Just Comfortable Enough to Get Immersive

Tara Khozein: Welcome to Bridge Between Realities, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. My name is Tara Khozein. I’m a classical singer and theatre artist.

Martin Boross: And I’m Martin Boross. I’m a theatre and filmmaker from Hungary.

Tara: We’re the hosts of this podcast series, which documents what we’re learning from our research project bearing the same name: Bridge Between Realities. This includes several workshop residencies and public theatre events across the US centering on contemporary theatre forms.

Martin: In addition to theatre workshops and residencies, we are also creating an essay series and this six-episode podcast series for HowlRound. These episodes were recorded at each of the workshop locations in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Bath, Maine; Philadelphia; and New York with the participation of the residency artists.

Tara: Each episode focuses on a theme that was a core element of the workshop we led. These include immersive theatre, devising, site-specific work, ensemble training, co-leadership, and working for and with community.

Martin: This project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Dwelling was an immersive performance event, the central topic of which was home. This one-night-only piece was created collaboratively by an interdisciplinary group of local artists, and it took place at q-Staff Theatre.

Tara: The audience was welcomed into a space that felt like a cozy café. They were seated at tables and scenes, musical compositions, choreography, videos, and other interactions with the artists came to life in different corners of the room. All of the content was created by and with our participating artists. For more information on Dwelling and Bridge Between Realities, you can check out the description.

Martin: “The act of active reception can be understood through the metaphor of a therapeutic massage. No matter how much the masseur stimulates, prods, tickles, or shows of their technique, it’s all in vain if they are not sufficiently attuned, if they don’t ask questions, if they don’t sense what the client’s body actually needs. Likewise, attempts to read his tension or reach sore spots will be ineffective if the client lies there like a block of stone, a state where nothing goes in or out. Of course, the session might still be survivable, but it yields much deeper results when both parties try to breathe together. That requires attention, trust, and devotion. At the same time, we must accept that some people hate being touched and that there are many massage therapists you’d want to flee from after two minutes, because you instantly know you don’t belong there.”

This was a quote from a series of articles that I published in Hungary called Director’s Journal. These journals served as the springboard for the residencies.

Tara: Our guests are Hope Orange and Diana Delgado. They’re two of the twelve participants we worked with throughout the week. Diana, in her own words, is a human being based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She’s an artist and creative person and also works as a public servant at the Albuquerque Museum. Her background is in devised performance art, circus arts, and physical theatre. She loves clown work, street theatre, installation, and using her body for storytelling.

Martin: Hope is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on acting. They are Southern Cheyenne, based in New Mexico, but raised all over the world. Hope’s main disciplines are performance art, circus, music, video art, and protest performance.

Tara: I just want to give some context about where we are right now. So we’re at q-Staff Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This is the day after our first showing, called Dwelling, on the theme of home. And Hope and Diana, actually, I think you hadn’t met before this project, so this is also your first time meeting and also your first time talking intensely about your backgrounds, artistic backgrounds. So this is also a meeting of each other.

Hope Orange: It’s our first date, and it’s being recorded.

Diana Delgado: Podcast date.

Tara: So yeah. Can you share any experiences that you’ve had, either as a performer or an audience member, either experiences where something was really, really working or something was really, really not working, and maybe reflect a little bit on why it felt that way?

Diana: I want to share about other experiences too, but I think just opening with that and being inspired by what you shared is super powerful because I think whether it’s walking into a dentist office or walking into a theatre performance when theatre scares the shit out of you, being received for the state that you’re entering is so important. I really believe in building community and creating space for people to come together and feel themselves either reflected or celebrated, held, safe, listened to, all of those lovely juicy words that are very ooey gooey.

When I do community building events or try to facilitate connection between people who maybe have never met before, maybe people who don’t even speak the same language, just that idea of being present and able to receive I think is super important. And I think for me, as a performing artist, being able to be present with the spectator, the audience, the participant, the podcast co-host, whoever it may be, I think is one of the most powerful ways you can create that sense of safety and belonging and not wanting to exit the massage salon, don’t want this person to touch your body anymore.

Tara: So Hope told us about their experience of seeing The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time when they were in high school. Before the show, there were these warmup games to warm up the audience.

Hope: They were pulling me out of my comfort zone immediately, but they did it in a very fun, safe way that they didn’t— I don’t think, at least, I wasn’t made uncomfortable. And then throughout the show, you’d get to shout things at the characters and whatnot.

Tara: And was it the gaminess, or the lightness or the way that you, the first interaction that you had with the person or the music? What made it feel okay to do this intimate stuff, like popping the balloon against someone else? What made it feel okay?

Working with people who aren’t performers, who are just speaking as themselves, is, I think, an interesting way of getting immersive, because you’re just experiencing the way that their voice shakes, remembering that they’re doing something that’s outside of their practice.

Hope: I think part of it is the performer’s energy. I think often that people think that they’re hard to read when I think most people are open books. And you can tell if someone is going to treat you kindly, usually. That’s not to say, “okay, and also don’t judge people by their cover and whatnot.” But I think the performers having a very open space or open, safe energy is clear immediately. And also, I think that particular show tends to draw a queerer, younger audience that tends to be a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more loose. And also, I went with colleagues and friends and whatnot, and there was people that I knew performing, and if I went to that show in a completely different city at the time, it would not have been the same.

Tara: So here we start trying to put our finger on the very complex combination of things that makes people feel comfortable in an immersive space. It reminded me of this experience that I had in Berlin in this blind restaurant where you walked in and all of the lights were off and all of the waiters were blind, and you were seated in complete and total darkness, and you just had to have this experience of navigating a dinner without sight.

Somehow it was one of the most profoundly lonely experiences I’d ever had, because I was there alone, and at some point during my dinner, my waiter expressed concern for me because I think she could sense that I wasn’t doing well. And she was like, “Yeah, it’s really a lot better if you bring people with you,” Which now just seems so obvious, but at the time, I think it was the difference between a really fun, exciting, interesting, creative, and empathetic experience, and just a really scary one. And I think that if I had known that, then it would’ve made something really positive out of something that was actually really sad and lonely. So in immersive theatre, we’re searching for what are the ingredients? What do you tell an audience that they have to know before they’re experiencing something, or as they’re experiencing something, so that they can fully receive it?

Martin: I think this alliance or partnership you are mentioning is not only true for other spectators, but also a connection or alliance offered by the performers. And this led us to discuss negative experiences where a true offering of involving the audience in the event was missing.

Hope: I got tickets to go see Stephen Colbert, a taping of it. So they’ll talk to you before and be like, “This is how the show’s going to go.” And they’ll pull people up sometimes and interview them to warm the crowd up because they want you to be laughing really hard at his jokes, or they try to prep the crowd to react a certain way, but also like, “Hey guys, you’re part of the show. We can’t do the show without you.”

Tara: I wish you could see the expressions on her face right now.

Martin: The quotation marks and irony.

Tara: There’s so much... Lots of furrowed brow.

Hope: If it’s not clear, my voice might sound happy, but I was not. I mean, it was a nice… It was fun to see it happen, but interactive-wise, I found myself not wanting to, I don’t know, I could tell when they wanted us to laugh, and I couldn’t. It was just was so forced, and I think that’s what I’m getting at, is they want it to be a very fun, loving type of environment, and you can’t get that by telling people that’s what you want.

Tara: It makes me think of a moment in the show last night, actually, Diana was involved in, that I thought was this like—actually, I was in the booth helping with cues, and it was the only thing that I took a video of during the show. But for me, it was this moment that you guys were clapping, you and Marisa DiMarco were clapping at the end of this noise set, or as she described it, clown-noise set.

Diana: Yeah, we were inspired by clown. We both wanted to do something that the other one wasn’t as well versed in, so I was like, “Here’s some clown...” We didn’t really know it was going to end up this way, but I was like, “Here’s some clown,” and she’s like, “Here’s some noise.” And yeah, it worked, I think.

Hope: The way I would describe it really quickly, for context, for people that didn’t get to see the performance, they basically did a DJ set with kitchen appliances and then did a dance party to it afterwards. It was very cool.

Tara: And got the whole audience involved with a pattycake moment, a very extravagant pattycake moment that involved fifty people. And it was just so joyful to see everybody doing this thing, and they were so ready to do it. And then you wanted it to become the applause of the set, which I feel like but you found a way of doing that in a way that felt honest and organic, where you psyched everybody up enough through your generosity or through the structure of the piece where you got us psyched in a sincere way. And I’m wondering how that, how those two experiences—

Hope: Yeah, because you had that plan before. We all talked about it.

Diana: It was a hope, it was a hope. It was a hope, Hope.

Hope: Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly it. And I think it’s also, you guys would’ve been fine if everyone didn’t start clapping. Even though that’s what you wanted, that wasn’t necessarily the end goal even.

Martin: To me, this is one of the very important definitions of good interactions, where people can stay out of it without feeling like they are spoiling the game. So, if it was a physical space as if they were able to pull back and go in the corner, they still get to be part of it, they still get to see and hear everything, but they don’t need to be in that zone that needs to interact, and that they don’t offend anyone around. I also wanted to provide two examples of bad interactions.

Tara: Let’s go.

Martin: So once, I think I saw this improv theatre group in New York City in 2013, I think they were called, or it’s a series called—

Diana: Oh my god, I was about to talk about that. That’s mine. That’s my show. That’s mine too.

Martin: Let’s talk shit together. And I was struck by the fakeness of the interactive aspect of the show where I think the only choice that was given to the audience in which order they are going to play out the scenes they already have. And to me, it was such a fake challenge that didn’t impact anything, really, and it was so not risk-taking.

Tara: It seems a little bit like many of the experiences that we’re sharing have to do with honesty and connection.

Diana: I just wrote that down.

Martin:Dwelling was a unique project in the sense that alongside participants who primarily identify as performers, it also included individuals who had never been on stage before. One of them was Esther Ilia, a mixed Assyrian Irish American artist, illustrator, designer, and storyteller. During the post-performance feedback session, she shared the following with us. You’ll also hear her daughter, who was sitting on her lap, chime into the discussion.

Esther Ilia: [from a prerecorded interview] Don’t take this personally, but I’m afraid of the theatre. And that’s on me, and it’s my own issue, and I liked how comfortable it was made for those of us who were not in any way tied to performance or performing or theatre or any of it. So that was really beautiful.

Tara: Of course, important in all kinds of performance, all kinds of theatre, all kinds of art, but it seems like especially important if you’re working with something immersive, because the idea is to put—to immerse something is to put it into water, to let it completely cover them. And I think that we can... Humans are social animals. We are all experts of interaction. So if something isn’t real, if something isn’t honest, if somebody’s not really, really feeling something, we know that right away because it’s like survival for us. And it seems like, and this is tying in a way that I wasn’t expecting, but working with people who aren’t performers, who are just speaking as themselves is, I think, an interesting way of getting immersive, because you’re just experiencing the way that their voice shakes, remembering that they’re doing something that’s outside of their practice. All of that changes the way that we receive them. And I just love that you brought that up.

Hope: Yeah, yeah, no, and I feel like that is the secret sauce in interactive things. Both openness and honesty from the performers and also, and the hope is that you get that from the audience and you can’t guarantee it. But I think it’s the more open and honest and just accepting of what whatever is going to be is going to be.

Diana: Yeah, and I think there’s something there also, and I think Martin, you were talking about it too. But for me, it’s important when people get to opt in as an audience: “Can I speak?” An audience member, participant, somebody who’s a spectator, whatever it is, being able to opt in or out of the pattycake moment, for example. There’s nothing I hate more than forced audience participation when you don’t know how I’m feeling in that moment, I might, yeah, sure, I’m a theatre person, but not tonight. I came to watch a play, not give you your content to make your show or whatever. I don’t know.

Tara: On the first day of the workshop, we asked participants what they were interested in exploring during the residency. It was during this conversation that the idea emerged for Hope to guide audience members away from their tables backstage for a one-on-one experience inside a special installation, which she called the Nest. So how did you explode a meadow and a tipi inside of a tent inside of a theatre inside of this performance? And how did you think about that space, and what were your considerations?

Hope: I mean, for context, tipis are just on my mind because Sun Dance just happened out in Oklahoma, which is a very sacred, has been going on for a very long time, ceremony that my tribe does or is a part of. It starts with the Cheyenne ceremony, which is what I am. So tipis were just very on my mind. I lived in a tipi, I actually lived in a tipi before. So I don’t know, I mean, I’m not going to get too far into this, but the question that has been affecting my art personally is how much I want to include my identity, and how much that being a forward-facing part of me, and how people experience me as a person and as an artist and all of that. It’s been a question for me. So there was a little part of me that was like, don’t want to bring a tipi, because I don’t want to be the Indian that pitched the tipi. Not to be that guy, not to be that Native, or whatever.

But it’s also when I think of comfort and home and stuff, I have a lot of memories in tipis growing up. That’s just my personal aspect of why it reflects home for me. I’ve moved around my whole entire life. Literally when I was younger, I wouldn’t even stay one place for a full year, so I got really good at making all of my different rooms that I’ve ever had my space again. So yeah, I think I just wanted to do that again. And my original idea, I wanted people to literally be able to lay. I wish the tipi could have been bigger so that people could lay down in it and just have that. But yeah, then it just grew into something else where I’ve been wanting to share my music that’s also deeply personal and about home, usually, and about people in my life that represent home for me anyway.

So that was playing off my iPad in the little tipi that I pitched, in the little garden that I made out of flowers that I personally own from my own film work, and then also beautiful, amazing giant flowers that Diana made herself, which is like—you know when you wish you could have been the person that made it?

Diana: You can come make flowers with me anytime.

Hope: Was really interesting. I had an idea of how people were going to experience... Or I don’t know, I think I also wanted people to experience it however they did. And then the first time I brought people in, we had the original plan of I bring one person in and they swap out. It goes like that. People just stayed.

Tara: No one wanted to leave.

Hope: Which surprised me, but.

Tara: Did not surprise me.

Music: [“Gardens, Texas” by Hope Orange] There’s fresh cedar in the air, I saw it when I was walking here. 

Waltz around the tipi bend, I’ll find the meaning in here somewhere. 

Came back twenty years later and I’d grown up. To a woman, be strong, I still feel young. 

I’ve been singing, I’ve been praying creator. 

Take your medicine, it’s always bitter. 

Deaf man praying for himself. Are you hearing, are you hearing for his health? Pick your medicine, don’t keep it to yourself. Are you healing, are you saying how it felt?

Tara: It was so beautiful. It was lovely. I got to participate once just as an audience member as we were trying it out, and I think that somehow you really accomplished this feeling of lying down with the way that there was an ottoman where you could put your feet up and you leaned back as you’re inside of the tipi listening to this music and above you she created this cloud with cotton.

Hope: It’s like a pre-made weird cloud light. Super cool, though.

Tara: It’s so beautiful, and it was, I think, such a successful part of the show. So thank you, and thank you for describing it.

I think maybe we can go to Diana. You can talk a little bit about your extended scaffolding moment with the audience. What was the script or the score for you, and what did you have to accomplish? And then, what was the reality like?

Diana: I think I didn’t really have a performance score. I just had like where Martin was like, “Put it here, and then put it here, and then make it rain inside.” So I was like, “Okay, Roger that.” And then of course, because the audience never really does what you want them to do, they’re always going to be in the place that is going to make your entrance onto the stage a little bit more difficult. And also, we had a lot of people, we had a really full house. So for context—since audio medium, visual description—there was a, what would, I guess, be the stage of the theatre, but that’s where the audience was sitting in cafe style tables with little chairs around them. Some of them had six to eight chairs, some of them had four chairs, so it was a very full. Imagine a very full restaurant or patio.

And then in one corner of the stage or the performance area, there was this giant scaffolding with tin, a piece of corrugated metal pitched almost like a slanted roof that had a Bluetooth speaker hidden in that would play the sound of a rainstorm, like a thunderstorm and rain drops hitting a tin roof. So the goal was to move that through the space, around and over people, without accidentally crashing anybody, to a different corner of the space. And it was very fun. And I don’t know, I loved it. I think some people didn’t understand what the hell is going on, and then I think some people really thought it was funny. I think some people, I know some people really enjoyed it. And I feel like there was definitely some other folks that were like, “Why is this happening? Why am I being inconvenienced in this way? My chair was here and I’m not ever going to move it.” And it’s like, “Sorry, sir, you got to move your chair. This is not going to stop until you move your chair. So please just make it easier for all of us.”

I don’t know. I don’t really know what else to say about it, aside from the fact that I really loved it, and I love that in performance. I don’t even know if it’s really an absurdist break because the whole show just flowed so well together. But it was just, I think, really disruptive for the audience. But I love that kind of disruption for audience. And yeah, I don’t know, I love doing stuff like that, so it was just really fun for me. Yeah, I would do it again, a hundred percent.

Martin: To me, what I loved about it was the dramaturgy of the audience engagement in it. So first they were like, “Haha, funny. What are they doing with this weird construction tool?” And then, “What is going on here?”

Diana: Yeah, I love it.

Martin: “Are they really going to push that through the whole space? Are you kidding? Is this really happening?” And then in the middle, kind of starting rooting for you. And by the end, it’s like a collective accomplishment and a common mission, that, “Yeah, we did it.”

Diana: Yeah, I loved it too. I loved it because people were like, “Oh, she’s just going to do this right here, right?” And then when they’re like, “Oh, no, they’re really dragging this thing all the way across the room.” So yeah, I absolutely loved it too.

Tara: And I felt like you were the perfect person to make this happen.

Hope: I was literally about to say—I could not.

Tara: You could have. I think it’s in you. I think it’s in you. But Diana was uniquely suited to execute this mission, and we knew that it had to be you because we saw you managing the Juneteenth event. Just an amazing, amazing space holder, facilitator, there for everyone at the same time. And I think you need that commitment to this is happening right now to everybody.

Diana: It’s not going to stop. We’re not changing the plan.

Tara: We’re not changing the plan, and you’re in it whether you want to be. For that, it’s almost like it goes against some of the rules that we talked about at the beginning where it’s like you can opt out. In some ways it’s okay to, when you have the trust of the audience, to push them to opt in.

That’s maybe the ultimate immersive moment: when the performers didn’t even intend for audience to be part of it, and the audience needs to or chooses to because they feel moved to be inside of it.

Hope: Because we built rapport with them at that point. And what this is all making me think about is there’s an interesting yin and yang between the rain and the nest type of situation where Diana was like, “You’re part of this. Sorry, you might not think you are, but now look at...”

Diana: I was like, “You guys can go to the bathroom.” I was like, “Now’s a great opportunity to stand up and go to the bathroom if you don’t want to be here right now.”

Tara: So you also gave them permission to deal with it in a way that might be more.

Hope: But whereas for me, I was walking up to people and it was a lot more choice-based, where I was trying to find people that I thought might be willing to, and I got “no” sometimes, and then I got yeses, but that was a very “you don’t have to do it.” Whereas with Diana, it was like, “Well, the wheel is here so you can choose not to move but...”

Tara: I think we want to go onto one more little closing topic. In your introductions, you both mentioned that you’ve worked a bit with protest art, and this is another immersive experience, so maybe you can just both talk a little bit about your experiences.

Diana: A fun one that I did is a long, long, long time ago, there was a street theatre group that would happen here in Albuquerque, and we organized—lot of us were really into clown work, type of clown work, it’s like red nose. You don’t use language. I mean, you can gibberish talk, but you don’t talk in any known language.

Hope: Physically based type.

Diana: Or I don’t even, like “bidapboopba!” I don’t know, just like sounds, gibberish sounds, or you don’t use any words. But we got a bunch of people who all liked clown work, and then other folks who wanted to do a little bit, like learn a little bit about clown work. I can’t remember, there was a lot, like fifty people, and then we did a protest in clown from UNM [University of New Mexico] down to the courthouse, and then other folks started to join in on us, but all of our signs were in gibberish, because we’re clowns, and nobody really knew what we were protesting. And the news came and was trying to interview us, but we were in clown so nobody could talk to them. So that was really fun. That was really fun.

Hope: I know it’s interesting, I’ve been involved with this project since I was probably literally ten. We did a devised work where we worked in partnership with this theatre group that was in Palestine on the Gaza Strip where they would take poems by children and teenagers who grew up—I mean, they were all the same age as me, so born around the 2000s, right around 9/11—and it was just them talking about their experiences. And we took those poems and turned them into live performances and dance work and aerial silks, and we had some just, what’s the word, apparatuses. And that performance has toured around the country, and actually the performers that stayed with it ended up getting banned from Israel. The Israeli government has literally completely banned them because of that performance. So this was a small section of it where there was wooden portraits of, I cannot remember if it was martyrs or the authors, but it was portraits of Palestinians, and then at the back of these wooden planks, we had their poems, the same ones from that.

And we did this in Santa Fe on the Railyard by the water tower, and it was right around, I can’t remember, because I mean, it’s crazy at this point. The fact that this performance has existed since I was a child, and now it’s still this relevant is so, so insane to me. But yeah, probably it was only five or six of us, and we laid them all out and we just started walking up and you would just pick one up and then you would read it out and then place it down face up until we got through all of them. And there was probably twenty to thirty planks, I’m probably misremembering that, but it was really cool, because we did not mean for it to be interactive. And then people that were there joined us and did it with us.

I think we were all just upset, and there must have been, I can’t remember what was happening in the moment now. But yeah, we literally just did it at a farmer’s market. Because they do it right next to the Railyard in Santa Fe, and so we were just hoping that people would be there and willing to watch, and they decided. It was the audience, in that moment, that literally decided to be part of it. And I think that’s just the power of performance and protest.

Tara: That’s maybe the ultimate immersive moment: when the performers didn’t even intend for audience to be part of it, and the audience needs to or chooses to because they feel moved to be inside of it.

Hope: Yeah, that was super cool.

Tara: Thank you so much. I can’t imagine doing this piece without either of you. You both brought so, so much to this mini-residency, and just thank you so much for doing this and spending the extra time with us and yeah. Yay, Diana Delgado, Hope Orange, thank you for joining us today at q-Staff Theatre in Albuquerque.

Martin: This is the first episode of the Bridge Between Realities podcast. In the next episode, we’ll be talking about devising method with Sandy Timmerman and Apollo Garcia.

Tara: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts, including non-commercial open-source apps like Anytime Podcast Player and AntennaPod.

Martin: If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and visit howlround.com.

Tara: You can find a transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlroun