♪♪ Hoepfner: When you talk about freedom, I feel like immersive theater is the Wild West.

♪♪ Fox: Everyone can look at the world thinking there's nothing impossible to put on stage, there's nothing impossible to put in a show.

The ability to incorporate impossibility into an experience, I think, is a frontier we're just breaking open.

♪♪ Woman: There's nothing like having the audience right here in front of you and just having that, like, energy, that conversation, that energy exchange of, like, we're standing right in front of each other and I'm gonna do this thing for you.

There's there's no performance like an immersive performance.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Sanders: "Dragonbutter" is an immersive performance, a game experience.

It takes place in a recently discovered, basically abandoned-for-40-year laboratory.

It wasn't -- No one's been in the laboratory since 1980s.

There was some Dr. Livingston that was in this lab.

The experience is discovering what Dr. Livingston was up to.

♪♪ Desirée: You go through different escape-the-room-type environment.

You run into lots of different creatures and oversensory rooms, and that eventually leads to specific games where you're like really interacting with the performers.

And then we get to the finale where you you get to the final, like, Dragonbutter that, like, we've been looking for this whole time.

Woman: Hello!

Hello, and welcome to DEOS Labs.

Please step right this way.

Sanders: When the audience arrives, I wanted them to have, you know, a genuine experience of feeling like they were, you know, literally inside a video game.

You know, when I'm playing a video game and my character gets hurt, I -- you know, I feel it.

So I wanted to give them that experience live and see what that was like.

So right away, we really try and introduce them to the other NPC characters and give them a role inside of the experience itself.

♪♪ I moved into this space, and it was only supposed to be a short-term project, but COVID happened and I ended up here without anyone else to work with, by myself, kind of brainstorming and working on some other projects I was working on.

And when I was working on them, I was developing prototypes for some flying mechanisms and fairies, and all of that just ended up being this, you know, almost an autobiographical story of me being this mad scientist by myself in this crazy loft space, inventing flying machines.

I almost, like, never want to go back to the traditional, like, performing and audience because it gives this element of surprise.

And you know, in this show, we need the audience to do these things for us so that the show can continue.

And every show is different because of that.

You get different groups of people.

♪♪ Sanders: It's really been up to the players themselves.

They've really found what level they are comfortable with.

Some of them dive right in and they are definitely active in order to score experience points, they need to be active.

Or some people just enjoy the journey without partaking.

So both are just as valuable an experience.

♪♪ Desirée: I would say that sometimes maybe, you know, like, there's a lot of prompts for the audience, right?

So, you know, if somebody doesn't get those prompts, they go either the wrong -- in this case, because it's, you know, an escape room, like, they go the wrong direction, and then you see something you're not supposed to see.

And then there's just, you know, like in the beginning, I'm kind of behind the "do not enter" door.

But sometimes people kind of walk through there and I'm just like... [ Laughs ] "Uh..." And that's actually where it becomes exciting because then I have to, like, dive into my actress self and be like, "Okay, how do I, like, stay in it without being like, 'No, go back inside'"?

♪♪ Sanders: "Dragonbutter" has a kind of underlying dark theme.

Basically, this guy, you know, this doctor, has a simple vision, you know, a simple idea of something he wants to do.

He wants to learn how to create a mechanism that will help him fly.

And, um -- but he ends up going to any lengths, sort of like Frankenstein, to do this and creates, you know, monsters.

And, you know, it's like, what length will we go to to bring ourselves joy and fulfill our dreams?

♪♪ I remember having dreams as a kid of being able to swim out of the water into flight.

And so maybe this is just a continuation of that.

I've always thought of dance as an aerial art form because really it's about trying to be weightless, right?

Or at least, you know, evolving gravity in different ways.

So, moving, you know, into the air just seems liked a natural progression for me.

Maybe, too, when I was a kid, I loved gymnastics and trampoline and that kind of thing, and I loved flying through the air.

So it translates.

♪♪ Desirée: For me it's really interesting to, like, have to learn how my body works in an apparatus that's never been touched before.

So, yeah, Jess Adams and I both kind of played with that for months and figured out what worked and what didn't work.

And, yeah, it's really fun.

It's very physical, obviously.

You know, with the double ring, it has a tendency to, like, do a sway instead of the circular motion, and so that's like one of the challenges of being like -- keeping it in this, like, circular realm versus like a sway.

So I think that was like the hardest.

I would say that's probably the hardest, like, challenge with this apparatus, specifically.

♪♪ Sanders: The immersive world, I mean, it feels like it's kind of new in a lot of ways.

And so we are finding our way of how to interact with the immersive audience, right?

You know, it's been, you know, a learning curve, but definitely it takes, you know, a new type of performer to find that that relationship with this new immersive audience.

♪♪ Desirée: I feel like majority of the audience that we've had so far are picking up on different things each time, like little things that we, you know, plant in there that we're like, you got to look for it, but, like, it's there.

And so, you know, there's always one or two people in each group that, like, kind of pick up on those different things.

I would say, for example, yesterday, our last show, there's a moment where you need to look for a hand.

And down this hallway there are fake hands, and we've never had it happen before, but someone picked the hand out and was like, "I found the hand," which was brilliant to me.

I was like, "I didn't even think about that, and I'm in the show."

Everybody's minds work differently.

Everybody plays a game differently.

So, it's, yeah, it's really interesting to have the different groups, different people and humans.

And I find it really exciting to just, like, you know, have a skeleton of this show and then everything in the middle is, like, always different, which for me is like -- it just makes it more fun, more exciting.

♪♪ Sanders: I've found theater, you know, since I was a kid, to be immersive.

The first time I stepped into, you know, a theater on Broadway and saw a show, I was maybe 10 -- 8 or 10 years old, and, you know, the gilded proscenium and, you know, the velvet seats, that was such a magical experience for me that I found that part of the experience just as important as what was happening beyond the proscenium.

And my entire journey as an artist creating work for people has always been about what environment I can put the participants of my work in.

Even pulling up in a car, you know, what's it like?

You know, every point, from clicking to buy your ticket, to leaving the show.

That's all part of the experience.

♪♪ ♪♪ Fox: We call "The Grown-Ups" an apocalypse around a campfire.

But it is a new play that is performed outdoors around a real campfire that the actors and audience share for a very few people at a time.

♪♪ When we really became aware of COVID, when everything shut down in March 2020, we felt like we didn't want to make work that would be better if there weren't the COVID restrictions.

Is there a way to make work where the limitations of COVID actually made the work better?

♪♪ We got this wildly impractical idea about our little backyard in Brooklyn.

We just do it for 6 to 10 people at a time around a campfire.

And, "What is the most special, unusual, spectacular, intimate experience we could give an audience?"

And that's how "The Grown-Ups" was born.

I didn't know!

Woman: It's good that you were.

It is so good that you were.

The kids needed a change of pace.

You could feel it in the room.

You guys killed it on your presentation.

It was all Becca.

Fox: You arrive at a secret location that you received an e-mail about the day before, and you'd wait outside the door, and on the door there's a little sign that says you're in the right place.

And suddenly you're in summer camp.

Sometimes Maeve just, like, disappears during our activities and I don't know where she goes.

The space is incredibly green.

There is a cabin out there.

There's a fire roaring.

From there you're kind of joined and mixed into a group of summer camp counselors in their evenings, after they've put their kids to bed, meeting up to talk about the day, gossip, hang out.

As they do, they start to find out about this kind of scary and unfortunate series of events that are happening outside of camp and begin getting closer and closer, and they start having to deal with each other, kind of figuring out how they're going to deal with taking care of kids in the context of these scary things that are happening and becoming more and more present and dangerous in their world.

Do they tell the kids?

What do they tell them?

If they don't tell them, what do they do?

And it's about these young people negotiating what it is going to mean to care for someone else and to care for each other.

I think they just took Kansas.

I guess I just don't see how we can do a drill without telling the kids what we're doing a drill for.

Woman: We can make it like a game, like a campwide game of hide and seek that could start at any minute.

Man: Some of them aren't very good at hiding.

Woman: And they still wouldn't have any reason to take this that seriously.

We could offer them a prize for whoever's found last.

Prizes are really good motivators.

Like a Popsicle.

Fox: There was a great challenge here to figure out how to do impossible meaningful things, how to create theatricality in natural space with no sign of theatricality, right?

In our dream, you walk in and there's no semblance of a theater there, right?

You're in a circle of counselors around a campfire.

We try to approach audience participation with a sense -- a real sense of risk and a sense of generosity.

What we aim to do is not just strike a balance, but kind of lift those two to create moments of participation and ways of participating that allow people to take risks, but risks in a way that actually affect the event they're participating in and where any way they participate makes the show better.

♪♪ I think when people show up to theater, they want to be pushed to take risks.

They want to be shown or reminded that there are parts of themselves still to discover.

And then once they enter that space and you start teaching them a new set of rules for how to interact with a space, with a story, once they learn those rules, it's kind of like a private language that you and they share, and you can start to speak it together, and that starts to break open the kind of risks an audience is willing to take.

♪♪ There are massive frontiers to explore with the idea of immersive narrative theater.

Right now, so much theater is basically separated.

There's either theater with story, right, and theater that's an experience.

I think marrying the two of those can create something so incredibly powerful.

For me, we have story as a survival mechanism, a way to make meaning out of suffering.

I want to challenge the immersive world, as myself as part of it, to not give up on what story can be, and challenge folks who are narrative artists to push themselves into breaking open the forms in which they tell the stories so you can actually create a situation where people stop thinking about form and shape and are just there and present in a moment.

And it's such an amazing tool for immersion, and it's immersion is such an amazing tool for storytelling.

You keep living.

You find a new place to stay and make new rules and sing songs and tell stories and play games.

Fox: What we think theater can do and what immersive theater can do is make people feel less small and less alone.

It can reintroduce us to our power to shape the world, kind of in the way that immersive theater actively shapes everything around us, and connect us to each other in our shared vulnerability that makes that scary.

And if we all have the opportunity, when we're immersed in that world to try taking risks together, maybe we're more likely as this kind of new special group to walk out into the world and do the same thing.

♪♪ We think the most magical and radical and strange thing about theater is getting strangers in a room together and to listen to and tell and be part of stories together.

And when people get off their butts and move through the world, as hard as the world is, and give you a piece of their life, you want to hold that with a real sense of weight and take care of the liveness of their experience.

And there's nothing more live than acknowledging that everything they interact with shapes how they experience a story and how they leave that space.

♪♪ ♪♪ Hoepfner: In "Bottom of the Ocean," otherwise known as "BOTO," five guests enter a hidden underworld in Bushwick, and they're led by spirit guides through a ritual that we made up.

And there's some catharsis, there's some introspection, and people are guided to dive into the self in this fantastical dream world.

♪♪ It started with a brainstorm that I made for a series of sound baths that I was doing.

Was just doing straightforward sound baths.

People lie down in a church or yoga studio and listen to gongs and listen to crystal bowls.

And I was also into immersive theater while I was doing that, and I thought, like, "What if somebody went through a little immersive gateway to get to our sound bath?

What would it be?"

It became very much more about the path than about the sound bath, and it became an exploration about ritual and ceremony.

♪♪ For the blade of the grass.

Hoepfner: I think another big influence is I was a church musician for the last decade of my life, as one of my day jobs, was, like, a nonbeliever church musician.

And I thought a lot about how certain things appealed to me about the rituals and about the services and certain things just shut me out.

And I sort of would sometimes daydream, "What if I could make something, the appealing stuff of the ritual, of like, "Oh, you get washed in water or there's, like, the chalice, we're partaking as a community," but I get rid of all the stuff that shuts people out, like you have to believe in the Virgin Mary, you have to believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins.

And so this is sort of like a secular ritual, a way for people to play with ritual in 2022.

Would you like to be the subject of most of my attention with him filming?

Sure.

Excellent.

Then let's have you move to this chair.

There is a chunk of rituals that do evoke like Christian rituals, right?

Like when you're getting your hands washed, that's sort of like baptism, or in the kitchen when there's food involved, that sort of Communion.

There's a confessional.

This is a confessional in here.

So those take from the Christian religion.

There's other scenes that are from my previous piece, "Houseworld."

And then the third group of scenes are just scenes that called me for one inexplainable reason or another.

Like, I knew I wanted the guests to reach into a bin of dried beans, and maybe they'd pull out, like, something ugly, like a dirt ball or a hairball, and that would make the scene go one way.

Or maybe they pull out something beautiful like a gem, and that would make the scene in another way.

And I didn't know why, but I just liked that tactile action and sort of like reverse-engineered the ritual based on that I wanted that.

♪♪ Almost all the scenes were written on my laptop before we found the space, so they're all basically, like, meant like you could perform them in a walk-in closet with just like bringing in a table and a chair into the walk-in closet.

Now bring in a cot.

And other than that, it's just a person in a walk-in closet at a table, right?

♪♪ There are two scenes that are site responsive now.

The scene in the ramp, Room 6 1/2, the veil, that's designed for the ramp.

Like, we have a spirit who's rolling things down the ramp to you from on high.

And of course the bonfire, which is when the jellyfish activates and everybody plays a drum circle around it, that's obviously -- it wouldn't have been made if we didn't have the big room.

♪♪ But a lot of this stuff, it started that could have happened anywhere, and then once we placed it in a room, it started to, like, slowly live, like the ivy started to creep up the walls of the room, so to speak.

♪♪ I just went through the show for my first time.

The show has been around for three and a half years now, and I went through it my first time three days ago.

And what I discovered is you hardly ever see the rest of the audience.

Like, you get sectioned off, and you're just on your own journey almost the whole time.

And so there's one solo pilgrim, and then there's two pairs.

And the solo journey is more intimate and introspective and maybe serious, and the journey with the pairs is more playful and collaborative, and you're sort of on a romp with your friend or your partner.

♪♪ There's only five audience members, so we get to know everybody really well in the two hours.

And of course, like, as soon as the door closes, we all, like, share our read on, like, "Did you like this guest?"

or like, "Do you think they liked it?"

whatever.

And sometimes we're wrong.

Like, sometimes we get e-mails the next day revealing that someone who we thought was keeping the show at arm's length actually had a great time.

A person's not always going to have a smile on their face, even if they're engaging with the show in the right way.

Like, if they're telling a confession, that means a lot to them, they might have a look of, "I'm going through memories of suffering," right?

You have to ground yourself as a performer to just know that, like, the smile isn't the only goal.

♪♪ It's always incredible when somebody shares the big moments of their life when they feed it into this show.

You know, like, we had a couple, and they were traveling separately.

It was at a time when we could have two people traveling solo in this show.

They were a couple in an open relationship.

And the first member of the couple was talking about, like, their love for the other person present tonight.

And the second member was talking about a different lover and how they were not comfortable in the relationship.

You can get some really personal dynamics.

And it's a privilege, right?

And we try to honor, like, when people do open up, we try to respect what they've brought and make it like a place that treasures their revelations.

♪♪ I came from the world of making albums, making music videos, touring and playing in bands, and I started to, like, notice my own music-video viewing habits, right, where I would, like, look through -- I'd just watch the first 20 seconds of a music video, and then maybe I'd start to scrub and see if, like, the scenes at minute three were different or if I basically had seen all the scenes, you know?

And when I would make my video myself and it take me a month, I'd be like, "Man, people are going to scrub through this.

They're going to watch like 10 seconds and then move on."

And so I very selfishly wanted someone's full attention for the two hours.

♪♪ In some ways, it's back to basics.

And in some ways it's like I'm holding you accountable to go back to basics for two hours, where, like, yeah, if you're in a Broadway theater, maybe you sneak a look at your phone.

But if you have a performer looking at you, then it's like, "Okay, I just have to engage with reality for two straight hours.

Let's do this.

This is the old way humans used to do it, and for these two hours I get to do it in a fun, weird, one-of-a-kind environment, one-of-a-kind fictional world."

♪♪ Sanders: The creative forces that moved into the digital world and that went inside of virtual reality, that just went into storytelling and film and television, I think artists are responding to that and saying, "Hey, I can do that in real life.

You know, how can I inject, you know, the participant into the world?"

It's like this one informs the other back and forth again and again.

♪♪ Hoepfner: If I go into a world and some kind of fantastical creature, like, takes my hand and takes me down a dark hallway, that's so exciting.

How can I resist that?

♪♪ Fox: If they want to just watch something, they have TV, and TV's great.

They have movies, and people are making exciting movies.

They have video games, and, gosh, those are interactive and immersive in so many ways.

So, what is it about showing up live?

In a way, we're trying to challenge ourselves to make the work that we as audience members would be excited to be challenged by and be pushed by.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪