PERFORMERS/CO-CREATORS: Torien Cafferata, Amberlin Hsu, Kelsey Benson, Kyle Kuchirka
VENUE: University of Saskatchewan Snelgrove Art Gallery

Project O (2015)

Our debut experiment in immersive theatre took place before we knew what to call it – our education had not brought us that far, but far enough to know how to go further.

In the spring we booked the Snelgrove Art Gallery on the University of Saskatchewan campus with a show that ultimately got scrapped, leaving us one month to come up with a new one. Thus we wrangled a company of collaborators for an experiment in trust and limitation: three of us would each choose one thematic prompt (birth, growth, or death), one area of the gallery, and one piece of tech or prop (laptop, glow paint, projection) and from this create a non-linear series of movement vignettes, connected by Kuchirka as the audience guide.

Performers had to be silent, each piece had to have some kind of audience interactivity, only three design colours (black, white, green) were permitted, and most importantly: each vignette had to be devised completely independent of each other. This means the first time we saw all of them together was during dress rehearsal, where we devised the ending. The white cube gallery was a dramatic inverse of our typical black box theatre – as if we had discovered a new world. The lights were relatively fixed – we basically had an on-off switch, which we nonetheless used when audiences had to find a character in a blackout with their phone lights – but by contrast we had four movable walls to allow for an ever-shifting space between and during vignettes.

Audiences were limited, but instead of increasing costs we made admission free – all it took to begin the show was to fill a bowl with stones and ink a fingerprint onto Kuchirka’s body. From there they would play with glow paint on canvas, share in mourning with a dancer, and teach an endlessly reborn “robot” how to move. There was no curtain call, leaving audiences free to explore the space as a gallery post-show. Thus began It’s Not A Box Theatre’s primary traditions and values: flat creation hierarchies, immersive spaces, audience interactivity, expressive movement, digital technology, Pay-What-You-Decide or free admission, and an interdisciplinary approach to devising.