Making large scale immersive work can be daunting; in this episode we discuss the creative, operational and financial aspects of scaling up live experiences for larger audiences in a variety of venues. We’re talking to industry experts to discover the exciting journey’s they’ve made towards getting a production live as well as what keeps them awake at night as makers and producers.
Our Guests:
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba Creative Director for Rematch Live, Lest Enfants Terribles, Secret Cinema and performer and practitioner for Gecko. @MiguelHTorresUmba
Fiona Porritt: Senior Creative at Les Enfants Terribles for Labyrinth Productions @fionaporritt_
Andrea Salazar: Head of Production at Punchdrunk and Executive Director at Darkfield.
Hosted by Dr Joanna Bucknall and produced by Natalie Scott for the Immersive Experience Network’s, Knowledge Bank. Funded by Arts Council England.
Podcast Transcript
For audiences with accessibility needs, here is a transcript of the recording.
Joanna Bucknall
Welcome to the Immersive Experience Network’s Making Immersive Podcast Series. Giving you the tools and insights into the making of all things immersive and interactive. I’m your host, Dr. Joanna Bucknall. Over the course of this knowledge bank series, I’ll be having conversations with extraordinary creatives, production specialists, and makers, who shape this tantalizing sector and the worlds that draw us into this form. In this, the first episode of IEN’s Making Immersive Podcast Series, the discussion is going to focus upon creating large-scale shows. I’m joined by Fiona Porritt, a creative producer at Les Enfants Terribles and a creative associate of the Labyrinth.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba is a Gecko practitioner but also directed for Secret Cinema, Les Enfants Terribles, and Rematch Live. I’m also joined by Andrea Salazar who’s Executive Director and co-founder of Darkfield and Head of Production at Punchdrunk. We’ll be spending the next hour or so discussing how to scale up work, what the challenges are, what the opportunities are in terms of creating satisfying and innovative work for audiences, the practicalities of getting audiences through spaces and navigating production in large-scale venues, and managing the finances, specifically how working at scale impacts the financial decisions that you make from conception all the way through to delivery. Enjoy.
I wanted to kick off by asking my guests just to give a sense of their training, background, and the routes that you’ve taken to get to where you are and get to working in immersive, particularly how you became involved in large-scale work. Andrea, can I begin with you? Can you just give listeners a sense of your background and expertise, but also a little insight into how you got to where you are now?
Andrea Salazar
I got involved in theatre when I was quite young. High school doing work experience, fell in love with it and then studied production management at Central School of Speech and Drama. I feel like that was quite a grey basis of production knowledge but also just an incredible way of getting to know other strands. At the time, they used to have a partnership with Circus Space. Immediately, touching base in London and getting involved with all of these non-traditional ways of theatre making an experimental for me was like an eye opener. Then I was really fortunate to do work experience and then become Production Manager for Shunt.
I very quickly and very early on in my career started managing really large-scale non-traditional spaces and making this incredible boiling pot of artistic site-specific work, and constantly worry about toilet capacity and power, which very soon you realize need to go hand in hand with what we do when you take on a non-traditional space. I think from then on, my career has really been a really fantastic mix of site-specific converting spaces into art spaces and that’s where my passion really is. The non-traditional space to create artistic work.
Joanna Bucknall
Shunt is like a baptism of fire. It’s challenging space, large-scale unruly audiences as well. You’ve been involved in that right from that first wave then really because Shunt are right there.
Andrea Salazar
Totally. After that, it was quite interesting to then start working with Punchdrunk and go, this is manageable in comparison, but yes, I was really lucky to get straight into it. That’s where my passion was. I think as I say, it was such a great time in, I think ,opportunities for new talent that also Shunt was part of with the Shunt lounge. I think we can probably go later into funding and opportunities but it was that time of them being able to go, wow, this is an incredible way of allowing IEs and work to be created in these non-traditional spaces.
Joanna Bucknall
Yes. Fiona, I’d like to come to you next if that’s okay. From one Vault Dweller to another.
Fiona Porritt
Yes. We have a shared experience there, which is very fun. I definitely came into working in theatre in general through that very stereotypical performing as an actor at high school. I went and trained at the Oxford School of Drama for a year and did a musical theatre course. Very much love performing and love being an actor in that way. Then I wanted to do anything to get to London as stereotypical as it sounds. I felt like London was where all the theatre was at. I looked at all of the universities in London and ended up going to Brunel University in northwest London and studied a theatre degree there.
I didn’t really know, similar to you, I had my eyes widening to all of these different genres of theatre. They had a lot of people who were teaching us about postmodern theatre. I heard the name Punchdrunk for the first time when I was there and I was like, you can walk around a space and have a theatre experience? I was very much having my mind broadened in lots of different ways during that education and it was actually while I was there, I went to Latitudes Festival, which was at the time, Tania Harrison programs, and amazing spread of theatre there.
I happened to come across Les Enfants Terribles who were performing an outdoor theatre show, which actually is lesser known for the company but we have a huge breadth of outdoor work that tours every year alongside everything else that we do. I absolutely fell in love with the company. At the time, I think they were used to using immersive techniques before they even branded themselves as immersive theatre practitioners. 10 years later, I’m now still here as senior creative but my trajectory probably follows similarly to what Les Enfants were in that everything that we do, we really want to focus on how we want to tell a story.
We might be more so known currently for immersive theatre but we’ve very much came from a stage show background, script, and storytelling, but always using quite interesting techniques to tell stories. You might find puppetry, live music, or some interesting and innovative way to tell a story. I think when the company directors, James and Ollie started thinking up how to tell a story of Alice in Wonderland, they thought, “Well, surely you want to go to Wonderland. You don’t just want to see that on a stage. You actually want to tumble down the rabbit hole and go on that adventure.” That was really the catalyst that for the last 10 years took the company into large-scale immersive. An idea that we took to the vaults has now turned into multiple other immersive shows in lots of different interesting spaces, which I’m sure we’ll go on to talk about.
Joanna Bucknall
Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Miguel, your background is actually in physical theatre. You come from that very disciplined training space. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve got your way?
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
Sure. Well, I am a performer at heart. That’s what I do. I’m an actor as well. I started as a young actor in Colombia, initially in carnival arts and street theatre, which in a way then later transfers to working with audiences like large-scale carnival arts parades. You’re used to loads of audiences. That was the first thing I did. Then when I moved to the UK, initially learned some English.
Then I went to study mime when you didn’t need much English, but no, you did. I did a training in corporeal mime and that was part of something that I was already doing in Colombia so the physicality made sense. It also made sense for me to be coming from what I had done already in carnival arts, physical, and also in the country whilst learning the language, it made sense for me to learn this technique. I was working and learning and training in physical theatre in corporeal mime, then I stumbled across people who were working with Shunt, working with Secret Cinema, working with the early movements that were going on and I was just one day invited to come and Secret Cinema needed some performers to come and fill in for a day, £20, one pizza. Come in, join. I’m like, “Sure.” I go.
In a way, I went with a couple of friends from the school, just a friend of ours was very close to it. We stumbled into the show and they were doing Ghostbusters, the first time that they did Ghostbusters in 2009. That was probably the fifth Secret Cinema that was already starting to grow. Me and my friends from school, also some Colombians, we had lots of experience working with audiences in Colombia, lots of interactive theatre and stuff, and Carnival arts. In a way, it just felt really natural to be in this space, interacting, playing with props, using our physicality, and that seemed to have worked really well.
Then Fabian and Matt Costain who were the early directors, Fabian being the founder of Secret Cinema, they liked the work that we were doing and they just kept calling us, and in a way started to become part of this ensemble of performers who started to develop the Secret Cinema style in terms of performance and that just kept rolling. That just kept rolling and it kept growing and then the next show was slightly bigger and then the next show was five days instead of one night, and then I was part of that group, and then the next show grew bigger, and then I still was part of that cast, and in a way just became quite used to it to the point that when the company started to grow and they started to need all the directors, it was sometimes hard to find the right person who would understand the style.
We’ve already developed a style, there’s already some expectations, and the new director might not quite fully be there and needs a bit of that development. I started to be asked to support the new directors to assist them and then that developed into, well, you do it. You seem to understand what you’re doing. Just from the experience of being a performer, being initially a volunteer actor coming to just take part of an experience to developing into being a consistent ensemble performer to then developing into being a performance director, and then a creative director, that’s the journey that took me to work on the large-scale shows.
In a way, since the beginning, Secret Cinema, since that one, it was always large-scale. Again, that didn’t feel dissimilar for me in terms of dealing with loads of audiences, again, from the experience of working on Carnival arts of being used to like, okay, every step of the way in a parade, having to be creating something new, giving the audience something special. I was used to that. I understand that trajectory and that led me to that.
Then the company kept growing exponentially and then we did Back to the Future, 70 performers, 4500 audiences in a field, Star Wars and Moulin Rouge, and then all the big shows. Then I was already riding the wave with them to create those large-scale shows. Parallel to that, my performing career class continued. I’ve joined Gecko Theatre. I keep doing both. I keep performing and directing.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s not the focus of this episode but it’s really interesting to see the threads through traditional theatre and the threads through that Carnival outside public space. I’m just going to park that. It’s just what I was noticing from everyone talking. I’m like, so interesting again that the theatre is so fundamental and such a catalyst at the heart of this. I think that’s significant and people listening can maybe think about why. This is Immersive question and I’m just going to throw it out there. Do jump in. What are the main challenges of working at scale and what are the aspects of it that give you sleepless nights? Let’s start with the tricky stuff.
Fiona Porritt
Get that out of the way.
Joanna Bucknall
Get that out of the way first.
Fiona Porritt
I think there’s always a moment. I think when you’re working at scale and you’re often potentially renting a huge venue to put your show on, there’s a lot of pre-work that has to happen as well as the more traditional things like script writing, casting, bringing the team together, you’re also trying to work out the logistics of how the audience move around a space a lot of the time. We spend a hell of a lot of time working on spreadsheets at the same time as working on the script. Probably the most sleepless night in the whole production process is that moment when it turns from page to stage and that knowledge that you need to use the time in the space to the best of your ability to not just be building the set but also bringing the performers in.
It’s a really unique way of working with performers because a lot of the time on stage, the performer is leading the drama, and the tech is seen to be supporting the performer, whereas actually, in our productions, it’s completely flipped around the other way. We have predefined how long the scenes will be, how much time they have to deliver different parts of the narrative, and actually, it’s the performers having to learn that side of it and really slip into essentially a dance.
That moment of actually knowing it works on a spreadsheet, we’ve checked these audiences, and we have different audiences in the space, which aren’t meant to see each other at the same time, so we’re having to trust the timings are working people won’t bump into each other but there’s always that nervous moment where you have to test it. I think what’s different now, we’re currently building a permanent immersive theatre venue in Waterloo with a new venture called Labyrinth where we will be putting on Alice’s Adventures underground again. What’s been really unique about this is the space is ours and it’s currently there right now. We’re building at the moment.
Actually, what we have been able to do is go down there, not with performers, but with stopwatches, have different people, I mean, it looks mental if anyone saw us down in this basement just walking around with a script muttering to ourselves, but it’s given us a really unique luxury that we’ve never had before where we’re actually able to really map out the show in a way that we haven’t before. It’s definitely that process, which I think can be quite terrifying. Then theatre, you’ve already sold your tickets, you know when the first audience are going to be coming through the door. That’s why we all love it though as well, that pressure to deliver but it definitely rates.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s like an addition to dramaturgy because dramaturgy is all about the story and the engagement and the audience. Then it’s that extra layer of not dramaturgy but almost logistics. I think this work has logistics in a way that other work just doesn’t have to think about those things.
Fiona Porritt
Absolutely. There might be a stage show. Ollie writes quite a lot of our stage work and he would have the luxury of being able to come up with the idea, come up with the characters, and almost sometimes deliver a first draft of a script, which then we would all get round and start to think about, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if we did it this way or that? Actually, in immersive theatre, you’re actually working out, well, who is available to say those lines at the same time as always making sure it feeds the story as well? There is a whole extra layer that has to work in tandem, not as an afterthought.
Joanna Bucknall
Yes. Developed in at the same time.
Andrea Salazar
Shall I go?
Joanna Bucknall
Yes. Go for it. Jump in.
Andrea Salazar
Well, it gives me a sleepless night. I think I almost feel like that’s part of my job description.
Joanna Bucknall
Sleepless nights.
Andrea Salazar
Sleepless nights will be part of your life forevermore, in a wonderful way. I feel like I’m the person that needs to ensure that this thing comes together. That we deliver it in time and budget, and that, for immersive experimental theatre, it’s a lot of boxes to feel every step of the way from looking around the building and thinking about licensing and planning permissions and neighbors and toilets and emergency exits, through to then the recruitment process, through to the entire health and safety process, back around to coming to a table and realizing that you’re at 10% of the budget and then you need to cut things. Through to leaving that space as you found it, once everyone’s gone for the party and going, all right, we’re still here, guys.
I think it’s a constant, which I really love, feeling that you’ve problem-solved something and hopefully, everyone’s happy and successfully made a happy team in there. Then on to the next challenge. I think though if you asked me, what do you feel that is the most constant thing that gives you sleepless nights? I think at the moment is recruitment and finding talent. Production talent. Technical talent. I think that’s just a mixture between and after COVID knock-on effect on our industry, a mix sometimes with a feeling that maybe people are just not as inspired to be in it.
Fiona Porritt
A bit quite smaller.
Joanna Bucknall
There is a limited pool of talent?
Andrea Salazar
Correct. For example, we’ve got a talent development department at Punchdrunk, which I like. It’s one of the most beautiful things to try to spread the word and show the younger kids that there’s an alternative career path into this marvelous world or young professionals, but I think it’s a constant battle to try to find the right pieces of the puzzle. When you’re doing large-scale work, you’re not thinking about one or two people. You’re thinking about 20, 30, 50, 60.
Joanna Bucknall
Risk as well. There’s a lot more at stake as well. You want safe hands talent too.
Andrea Salazar
Yes. Most of those safe hands have actually gone to an industry that pays better. I think we need to embrace the fact that we need to be investing more in getting the new generation up to speed.
Fiona Porritt
I think that’s such a good point actually. I think a lot of people find their way in immersive and because it is so technically demanding, we learn so much. You can take that anywhere. We have a brilliant director called Christa Harris who’s one of our associates. She’s now gone off working in the West End because the time coding systems that they use on the West End and the way that Alice has the same cinemas as some of the biggest West End shows, same with all of your guys’ companies, it really does mean that from a technical creative side, you can go and conquer the world but it does mean that you do find the production talent or I think they do go off and find other roles.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
I would add that the expectations of the audience and the companies are now big, whilst with the companies we work with, and in the past, they’ve been developing and talent has been developing alongside. Now, new talent needs to start getting a similar level because the productions are already at that speed and that size. There’s no much time for someone to learn and you need to get them to a good place very quickly. Same thing with actors. When you try to recruit new actors, you’re like, I know exactly what I want but also, it’s a whole different story, I can’t just get the same person over and over again. Let me just find someone new and that someone new won’t get into that place two, three shows down the line. How do you speed that process? I think that’s a challenge.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s on-the-job training. There isn’t really any other way to do that yet. I say very much so yet, in a hopeful way. You’re right.
Andrea Salazar
Completely. I think there’s a lot of one of the other bigger institutions, at least for production. ABTT, they are really interested to understand how they bring experimental and immersive into the practice. I think these types of forums hopefully help to zoom to try to understand how we create more proper education.
Joanna Bucknall
Where do you begin working at scale? Where does it start? Do you start with physical space and the journey, or do you start with the narrative, or is it bespoke to literally every project?
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
Well, again, it really depends on the company’s style. I think each company has developed their own way of approaching it. In the case of the shows that I experience, it tends to be both hand and hand. The title and there’s the idea of three titles that could fit this space. For example, Secret Cinema was like, which one of these three films would make sense outdoors. We know these work in the outdoors environment. This wouldn’t work indoors. We don’t want it to be a big festival type of show in a small warehouse. We want something that feels more intimate in the warehouse. You’re constantly looking for the spaces.
Once the space becomes available, then you go, okay, we got these three ideas that can fit that space, and then you start marrying them. We would have developed a number of ideas ahead of time, already probably created some decks, some pitch decks of what the narrative could be around that story, if it’s to be on fame, or if it’s to be in the case of Rematch, which one or of three different sporting events we can do, this one is the one we like the most. We really want this to work. Also, the other thing is, if the story is related to or someone has the IP rights somewhere else, also, do you have them available? Are they already on board with you? In the case of Rumble in the Jungle, the Muhammad Ali, everyone was already behind it. We knew we had those rights. Those rights were purchased, so we could just do that. That was already in our bag.
Those decisions start to come together. Then at some point, it just comes to this is the one we want to make. This is the story we want to go for. Now let’s find the right people. The right team who would understand putting that together. At Rematch, it took them a while and they tried with different creatives before to find all of those things together. A pandemic came, didn’t let them do the show. They came back again. The venue fell through. The creatives involved were also already engaged so they couldn’t do the next iteration. They had to start all over again. Find a new venue, go around, find new creatives. All those things seem to naturally finally fall in place. It’s the kind of thing that maybe that’s the way it needed to be and therefore the right people were in place for that time.
Then with Rumble, for example, I knew they had a concept. They wanted to do this idea of a Secret Cinema world, which was quite open, available, free-roaming with loads of agency for the audience with a sporting event. Then there was an element that I had plenty of experience in but then the new element there was how do we stage this? How do we stage the fight? This is something we haven’t done. No one’s really done this. How do we stage a sporting event that is theatrically engaging that remains immersive? Then the process is, let’s just try to figure out this. Bringing together all the elements from previous experiences. I think that’s where it’s challenging for new companies coming up. There’s a lot already being done. How do you bring all of those shorthands and that learning to try to come up with a new concept and then fit it in the venue?
Then for me, the venue would tell me a lot. As soon as I step into the building, then I start figuring out what the journey is, or from an audience perspective, what’s the best way of giving them a consistent reveal, consistent sense of wonder as the experience develops? If it’s a big space like a warehouse, how can I split the space so that I keep revealing a new space for them, as well as the narrative? If it is a modern space, what’s the best journey? The least expected. Trying to always go from the thing that would make less sense in a way, which sometimes is not the best for producers or for venue managers. They want you to use the main door, which is, we want to go through the real one. We want to go underneath and we go through this. We’re constantly pushing and challenging the practicalities.
Joanna Bucknall
It sounds very precarious in a lot of ways. There is almost a serendipity to a moment when all of those different elements, practical, logistical come together before you can even then start developing the audience journey.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
Yes, I think so.
Fiona Porritt
Yes. I completely agree. I think we have played that dance so many times where you’ve worked out the idea for the show, then the venue falls through, then you find another venue that doesn’t fit that idea, and then you have that conundrum of, oh, do we shelve that idea and wait for the right venue to come along or is the venue giving us enough that it’s adaptable enough for the venue? Then there’s also certain instances where the venue has to work. I think James would tell you that when we licensed Alice to China, I think we went through over 10 different venue iterations because they were paying for a license of a show that had already had all of the … We weren’t going to redo the logistics of how the show work. In a sense, it had to work.
Saying that though was still incredibly malleable. We would look at all of the rough dimensions of the rooms and literally Lego block, try and drop them into a different order. You still have to be incredibly malleable even with fully formed productions. Then there’s all of the other considerations of going, oh, how far out of London can we go? How far on the overground can we be? Do we need to be in central London to get the amount of audience that we need to break even? There’s all of those considerations as well.
Joanna Bucknall
So many different things and not huge teams either really managing that process. Most of you sat at this table are responsible for seeing that through from inception to delivery. Andrea, how about you? What do you think about in terms of what are the different elements that have to come together that you have to manage?
Andrea Salazar
I think you put it really right. I usually say to people, all the stars need to align for these things to happen. I’d say, for example, in the case of Punchdrunk, probably do a new mass show every eight years. In between, we’ve seen so many buildings and rewriting so many things and had a look at so many possibilities. It’s a constant bit of work together with looking at possibilities of remounting work internationally or doing new IP is just a really fantastic work of just staying open and positive to the possibilities.
From my point of view, I am probably those bad news for everyone where you look at a beautiful building and you go, okay, it’s going to take us a couple of million to bring it up to regulation guys. Is this worth it? There’s just trying to bring a bit of visibility that where you go, we just know that the audiences will arrive and need a toilet. Let’s try to be a bit pragmatic about some of the decisions that we’re making from the outset. Then not all of our budget goes into toilets. Nobody wants that. It’s just trying to work with creatives from the outset to give the creative part the best chance to really flourish and at the same time go, all right, I understand code, I understand regulations. Let’s start working on that side of the story.
Joanna Bucknall
There are so many more things that usually if you’re to a theatre venue, they have the infrastructure to code already as a venue. That must be a huge challenge, is there a central place where you understand what’s required of you? What is legally required of you? What’s often safety required of you?
Andrea Salazar
Not so much. I guess there’s just a gray pool of people that just start collecting over the years and you just know what consultants to go to. In the meantime, you have to start learning loads by, hopefully not by mistake, not by missing out but you do just need to learn on the job constantly. In the same way that when you do a new artistic project, you will learn about some new way of using a bit of technology or a transducer or a sensor or a magnet or whatever to create a solution. I think that applies to the bureaucracy as well.
Joanna Bucknall
Yes. Sorry, go on.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
No, I just wanted to add. It’s also the vision. The ambition and the vision of the company, both creatively and financially as well. That always determines whether we want to make it a big-scale show or we just want to make it smaller because there is also that. We want to sell X amount of tickets because we want to make this amount of money or we want to make sure then that gives us for the next project. There’s also that consideration.
Andrea Salazar
I’m yet to find an artist that wants to make it smaller.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
I want to make it smaller. Let’s talk. That’s one of my points.
Joanna Bucknall
The other things that we just literally roll out of sight, would you just get them a flick of air? Consistent things you would be like, no. Are there any consistent things where you’re like, this is what we always hope for or need.
Andrea Salazar
Like asbestos.
Fiona Porritt
Air handling system.
Joanna Bucknall
You don’t want to be paying for that yourself? Is it about that? Is it really about budget then? Do you have a sense of how much of the budget you want to spend on logistical site things and then how much you want to free up?
Andrea Salazar
Generally, yes. Then I think there’s always also a beautiful conversation usually with the landlords or the people that are either activating the area or that might not want to, I think there’s just a lease process negotiation in that first stages of the work.
Fiona Porritt
I think a big factor that goes into it is how permanent the show is going to be as well because that part of the budget will grow if you’re building a permanent venue, for example. Everything that we’re doing at Labyrinth in Waterloo is the thought, well, we know we’ve got the lease for 15 years. We’re putting Alice’s Adventures underground in there at the start but we know that by putting in the toilets and the air handling system, they’re not going to change when we inevitably change the show in a few years’ time. In that instance, it feels like it’s a worthwhile investment.
However, if you know that you’re just coming into a space for a summer or for a couple of weeks, we just would not be wanting to touch any of those parts of the infrastructure. You just would not make the budget work if you were having to think about things like toilets on top of everything else because it is so sad. It just makes you feel like you’re dropping money into a pit that no one ever sees or appreciates. Whereas when it’s spent on a piece of beautiful set or a puppet, it feels really well. It sounds really weird.
Andrea Salazar
I think location that you mentioned earlier on is a really good thing to think about but there’s probably a beautiful list of …
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
There’s also the flexibility of the space. Creatively speaking as well, you go, how flexible is this venue? How many real possibilities I have in this space to play with different ideas or if I’m too restricted when developing the idea, I’d rather go for a venue that gives me more flexibility. Either because of permits or because of the way the venue works. The building is in itself or the restrictions are how much we need to fix the roof. If there’s too much of that, you go well, also creatively, that doesn’t give me much space to play. I’d rather use somewhere different or maybe just wide open so that then I can put what we want to put in there because ultimately, it’s all about doing something creative and pushing that side. You want to allow for as much flexibility.
We’re also already dealing with a style of theatre that is in itself looking to push forward and to keep challenging the way we deliver a show to an audience. If we then start becoming too restricted, then it loses its point. The point is that we are reinventing and we’re constantly challenging how we create. It has to allow that that is key. The space doesn’t allow it if the production doesn’t allow it. Let’s look for something that gives us that flexibility.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s so interesting that space seems to be so central in getting all of those things in place. Once all those things are in place and you’re like, this is a safe place, people can go to the toilet, people will be able to breathe, I feel very comfortable with that, where does then the process begin? I know for Les Enfants Terribles, it’s very traditionally driven in terms of script only as a playwright effectively, but also, how do you manage the audience journey? How do you start designing the audience journey once all of that safe stuff is in place, or is it different for every single project?
Fiona Porritt
I think it can be different for every single project. I think we probably have a process where it starts with the story and maybe Ollie and co might write a few key scenes that we know serve the beginning, middle, and end but actually, a lot of our scripts in their infancy, they look a bit more like film and TV scripts where actually, they’ll just be a scene dropped in there that will explain what happens to the audience and who they meet and what they feel and what they learn. Then that will all get tested. I mentioned spreadsheets before we use, not with all of our shows because again, it’s what serves the story, but I think we’re quite known for the audience entry system where we send smaller audiences through the show in usually about 15-minute intervals.
In Alice, for example, there’s an audience of 60 that go in every 15 minutes. That happens 11 times a night, which means we can facilitate 660 people going through the show. Actually, within the show, they also get different choices and end up for about three-quarters of the show actually split into a small group of 15. You can imagine that if there’s four different routes going through, that means that Ollie and Anthony Spargo, who wrote Alice, they have to write four different scripts. When we do the cast read-through on the first day, we’re there for hours because we go down that one route, read that in its entirety, and then go straight back to where they split again, read that one altogether. That’s so important because the whole cast and production team, they have to understand every single route.
It really is a testament to, I think scriptwriters, they have to be so much more malleable because if we then check our lovely spreadsheet, which says where every single performer is at each time and that actor is not free and we can’t change something to make them free because they are in another space delivering another scene, they will have to change and mold the creative. I find that really interesting and exciting. It’s really fun for me who usually works in a dramaturgical way. We all get really involved. It’s not just the writer holds all of the keys and we can be changing things right up until press night as well.
Joanna Bucknall
It was like the audience is present before they were even there. They’re a force that impacts on that creative process, I think.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
For me, they are the hero of the story. The way I see when making immersive or the way I develop this for the show that I work is, I think every art piece, performative art piece has a main artist at its core. Film is the director. The director would choose what the final cut is. Then on theatre, I think as the actor, we make the choice of the timing of the delivery even though we’ve done rehearsals.
At the end of the day, what I’m doing on stage is what I’m doing on stage. I think for immersive, for me, the main person that I look after is the audience. They are the hero of the story. They are the ones I want at the end of the night to have gone, I went through this, this, and this and that. Just as much as you do when you travel around to another country. The country is the same. The people in that country are the same but you have your own story depending on what you went to do. I want to create that sense for the audience. When the project is ready to be done, the first thing that I do is write in a top-line creative plan. In a way, what’s the overarching idea? What’s the experience we want to take the audience from beginning to end?
In a way, not much detail in it really like, what are the big moments? What’s the sense of it? What’s this emotion that we want to evoke and the senses and what things we want to create in this show? There’s a top-line creative plan, which then gets thrown around and approved or not. Once that’s done, then we go into developing the creative plan, which is flushing out those ideas to really understand what those ideas are like. Again, we don’t quite get or in my experience, we haven’t quite got there to scenes or to fix characters yet. There is obviously, if we’re working on a story, well, the main characters will definitely be there but we’re thinking about the journey that the audience are going through and how are we opening the story in all directions.
Not just following the main character but we know what the secondary character in that film or what that promoter was doing when the fight was happening. What else is going on? How can we then open it sideways and upside down? We’re really opening the story in many directions and putting the audience in there. Who are the audience in this journey? Are they travelers? Are they just part of the Hill Valley Festival in 1955, or they’re all boxing associates coming to Kinshasa to observe and they happen to be also journalists? It’s really important to decide in the shows that we do. Who are the audience in this? What’s their journey? What’s their character?
Once that creative plan is more developed and that’s the plan that the other departments start using to create design, music, costume, all of that, then there is a performance plan, which is then that performance plan becomes the, okay, let’s just start breaking down. How many actors do we actually have? How many scenes do we actually create? In my experience, we don’t create scenes yet. The scenes will be developed with the actors in the room. There will be plays. They will be hero in moments. They will be the main moment where we definitely want everybody to come and watch this bit. They’re the scenes that definitely have to happen because you definitely have to have Dirty Dancing lift. It has to happen. You definitely have to sing a song from Moulin Rouge. You have to have those moments.
Then in the development of the performance plan, you then look at timings, how many rooms we have, how are they timed or not. Some shows we’ve done as well, they’re very well-timed. Others are really open. We know we have flats in the space but also in between, the actors have lots of flexibility. That opens up and then it goes into rehearsals, and in rehearsals, they get even more fleshed out because the actors are going to come up with further scenes, further development, all of that. It’s just a cascade of development that to me goes all the way into the first week after press night, even more so. The show doesn’t quite make its fully … It’s not fully formed until, even press night is not quite a thing. It’s like show but I still have another, I need another week because now we have an audience.
Until we have an audience in this space, we have no idea how the show works. How the flow works. What it’s actually landing, sometimes you spend so much writing those spreadsheets and those scenes and then you suddenly go, that scene is really boring. That doesn’t work. You spend hours thinking and developing that scene but actually, or it’s not the best. It’s not even that it’s boring. It’s just not suited to create an experience or something else or an actor suddenly when had a struck of light in him or her and is creating a beautiful scene that is making everybody come to them. It’s like, okay, that means I’ve got three scenes running with no audience, what do I do? How do I help balance these? Maybe I bring that down from those two scenes and then put them in another. Constantly then shifting to make sure the balance of the show works.
Fiona Porritt
It’s so interesting though because the way you talk about how you develop the scenes within the rehearsal process going back to what we were talking about earlier about finding the right people, you really need those people to show up and have those act of God moments to come in play and develop with you. It’s so important.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s just hugely collaborative, and even with the audience. Like you said, you never really know what the show is or feels or looks like until there’s people living through it. Then again, there’s that whole sense of readjustment. Again, that’s quite precarious. There must be that moment on that first time when audience come in where you just hold your breath the first time real people enter that space. How about for you, Andrea, as well in terms of audience? How do they feature in the process?
Andrea Salazar
Massively. Yes. There’s the amount of changes that we’ve had to make shows once you push the audience in and then you’re like, okay, that was a great test. We need to cancel two shows and we need to rebuild this entire section and realine this entire section and redo this entire section. I think I completely agree. It’s brilliant to have experience on the ground that can spend hours planning and try to do as many R&Ds as possible. Try to do as many previews. Make up that space and walk it through and invite people for a beer afterward so that you can have a sense of how they might react to that movement of time means my work. I think research and development trials is one of the most incredible things to have in a budget line to really just go, we will need time to experiment the things that we haven’t thought about. There are going to be issues. Champion of R&D.
I think though, just going back to the creation process, I feel though that for us, we are a lot more space and design-led maybe. We have source material and there’s an incredible amount of work on the content but the lighting, the set, and the sound really grow with their story and where we are putting it in. We really want audiences to discover the story through the smells, the sound, the lighting, and the detail that they found a little draw that they found by themselves, whether it’s later as well as all of the performative layer. I think that’s one of the things that I love the most about my role at Punchdrunk that I get to think about so many of the layers that people are going to be able to experience.
Joanna Bucknall
That free roam is slightly different. It’s the way that hermetically sealed aesthetic space becomes a character in itself.
Andrea Salazar
Correct. That’s incredibly exciting.
Joanna Bucknall
That’s up to audiences how they navigate because you’re not driving them through. You have that narrative thread. The narrative thread, of course, that will run through it. I think you can try audiences slightly less.
Andrea Salazar
Solving so many other ways.
Joanna Bucknall
A very quick question actually is, that’s so much work and people listening might be like, Good Lord, that’s so much work. How do you do? In terms of time, how long does this take from going I’ve got an idea to audience coming through the door. Is there a usual timeline?
Fiona Porritt
It can really depend. You could be sitting on an idea for a couple of years or actually, we collaborate with a lot of brands and do quite a lot of brand activations. From knowledge of some of those in the past, we could get a call eight weeks before and still really push ourselves to make something quite full-on, we call them miniature immersive shows, even if they might happen once. We love to use them to test out things that we want to do in our work as well because we’ve been given this exciting budget and the short timeframe means that you can just make decisions and really push yourself and go for it.
I think in terms of the more permanent shows, I do think that the venue question, yes, maybe there is a timeline that you’d set out once that venue is 100% secure but it really depends. You might also be thinking, well, if I’m doing something outdoors, that’s got a hit in summer. I know I’ve got away or January’s an awful time to open. You’re also working with your marketing department as well to make sure that that lands in the right way. Previously, we’d love to get tickets on sale maybe even a year beforehand but actually, buying trends have really changed. People are booking a lot more last minute as we all know, which is terrifying but it also means that you could also have a shorter time frame and announce a lot later on, which I guess is good in other ways.
Joanna Bucknall
Traditional theatre, even in the West End, they have really short rehearsals now. You’ve got probably four weeks once performance getting to the room. You know what? Four weeks, a luxury, and two weeks is often a standard, not with your dancing and singing and musical stuff has a bit of a bigger timeline. Is there a crunch point where you, is it at the moment when the cast come to be like, we have four weeks to reopen or is it still a bit more nebulous?
Andrea Salazar
I think for us it’s quite set. When we take on a large-scale show, you’ve got a year-and-a-half plan thing that you try to map out or whatever that is. I think we’ve now maybe become a bit more like we cannot do it in that time, knowing that you can’t do it that quickly rather than knowing how long it will take. Somebody is like, oh, can you do this in three months? I know. What about six? Let me check. I think you do know your Gantt chart of here’s the period of building, here is the period of rehearsal, and then probably you start then having to.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
I didn’t answer what gives me sleepless nights. I think this is what, in my experience, has given me a sleepless night is that the shows that I’ve made have been made in a very short amount of time. Rumble was six months from when I joined and when I started writing the creative from zero because we didn’t use anything from the previous developments. We didn’t have a building. Even after I was already on board, right in the top-line creatives and the creative plan, the building was not confirmed till a couple of months later. I was still waiting to adapt the creative vision to whatever building came along. Then once the building came in, was just like, go, go go. Six months from when I joined to opening night.
That is a very small amount of time to do everything. In that sense, what I mean is it’s a big show. The bigger the ship, the harder it is to steer. There is no R&D, although we did an R&D for the staging. That was a thing I learned from not having done many R&Ds with previous shows before. A similar scale of time. Just go. The ideas have to really work very quickly. That’s scary. If you’re telling them we want this stage designed this way, there’s not much more room to play afterward.
If we’re not R&Ding or having enough time to develop it, your idea has to be the one, and if not, then you have to be able to make it work. To make decisions so quick with such an amount of pressure. The more the time passes, the more audiences, not audiences, sorry, crew, people wanting answers, they way we want that light, the way we want this set design, what image you want in the post-it. All of that information in my experience has had to be answered in such a small amount of time at the same time. Now, still developing posters whilst also writing characters and auditioning and also talking to the composer, all of it.
In other versions, you write the show and then you have the script and then from then, you work, whilst in my versions, it’s been similar amount of time. At the same time, things are happening. The scope of time has been really small. However, once you set the opening date, again, because it’s built independent, that’s your opening night. You work backward. You go, okay, we have four weeks, we have five weeks of rehearsals, and that’s the amount of time we have to put it together and within that, you have to fit all your tech rehearsals and you have to fit all you like. Then the fit-up of the venue. Basically, then you work backward, but you know how long you’ve got a building for and you have to work within the parameters of that lease or that time that you’ve got your building. Then you work backward. I wouldn’t recommend doing it in six months really to anyone. I try to not do it again.
Once when a project comes in and it’s exciting, you go, “Sure, I can.” Oh, God. It’s not the best for your show and everyone’s show. I think that the challenge with that is, of course, in such an amount of pressure time, everybody would break. Someone would break emotionally and it’s not ideal to create things that also end up being taxing on people’s emotions and you might not be able to look after people in the group in the best way. I think that’s a pitfall in creating these things is that sometimes in the urge to create something innovative and fun and different, we sideline looking after people whose development is important for the future. Some people were talking about probably don’t even want to come back to work and this event.
Joanna Bucknall
You want them to come back. You want to create an environment where they come and perform in your next show.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
If they had a hard time, they go, no. That was horrific. I worked so many hours. It was so stressful. Directors were stressful. Producers were stressed. Everyone was really stressed. I don’t want to put myself in that again. That is something that I think the more we can carve the time and develop it to make it properly and give everyone a good experience, I think that’s something good.
Joanna Bucknall
I think sharing moments like this of sharing practice, sharing concerns, sharing challenges will start to open up that discourse and also start to look at pragmatically as well as how do you fit that into that structure. The next thing I’m going to ask about is money really. A year and a half potentially with no audience coming through the door yet is a long time to not have that revenue coming in. How are these large-scale shows bankrolled effectively? What’s the finance model for these?
Fiona Porritt
Simply from us, we very much adopted a West End commercial investment model. Actually, there are so many similarities to how we’re pitching our immersive theatre shows, especially as we’re now developing a permanent venue and a permanent venture, we are very much pitching it as a West End immersive theatre show. That is a good language to speak about when you’re speaking to investors who are already investing in the West End. Getting them to understand talking about making decks earlier and audience journey, that is as important for talking to potential stakeholders as well as briefing your creative team.
Then saying that some of our immersive work has come from commissions. We were commissioned by Kensington Palace to make an immersive theatre show in the palace, which was on in the evenings after the more tourists. They got their daytime really lovely exhibits in their spaces and we were given the space in the evening. I guess how they justified that commission is that they really wanted to diversify their audience. I live in London. I’ve never even thought to go to Kensington Palace because I think it’s just on that list somewhere of really beautiful places that you go when you’re visiting as a tourist.
I love their ambition of coming to an immersive theatre company and saying, “Actually, we want a different audience to come through.” That was a lovely moment where we were given money and the palace was amazing actually because that show closed because of COVID, unfortunately. I think we did a week or two and we just pressed and then one person had to isolate and then as it did for the whole of the industry came crumbling down. They were incredible. They paid every single person that we got on board for the entire run, even though we had to close early.
Joanna Bucknall
That is quite a traditional theatre model then. That idea of investment and commissions as well. I know also there’s been access to public funds as well way back in the day.
Fiona Porritt
We still very much apply for project grants with the Arts Council for our stage work as well. That’s a huge part of what we do. As a company, we were supported by the Cultural Recovery Fund through COVID. That really saved us.
Joanna Bucknall
Were you doing a family show as well? You guys are doing work that engages a really broad range of audience.
Fiona Porritt
Yes. We’ve got a brilliant engagement strand, which we’re currently looking at applying for funding for which sits really alongside the commercial theatre model. We’re doing all we can to bend that side to benefit from the more commercial model that we’re adopting with immersive.
Joanna Bucknall
Miguel, you’re saying six months tight schedule, what was the funding model that enabled that?
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
It’s all private investment. It’s all private investment based on, which again, that determine numbers and determines your budget in terms of, we need to get X amount of people through the door for this amount of time in order to break even and start making some revenue. In the case of Rematch, they go in for a long-term development in terms of a company, which come from having developed, having had a few companies in the past. He’s got confidence in time being the way that the company will grow. We know we now have a product, we have a show that was relatively successful, and then now that product can be then put forward. Also, Rematch started with having a massive following base, in a way was just trying to put something big. That caused a lot of attention. That’s very scary. Then hope that that attention then will give it a momentum. I think that’s where we are.
The show created that momentum. That attention. It brought a lot of attention from different people, from audiences from different backgrounds. It was the first time I see such a diverse group of audiences. It was just really great to see an adult show with families and prams and kids. It brought a group of audiences that normally wouldn’t come either to immersive or to even boxing. That was the other thing. Brought sports fans and brought theatre fans and music fans because we had a live concert as well. It brought loads of people into it. That was good. Having that, it means our company has something to hold on to and look forward into the future in terms of continuing funding the next work.
Joanna Bucknall
It’s challenging in how it often dictates numbers. That, of course, then it takes the shape of the show. How about for Punchdrunk? Those are large numbers but also a really long time before people start coming in.
Andrea Salazar
I think we’re quite lucky to place ourselves in a way that we’ve got other international work running at the same time. The company can be of a cushion in that. We’ve got a great reputation, of course, so brands want to work with us. Brands want to sponsor us. There’s investment. There’s also brands literally sponsoring us. In the commercial side of the company, we definitely stick to commercial avenues to sponsor the shows and any public.
Joanna Bucknall
Very quickly for people who are listening and thinking, okay, what’s the percentage? What’s your capacity that you have to hit every night usually to break-even? Do you have an idea? I know in the West End, they operate off a particular percentage. I don’t know how they do that. I was wondering, or if there isn’t, is it different factors that go this is our minimum audience to break even?
Fiona Porritt
I think the short answer is we probably, again, operate on a West End model, which sometimes can be around 50%, but there are so many other factors at play. Are you benefiting from using the space in another way? We’re looking a lot more into how we can have an always-on approach to our venues. Maybe there is a more traditional immersive show of performers happening in the evening but actually, we’re doing a children’s version of Alice in Wonderland in the daytime that is also creating revenue.
Then with having the space always open, we’re also now thinking about food and beverage and all of that side. Having a restaurant, which is selling a pre-dining experience, and then a bar that the show conveniently spits you out into at the end of the night. The Labyrinth license is until 2:00 AM on a Thursday to Saturday. There’s really a thought of trying to capture your audience and keep them there for the entire night, not for the show, and all of that, of course, helps with revenue.
Joanna Bucknall
Of course. I think that’s something that I’ve noticed across all of the different types of work. It’s a diffused revenue stream. It’s never just tickets that can fund the shows. There’s got to be.
Andrea Salazar
I think it’s incredibly important to diversify but to do that, you need to be thinking about it from the outset. You can’t be halfway through the show or opening night and then be like, we should also have daytime activity, we should also create events. It actually needs to be part of your business plan and your forward planning and embedded into the operations of how this is going to roll out from the outset. I think, again, this is just something that we just try to be incredibly aware of. Whenever you’re developing a project, especially an artistic one, you are so literally immersed in the nuts and bolts of this one thing. It sometimes takes a little bit of a bit to step back and be like, wait a minute, there’s all of these other things that need to happen and all of these need budget, but they are investment into diversifying the project and creating more income.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
I don’t know how long. Are we closer to the end?
Joanna Bucknall
We are definitely heading towards end of time. I was going to ask one last thing, really, which is for folks who are listening, is there one tip or trick that you really think would be useful to share with people who are thinking about making large-scale work?
Fiona Porritt
I would say ask yourself if you want to scale up and make something big because it’s cool and exciting, or is it more from a place of serving the story that you want to tell? You could end up maximizing your space and your numbers and then completely losing your audience’s attention not being able to serve your story. I think you really need to be always questioning yourself in that respect. I think another thing that we’ve touched on as well is about really having a core member of your team who has that logistical brain as well as the creative brain who is in every single conversation always banging that drum.
Another thing that we’ve not touched on as much is that also, we all know that the word immersive is still, it’s now a real buzzword but it’s still a real growing form where our audiences aren’t sure what it is any more because it is being used in such a way. Again, I think we always make sure that there is that core member of the team who is as much within the roots of the marketing and the press as they are within the creation of the show. Like you said earlier, those things need to work in tandem and there’s so much education that we still need to give our audiences to convince them or get them to understand what they’re even coming to see. That will probably be my stuff.
Joanna Bucknall
Brilliant. Thank you. Miguel, did you want to say?
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
Yes. I would say don’t scale up too quick. I would just say, really develop. I think that the success of the companies we work with and the companies that have had a level of success is that they started with the smaller shows and it took a number of years to get to that place of going, okay, this is a big production, and we can hold those productions. Even then, those are challenging. I don’t think you need 15 years to grow but you do need to really hone the shape of your show, really understand the story you’re telling, and the difference of your style because obviously, there are so many different versions now, but really hone that. Then let that scale.
I think I’ve seen a number of producers and people wanting to get right up there from the offset and you’re like, we’re wasting an opportunity because also every time we do a show that is not paying off for the audience, it’s the audience that’s going to be less likely to come back. It’s an investment for a family or for someone to go, I’m going to pay a £60 ticket or even £45 ticket when they do not know what it is. When they’re taking a risk and then you deliver something that is not quite that, they’re not going to come back to another immersive show. They’re going to think it twice.
Really hone that. Take a couple of years to hone new shows in a good manageable scale before you start growing up. Then that will be great. We need more companies in the spectrum to keep that going but also, we need quality work that is delivered at a standard that has already been set. Otherwise, the industry is going to wobble because people don’t go back if they don’t like it. Then we ended up having a struggle in trying to get the audience back in.
Joanna Bucknall
It matters, doesn’t it?
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
It matters, yes.
Joanna Bucknall
If everyone’s making quality work, then it benefits everyone because if someone goes to a bad immersive experience and they’ve paid £60, £100, or whatever, they won’t come back. That affects all of us.
Fiona Porritt
I think some people think that the same company is putting on every single show as well, especially if it’s in the same venue because the Vaults now has had many immersive theatre productions. The amount we see on social media where people are saying shows that are not our shows are our shows. We all have a duty to each other to deliver in a really considered way.
Joanna Bucknall
Andrea, do you have a tip for folk listening?
Andrea Salazar
I think just talk to the people that are doing it already. I think quite a lot of us have started from the rubble and putting it together with masking tape and there’s been just so much learning that even though maybe the formal education is not out there for everyone to read the textbook of how to do this, there’s actually an incredible amount of people that will love to share knowledge and would love to tell you some crazy good experiences, some crazy bad experiences of things that you might want to avoid doing. Some mistakes that you can avoid running into if you just talk to other people. If you want to do something out there and you have a bit of a plan and you know of a company that you might admire, then why not reach out to them and see if they might be happy to have a coffee?
Joanna Bucknall
That’s something as someone been involved in that, and scholarship over many years now, everyone is open. Everyone is genuinely approachable and willing to knowledge exchange. This is again part of that and sharing. The more we share our knowledge, our experience, our tips and tricks, and the ways that we do things, the more we’ll grow and the more innovation that we’ll see. Thank you so much. I know you’re all very busy at the moment as well in the thick of things. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and share your knowledge and your experience with us. There’s 1000 other things I could have asked and would like to ask but hopefully, this starts to open up that conversation about large-scale work. Thank you very much for joining me. It’s been a pleasure.
Andrea Salazar
Thank you.
Fiona Porritt
Thank you.
Miguel Hernando Torres Umba
Thank you.
