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

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 simply 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: Concept, production, core creative team, lighting, sound, music, projections, room design. Content devised with ensemble and core creative team.

Initial run throughout Fall 2018, remounted in Summer 2019.

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. 

Roles: Co-Producer, Co-director, Experience Design, Sound Design, Music, Video, Photgraphy, Projections.
Content devised in collaboration with the ensemble: Josh Aterovis, Francisco Benavides, David Brasington, Emily Hall, Martha Robichaud, Trustina Sabah, Lisi Stoessel, Sarah Olmsted Thomas, Alex Vernon.

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:

“I was blown away by the quality of the work.”
-J. Wynn Rousuck, WYPR

"Museums spend years acquiring the sort of artifacts Submersive Productions assembled for this show. It’s one thing to stage a show in a real museum – quite another to flesh out an empty one."
-Baltimore Post-Examiner 

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

Roles: Live-performed sound design, music, light, projections.

Written, conceived and performed by Francisco Benavides and Lisi Stoessel; with Josh Aterovis, Ursula Marcum, Glenn Ricci, and Susan Stroupe.

Three eight-hour performances in November and December 2018.

Billed as "Episode Six" of The Institute of Visionary History and the Archives of the Deep Now, "A Horse" took a radical departure in the form of an eight-hour continuous performance. Because the performance was roughly half-improvised and eight hours in length, I decided to generate all sounds and music live while watching the performance on screen in a separate room. After their stay (between one and eight hours) in the main performance space, the audience could cross over into my area to experience the performance a whole other "behind the curtain" sort of mode.

Using a combination of audio software tools and live instruments, I wove a soundscape that lept between Renaissance stylings, more recent western film scores, and futuristic sonic journeys. As the audience came to slowly realize that the sound was responding to the action, they began to percieve it as a third character of sorts. 

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 and 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.  

As a photographer who is in constant collaboration with performers, I have captured hundreds of character portraits in and around each production. 

Music and sound are the most immersive of media and lie at the foundation of everything else I do. I began writing and recording music at a young age, first on acoustic guitar, then on simple multi-track devices, eventually evolving into using all the  technology that has democratized recorded sound. These song selections represent my more recent, from indie rock to electronica to ambient soundscapes. This project also contains original videos I created to accompany some of my songs.

Delirium Dog emerged from the need to create original music for the haunted attraction "Delirium 3-D" at The ScareHouse in Pittsburgh in 2009. I was asked to produce an original set of compositions in a "Techno Goth" style which played throughout the haunt. Having just released my first solo album as "Lunatic Dog," I thought that "Delirium Dog" would make for a fun, but temporary alter-ego. Due to the music's popularity online, I released two albums as Delirium Dog: "The ScareHouse" in 2009 and "FEVER BRAIN BATTERY" in 2011. I have done all work under that name ever since.