Latest / CINEMACTIVIST / S03E02 - Meet Tethered
Transcript
- John C. Lyons: Hi everyone and welcome back to the Cinema Activist Podcast. I am your host, John Lyons. Thanks so much for being here. This is episode two of season three of Cinema Activist, and this week we're going to catch you up on Tethered. And this week we're gonna catch you up on tethered. And this week we're going to catch you up on all things tethered. So tethered came about after I attended So Tethered came up. So tethered came up after I attended Sleep No More for the first time in New York City. If you're a person that knows about immersive theater already, you most certainly know about Sleep No More. Sleep No More took place ⁓ Mm. How long did sleep no more run? We sold. And in today's episode, we're going to be talking about all things tethered. Tethered is And in today's episode, we're going to be catching you up on all things tethered. Tethered is a performance art company that works in the immersive theatrical space. What is immersive theater? Well, if you know anything about immersive theater, you've certainly heard the name Sleep No More. And Sleep No More was my first experience with immersive theater. It ran for nearly 14 years in New York City, and I was lucky enough to see it before the end of its run. Sleep No More is loosely based on Macbeth, and it was a theater company called Punch Drunk that had this six-floor building in Chelsea. Basically, you wear a mask and you show up, they drop you off on a random floor. And you just roam and you're free to roam. It's sort of a choose your own adventure. It was fantastic. It was really a life changing experience for me. I wanted to stay in that space all day and all night. I stayed in for the three hours. ⁓ each group, each block was in three hours of time. And yeah, you essentially roam around the space. You'll encounter characters, all of the characters in the show, all the performers in the show, they are not wearing masks. So that way you can tell right away who's an audience member and who is not. ⁓ it has a very dreamy, mysterious, voyeuristic vibe to it. ⁓ you can't interact with the performers or speak, but they can ⁓ interact with you. And then if you're lucky enough to get a one-on-one with one of the performers, which I did, there was a character called the nurse. ⁓ I was in a scene where it was a forest and there were pathways in the forest. Yes, they build a forest ⁓ among many other awesome sets in this building. ⁓ it was two characters, they were separated by the trees. You could tell that they had a longing for each other, and I was kind of sticking around there. ⁓ by myself watching and ⁓ the nurse came up to me and took my hand and walked me through the path and then built into the corner of this ⁓ huge space ⁓ was like a tree house or a clubhouse and I sat in there and she took off her mask. and yeah, it was it was an amazing performance. ⁓ just for me it was emotional. It got me emotional. ⁓ She was emotional. ⁓ and it was it was fantastic. ⁓ obviously it it felt very intimate. ⁓ it was like something I had never experienced before. It was like stepping into ⁓ a noir film. The lighting was great, everything was top-notch, and there was music playing throughout the entire space for the three hours, and ⁓ the music had cues through it. Very subtle ⁓ that the performers would listen for, and that's how they would synchronize their timing across the space. So that was fantastic, Sleep No More. And I saw that in ⁓ late 2022, during similar, very similar to my stories in the previous episode about the Holy Ghost feature film project. ⁓ this is another Christmas. in New York City and ⁓ heavy influence, the influence on coming back to Erie ⁓ at the beginning of 2023 and wanting to see if we could pull something like this off on our own. ⁓ well not on our own. ⁓ and seeing if we could pull something off of this scale or anywhere near this scale in Erie, Pennsylvania. No one was doing anything like this before, and started inviting dancers, choreographers, artists, writers, to ⁓ theater directors to meet and just kind of kick around ideas of how this would look. ⁓ fast forward to our first show. Which is in twenty twenty-four, in February of twenty twenty-four, we did ⁓ just a two-night show. It was called Tethered, and the theme of that show was codependency. And our first show took place at PACA, which is the Performing Arts Collective Alliance in downtown Erie in a historic building. ⁓ it's a five-story building called the Meiser Building. And Paca was great partners. We also partnered with SafeNet on that show. And it was about codependency in all its different forms. And essentially we were testing the waters on a lot of things. ⁓ we had a big cast of 30 if I recall and a crew, very dedicated crew and performers. And essentially ⁓ one of the team members, ⁓ Nikki Behr shared some personal stories that informed ⁓ some of the spaces in the show. This was essentially not for the performers a fully ⁓ roaming throughout the the various spaces in the various sets, like they did in Sleep No More. In our case, we only had ⁓ three or four characters that Roamed across the five floors. The rest of our performers were pretty much static on a set ⁓ that their individual story and experience took place in. And so our audience members would ⁓ either traverse the stairway that went through the center of the building or ⁓ took the elevator up and down. And basically they could stop and watch. the different sets or follow one of the the few characters that moved around. ⁓ we had Tony Grey who made the original score for Tethered and it was a one-hour performance and a one-hour score that looped three times each night, which was how Sleep No More was set up. We had ⁓ clocks, digital clocks that we also ⁓ placed on each of the sets so that our performers could, you know, have the the music playing to keep them in sync ⁓ and in time. And then we had the clocks as well. And that went really well. We had ⁓ hundreds of people attend. It was again just a two-night and done. And we proved that we could do something like this in our region. So Basically, as soon as that show ended, we started work immediately on the next tethered, which again was called Tethered. And this one was focused on the themes of memory and consciousness. And that show took place over four nights, two weekends in September of twenty twenty five. Yeah, that's right. In September of twenty twenty five. And again, we had hundreds of people attend. We had ⁓ a combination of dancers and performers. This time we had our characters roaming across the entire space of the former Maenner core club building. so this was a German, you know, men's singing choir, mana core club, and ⁓ the building is three floors, it's thirty-six thousand square feet. A huge space. In the previous show, when we were in the PACA building, we didn't have ⁓ ownership, if you will, of the entire building. We had ⁓ a space or two on each floor, but we didn't have the whole building. In the case of our 2025 show, we had the entire building, ⁓ which, you know, led to a lot of different challenges of its own. It's a very wide ⁓ space to cover. But again, we had a cast of ⁓ about 20 dancers and ⁓ theater performers, film performers that were in the cast. And it was the same general setup of it was again an original score by Tony Grey that was an hour long and it played three times ⁓ back to back to back. What we did in our story development, ⁓ is we had a progression change for some of the characters between the three loops as we called them. So instead of doing the same thing every time, due to the nature of our story, we were able to have add different shadings and colorings and some story arcs ⁓ that were developed and ran through the the course of the three shows. So there was actually, you know, a a different reward for audience members ⁓ that stuck around and and the ⁓ vast majority ⁓ of people stuck around for the whole thing. ⁓ yeah, they would see like a different ending and like a complete ending ⁓ at the end of the third loop, which was very cool. We introduced some different challenges ⁓ in in the first year. our performers, some of them spoke and had written dialogue or improvisations. And in the second year, when we did the memory and consciousness show, we did it was all movement based ⁓ for the vast majority of the show and for the performers. So it was non-speaking. We did have some rooms that were set up that a couple of our characters, when they went into ⁓ they would talk and they would interact with the audience and the audience could ask them questions and interact with them. But otherwise it was non speaking and that led to challenges, of course, of its own. I have some footage. So each year of Tethered, we created what we call a video companion, which is essentially a behind the scenes look at the production and development and includes some ⁓ footage from the live performances of each show. You can find our entire Tethered 2024 video companion documentary on YouTube. It's on the Cinema Activist YouTube and the Lyons Den Productions YouTube. I'm going to show you some of that footage now. And after that, I will show you some footage for the upcoming Tethered 2025 video companion, which was made by Everything at Once Studios and includes ⁓ some QA discussion with the cast and crew during our talk backs, as well as some footage as well. The entire Tethered 2025 video companion is releasing on June fifteenth of this month on both the Cinema Activist and Lyons Den Productions YouTube channels. So if you jump over to Cinema Activist or Lyons Den Productions on YouTube, you can add a notification to Tethered 2025 and watch the entire behind the scenes documentary. Let me show you a little footage ⁓ from both of those here now so that you can kind of get a feel of ⁓ the experience of the performers and the story writers and the crew and the directors on working on these projects. So for first we'll so first we'll start with twenty twenty-four footage. And here's some footage from the upcoming and here's some and here's some footage from the upcoming twenty twenty five video companion for Tethered. Mm-hmm. So what is immersive theater? Essentially, when you see a play or a film or a dance performance, there's a clear separation between the audience member and the performers. There's a proscenium there's a stage. You're sitting passively in the audience, and you're either watching a screen or you're watching someone perform on a stage. In immersive theater, there is no proscenium So there's not such a clear barrier between audience and performer. There's many different types of immersive theater. It can range in there's many different types of immersive entertainment, but the kind that we're focusing on is the more theatrical, which can be a combination of dance performances and actors. Essentially the idea is to immerse the audience into the world of the show. It's sort of a choose your own adventure. It can be varying degrees of ⁓ you can have varying degrees of autonomy in these types of shows. You can be totally free roaming. ⁓ like Sleep No More, for example, was so well designed that You could walk into any room and open drawers on desks and go through the props that were inside those drawers and everything that was everything was related to the show and the characters of the show. It was a fully lived in world. When we did our first tethered show, you couldn't get immersed that at that level. There are also types of shows So that's one form of immersive show where it's kind of free reign, choose your own adventure. Then there's another type of show like Masquerade, which is going on right now in New York City, which is based on Phantom of the Opera. And that one is more guided ⁓ by the the staff that are working on the crew. where they will escort small groups into a room and there will be a performance and then they will escort you into the next room, ⁓ which is also very fun and people love very much. And then you get, you know, special little trinkets from the show, which is really cool. And people love collecting those. Here's one that I got from Sleep No More Playing Card. For our tethered show. We give our audience members little tethered pins so that they can get tethered. So, yeah, it's all about making your audience feel like they're a part of the show. You can interact with the performers, they can interact with you. You roam across the space however you want. You can arrive late, you can leave early. There's the idea is that The show are is so packed with characters and story that there's really no way that you can experience all of the show. You'd have to go back many, many, many times. So it also gives you a feeling of ⁓ giving it also gives you a feeling of having a unique experience, right? No two people in theory will have the same experience of going to that show on that day or that night. Because you're all making your own choices. You might connect with a certain character and someone else in your party might connect with another character and you'll go your separate space. And you'll go your separate directions. Yeah, so that's immersive theater in a nutshell. It's a combination of dance, film, theater, escape rooms, video games, ⁓ haunted houses. It's kind of all of these things combined, and it's really, really exciting art form. As I said, I I loved my experience at Sleep No More. I loved my experience at Masquerade. ⁓ I loved my experience at what was the one called? It was cancelled. Yeah. So yeah, it's a fresh approach to the live experience. I have loved my experience at Sleep No More. I saw Life and Trust in New York City. I've seen Masquerade. I went and saw Meow Wolf ⁓ out in Denver. Any chance I get now, ⁓ anytime I'm in a city that has immersive entertainment of any kind, I try and check out these shows. I'm loving them and addicted to them and super excited to be making them where I call home in Erie, Pennsylvania. I will tease then that we've been working for many months now on the hopefully 2026 show of Tethered. What we're working on is two interconnected experiences. One will be alive. Theater show like we've done before, but again, switching up the mechanics and the logistics of it a little bit again and making it unique from the other two experiences with a completely original storyline as well. And we're also working on an audio drama that would be featuring a character that's from the live show and stepping into their shoes as you're walking around in downtown Erie, listening ⁓ through your headphones or earbuds to their voice and their experience as they're kind of ⁓ serving as a tour guide through downtown Erie and you're connecting with them as you're listening. But yeah, so that's the other project that I'm fundraising for is the new tethered immersive theatrical experience. The storyline is based on ⁓ a nonprofit organization And corruption. It's also about worker power and unionizing. It's really a story of the haves and have nots. Our cast is made up of members of this nonprofit organization as well as members of the staff that are working to support them and the club that their meetings take place at. This setup of the show is that. The nonprofit organization is having giving their annual report, and the public is invited to attend that annual report meeting. And throughout the co course of the and throughout the course of the show, as you're meeting the various performers and staff members, you might be seeing some cracks in their stories, and some of that corruption will start bubbling to the surface. And then the audience members themselves. in this show will be directly involved in the outcome of the show. This time we're not going to do three loops, but it will be a up to three hour long performance. And the audience will be again directly involved in either supporting one side of efforts or the other, maintaining the status quo or bringing about justice and equality. And depending on how the audience does and what the chemistry of the audience is in on that night, there couldn't be possible different branched outcomes to the story, which is really exciting and of course has its own new challenges. So that's essentially the background of Tethered and giving you a little tease of what we're working on with the new show. I am extremely happy for this show. as well. And we're right now fundraising and ⁓ applying for grants and seeking sponsors too. I do have some other news as far as the venue and some of the performers and the crew involved and the timeline of the show. But I think I will but I think I will save that for ⁓ future episodes of this podcast. I think we'll leave it at that for now. So this gives you, after episode one and episode two, a little more background on the Holy Ghost feature film project and of the tethered show, which is the two interconnecting stories. We're calling the live show ⁓ the lever, and we're calling the audio experience seized. Fundraising for both, hoping to get them both off the ground and bringing you along for the ride. We'll be back soon. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon.