From Carnal Food Movements to Haunted Hotels: Nordo's Immersive Tale
Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. Photo by Thom Kaine
For me it began in 2008 with Sleep No More, that haunted labyrinth of the McKittrick Hotel in Manhattan. As an audience member you don your mask and wander amongst bloody bathtubs, candy shops, asylums, graveyards, and forests as characters from Macbeth race through “Scotland” in a noir fever dream. After the production was completed not a single piece of taxidermy could to be found on the East Coast, so heavily stocked was the multi-story experience.
To this day it remains one of the most influential productions I have ever seen. It also proves to be one of the best examples of an Immersive Experience: The world of the story revolves and evolves around you, and you discover it.
Nordo has been producing immersive experiences since 2009. We built our worlds around your dining table. We put you in an airplane lounge as espionage bubbled, a saloon the night before a hanging, the lobby of a haunted hotel, inside the doll house of girl named Violet. We engaged all of your senses. You, the audience, had a role and were implicated in the action. In our very first production we opened of a pop-up restaurant lorded over by an enigmatic chef who demanded your attention and preached the tenets of the Carnal Food Movement.
The set of the Modern American Chicken, 2013. Photo Credit: Bruce Clayton Tom
Production Images from The Modern American Chicken, 2009. Photo credit: John Cornicello.
In the decade that followed the “Immersive Theater” genre exploded. Escape rooms, themed bars, and site specific performances popped up in every major city. Then, the Sante Fe based company, Meow Wolf, created its first exhibit the “House of Eternal Return”- an entire world designed by artists through which you explore and discover a story simply by finding objects, reading letters and experiencing the art. Meow Wolf has solidified the word Immersive in the zeitgeist.
Like all things live, COVID squashed the momentum. But the creative wheels were still turning, waiting for an opportunity, because as restrictions lifted around the country immersive experiences have been popping up like mushrooms. In major cities like New York, LA, and London there are dozens of options to choose from.
So, “what is immersive?”. The word “Immersive” covers a lot of ground from escape rooms to performance art, from theme parks to haunted houses, to dinner theater. The immersive experience is one in which the audience member is a participant and not simply a voyeur. In many ways, theme parks are the original immersive experience.
In 2023 it’s a buzz word trying to describe an emerging style of entertainment. In the age of screens patrons want something vibrant and interactive, and “immersive” is nothing more than asking you, the audience, to engage with your experience.
So, in considering what the next steps for Nordo should be, we asked ourselves, “What do we enjoy? What do we want to see in the world? What makes our faces light up with Wonder?”
We discussed our love of spectacle. The sense of danger at not knowing what may happen around the corner. The joy of entering a portal and being transported into a different world. We’ve stepped through refrigerators looking for wormholes, walked the aisles of a multi-dimensional grocery store searching for alien artifacts, and stepped off elevators into a maze of birch trees with no purpose other than to marvel.
And we realized, with some surprise, that Nordo has been cresting this wave without quite knowing it. Our Cabinet of Curiosities production way back in 2012 guided our audiences on a tour of the best exhibits of a time traveling museum dedicated to the culinary arts, for example.
The Cabinet of Curiosities, Photo Credit: John Cornicello
Today, we have an explosion of great storytelling through all of our streaming services. And gaming is having a renaissance whether it is on a console or the dining room table. Immersive experiences are a mixture of these two trends, and it’s going to continue to grow. I want to pull back the curtain a tiny bit on the world of immersive entertainment that is going on right now.
Let me introduce you to No Proscenium, a website that attempts to describe, encapsulate, and review all things Immersive.
And this site, Everything Immersive, by the same people, attempts to catalogue every immersive experience currently going city by city.
Would you like even more of a distillation? Here are some current shows that have peaked my interest …
Officially a cooperative game and not an escape room, this production by the Doors of Divergence is chapter 2 in a three-part series described as a narrative puzzle. Join the journey to solve how time broke and who is responsible. With performers and multiple endings the production asks you to leave your life behind and give it over the staff at Holly Groove Sanitarium. I plan on being in NYC in late June and will definitely be buying tickets to this.
Equipped with flashlights you explore the storage room of a recently deceased woman obsessed with documenting her life. Piece by piece you unravel Josie’s dramatic life story. Part escape room, part narrative story, part podcast (there are audio tapes she left behind) this production by Hatch Escapes is a new take on intimate storytelling.
These are just 2 of the many that caught my attention.
I will be going to a conference in LA called Next Stage for immersive artists and companies. I can’t wait to see and hear what innovators in other cities have been conjuring. Stay tuned for what I find.
Immersive is everywhere.
-Terry Podgorski, co-Artistic Director and World Builder at Nordo