Latest news with #Punchdrunk
Vogue
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
I Survived ‘Viola's Room,' a Spooky New Immersive Show Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter
The real world is plenty scary right now. Forget turning on some gruesome horror movie: reading the daily headlines is enough to make just about anyone scream. All the same, I couldn't resist doubling down on the fear factor and checking out an eerie, immersive new art experience that opened in New York City this week. On through October at The Shed, the show, titled Viola's Room, is directed by Felix Barrett and produced by Punchdrunk, the award-winning theater company behind Sleep No More. An interactive, hour-long journey, it has guests weave barefoot through a labyrinth of darkened rooms and halls (by designer Casey Jay Andrews), while a delightfully spooky Helena Bonham Carter narrates a fable, based on the 1901 story The Moon Slave by Barry Pain, through provided headphones. Even with no live actors or jump scares, it makes for an intensely effective—even somewhat poetic—haunted-house experience. Guests walk through Viola's Room. Photo: Marc J. Franklin When I arrived for my prescribed time slot, I was surprised to find that there was only one other brave soul in my group. (Viola's Room is designed to be experienced by no more than six people at a time.) Our instructions were simple enough: do not lose sight of each other, and follow the flickering lights from space to space. (I was more than happy to let my partner lead the way.) In the first space—a teenage girl's bedroom, its walls adorned with Tori Amos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters—Carter instructs us to lie down as she begins to tell the gothic tale of a princess who disappears from her castle, abandons her prince, and mysteriously journeys into the night. In time, the room around us was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from inside a blanketed fort in the corner. When, skeptically, we crawled into that fort, we immediately entered into a brand-new space: a maze of hallways lined with ghostly, draped white sheets. As Carter's narration goes on, she describes the princess's descent into an enchanted and ominous forest—just as we, too, were taken through ever more otherworldly settings. Walking barefoot, we traversed terrains that felt alternately grassy, sandy, and like concrete, our surroundings ranging from a forest landscape to a high-ceilinged chapel featuring stained-glass windows suffused with a foggy light. Another room with a giant dinner table had balloons lining the ceiling, though in the darkness their strings felt more like vines, or even spiderwebs.
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter
Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: 'Viola's Room.' Didn't see 'Viola's Room'? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of 'Viola's Room,' then called 'The Moon Slave,' at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators. 'It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,' Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has. A reconceived 'Viola's Room' began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas ('Sleep No More,' which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater. 'It's all about trying to do things that our audiences aren't expecting,' Barrett said. 'Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BBC News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Dunham Massey: National Trust park exhibits nature-inspired art
An immersive art installation exploring nature, inspired by a rare Himalayan flower, has opened at a National Trust of the exhibition at Dunham Massey in Greater Manchester said they had wanted to create an environment "where visitors can slow down".The Origin exhibition, which will run until 2 November, was displayed twice in London last year and has been specially redesigned for Dunham Massey park near 200 Giant Himalayan Lilies, which take five to seven years to flower but produce thousands of seeds, have also been planted in the hall's courtyard. Created by artists Stephen Dobbie and Colin Nightingale from the theatre company Punchdrunk, Origin incorporates sound, storytelling and artwork to explore nature's life cycles and allows visitors to lie back on mats or accessible said they wanted to provide "an experience that resonates both intellectually and emotionally".He added: "In today's fast-paced world, it's easy to lose touch with the deeper rhythms that shape our lives."Our aim for Origin was to design an environment where visitors can slow down, allowing the interplay of sound and light to guide them toward a more reflective and grounded state." Co-creator Dobbie said: "Throughout our careers, we've explored how sound influences the way we perceive and interact with the world. "Here, we wanted to push that concept further - creating an experience where sound isn't just heard but felt."The exhibition also includes work by composer Toby Young, who has previously collaborated with The Rolling Stones and violinist Nicola as a hunting area in medieval times, Dunham Massey now accommodates a Georgian stately home, gardens and a deer park. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram. You can also send story ideas via Whatsapp to 0808 100 2230.
Euronews
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Euronews
'It's a sacred space': Inside the new sound exhibition from immersive theatre legends
ADVERTISEMENT A short drive away from Manchester is Dunham Massey, a 17th century National Trust property where a new soundscape installation will give audiences a unique experience of the cycle of life, nature and grief. 'ORIGIN' is the latest art installation from A Right / Left Project, Stephen Dobbie and Colin Nightingale's soundscape collective. The pair met through Punchdrunk – where they are Creative Director and Associate Creative Producer, respectively – the innovative stage company that changed people's perceptions of what was possible in immersive theatre through shows like 'Sleep No More' and 'The Burnt City'. With A Right / Left Project, Dobbie and Nightingale have expanded from working within the structures of immersive theatre to creating their own experiences from the ground up. Related Why are we still being scammed by immersive art exhibitions? Immersive exhibition celebrates the colourful 'queen of fado' singer Amália Rodrigues Together they've created bold works that break apart – sometimes literally – audience conceptions of what a sound installation can be . 'Beyond the Road' at London's Saatchi Gallery in 2019 took the work of electronic musician UNKLE and created the first 'walkthrough album'. Their next project, 2023's 'The Retiring Room' was a sonic expedition in a hotel room that could only be experienced one person at a time. Whether it's in one of Punchdrunk's expansive settings or their more intimate installations, both agree that sound is beyond essential in the experience. 'An image can be as grainy or as distorted as you want, but people will not forgive bad sound,' Dobbie says, noting how films like The Blair Witch Project could get away with shaky cam footage because they'd pushed the budget on telling the story through audio. Stephen Dobbie and Colin Nightingale A Right / Left Project 'We used to joke that, essentially, as long as we had a building and we could get sound through it, we could literally switch the lights out and give someone a torch, and they'd have an experience,' Nightingale adds. 'All the rest of it was actually just an additional bonus. Without the sound there's nothing.' For 'ORIGIN', Dobbie and Nightingale are back with one space. It's a far cry from the elaborate Punchdrunk production of 'Sleep No More', which loosely followed the plot of 'Macbeth' as audience members independently traversed the many rooms of a hotel. 'We've been a part of some massive scale projects,' Nightingale says, 'getting the right circumstances to allow those projects to happen is really tough.' From the pair's interest in spatialized sound, ''ORIGIN' came out of us trying to scale down a little bit and explore what you could do in one room where there's minimal intervention, but there would still be emotional impact.' After people spend some time enjoying the 300-acre parkland around Dunham Mass where fallow deer run free, they'll be able to enter the opulent house at the heart of the estate where 'ORIGIN' will be set up. In the room, audience members will lie down around a structure designed around the Himalayan Lily to experience the soundscape. ORIGIN at Dunham Massey Stephen Dobbie 'We wanted to take an approach of cinematic sound and reimagine it in an environment where an audience is more static,' Dobbie says. Although everyone is in the same room hearing the same soundtrack, through the way they've spatialized the music, each experience will be unique. 'You might get slightly more flute or slightly more violin. I think in animating the space like that, and animating the composition, it shifts the way you experience music.' 'It's almost as though you're experiencing music as you experience sound in quite a naturalistic way,' Dobbie adds. A Right / Left Project first created 'ORIGIN' with the composer Toby Young and lighting design by Ben Donoghue. It was first unveiled last year at World Heart Beat in London's Embassy Gardens before a stint at London Design Festival. As it returns, now in Dunham Mass, the pair are still reticent about what 'ORIGIN' is actually about. 'We all have our own relationships with births and deaths over the last couple of years and a lot of that thinking has gone into the work,' Nightingale will admit. 'But that's all we really want to say to people.' The only true way to experience something is, after all, for oneself. It's on the audience to find their own experiential narrative. While the music might occasionally play into 'familiar tropes', Dobbie says of its 'dramatic swells', there are also 'breaks of sparse atmospheric sections'. All of these give the audience room to feel it as they wish. 'We're trying to create a piece of music as an invitation to explore within yourself. To explore what might be going on in your head,' Dobbie suggests. ADVERTISEMENT 'ORIGIN' at Dunham Massey Stephen Dobbie Anyone who's seen Punchdrunk's work such as the 2022 London show 'The Burnt City' will be familiar with the production company's abrasive and in-your-face approach to immersion. They've never shied away from violence, nudity or gore. Yet, 'ORIGIN' represents a quieter and calmer side to the sound engineers' artistic impulses. 'A lot of that work is coming from a place of taking people out of their comfort zone as a way to then engage them in an avant garde approach to theatre,' Nightingale says. Punchdrunk began at the cusp of the millennia, 'where people were starting to get fractured information, but you were still kind of in control of how you received information.' 'Now we live in a world that's just madness out there with so many truths,' Nightingale continues. 'So we were interested in creating a sanctuary. It's a sacred space where people actually listen to music and disconnect from the madness out there and maybe regulate their nervous systems a little bit.' 'ORIGIN' will be at Dunham Massey, Cheshire from 3 May to 2 November. ADVERTISEMENT
