I come from a background of playing video games and loving theatre as a kid. I love to tell stories and when I was younger I used the medium of musical theatre for that as I had a big passion for singing. But I was torn. As much as I loved to perform there was another side within me who sometimes loved to view more and reflect upon work, fantasize about what to alter when watching a show at the theatre, or simply to just create my own thing. Still with my passion for videogames and improv theatre lurking in the background I went to study Interactive Performance Design.
In here I could discover new forms of theatre that mixed different media together. Most things I had never seen before. It was overwhelming at first and I thought every single thing was fascinating but nothing completely grabbed my interest until in my second year I found immersive theatre. It felt like stepping into a world from a video game or movie, especially with the agency you were able to get as the audience, yet it was theatre. I wasn’t just controlling a fictional character, or witnessing a story from the sidelines. Now I was in it myself and I am my own character within the story. My love for immersing myself into fictional stories could now become even more real and closer to reality. This was the ultimate way for my love of acting based theatre to come together with my passion for video games and escape rooms.
I started to dig into Alternate Reality Games (ARG’s) and pervasive games thinking that was it. Within that genre what grabbed my attention the most was the blend between the fictional world that was being created and the real life world. Not knowing when it starts or it is finished, what or who is a part of the work, and not sure if it even is a game.
But I always kept coming back to live immersive theatre. I missed being in a space with an audience and not just digging all on my own. I missed actor-audience interaction. I missed just stepping into a physical space instead of a lot of the experience taking part online.
