Notes from an immersive world-building workshop

From Third Rail immersive workshops with Tom Pearson

The origin story of Then She Fell

It started as a commissioned installation at Burning Man: a labor-intensive museum installation inside of an Army tent. Later, it was presented at the World Financial Center. The museum was based on ideas of genetics and weird storytelling and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A. (half-fact, half-fiction). This was the beginning.

Before that, there were 10 years of site-specific installations and experiences.

Secert compartments, libraries, hidden artifacts. No Alice yet. Performance component based on a design for the WFC. Grand marble staircase. Palm trees. High-end mall. Design something that could pull focus in a place that had no focus. Staircase dresses. Palm trees as parasols. Performers would dress in artifacts and interact with the space. Many items from previous works.

Commissioned at One New York Plaza. Reanimating empty retail space. The window would get opened slightly more everyday as it's being designed. A lot of that became the set for Then She Fell. Many of the environemtns were develoepd this way.

Installations & Ephemera

Few people each week would come and visit. The paintings were portraits of them. Visitors would become part of the world with commissioned animal self-portraits.

Then onto a site-specific performance.

Two Alices. One that was getting into the water, and one was staying dry.

The tea table became the centerpiece as the performance moved from place to place. The structure was a 20-minute series of actions that would repeat for a few hours.

Character became the grounding factor. Environment design went out the window because the atmosphere was actively antoagonistic to that effort.

A la Haunted House: pulsed entry.

Lewis Carroll was added into the mix.

nEW. CHARACTERS WERE ADED. Everyone got edgier and weirder.

2014. We know what we're doing. Arts@Renaissance in Greenpoint. A hospital. All of these rooms were in a hospital. The duet began in

World-building with characters in mind started at the hospital. Reminiscent of Cuckoos Nest. Nurses' uniforms from the era.

This points to an interested strategy of iteration through mini-grants, and building up a small piece into an avalanche that put Third Rail on the world theater map alongside big players like Sleep No More.

What are the major characteristics of site? What's emphatic in the site? What is the obvious thing pulling in your attention? What's symmetrical? What's not? Sizes, structures, textures? What's playable? What is most difficult to damage? What can bear your weight? Where can we expand and contract? Dynamism of movement and relationship to the architecture.

Fight your site or flow with it.

Weird ways to get attention in public spaces: sounds get more attention than images. Images are seen as disturbances.

Where do your hips meet the table top? Where's your center of gravity in relation to the objects of the space? How do you fill? Expand? Amplify? How do you let it work on you? This is a chair? What do you do? How do you meet it in a new way? How can you develop a piece with a chair without sitting in it.

Flowing vs fighting

Make choreography invislbe Functional . Action-based. Movedment-based theater. Fight choreopgraphy. The ruels of that. COnstact improv. Pig Iron THeater. Image-based visceral movmeent based works. Embodied expression of theater. Movement fucntionality in theater, funtionality with a flourish. Bravado.

Fight choreograhpy. Action-based. Literal. Set up an environment — flow through, disrupt it. How do you use a space with a set of action .Set of actions and objewctives vs theirs. Dialogue in movement. Action-based choreography. Objectived-based. Name the action and physcialize it. Or go into a feeling space. Center-out or outward-to-center. From core or distally. Absract vs. concrete.

Soft bodioes, hard surfaces. Get to knwo the surface. Get bruised and knocekd around .Meet a partner for a first time. The site is your partner. Get to knwo it. THe site will give you resistance.

Fit it, fill it, shimmy, skitter, nest. Cateogrize. What's a soft or hard approach?

World-building

• Sense of overwhelm — full immersion

  • You can't experience everything.

Rules of engagement

• Audience as scene partners

  • They're not scripted

    • What does it mean to include people? Task them with something relevant to the scene moving forward?

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  • Linear pulsation —audience moves at an interval

  • Durational — 30 minutes repeat over 3 hrs (or whatever)