immersive theatre

For Chicago’s theatre community, the past year and a half has been marked by reckoning. As companies postponed shows and shuttered their doors, artists and theatre-goers alike were forced to mourn some of the most fundamental elements of live theatre: shared space, spontaneity, gathering. Now that live arts are beginning to return to Chicago, the question looms: how will theatre companies grow to incorporate the perspective gained over the past year?

Theatre Y’s YOU ARE HERE: The Emerald Camino Project has an ingenious answer: by making the lost experience of gathering the performance itself.

YOU ARE HERE: The Emerald Camino Project is a month-long series of ambulatory performances held across twelve neighborhoods connected by Chicago’s Emerald Necklace in the South and West Sides. The performance itself feels like a delightful cross between a walking tour, a chaperoned blind date, and an immersive art piece. Before setting out, each participant is paired with a stranger and a Theatre Y actor. The actor guides the two through the walk and facilitates conversation between the two. Led by actor Haman Cross III, the groups walk through the neighborhood, visiting landmarks, listening to presentations by community leaders, and enjoying performances by local artists (in North Lawndale, the performers were high-school-aged rapper Marcus Quinn Jackson and Willie Round, a.k.a. Prince Roc, a rapper and poet gifted with a resonant bass voice). Continue reading “Theatre Y’s ‘YOU ARE HERE: The Emerald Camino Project’ is a Radical Reimagination of What Live Theatre Can Be”

When you purchase your ticket for Broken Bone Bathtub, the confirmation email you receive will contain directions not to any specific theater, but rather to a residential building somewhere in Chicago. The venue changes from night to night, ensuring that no show is exactly the same.

Upon arrival at the third-floor apartment in Rogers Park where the evening’s entertainment was to take place, we were ushered into a living room which served as a sort of theater lobby. When the performance was about to start, we were asked to arrange ourselves by height. Carefully, methodically, the producer and usher arranged us in the bathroom around the bathtub, where performer Siobhan O’Loughlin sat fully nude, her only costume some bubbly suds and a dash of glittery blue eyelid makeup. We sat on stools and boxes, packed in like Tetris pieces — one patron was seated on the closed toilet seat. When we were ready to start, Siobhan raised her head and began to speak quite suddenly, without preamble. She spoke with such an easy familiarity that it seemed less like the start of a show, and more like jumping into a fascinating conversation that is already clipping along at a good pace by the time you start to pay attention.

Continue reading “‘Broken Bone Bathtub’ is a Spare, Straightforward, and Entrancing Piece of Immersive Theatre”