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Who Am I? Casting the Audience in OjO

OjO was mounted by Bricolage Production Company in Pittsburgh in 2014, then again at La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival in October 2015. T his blog is the third entry in a series elucidating the process from the creative team’s perspective, beginning with our initial iteration in Pittsburgh to our sold out run at the Festival in La Jolla.

September 20, 2013
Jeffrey Carpenter (Bricolage Artistic Director/Co-­Creator/Director) won a grant to develop a new immersive piece at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, and he’s invited a big hunk of the team that created STRATA to make it with him—Tami Dixon (Bricolage Producing Artistic Director/Co-Creator/Director), Gab Cody (Co­-Creator/Lead Writer) and me (Co­-Creator/Director), along with Bricolage General Manager Hannah Nielsen-Jones (Co­-Creator). This is our first meeting since we initially discussed the project back on August 21.

We dive right in looking for ways to connect the visual arts and gallery milieu to the immersive performances we’re most interested in creating. Right from the start, we start to develop the idea that each participant will travel by foot around downtown Pittsburgh, searching for a Norwegian svengali who has created a system that enables people to see things differently. We call him “Mies” partly after van der Rohe, and partly after the cat who lived across the hall from us. The idea, right from the beginning, is that the person the participant is looking for—the person who will help her see differently—is herself.

Mies=Me.

Right before the end of the meeting, Hannah rescues us from a brainstorming spiral. We’re trying to name the project (The See, See Thee, Thee See Me, See the Art, Art the See) and Hannah, who speaks Spanish and has lived for stretches in South America, jokes that “Ojo” translates as both “eye” and “Pay attention! Look! See that!”

She’s flummoxed when we all go bananas for the idea. And just like that she’s accidentally named the show we’ll dedicate ourselves to for the next two years.

January 16, 2014
We’re meeting again to debrief after beta-­testing a section of Ojo at the First Night celebration in Pittsburgh. Some of our ideas worked well, but a lot of them didn’t. Our primary concern is that the participants didn’t understand their role. Who are they and why are they participating?

Immersive work at its best deploys the techniques and artistry native to traditional theatre to fulfill the predilections of a younger audience, who, raised on video games and the Internet, are accustomed to interaction, agency, and an expectation that their decisions will affect the outcome of their experience. But immersive projects are truly successful only if practitioners assiduously answer the most important question in the participant’s mind: Who am I?

To guide participants through the many different interactions they’ll have throughout our immersive piece, we’re careful to create a “spine” for their journey through the piece, and then to make a clear demand of the participant for every interaction they experience throughout. (It’s not unlike an actor’s preparation for a role in a play, or a playwright’s development of a character.) At every turn, participants receive all the information they need to understand who they are, and what decisions they must make.

When this work is at its most effective, we’re introducing the participants to themselves. We’re providing the opportunity for them to gain perspective about their own personas, their prejudices, their fears, their comfort zones, and their blind spots.

June 16, 2014
Ojo’s run at the Arts Festival in Pittsburgh closes tonight. In the end, we ditched the Norwegian svengali idea, but we’ve made effective decisions about the structure of the piece. In Ojo, our initial endowment casts the participant as a traveler, departing from a storefront travel agency. The role is clear—you are a traveler.

It’s been an intense, magical ride. We’ve met and collaborated with two artists who are blind, Ann Lapidus and Joyce Dribben, whose experiences and personalities have become an essential element of the piece.

OjO has succeeded in large part because we created a simple role for the participants to play—they’re going on a journey. After navigating city streets and finding their departure gate (Gate C), participants were whisked away to the streets of a developing world metropolis, where they were clearly tourists immersed in an exotic new environment. A short time later, they found themselves at a teenage house party (in America) where the parents were clearly not present. Again, the casting was clear—participants were high school students at a party. But how much they invested in this reality, and what decisions they made once they bought in (or didn’t) were entirely up to them.

As the creators, defining the role of the participant is a good way to grant agency, though it can be a challenge for many participants to fully engage as a “character” within the simulacrum they’ve entered. There is always a Brechtian verfremdunsgeffekt at work since the participants know that this is all pretend, and they’ll always react first as themselves, then as their character.

Our goal is not to turn the participants into actors. When this work is at its most effective, we’re introducing the participants to themselves. We’re providing the opportunity for them to gain perspective about their own personas, their prejudices, their fears, their comfort zones, and their blind spots. At every turn, and with each new experience within the immersive piece, we can alter the participants’ frames of reference and decide how much information to give them, how quickly and how specifically, and guide them from not knowing to knowing who they are, and what they are required to do.

collage of sketches
Participant Michael Arthur created this original drawing the morning after experiencing 
OjO at the Without Walls Festival—that's Bob Kanish in the upper right.
Photo by Michael Arthur.

September 22, 2015
Almost two years to the day since our first Ojo meeting, we’re at the last meeting of the Creative Team in Pittsburgh before we head to the La Jolla Playhouse for the Without Walls Festival. We’ve had lots of great talks about what we’ll need to change about the piece due to the new site, the exigencies of festival performance, and the increased capacity that indefatigable WoW Festival Director Marike Fitzgerald has requested.

The travel agency storefront location is cut, but the idea of a journey remains. We have developed a new idea for the opening of the piece, and Teresa Sapien, LJP’s Artistic Assistant who works as our expert casting director, has found us Markuz Rodriguez, the perfect actor to play the first character participants will meet.

Though the opening is different, the spine is the same: OjO (the second O is capitalized now—see how it looks like two eyes and a nose?) casts the participant as a traveler, departing from a comfortable developed ­world milieu. Though their first character contact is “Uncle José”—the sort of glad-handing ticket hawker you might encounter selling tour bus tickets at any tourist area—the participant’s casting is clear: you’re going on a trip; prepare for travel.

October 6, 2015
For our first preview, just ten participants, mostly staffers from LJP, attend. As we’ve refined this new production, we’ve discovered that the map and the mission are not paying off for participants as we hoped. We are lucky to have feedback from the knowledgeable staff of the Playhouse, Marike Fitzgerald, Teresa Sapien, and their Director of New Play Development Gabriel Greene, who help us zero in on a dramaturgical problem.

October 7-­8, 2015
The piece overall is going great, but we’re struggling with Gabriel’s question: how can we bring the final moments into line with the rest of the experience? There’s a quest embedded in OjO that isn’t paying off.

Our creative team huddles into the night, and reconvenes the next morning, searching for the best solution. How can we make the pay­off more satisfying? Is there a way to make the build­up less portentous, so that it matches the climax we have? Should we just cut all of it?

After several frustrating hours, we step back from the questions about props and dialogue, and return to our essential principle: Who am I? The participants, we remember, are travelers, not pilgrims. Our developed world audience members are operating under expectations derived from a familiar environment of travel agents and airport rigmarole, and our attempts to layer a quasi­-spiritual quest over this more familiar contextual framework are not effective. By examining our problem through the perspective of the spine of the participants’ casting, we are finally able to adjust the final moment.

The very first impulse we had back at that very first meeting—that the “Mies” character the participants sought was actually themselves—had found its consummation two years later on the Pacific Coast. As our actor instructed the participants who were standing opposite a reflective wall: “Remove your masks, and see.”

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Thoughts from the curator

Jeffrey Caprenter details Ojo, an immersive experience which aspires toward a traveling, non-visual theatre.

The OjO Experience

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