“This experience was profoundly interesting and I’m really excited to debrief it,” stated Chris after attending the Theater of the Mind in Denver during our January meet up to work together in person. This is exactly what we like to hear at Salt and Clay - what experiences have transformed you? How did a guide support you in those moments?
Theater of the Mind (TOTM) is an immersive theater experience that ran from August 2022 - January 2023 in Denver Colorado. Co-created by Academy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning artist David Byrne and writer Mala Gaonkar, Theater of the Mind is a new theatrical experience you’ll see, feel, taste and hear. Inspired by both historical and current neuroscience research, the show takes you on an immersive journey inside how we see and create our worlds. Over 75 minutes, participants move through a series of rooms where they participate in thought-provoking neuroscience experiments. They learned how easily their own senses could deceive them and how perception and memory are both malleable. A tag line of the show reads, “Caution: the brain may wander. Side effects may include a distrust of your own senses, a disorientation of self, and a mild to severely good time.” Woah we thought - this is just our vibe. Talk about mystery and magic!
In order to create the mystery and magic behind TOTM, while also creating a safe space for participants to explore, guidecraft was necessary. “We look for actors who had credentials outside of theater as well - like school backgrounds, communications or event planning. This showed us that they could work as a guide through the immersive theater experience,” stated Andrew Scoville, director of TOTM. Andrew continued to say that TOTM was a particularly unique immersive theater experience because of the high level of reliance on guides. “Usually immersive theater is more scavenger hunt esque, but we had to depend on our guides to facilitate specific circumstances to get the science experiments to work correctly,” stated Andrew.
Andrew also drew incredible parallels between guidework and the importance of letting themselves come through really strongly. For me, without a theater background, this raised my curiosity. Is an actor authentic as themselves, or as a character? “The barrier is thin between personalizing immersive theater for your character or for yourselves as an actor. Actors are trained to manufacture authenticity. They are always prepared to create a character and a third party so that you truly believe it is them. The more of themselves that they bring into that, the better,” shared Andrew.
This really resonated with my understanding of guidecraft and storytelling. Throughout my interviews, folks have discussed a secret sauce for guidecraft: setting your ego aside while weaving expert knowledge and your true self into a powerful narrative of your shared experience. The stronger the narrative, the better the investment we see from our participants. I had never expected acting and guidecraft to crossover so immensely and came away from this conversation with a renewed understanding of storytelling through guidecraft.
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