Theater by its magical power can provoke a true emotional response, maybe even an unexpected one.

People usually come to something like this because they're at a transition point, you know, like you go on an epic adventure.

Generally, when you are searching for something, Tequila!

To me, that's not something that the faint of heart take on.

We're going to go over for days all these different locations in Mexico with all of these people who most of them had never been to Tulum.

There is a strange and an empowerment to standing next to or in a group of humans all feeling the same thing at the same time.

That's something that you cannot replace.

When you are brought into a fiction and you are heard and listened to and given a chance to share things about you that feel very vulnerable, this storytelling is the most powerful of all.

Epic immersive creates innovative live experiences where stories, spectacle and interaction create inspiring, transcendent journeys.

I really do believe in the idea of the epic.

I believe in the idea of grand stories that, through their intensity and through the sort of ritual participation, they ask for, are transformative for people, and that help people to see themselves and their lives as epic.

We try to move the world of theater forward by any means necessary in terms of making it more epic, more popular, more populist, more multidisciplinary.

How do we come together as an ultra collaborative industry?

How do we tap everybody's skill sets, and how do we all rise together to really reinvigorate this most ancient of art forms?

And I sort of wanted to do everything I'd ever dreamed of doing in one show.

The Immersive World Adventure is a four day, highly intensive retreat filled with workshops, but also a four day long, incredibly epic, long duration, immersive experience.

Welcome to this adventure.

This dream, this madness.

Immersive World Adventure is a combination of an immersive experience woven in with more of the nuts and bolts tools, workshops, classes for immersive creators, artists.

So that's a peek behind the scenes getting to meet and learn from different creators, specialists and forming this really, really special community that's being built here.

One of the things is that it married immersive experience, but also travel, cross-cultural exchange.

It had time or space that it held in a very different way than reality.

Today is a long day.

It is quite the journey.

It's also going to be incredible day of of culture.

And starting with this baraat, which is a procession.

When I went to an Indian wedding, the baraat was going in circles around a small parking lot in San Francisco.

So this will be more exciting, I think.

My sort of formative time was spent studying Shakespeare and then training internationally.

So I would go to India and Thailand and Bali and just spend time being completely immersed and physically immersed and physically exhausted, and the art and philosophy and culture and history and spirit of the places.

And my travels eventually took me to here, to Tulum, which is a beautiful, magical and incredibly complicated place.

I was completely inspired by the terrain and the culture, and I realized that we could combine this whole summit and show idea with the international intensive idea that I had done to make something, that's a little bit jaw droppingly ambitious.

We started kind of a series of experience design conversations.

What do we want people to feel?

What do we want them to experience?

What are the most important pieces of this?

And we all brought to the table our dream components of this experience, saying like, hey, I really want people to feel connected to the land.

I really want people to feel a sense of catharsis.

I want to feel, some turn on.

He kind of took all these inputs and, created the outline of this.

I had two inclinations that I could not explain.

One was I wanted to do an Indian wedding, and then I wanted... Hamlet is my favorite play, for a lot of reasons.

But, a lot of the sort of contemplation around, life, death and humanity.

And I just sort of had this inclination that I could take this Indian wedding and hamlet together and kick something off from there.

That would then take us on a journey.

So my name is Toni Michelle Rubio, and my role is Gabriella.

So Gabriella is a biotechnologies, and she and Haresh and Raj, who are brothers, formed a company called Gilgamesh back in their college days.

And now here we are 30 years later.

Back in college days, they she married Raj.

The three of them ran the company.

They have a son named Amit.

And now Raj mysteriously died a year ago.

And she is now marrying Haresh, his brother.

His younger brother.

As a plot line.

Everything that we own and we care as comes from Mother Earth.

There's a beautiful wedding, and Gabriella and Harish actually do get engaged with the gorgeous shaman who does this beautiful Mayan ceremony.

And then there's a big Indian ceremony which is in a beautiful scene all day.

It is dream upon dream of any bride getting married.

You learn during this party that Ahmed's father, Raj, was killed by his brother Haresh and is now in the other world.

And Ahmed has to figure out a way to get Haresh to actually say that himself, to prove that it's right.

What the [Censored] is that?

What happened?

The God of death?

The one who.

The one who shook his head at me and said, it's all your fault.

Shiva.

Overarching themes are really about death and rebirth and connection between this life and the afterlife.

I wanted, and I think everyone else wanted that experience to be a place of real reflection and mystery.

And so I think ultimately it's the quest for aliveness, of what it means to be alive and what distances and lengths we go to seek that out, and then to hopefully come back to our own lives reality with a new sense of purpose.

We're going to go over four days, all these different locations in Mexico with all of these people who most of them had never been to, to Tulum, right?

So that was creating, something even larger than what I would call an immersive performance.

I think that was creating a festival that was creating, something that had like a ceremonial arc to it, the spatial and the durational aspect of it it's just a lot larger than I think anyone's really taking on.

This story is told in chapters, so it's not one continuous four day event because people need breaks and the chapters are intense.

The construction of this story pretty closely follows the hero's journey.

It's the audience that is quite literally resurrected in the end.

They come back from the world of the dead, which is not so different than them coming out of the long four day experience, which is not so different than them leaving magical Tulum and going back to their preexisting reality.

So there is a resurrection of sorts.

But it's the audience that goes through it.

We have worked really hard.

Whether it's our sort of core cast, the guests, the staff, the speakers, local artists, indigenous artists, performers from different companies to make it one community, that all has different roles to play in this fiction.

The majority of people here are immersive makers of some kind, which is exciting.

I think these are people maybe working in immersive experiences for like climate change and partnering with aquariums.

And it seems like a lot of people really interested in more in healing and in technology.

And I do think they're the people who are here are really interested in particular in the possibility of this experience, whether that's in self-transformation or in adventure.

But I think they are hoping for maybe something bigger and greater and more impactful than you might get from your one night ticketed event.

As we've been traveling in the vans location and location, we get to sit with the guests as as guests, and even enjoy so much of the things that the guests enjoy, which is really the best part.

And even all of us, all the performers, the local performers as well, we are all one.

With each other.

So when you hear their stories and what their backgrounds are and what they're looking for in this experience, the commonality for all of us, even as actors, is change and transformation.

And there are different workshops that help us to be open.

But it's the people talking back and forth and their personal journeys that you get to hear.

It's just mind blowing.

Oh, pray.

You better pray, you better pray And you're gonna get her to back here.

I don't care where you go.

I've been doing that for 20 years and this is the biggest immersive piece I've ever been in.

When the audience is so close to you and you don't have that fourth wall, you really have to live as that person because the person next to you is also living as them, as a real person.

They're not nobody's pretending here.

And that's the that's the whole thing.

It's really cannot be a pretense.

You have to be alive.

You have to make it as natural and as real as possible so that everybody does feel they're living in the world with you.

There's no fourth wall.

It's not a screen.

There's no distance at all.

I love that.

I really, really love that He gets his [censored] into the feet of the dead and I get turned into a [censored] doormat I'm sorry.

Legacy.

I'm not feeling it.

What I am interested in as a designer, as a creator, is this idea that you make a really good sort of scaffold for all of this, or you make a really good, like, infrastructure for it, and you create a lot of room for it to shift because there's so many unknowns that require a lot of flexibility, a lot of responsiveness.

And that's exciting because it also forces you in a larger structural way to acknowledge your audience.

A lot of it's improv and the experts that are here, he's invited some really, really high level experts in their fields, and then they fill you with so much information that in the improv, I heard myself giving information that I never knew before.

And I'm really happy to know now.

It helps me in this life today, but to be able to interact with people who are coming as guests, who really knew their field and had this knowledge already to be able to, banter with them in this story was just, so helpful.

We partnered, obviously, with an incredible range of so many local and indigenous artists.

The very first time we all met together, I sort of told them all about immersive theater, and I did about a I told the story which which takes about six hours to tell.

And I told it all, in Spanish and and after that, they were like, yeah, we get this.

There's a play within a play in Hamlet, right?

So okay, that's an opportunity to do something, you know, ultra meta, but immersive experience within an immersive experience that could be anything that can tell the story of this land.

So this wider show features an original, immersive creation made by our like, cast of 30, indigenous, incredible artists that spans, you know, as Aztec traditions, but also Mayan traditions, but also Toltec traditions.

You know, why have a class on pre-Hispanic culture and traditions when you could spend about four hours living it?

In the sort of notion of the play within a play that happens in the show, you really are invited to feel yourself as part of this world.

It's always tricky, especially with immersive.

It's like, how do we, as members, not of this culture, step into the culture in a meaningful way?

And I think the beauty of this piece and the way it was co-created, especially this over the last couple days here on site, is that it really, truly was a cross-cultural co-creation.

There's a lot of the pieces that were really not written at all and were born out of the Mayan, Aztec, Mexican artists that are here.

With my own work I'm always looking at like what collaboration actually means when you go, especially when you go to another country, especially when you go into a different cultural context, which you, you know, you have to share some, some authorship inside of, right?

Because you cannot bring these things to to people in your own right.

There were cultural bearers in the group that wanted to also break through to, to maybe, like, not be the destination culture for tourists to come to Tulum and like and I'm sure that works on some level, but like, what would it mean to put it in a contemporary context so that, like all of these traditions are seen as a trajectory?

You know, it's not like, here's the historical thing and here's the it's like all the thing is one big large continuum.

I think having the artists co-create this experience and say, what is the what are the things that we want to share with them?

And really teach people these elements that I don't think you usually ever have access to.

What is it to learn Toltec postures from, you know, the the people who practice this type of ritual on a daily basis in an immersive experience feels very different than I went to a class on Toltec postures and, you know, and sort of put on that face, here we're in all in the process of co-creation together and in the fiction.

And I think, there is a sense of permission in that.

That's really beautiful.

This is what's guided both my work but also my exploration.

Right.

This is why I wound up in Bali and Thailand and India.

This is why I wanted to invite people to Mexico, because there is such a rich heritage of different rituals and practices and stories and spectacle and sensory kinesthetic responses.

I believe in the dirt.

I believe in the campfire.

I believe that kind of earthy, raw storytelling is the most powerful of all.

I felt because of the duration, because it went over several days and you get tired, you get worn down, your ego gets tired of resisting.

And so there was something that happened where things that I would go into a two hour performance and be like, really guarded against.

I started to let that go.

I started to let down my guard and just be like, it's life, you know, you're here and, all these beautiful things are being offered to you.

Like, are you going to accept them or you're gonna go with it?

There are also moments where we have tried to turn the mirror around and make it about the guests.

And so, for example, we have one moment, where we need to head to a deeper layer of the underworld.

How we did that was we get people in the water in a in a dark, candlelit cenote.

When you bring people into a genuine trance state, you are literally banging giant cimbals and sending vibrations through everyone, you can give people this experience of a kind of a genuinely epic and highly personal journey.

When we were in this in the cenote, in the sound bath, that was like, you know, the level just went into something like longer with the longer history, with the with the, you know, like something deep in the taproot of who we are as human beings.

That was the most restorative moment of all for me.

On one end is where you are now, on the other is where you need to go.

What landmarks are on that map?

You could feel everyone's attention focused in on what it was they were doing there, why they were there, what they wanted from it, and that was a real moment of coming, kind of cross fading out of the fiction into our own realities, which were still being held by the fiction, which was still being held by the reality.

That sound bath, that particular one, is envisioned as a rebirthing ceremony, and we didn't all need to know what all that meant, but we kind of physically understood what was happening.

Like, we're in water, all floating and thinking about where we are in our lives or what comes next.

And, a lot of people, I think, had some profound revelations in that that was that was powerful.

I want people to see their own lives as epic.

I want them to genuinely see themselves as heroes and to feel the resilience, to be able to overcome the traumas that come in that path and to be able to have, meaningful intention for the mark they want to make on this universe, whatever that is.

I think there is merit in identifying that.

And I think there is merit in having the tools to approach that and the context to approach that.

And the energy to approach that.

I really think we're moving into this next phase of the transformation economy, meaning that we are so hungry for personal transformation.

We're so feeling the deficit, a personal connection.

We're feeling like we're missing something.

We're definitely lonely.

We're definitely feeling late stage capitalism.

And so the question of how can immersive art respond to that is something that feels really interesting and and important to me.

And I think to the members of this team as well, is like, how can we create immersive experiences that are not just entertainment, but actually create the platform for change and transformation?

For me is why I'm in theater, which is that I see it as a kind of a secular church.

You're not asked to believe anything other than the time you're there, but in the time you're there, we will use stories, metaphors, parables, rituals, participation, and congregation to move you and to expand the universe for you.

It feels to me whenever art does something and it really touches people or really affects them, it has intervened into something.

It has provided an antidote for something.

It's like it's just shaking up the world a bit and you wake up and go, whoa!

I think this experience is a blend of how we get people into this world, into a state of en wonder, which we know from neuroscience, opens our brains and opens our hearts up to be more receptive, to sync up with other people.

And so it gets us into this state of receptivity and then puts us in an ability to actually reflect more on the change we want to make in ourselves and how we want to connect with others.

And so I think there's a real power in immersive art to be able to do that in this sort of next phase, of where our society is headed.