Josephine Machon, the author of “The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia,” argues that Punchdrunk’s command of the art form is unsurpassed. “It’s about really indulging the senses,” Maxine Doyle, a choreographer and a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” said on that same video call with Barrett. If you came with friends, each of you might piece together an entirely different experience, then meet at the bar to debrief afterward.īut the intimacy of Punchdrunk’s work, the freedom and eroticism and sensuous style, made it feel sui generis. Spectators can chase after the actors, enjoying wordless, dance-heavy scenes, or linger alone in luxuriant rooms - reading letters, sniffing herbs. A typical Punchdrunk show plunges masked audiences into sumptuous spaces and lets them choose where to go and what to see. Barrett had founded Punchdrunk in 2000, pioneering a type of environmental theater that transformed deserted buildings and disused factories into strange new worlds.

It sounded mostly like a promise and a little like a threat.Īs Barrett tells it, “Sleep No More” first arrived in New York almost by accident. “Nothing’s going to wake you from the dream,” Felix Barrett, a co-creator of “Sleep No More,” told me during a recent video call.

And after two years of a pandemic, will New Yorkers really want to come back to something this macabre? Knowing New Yorkers: probably. Even at that sparsely populated rehearsal, there were rooms that didn’t permit standing six feet apart. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.ĭistance can be difficult when you are one of dozens of attendees chasing Lady Macbeth down a dim hallway. Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May.Rising Stars : These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Musical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.The ventilation system received an update, too. But beginning in the fall, the space had been thoroughly rehabbed and redecorated. “We joked that the ghouls looked out for us,” Carrie Boyd, the director of performance and production, told me. “Sleep No More” is a Hitchcock-inflected version of “Macbeth” and walking through its Highland noir rooms, uninhabited for nearly two years, I thought of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, then, ridiculously, of Pompeii. On an evening in late January, I arrived at the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea for a rehearsal visit and a tour. 14, for those who prefer their Valentine hearts still bloodied, “ Sleep No More,” will reopen, with new masks, new protocols and a fresh commitment to total immersion. Performances were to resume last October the Delta variant changed those plans.įinally, on Feb. The March 2021 date that would have marked its 10th anniversary came and went. “ Sleep No More,” the dark and dreamlike show that reshaped the landscape of participatory theater, left its performance space intact when it closed the doors on its dozens of rooms in March 2020. I had a chance to catch up with Punchdrunk creative producer Colin Nightingale at the Immersive Design Summit on January 6th where I had a chance to talk to him about his journey into becoming an experiential designer for immersive theater, how immersive theater is being used for education and medical purposes, and the latest Punchdrunk productions which are all focused on blurring the line between what is reality.So have the lamps, the cards, the dolls, the crucifixes, the trees, the mounded salt. Sleep No More has been a catalyst to other types of experiential entertainment including escape rooms, site specific performances, immersive and interactive art museums, and the digital mediated versions of these experiences through virtual and augmented reality. Rather than sit in seats watching actors on a stage, audience members could explore an open world of 100 rooms across five floors, and make choices as to which actors to follow through the space or which parts of elaborate set design to inspect. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall, and encouraged audience members to become fully immersed within the experience. Punchdrunk’s immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it’s inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences.

Punch drunk sleep no more