Roles: initial concept, production, sound design, music, experience design, core creative team member. Content devised with ensemble, fabricators, and a four-member core creative team (Mika Nakano, Trustina Sabah, Susan Stroupe, and myself). 

"Katalepsis is an exemplar of the gift immersive theatre can give us. It succeeds in walking a thin line: Both an engrossing escape from the everyday and art that shines a light on these recent years we’d like to forget."
-NoProscenium

"Katalepsis" invited audience members into a world set many generations into the future, when humans are no longer the dominant life form on earth. Three Creators living in total isolation have been tasked to generate creative content for mysterious Benefactors, who support their work. Relying on help from audience members, who appear to them as holobeings from the past, the characters of “Katalepsis” search for fulfillment, connection, and a way forward.

This experience ran March-May 2023 in the basement of The Peale Center, playing to over 500 people with a maximum audience size of 28 guests per run.

I initially conceived "Katalepsis" prior to the Covid-19 pandemic as a story about three "creator" characters living in isolation due to a deadly virus. It was meant to be an exploration of the many forms of social isolation we were choosing for ourselves at the time, and its cost to our mental health. Then an actual deadly virus struck and greatly changed the course of our shared story. Our "near-future" narrative moved to the very far future and, no longer having to explain what pandemic isolation might be like, we were able to take all elements of the world into more inventive directions.

The audience began their journey in the near future, when a virus that learned to jump between computers and people has wiped out most people and infrastructure on the planet. With computers becoming too dangerous to use, the Katalepsis clinic provides a way to cheat death. Drawing energy and computational power from the mycelial network (i.e. mushrooms and fungus) the clinic can created replicas of their clients' bodies that can live on without disease. The audience is transformed and wakes up some time later (perhaps centuries) and are tasked with making life bearable for the last living humans. No longer the dominant life form, the humans are kept alive by highly advanced fungal growths who move slowly through the world and affect the progress of the story in mysterious ways. Separate pathways converged at a "contribution" scene when each character presented an offering of their creative labors to the benefactors. 

As with past Submersive shows, the audience could choose how much time they would spend with each character and interact to a high degree.

It may all sound rather dark, but the audience had great fun explaining aspects of our present day to curious characters living in the far future. We found much humor in imagining how future humans would interpret artifacts of the present without any context or understanding of the culture they came from.

Unable to open an immersive indoor show in 2021, the same team conceived of "rECHOllection" -- a prologue to "Katalepsis."

Concept: Due to a temporal rift next to Latrobe Pavilion in Druid Hill Park, denizens from 2032 mysteriously began to appear in our space and time. As the audience encountered them, Submersive was on hand to curate the experience.

My company's first future-fiction piece, "rECHOllection" invites audience members into the year 2032 as the earth is beginning to push back against humankind in fuller force. A virus has evolved to cross between computers and humans, rendering digital technology unusable and has greatly reduced our population. Personal and shared memories are eroding. Air and atmospheric quality make it difficult to spend time outside without full-body protection. The practice of physical distancing has only increased. And yet, through these conditions, community members of Baltimore strive to find new ways to connect, express themselves, and attempt to heal from our collective loss of memory and companionship.

The piece was our first experience to take place outside in a public park, with no tickets, restrictions, or gateways preventing audience members from entering. Not only did the outdoor venue contribute to audience safety during a pandemic, it allowed the audience to interact and respond in open and unexpected ways. Acknowledging that interactive, immersive experiences can always feel a little awkward, the experience reflected the extent that we are all in an awkward, in-between place when it comes to being out in public and interacting with people. The resulting experience seemed to meet the audience where they were and resonate with the very moment we all are sharing in.

Roles: production, lighting design, sound design (with Megan Livingston), music, core creative team. Content devised with ensemble and core creative team (Josh Aterovis, Kim Le, Megan Livingston, Ursula Marcum, and myself). 

The concept: Visit Boundry, a brand-new startup that allows you to pre-plan and customize your afterlifeexperience. As part of our exclusive market research team, tour our state-of-the-art facilities andafterlife showroom. For every door that closes, another will open.

Over 600 guests experienced "The Boundary" from September-November, 2023. Audience entered in groups of up to eight people each half-hour, with four groups each night. 

"The Boundary" began with an idea by core team member Kim Le, who wanted to create an experience that helped people better orient themselves with the idea of death and the afterlife. In 2020, as we were losing friends and family members to a deadly pandemic, the topic of death still felt strangely detached from our day to day lives.

The audience's journey began in Boundry Labs where a lab attendant led them in a conversation about death and the afterlife. They were then free to explore the Afterlife Showroom, which contained about a dozen explorable installations. After some time, audience members were invited to join a "focus group" where they are accidentally ushered through a rift that transitions them to their own afterlife. Fortunately, the beings on the other side are able to offer a way back. In the meantime, we provided a number of ways to contemplate their own death and leave messages for those who crossed over before them. Many audience members reported that the experience gave them a deep shift in perspective and they have been contemplating it ever since.

The experience was included on a national list of "Best Immersive Moments of 2023" 
 

Roles:  production, lighting design, sound design, music, experience design, core creative team. Content devised with ensemble and core creative team. 

"See Also" was a devised, site-specific, immersive experience that was run as a part of the "In the Stacks" series held at the George Peabody Library, in Baltimore, in February of 2020. Following threads (both figurative and literal) around the Peabody Library in a choose-your-own-adventure style, participants encountered visual art, soundscapes, and performers portraying character composites based on historical women and non-binary individuals from the collections of the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries and University Museums.

The performance culminated in the world premiere of a work by contemporary female composer Briay Conditt. For the eight-channel soundtrack, I provided sound design, additional music, and coordinated the long-distance collaboration for Ms. Conditt's composition.

This highly collaborative work was developed with a large cast and a Core Creative Team of nine members. 

Roles: Production, core creative team, live sound design. Content devised with ensemble and core creative team.

As our bodies move, we tell a story. Where we have been, where we are going, what we hold on to, what we let go of. When bodies move in masses, they tell a larger story. Hope, fear, war, famine, the search for a better life. What does it mean to be just one body moving in humanity’s great crowd? This is a movement piece. Prepare to be moved.

MASS/RABBLE had the audience join a diverse ensemble of thirty movers to explore themes of mass migration and the borders and boundaries that separate us.  Our largest production to date, the performance was experienced by over 500 participants during its two-week engagement in April 2019 at the Baltimore War Memorial. 
 

For "Musaeum," Submersive formed a team of over twenty artists to transform all four floors of The Peale Center into a museaum of artifacts from another planet. Every show night was the "Grand Opening" of H.T. Darling's exhibiton of aquistions from the planet New Galapagos, including his prized possession: The Humanoid Specimen. The audience was greeted as members of high society and museum supporters, thus implicating them in the proceedings. Our guests had free rein to explore the space and follow any of the many narratives that played out over a two and a half hour period. The story, as told through a science fiction lens, allowed us to simultaneously celebrate our love for museums while delving unflinchingly into the dark themes of colonialization and cultural appropriation.

In term of experience design, it is always my goal to present a world that is larger than one person can percieve in a single viewing. Audience members who returned to "Musaeum" reported seeing what seemed like a completely different series of events, and even those who returned upwards of a dozen times said that they were still discovering new things. While we encouraged a very open collaborative environment, I used my roles as Producer and Co-director to keep pushing in the direction of a broadening mystery with no easy answer or resolution. In keeping the audience at the center, we place a high degree of trust for them to discover meaning for themselves rather than provide easy answers that could shut down their own meaning-making.

Press quotes:

Role: Concept, Co-producer, Co-director, Composer, Sound Designer. Devised with Ensemble.

"The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe," was a many-layered immersive theater experience that ran through the Spring and Fall of 2015. The audience would freely explore the first floor of the Enoch Pratt House and observe one or more of nine overlapping stories based Poe's life and fiction. The fully devised work incorporated movement, spoken word, song, explorable sets, and private character encounters. The action was synchronized to a 2-hour continuous soundtrack that I composed in conjuction with the rest of the devising process. After a sold-out run in Spring 2015, the show was remounted with additional characters and a double cast for three more months of shows in Fall 2015. At 62 shows total, it stands as the longest-running immersive theatre piece in Baltimore history.

Press quotes:

"'The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe' proved that there are many corridors of the poet's mind yet to explore."
-Baltimore City Paper

"Surprisingly unpredictable, each performance draws a small circle of theatre goers into a world both bizarre and beautiful."
-Baltimore Post-Examiner

"Poe himself is not present, but is everywhere in the atmosphere."
-Hyperallergic

"An intensely immersive theatrical experience like no other in Baltimore, Washington, or any of the surrounding metropolitan areas, 'The Mesmeric Revelations! Of Edgar Allan Poe' is quickly becoming Baltimore’s own 'Sleep No More'".
-TheatreBloom

"'Revelations!' is like going to a haunted house run by everybody’s favorite 'cool' AP English teacher...It’s the nevermost."
-The Bad Oracle

Plunge: An Interactive Storytelling Lab (2017)
Roles: Concept, production, sound, lighting, design and content devised with ensemble.

Plunge included five stories and installations exploring the theme of "the other." Five performers (“tellers”) were paired with five installation artists (“makers”) to present unique immersive environments and one-to-one experiences for audience members during one full weekend of performances. Inspired by how our character in The Stranger had connected with audience members in an individual and personal way, Plunge was created to further explore the potential of one-to-one performance as well as work with a new and diverse group of artists.

To create Plunge, we designed and conducted a series of workshops focused on storytelling and intimate performance,  with both makers and tellers participating together in all stages of learning and creation. Part-way through the process, makers and tellers were paired up to jointly develop their experience. The result was an eclectic set of small worlds each containing short performance, all joined by a “Hub” space where the audience could pause to collect their thoughts and engage in a number of activities that reinforced the main theme.

BATS! (2018) 
Roles: Production, sound, lighting, projections, core creative/devising team. 
Run: March  15 -31  2018

Words and performance by Michele Minnick, devised by Minnick, Caitlin Bouxsein, Ursula Marcum, Glenn Ricci, and Jess Rassp.

"BATS!" was Submersive's first newly devised solo work, performed in the then-dormant Marquee Lounge at The Creative Alliance. Through conversation, interaction, stories, sound, original illustrations by Baltimore artist Chelsea Demitras, and some accordion songs, "BATS!" explored the tricky landscape of reason and insanity. 

The performance used all aspects of the room as the audience, while seated, were invovled to a high degree. Using the fiery mural wall behind the bar as a projection surface, I wove light, sound, and motion into the experience as the rest of the action was being devised.