♪ It's a very strange work.

We're animating these blocks in a way that they become alive.

So people start laying underneath the piece, relating to it, and it gives a sense of the lifeless coming -- coming into existence and discovering its purpose within our world.

♪♪ It's taps into a very ancient feeling of gathering, of belonging, of finding connection.

But at the same time, those blocks of concrete are the symbol of our world.

This is the -- the element that we built our world of.

And we need to learn to build a world that can change, that can adapt.

And we're proposing a slight change here and see if people feel comfortable with it.

♪♪ There's nothing out there that is similar.

It's different than taking something from the shelf and -- or, you know, beaming a projection.

It's basically buying a Bimmer, you make an animation, great, but what does it bring, you know?

Instead of putting people within the digital world, we want to pull them out and bring them back into the real world, you know, and make them understand the value of the world we live in.

♪♪ But what I hope people feel when they walk away from this exhibit is that they feel they were in a place where they felt connected with themselves and that they got space to think, to feel, and to actually think about their own role in this world and how they want to feel, how they want to live, and not just accept the reality that is built around us, but actually realize that you have an impact.

It's about us starting to build a new environment.

I want people to feel empowered that they are part of this future and they can play a role in this.

♪♪ ♪♪ Weems: I thought that we were involved in such a complicated time that I wanted it to be a place of, uh -- of deep consideration and reflection.

♪♪ ♪♪ Eccles: Carrie Mae Weems has been an artist for 35 years at least.

She's always been there, but she's never made a work on this scale.

And what's really exciting about this installation, entitled "The Shape of Things," is that suddenly, Carrie Mae Weems, her work suddenly comes to us on a scale, with an immersion, with a power that probably we've never seen before or experienced before.

♪♪ -I wanted the audience to have a journey From the moment you walk in, the moment you walk through the door, you are completely engaged with your senses with what you hear, what you see, even what you smell, actually, are a part of this exhibition.

♪♪ -Carrie Mae Weems has always been an image maker, and probably know most of her work through her photography.

And she makes you look at an image, and she normally overlays text onto the image.

Here we have the moving image, both found footage and new performances, and suddenly, the whole thing gets scaled up.

♪♪ -There are spaces in the exhibition for you to really sit, to sit and be with yourself while you are immersed in sound.

It's called "Life's Excerpts."

Surrounds the space -- the sound surround in the space.

Man: But for reasons unknown, I rejected my own hunch.

I deceived myself by refusing to believe that this was possible.

Eccles: What we have here is a series of installations at different temperatures, different speeds, film projections, light pieces, to then quite moving memorials for those who have died through violence.

And you go through a kind of sequence of -- of emotions from, you know, real joy in some places to real horror in others.

♪♪ Weems: There's a really beautiful sitting space, contemplative place space called the Blues Corner.

We're all blue, all blue.

A place to sit and to reflect and to think about life in general.

♪♪ The heart of the installation, it's a cyclorama that has a series of projections inside of it.

I think it's a six-part piece that's about 30 minutes long that looks very specifically at sort of contemporary conditions in America, but told from a very poetic point of view.

Woman: -I'm sorry, I'm gonna ramble, and there's a man -- African American, he has a bicycle helmet.

He's recording me and threatening me and my dog.

♪♪ Eccles: She has this incredible voice that, within a film, captivates you.

But then suddenly, you realize that she's talking to you -- that the questions she's asking are questions for the viewer.

And so what I think is kind of really powerful here is not only the scale of the work, but the fact that the visitor, the viewer, is also implicated somehow in the work.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

♪♪ ♪♪ Often, when we think about making artworks, we think about material.

Is it paint, is it bronze?

The question at the Park Avenue Armory has often been, "What about sound?

What about light?

What about walking?

Running?

What about how the floor is made?"

Everything you do here suddenly multiplies up.

That tends to push you into a kind of more immersive type of art, as we see here today with Carrie Mae Weems.

Woman: They were no strangers to some.

Time and time again, the man is rejected, the woman is to die.

The man is killed.

The body lay in the old room, uncovered and exposed.

Weems: A friend of mine, Carl Hancock, who actually also contributes to some of the text in the film series, says "Question everything.

Question democracy.

Who is curious?

Who is conscious?

Where are you?

Where are you now?

What do we change?

Where is our congress?

What do we care about?

What is meaningful to us now?"

♪♪ Eccles: I hope with this installation -- and I feel it myself -- that some of the things that have taken a certainty are a little less certain when they go out.

♪♪ Weems: Knowing that America is shifting from white to black then varying shades of brown, is this extraordinary, extraordinary demographic shift in this country that will have ramifications for centuries to come.

It is shaping, reshaping our world.

And how we respond, then, to this moment is absolutely critical and crucial to our daily lives, our cultural life, our political life, our social lives and our personal lives.

And so that is the thing that I want my audience to leave with.

Who are we now?

What do we change?

What do we want?

What do we care about?

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Wright: So Tammany Hall is what I would call a narrative-led immersive theater experience that is focused on the mayoral election in New York on the 5th of November, 1929.

So it invites an audience into that election process, and it's in a real time, one hour 30 minutes, and the audience spend in this building, which is 15 Vandam Street, Soho Playhouse, which is where a lot of those events took place.

All right.

All right.

Welcome to Election Night New York, 1929.

Welcome to Tammany Hall.

Let's roll.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

The idea of telling this historic narrative in the actual space that it happened in and inviting an audience into that space felt like quite a unique alchemy, which for the most part, in immersive work, you don't get to lean on.

You're always trying to create a fakery in some way.

Whereas here one of those fakeries is removed because the building is as the building was.

If you need anything tonight, you let me know.

Man: Will do.

Alright.

It's a pleasure to have all three of you here.

Now, do we know who we're voting for tonight?

Woman: No.

Undecided.

Undecided.

I mean, that's -- What about you?

Dockery: The show begins with a debate between my character, Mayor Walker, and Fiorello LaGuardia, who will be the mayor of New York someday but is not now.

He's just the Republican candidate.

So we've had a debate, and then I take people away from that debate.

I scoop up some audience members, which is always a fun moment for me because I know that I'm now going to spend a good chunk of the show intimately with these people.

Hey, grab that vest.

Oh, I think it's well placed, Betty.

Very well placed indeed.

Front page in tomorrow's paper is going to be with a "Walker walks all over LaGuardia.

Wright: For me, those things are the most interesting when every track is unique.

So we're not on a loop.

We're not on a series of tracks where anything repeats, or on a carousel, where the audience will pass through the same scene, but at different times across the evening.

Nothing repeats.

It has to be about story and it has to be about characters.

So what's gorgeous about that is it turns into a medium which very much relies on actors.

It becomes a very actor-led medium, which is brilliant.

Picking up the women, charging them for no reason, inflating the bail, and then keeping a difference?

Ryan: I play Legs Diamond in Tammany Hall.

Legs is based on a true person that lived here in the United States.

He was a gangster.

The most challenging part of this role has to be, honestly, is being believable as myself, Nathaniel, in this time period.

♪♪ Dockery: The audience is a character -- is, in fact, many characters because there's many different audience members, and so you can't really know what the show is in many ways.

You can't know what the timing is of the scenes as they weave in and out of each other.

You can't know how it is to deal with, you know, extemporaneous comments from an audience member until you actually have an audience member in front of you.

-Can you hand me that suit there, please?

I was just saying that I need to wear -- be wearing the perfect suit so that when I walk out there.

You look like $1,000,000.

I look like $1,000,000.

Okay.

Ryan: Well, having done improv, I'm -- I'm okay with people just throwing things in out of nowhere.

What makes this process so unique for me is just being able to remain truthful in the moment when someone throws something offhand out of out of nowhere.

Can you tell we're supporting Walker, right?

It's a little subtle.

Woman: A little, yeah.

Some context cues, right?

What happens is it's a story about corruption and about trust and about kinship and the relationship between a community and its governance.

And that's the kind of plot of what's going on in 1929.

I'm the former mayor of New York, and I feel within the world of this show, I'm up for reelection.

I'm trying to make everybody have a good time.

And as there is a sort of a rising flood of revelations of corruption and misdoings and misdeeds, I am striving ever more to maintain a happy and festive demeanor, creating, I think, an interesting sort of dynamic for the audience member where they have to decide do they ultimately want to be with and vote for somebody who they want to hang out with and who just wants to have a good time?

Or do they want to perhaps stick with their principles and vote for somebody who has sort of righteous ideas about what they want to do for New York City?

♪ And I wondered if you'll love me then ♪ ♪ Dear, just as you do today ♪ ♪ Will you love me in December ♪ ♪ As you do in May ♪ One of the most important things is to think of it as a piece of new writing and a piece of work, which is to do with our here and now.

I think telling a purely historic story or a museum piece is pointless.

There's no reasonable interest to do that whatsoever.

Especially work which audience get to sit actively within and have an opinion and an attitude within, which feeds into the overall atmosphere of the show and the story.

Because we should all have access to the inner workings, to the truth, you know what I mean?

Thank you very much.

Hey.

Hopefully what it's about for a 2021 audience is for them to think about trust and about that relationship between an honest set of governance -- an honest idea about governance, and an honest idea of our relationship between us as a community and the way our community is run and how we elect and consider the way our community is organized.

What do we think?

What do we think?

Did you like it?

Yes.

Do you hear that applause?

You know what?

We're putting it in the show tomorrow!

No, I -- Dockery: Some people just are really on my side, no matter what is revealed.

They're just full on about Jimmy Walker, and I'm having a good time with him.

Conversely, there is audience members who really don't like my character, whether it's because of the corruption politically or whether it's because of all the revelations about my extramarital affairs.

It's really an interesting thing to exist in a world where people love you or hate you and you've never seen them before.

Some stories were be best told with an audience just sitting, listening, and some stories were best told with an audience, you know, racing through the middle of it.

I think the idea of presenting a story that's very much about community and about people and about how that creates a community and that creates a people are able to have a political conversation which represents them and us and their and our beliefs.

It would feel very peculiar for that conversation to happen where an audience sit in the dark and are ignored for 2 hours.

That would be the most isolating version.

♪♪ Dockery: It's a true immersive piece in that you get to actually speak and have some some agency and be able to -- to -- well, to talk to the characters and affect what sort of information is coming out, and talk about opinions and go deeper in somewhere.

Well, the whole show always will funnel in the same direction, but within that, you're able to really get to know the characters, and they can really get to know you in that way.

I was saying before, you know, I feel I have this intimate half hour or 40 minutes with this particular group of people that I take at the beginning.

♪♪ Wright: I think immersive storytelling -- For me, I think the more exciting part of those two words, "immersive storytelling" is "storytelling," of where storytelling and how we tell stories and where that goes next, and how that constantly best evolves to meet people and for people to meet story.

And in some ways, our technology gets more and more exciting to facilitate that.

But then the antithesis of that is always that it gets more and more exciting just to sit and tell a story to someone.

It's interesting that no matter how far that technological advancement of storytelling goes, the kind of actuality of people just commuting together and sharing things and eating together and speaking together and singing together and playing together always feels like the real heart of it.

And that's what we're playing with and evolving and reinventing.

♪♪ There is, in the story, a lot of very fractious conversation and a huge amount of friction between, I guess, what people believe in, what people think they should believe in, what name is given to what people believe in.

And I think it'd be gorgeous for people to leave the show thinking about the conversation around those things now.

It's okay to have a conversation around those things and to listen to each other rather than just to blindly and belligerently argue for what you think your version is.

♪♪ Eccles: Any great work of art is to some extent open.

The visitor takes away probably quite a lot of what they brought in.

I think a truly great work of art is where we go out not quite the same as we came in.

♪♪ Wright: I think it speaks to an audiences desire to be a part of something.

That's exciting and how artists continue to find ways for communities, people, and stories to continually intersect.

And that, I think, is the most thrilling thing, to see where that goes.

♪♪ Gordijn: This taps into very primal emotions that we are very often not even revealed to, or our daily life is so demanding that we can't connect, reconnect to these primal feelings.

And we want people to rediscover their intuition and rely on that.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪