Miami workshop seeks to answer the question ‘what's really immersive'?

Miami Herald

24-06-2025

Projected renderings of the works of Van Gogh, Monet, and Michelangelo surround the museumgoer. Bubbles release cloud forms covering participants at another museum. A theater performance in a motel brings the audience in as part of the play's world putting them in active role that furthers the story. Dancers create choreography in step with the ocean communing with the environment.
These are the new wave of arts experiences and the buzzword is everywhere — 'immersive.' Some are true to form while others merely borrow elements from the immersive playbook but don't fully deliver.
Tanya Bravo, who began Juggerknot Theatre Company in 1999 in Miami, has been focused entirely on producing immersive theater for the past 10 years. Now she's hoping to make Miami a center of learning for the future of the arts genre.
From Thursday, June 26 through Sunday, June 29, Juggerknot Theatre Company and Live Arts Miami Dade College will co-produce the first annual 'Miami Immersive Intensive (MMI)' with most programming taking place at The Idea Center on Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus.
'We want to position Miami as a global hub for immersive storytelling,' says Bravo. 'That's not happening anywhere else. We have the people here who want to learn it, but you also have the people here who want to teach it.'
While workshops and speakers are mostly relegated to those participating in the MMI conference, there are some opportunities for the public to get a feel for what true immersion is about.
On opening night, Thursday, June 26, a multimedia experience, created by the French transmedia collective Le Clair Obscur, places the audience in a suspended space-time at the Frost Museum of Science in collaboration with another 'putting Miami on the map' organization, FilmGate, who each year produces a convergence of the latest happening in film and technology during Miami Art Week.
Other open-to-the-public activities are a virtual workshop from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Friday, June 27, with Lauren Storr, senior producer at Punchdrunk, the creators of the groundbreaking 'Sleep No More.' The reimagining of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' invited audiences to explore a story at their own pace wandering throughout New York's McKittrick Hotel. After a 14 year run, 'Sleep No More' closed in January but it is legendary for how it attracted return audiences in a true-form immersion experience where no two experiences were alike.
At 6:30 p.m., Saturday, June 28, in The Art Lab at MDC Wolfson Campus is a screening of the documentary 'Meow Wolf: Origin Story,' about the mind-bending art collective that has become a phenomenon. With its flagship installation 'House of Eternal Return' in Santa Fe, which combined art, technology and storytelling, they've now expanded to Las Vegas, Houston, and Denver, with more exhibition spaces on the way. Alexandro Renzo, 'Meow Wolf's' creative director will be part of a question-and-answer session.
'They were a group of scrappy visual artists in Santa Fe who were creating these immersive walk-through visual experiences that have completely blown up. This is the story of how the collective started,' says Bravo.
It was from her own experience in New York participating in the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman's LAByrinth Theater Company's week-and-a-half-long workshop that the idea of an intensive such as MMI brewed for years.
Bravo had taken a break from theater, working in corporate America, when she attended LAByrinth's intensive. She ended up being in a show produced by PopUp Theatrics, run by the now Yale School of Drama program chair Tamilla Woodard.
'It was this one-person-at-a-time immersive show that took place in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and you would go through retail locations and different spaces and learn about them. And when I experienced that, I was like, this is what I want to do. This is the future of theater. This is what we need right now.'
She returned to Miami, connected with an old friend Juan C. Sanchez, who had written a play called 'Paradise Motel' and they turned it into the immersive real-time theater experience, 'Miami Motel Stories.' Woodard was enlisted to direct.
'It was the first immersive piece that we did and then after that it was five years of non-stop Miami motel stories,' says Bravo.
She believes that now is the time to present a deep dive for presenters to get to the core of what constitutes an immersive production.
'We are at a point where everyone wants to create 'immersive.' So, then there's a responsibility, as an organization, to train (them), we need to understand what immersive really is,' says Bravo.
While there are events open to the public, the intensive is focused on those who are interested or working in the field of immersive work.
'I'm hoping that we take that buzzword and we make it a little bit more concrete for creators on how they actually do immersive,' says Bravo.
For the first MMI, Bravo says about 85 percent of participants are local but they've already started planning for next year.
Plans are for the MII to be held each summer to grow it into a training ground for those who want to work, or who are already working, in the immersive space.
'We are hoping it can be a magnet for people to come to Miami from everywhere,' says Kathryn Garcia, executive director of Live Arts Miami, who is co-producing the MMI with Juggerknot. 'We want to create that next level for people who are working in this field, who are trying new things and deepen their skill sets.'
In additional to national speakers including keynote speaker and workshop leader MiKhael Tara Garver, founder of Culture House Immersive and director of Disney's groundbreaking 'Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser' experience, local 'experts' including Octavio Campos, choreographer and director of intermedia performance, Pioneer Winter, artistic director of Pioneer Winter Collective, France-Luce Benson, playwright, 'Miami Bus Stop Stories,' Natasha Tsakos, known for live performance in microgravity and Bravo, will be presenting workshops.
Garcia stresses that with the breadth of speakers and presenters they've enlisted, there's an opportunity for variety.
'That's intentional because there's something great that happens when you let go of the borders of discipline and just bring artists together for a common person. Everyone who will be involved is interested in this particular way of storytelling, whatever the form may be,' says Garcia. 'But I also think that this genre is still growing and defining itself and maybe that's what we learn, which will keep things exciting for audiences.'
If you go:
WHAT: Miami Immersive Intensive: MMI
WHERE: Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, 315 NE 2nd Ave., Building 8, Miami
WHEN: Begins at 2 p.m., Thursday, June 26 through 5 p.m., Sunday, June 29.
COST: $350, MII four-day pass, $40, Punchdrunk Live Stream, $10, 'Meow Wolf Film Screening and Q&A. Does not include fees.
INFO: Complete program guide at www.miamiimmersiveintensive.com/program; tickets at https://www.squadup.com/events
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