The No Proscenium Podcast

It's a big show this week. First up: writer-director Ryan Griffen and executive producer Nathan Anderson are here to talk with us about Lustration , the narrative VR series available on Meta Quest that adapts Griffen's neo-noir afterlife tale from comics to virtual reality. With a little help from voice actors like Kevin Conroy and Dante Basco. [6:00] Then David Markland of Midsummer Scream is her...

We wrap up our Tribeca Immersive 2022 coverage with this gathering of the Review Crew: NYC correspondent Edward Mylechreest is joined by special guest Nick Fortugno who makes his Review Crew debut both of whom were on-site at Tribeca this year. Hosted by NoPro Podcast host Noah Nelson, who held down the fort on the at-home portion of Tribeca. In this episode: This is Not A Ceremony [3:00] Plastics...

Our Tribeca Immersive coverage continues with interviews of the creative teams behind two of the most exciting projects at this year's festival. First up: Glenn Neath of DARKFIELD and Garth Mullins of the Crackdown Podcast join us to talk about their collaboration with documentarian Brenda Longfellow called INTRAVENE , an immersive docudrama series about the overdose crisis in Vancouver. [3:35] Th...

This week New England correspondent Leah Davis hops into the host seat and is joined by Arts Editor Laura Hess to talk Stranger Things. No, not Season 4 and its upcoming finale, but to swap notes on the past two years of Stranger Things experiences. First Laura takes us back to 2020 and the Stranger Things Drive-Into Experience in LA to set the background. Then Leah pivots to the NYC edition of St...

Summer Festival season has started in earnest and this week's episode has us touching base with two very different events on the East and West Coast of the United States. Ana Brzezinska curator of this year’s Tribeca Immersive at the Tribeca Festival which is taking place RIGHT NOW in New York City joins us to talk about this year’s selections and how it all comes together both in NYC and in...

This week Review Crew host Kevin Gossett is joined by NoPro publisher Noah Nelson to chat about two shows they've caught so far in this year's Hollywood Fringe Festival. First up is Last Call Theatre's Signals , which takes the online-MMO format and adapts it into a theatrical setting that uses the internet's own crowdsourced SCP Foundation as inspiration. Then it's The Queen's Fools production of...

We kick off our Tribeca Immersive coverage this week with Ahnahktsipiitaa (Colin Van Loon) the director of This Is Not A Ceremony , a stunning piece of 360 cinema that calls on the viewer to bear witness to personal details of the injustices visited upon Indigenous men in Canada. It is a film that understands the power of its medium, and through the heaviness of its subject matter also demonstrate...

Blake, Patrick, and Kevin dive into the last two Book Club selections: L.E. Hall's Planning Your Escape , which serves as both a history of play that led up to the creation of escape rooms and as a guide on how to approach escape games (with a good dose of immersive theatre history to boot); and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus , a fantastical novel set in the midst of a duel between two magici...

Artist Adam Schwerner joins us to discuss Your (Un)natural Garden , currently delighting visitors to LA's Descanso Gardens . We talk about the interactive installations, botanical gardens as a canvas for art, and what he's learned about large-scale art as part of the executive team of the most iconic venue in themed entertainment. Plus: The Pick of the Week Headlines Apple Mixed Reality Device Det...

It's a whole hour focusing on the Meta Quest, from the recent showcase to what's worth playing right now. Kevin Gossett plays host as Kathryn Yu and Patrick McLean blast through: Meta Quest Gaming Showcase Moss: Book II by Polyarc Ghostbusters VR by nDreams + Sony Pictures Virtual Reality Among Us VR - Innersloth, Schell Games, and Robot Teddy Red Matter 2 by Vertical Robot A quick detour to talk...

Artist Glenn Kaino joins us to talk about his latest installation, ' A Forest For The Trees ,' a stunning work in Los Angeles presented by The Atlantic and Superblue . This one's a can't-miss experience. [7:15] We also talk with Erin Brindley and Terry Podgorski , co-executive artistic directors of Seattle's best kept secret Cafe Nordo , which returns to live work with ' Down The Rabbit Hole .' [3...

NoPro London Curator Shelley Snyder is joined in person by New England Correspondent Leah Davis to trade notes on their experiences at Punchdrunk's latest production The Burnt City . Watch out for spoilers, as Shelley and Leah go through their multiple runs of the show and share some of the secrets they've uncovered in this highly anticipated, hugely ambitious work from the creators of Sleep No Mo...

Cesar Hawas, executive producer of Particle Ink: Speed of Dark , an incredible new show that seamlessly blends projection-mapped characters with live performers to create an immersive work like no other. It's playing now in Las Vegas and you really should go! Plus: Landon Zakheim of the Overlook Film Festival drops in to talk about this year's immersive offerings at the New Orleans celebration of...

This week, Graham Wetterhahn of After Hours Theatre Company joins host Noah Nelson to talk about the upcoming Los Angeles Immersive Invitational , a 48-hour pop-up festival that challenges immersive creators from across LA to make new work out of thin air and share it with the public just two nights later. After a successful 2019 event, this year's edition will be held at the Shakespeare Center of...

This week Kevin Gossett hosts as Laura Hess and Noah Nelson report back from the 2022 Without Walls Festival in San Diego. The now annual festival, produced by La Jolla Playhouse, returned to Arts District Liberty Station with a collection of plays, performances, and public art pieces. The Crew tackles just a slice of this jam-packed event. Monuments [6:51] TransMythical [11:42] Ants [14:06] Somni...

This week we talk with Owen Kingston and Chris Styles of Parabolic Theatre in London about their current season of immersive works and the company's new home the CRYPT in the East End, which they've shared with a few productions rehomed from the canceled Vault festival. Show Notes Parabolic Theatre The Los Angeles Immersive Invitational Review Crew on Big Beautiful BRANDS: Doctor Who, Bridgerton &...

This week Kevin Gossett hosts a conversation all about the kinds of big branded experiences that are many people’s first foray into immersive. Shelley Snyder joins from London to talk Doctor Who: Time Fracture [spoiler warning at 12:00] while LA correspondent Briana Roecks and Arts Editor Laura Hess detail their time at Netflix’s Bridgerton ball in LA (which has popped up in Chicago and D.C., but...

It's a mega-episode this week starting with a panel of rebels & rogues who offer their travel tips for journeys on Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser . Journalists Brooke McDonald & Todd Martens and experience designer Nick Tierce, all of whom were amongst the first travelers on board the Halcyon, join us for a spoiler-free discussion that aims to help those who are traveling on board th...

This week Patrick McLean takes on the host duties and chats with Leah Davis and Laura Hess about the often overlooked genre of telephone-based immersive shows. The Crew dives into what makes the format tick, starting with a discussion of Leah's time with Sylvia Plath (in a sense) as part of ' We Should Meet In Air ,' and carrying on with talk of Capital W 's 'A Call From The Resistance,' the work...

Leanne Pedante (Head of Fitness) & Jonny Ahdout (Head of Product Marketing & Community) for the VR fitness app Supernatural join host Noah Nelson again on this the second anniversary of the launch of the best fitness app in VR and then some. Only this time we're in person and it's a blast. [8:25] From NYC: correspondent Allie Marotta interviews Kendra Slack and Jordan Chlapecka of Linked D...

This time out Blake Weil, Patrick McLean, and Kevin Gossett report back from the NoPro Book Club and dive into Neal Stephenson's seminal Snow Crash, the 1992 book that brought us the term "metaverse" laid the groundwork for countless imitators and an industry. Coming up next from the NoPro Book Club: Laura Hall's Planning Your Escape. The club meets for its discussion group next Tuesday, April 12t...

This week we talk with Amy Ashton, producer of La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival which runs April 21st - 24th at San Diego’s Liberty Station — it’s the longest-running theatre festival of its kind here in the United States and this marks the beginning of an annual cycle for the festival. [4:36] Then solo performer Siobhan O’ Loughlin will be here to chat about the upcoming remount o...

The Review Crew goes on another deep dive, single-topic discussion this week about Cadences: The Story of a Distance of its Pair . Leah Davis and Blake Weil recount in detail their experience play-at-home LARP from Soft Chaos. The conversation also goes into their LARPing experience and thoughts on storytelling, as Patrick McLean peppers the pair with questions. Note: while there are “spoilers” ab...

Some know Josh Randall as the co-creator of the seminal immersive horror production BLACKOUT, others as the director of large-scale promotional activations at Comic-Con and in Hollywood, and yet others as part of the team at Two Bit Circus in LA — some of us even know him as all three. This week he's here to talk about something radically different: his performance in a site-responsive production...

In honor of this week's Game Developers Conference, we're dropping this NoPro Bonus Round segment, a sequel to episode 332 with Heavnue CEO Alex Coulombe . Our conversation picks up right after the end of that conversation with a dive into how the current state of cloud gaming architecture is setting the stage for the virtual, ah, stages of the tomorrow. Then we get even nerdier after that. Origin...