NoPro’s Best Immersive Moments of 2022
Our team weighs in on the moments that spun them right ‘round.
The end of year brings with it the annual Best Of Lists, and immersive land is no exception.
Those who’ve been with us for a while know we do things a bit differently, as immersive work covers so many different mediums and styles. So while you won’t find a definitive Top Ten list of immersive experiences on the site this week you will find the personal notes of our Review Crew on the work that has been moving them all year long.
We do this in two ways, with this — the Best Immersive Moments — focusing in on those brief slices of time that stick with us. We do this in part to remind ourselves, and all of you, that the art of immersive is one made up of these moments. The building blocks of the memories we make that, more than any tchotchke or swag from the gift shop at the exit, are what we truly cherish for having had the experience.
Be warned: spoilers abound.
Next: The Best Shows & Experiences of 2022 (coming Friday, Dec. 16th).
Rushing Down The Stairs
The Burnt City — Punchdrunk
The breathless anticipation of years spent waiting, the approach to the temple, the donning of the mask and the steady movement through a disorienting gallery of black velvet walls. ’Til finally, finally, the last gate opens and there’s nothing between you and an unmapped infinity except a downward flight of stairs.
That’s my moment of 2022: the excitement of rushing down those stairs at the beginning of The Burnt City. In those fifteen seconds dwelt so much hope, trust, excitement: the unshakable knowledge that the next three hours were going to be good. No matter what happened, no matter what they’d made, it was going to meet and exceed all expectations.
I hope it did for others, I know it did for me.
— Shelley Snyder, London Curator
The First Glimpse
Monuments — Craig Walsh
This site-responsive, outdoor projection art project by Australian artist Craig Walsh began in 1993. I experienced an iteration at La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival in San Diego. In Monuments, Walsh casts massive projections of faces onto trees. The facial recordings of real people animate in tandem with the trees’ movement. Gaps in the branches become facial scars and upticks of wind stretch a smile. The result is stunning. The project’s scale and integration of the natural world form an otherworldly dimensionality. Being dwarfed by what feels like a live, human giant invokes a quiet and profound communal reverence. Especially at a time of social unrest and racial reckoning, Walsh’s work is an important, gorgeous example of how we can create public, representative monuments in an expansive and emotionally resonant way.
— Laura Hess, Arts Editor
The Punchline Lands
i cut myself shaving and it bled so much — Candlehouse Collective
Near the end i cut myself shaving and it bled so much, the show delivers on a punch that it’s spent almost three hours winding up. As soon as the punch hits, it becomes obvious what the show has been doing, and it’s a testament to the writing and acting on display that it manages to hide it so well. Light spoilers ahead! It’s always exciting when immersive theatre manages to give you a choice that truly feels like a choice you have to make for the sake of a show, and not just picking one of a few predetermined paths. Even if that is the case here, i cut myself shaving takes the time it needs to effectively build to the moment that it feels like a life or death decision. On top of that, the moment also manages to tie up the seemingly random threads that you’ve spent discussing during the run time. It was fun, it was twisted, and my favorite moment of the year.
— Kevin Gossett, LA Reviews Editor
A Chat With Hades
The Burnt City — Punchdrunk
It’s been about five or ten minutes of awkward chit chat with the lord of the dead when Hades finally asks the question on no one’s mind.
“Would you like to see…my wax museum?”
I almost choke on a laugh. Wouldn’t you?
The Vincent Price enunciation, the dim, flickering lights, the Bosch-esque monstrosity hanging above the desk. This is the epitome of the surreal lived camp that defines my favorite moments in immersive theatre. Everything from Sam Booth’s shaved head and mustache, to the occasional booming roar that he dismisses with a wave of his hands as the problems of the greater world serve to build the scene to this impossible to predict climax.
And yet despite my understanding of the bizarre Hammer Horror quality of this moment, I’m crying. Hades insists upon intimacy (doesn’t death insist upon intimacy with us all?), and tells me how much he loves me and awaits my permanent return home to him. He shows me his collection of records and suddenly the whole “wax museum” around me comes into stark focus. Troy, Greece, Patroclus, Polymnestor. None of it matters. We’re all headed home to the same place, and can’t help but leave grooves behind, to be eternally traced and reviewed by our descendants.
While many moments this year thrilled me, including multiple in The Burnt City, few moments have ever completely recontextualized an experience for me. What makes my brief time alone with Hades shine is how it both distills all meaning to a single point, and becomes a central axis, infusing all other points with a new layer of melancholy.
I can’t help but remember my forced promise to return to the land of the dead. Still, better to acknowledge the immortal stories we leave behind than ignore our terrible, mortal power.
— Blake Weil, East Coast Curator at Large
Chad’s Breakdown
From On High — Odd Knock Productions
As the “week” progressed in this 80’s corporate satire, so did the vibe… and not in a good way. With each day gone by, my “colleagues” seemed to be inching closer to a mental breakdown. What finally pushed them over the edge was when Chelsea, the longstanding Employee of the Month, was stripped of her title, disrupting the entire office dynamic.
The day after this happened, standing alone in a dark hallway just outside the office kitchenette, Chad — the newly crowned Employee of the Month — contemplated the mounting pressure and responsibility of the title that had been bestowed upon him. He walked to the wall, turned a handle, and a curtain of water began to fall along the back wall of the room onto a long, white pew. Chad slowly undressed down to his undershorts and began to process his emotions through movement and interpretive dance. Moments later, he was drenched in water, sliding up and down the pew, and all around on the ground before me.
With this bizarre baptism complete and now seemingly in a trance, we followed him down the hallway into a luxury corner office where he continued the ritual. After more choreographed movement on top of the executive’s desk, Chad opened a chest to reveal an oversized cloak made of suit jackets and ties. He draped it over his shoulders, removed a geometric ox head from the wall, and slowly walked toward the central office area holding the head by its horns.
Shocked and confused about what was happening, we shuffled behind Chad into the main room where we convened with the rest of our colleagues for the show’s conclusion. The remaining characters had also undergone similar breakdowns in different areas of the set, but Chad was the only one who showed up sopping wet.
— Danielle Look, Denver Correspondent
Finding A Novel Solution
The Last Clockwinder, Pontoco
While it’s an utterly enchanting moment when first entering The Clocktower, seeing the gorgeous interior of this tree that doubles as home and workplace, it’s when engaging with this VR game’s first puzzle that took my breath away. In the Blusher Garden, you have to plant, harvest, and process these plants, creating a “fuel” to run The Clocktower. But to do so you have to create robots who copy your movements, yet only for a short amount of time, creating the need to make many robots.
In a majority of puzzling experiences, be it in-person, an at-home box, or digital game, a puzzle’s solution is a fairly prescribed thing. Do things one, two, and then three accordingly in order to proceed from point A to B. But for all the puzzles in The Last Clockwinder, the solutions are my own, solely original solutions. I could use thirty robots, or just three. They could carefully hand planets to each other, or the robots toss them across the room. Until The Last Clockwinder, I’d never encountered such freedom and ownership in solving a puzzle.
— Patrick B. McLean, Chicago Curator
Speed Running Synchronicity
Convergence Station — Meow Wolf Denver
I am on C Street, having just stepped past a bus that is embedded in a wall that separates the street from a massive musical junk pile where I left a pair of my friends, Jaden and Spencer, moments before. I have only 30 minutes left in the all too brief 45 minutes I’m going to have on this, my first visit to Convergence Station. I’m thinking about how I need to cover as much ground as I can because I’ve got to get back to playing host soon.
Which is when the pay phone I’m walking past rings.
Naturally, I answer and I start BS-ing — *ahem* — improvising into the phone. I don’t remember about what, but after a minute the person on the end, who is somewhere else in this vast building asks: “Is this Noah Nelson?”
I deny it. I hang up. I scoot along my merry way past a sentient vending machine and down into a crystalline ice cavern complete with a giant mech (or two? it’s all a blur) when I run into my friend Abel, who is having as much fun as I am. Within moments we trade notes and I realize it’s Abel who was on the other end of the call.
Then a passing family helps us take some ridiculous photos all before I head even deeper into the guts of the place where I catch back up with Jaden and Spencer, now universes away in the mycelial forest of Numina.
My time there was not nearly enough, but every second is burned into my brain.
— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host
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