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Pop-ups provide a completely immersive, multi-sensory, experience, giving attendees the opportunity to interact with a brand in an up-close, personal, and highly Instagrammable way. When done right, it is at the top of the ladder and the center of the experience dimension. Pop-ups can also be very effective in promotion programs or productions, especially for arts organizations. For example, for a show like Waitress, a pop-up pie shop could be set up where people can get actual mini pies and take pictures with set-pieces look-alike.

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Virtual World and It's Potential of Third Place

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Virtual World and It's Potential of Third Place

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Online community may just be the future of Third Place. This is not only for the tech-savvy young generation, but also for those who face accessibility issues and cannot get around easily. Digital community may be a good thing to include for accessibility commitment for organizations.

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A Virtual World And A “Third Place” May Just Save Your Health

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“Third place” is a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg and refers to places where people spend time between home (“first” place) and work (“second” place).

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Using Interactive Activities to Enhance Engagement

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Using Interactive Activities to Enhance Engagement

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When it comes to increase engagement and interactive installations, technology is really not the center piece. It is about designing the layout and the space from a visitor's perspective. The Q&A between visitors and artist is a easy yet highly engaging method for museums. I can see the use of this method especially on art pieces that needs more background knowledge to understand.

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The "positive" and "negative" cues are extremely useful for events because they are possibly the easiest, most low-cost, yet effective way to shape an experience. In theatre for example, instead of just handing out the tickets, staff can address the ticket as other names according to what show they are doing. For example, a golden ticket for Charlie and the Chocolate factory, a student id for DEH, etc. For smaller venues like Liberty Magic, they use keys instead of paper tickets to enhance the mystery experience for the magic house.

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Arkansas Rep talked about how they wanted to transform the theatre from a place people "stop by" to a "destination" where people can socialize. This is exactly what the concept of a Third Place is. The Rep is achieving this through collaborating with local organizations to show a strong presence in the local community, which is a method that is applicable for a lot of non-profits. These organizations they collab with are mostly a Third Place to begin with.

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Hamlet Heats Up Hannah with Dual Casting & Immersive Design

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Hamlet Heats Up Hannah with Dual Casting & Immersive Design

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When it comes to immersion experience, it is better to make it actually appropriate to the production rather than making a production immersive just for the sake of it. In this case for Hamlet, the immersive elements focused on the placement of the stage and audiences, which works for the show because it has the "play within a play" element.

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Hamlet Heats Up Hannah with Dual Casting & Immersive Design | March 09, 2017 | Great Lakes Theater

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The production features alternating female and male actors in the show's title role and immersive, Elizabethan theater-inspired onstage/stageside seating experiences for audiences. CLEVELAND, OH - Great Lakes Theater (GLT), Cleveland's Classic Company, continues the second half its 55th season with the world's most famous tragedy, William's Shakespeare's Hamlet. The production will...

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I always think about those pop-up spectacle exhibitions that has nothing solid in terms of content. Those exhibitions are always hyped up so much as an instagramable experience but photo opportunity is all they can provide. Omega Mart, as well as other Meow Wolf projects, on the other hand, actually has a story and artistic intentions behind it. The concept of Omega Mart looks simple, but it has a lot of details for visitors to notice, which make people keep coming back because there's more to it.

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Meow Wolf's Omega Mart celebrates one year, over one million visitors

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When Meow Wolf opened Omega Mart in Las Vegas on Feb. 18, 2021, the arts and entertainment company never imagined the popularity it would gain within the span of one year. On the anniversary of its opening, the difficult-to-describe interactive art experience announced over one million guests visited the super dimensional market place off Interstate 15.

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The Palm Spring International Festival case study is a great example on community engagement, especially the concept of "relate, don't sell." They understand what needs to be done for the event to be accessible to the community and executed it instead of just telling people why they should come. Reaching out to local leaders and key opinion figures also sets up reputation as well as understanding what the real issues are.

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Experiments in Arts Engagement Case Studies .pdf

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Sleep No More definitely is one of the most successful immersive experiences. It manages to stimulate the sense of the audiences as well as "hide" them in the crowd using masks. Relating back to the "don't expose the audience" point in the reading, sleep no more used lighting and props to help the audiences do that which is clever.

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Jonathan Hochwald, Randy Weiner and Arthur Karpati formed production company Emursive with the goal of bringing Macbeth-inspired immersive-theatre-dance mash up to New York City. One might think that such an unusual production, where audience members wear plastic Venetian masks and follow the actors around a vast and detailed set, would meet a quick end as a passing fad or historical curiosity. But in the three years since its opening, demand for Sleep No More has surged without letup. Ticket sales for 2013 were actually stronger than 2012, says Hochwald.

Emursive has been slowly adding "ancillary attractions" to Sleep No More 's fictional home -- the McKittrick Hotel, a sprawling 100,000 square foot building in Chelsea which used to be three warehouses. First came the parties, followed by verdant rooftop bar Gallow Green. Now the company has made it first foray into the New York dining scene with The Heath, a wood-paneled jazz bar and restaurant complete with dining carriages that look like they've sprung fully-formed from the 1920s. Hochwald says that the summer will see the McKittrick reach its zenith with "the whole building in bloom."

"The initial plan was, and continues to be, that we never have a lot of weeks on sale at one time," says Hochwald.

"A traditional show might put many weeks on sale and really be a sit down engagement that's here forever. Our feeling has always been about not allowing ourselves to think that far ahead."

Of course, the element of the night circus, the here-today-gone-by-morning aspect, is part of the show's clandestine charm. But it's actually been a gargantuan business undertaking - reportedly the highest costing Off-Broadway show in history at somewhere between the $5 and $10 million mark.

Before founding Emursive to back Sleep No More,the co-founding trio knew each other and were friends. Hochwald was the executive producer of Madison Square Gardens, putting on huge shows like the Christmas Spectacular. Randy Weiner was best known for producing The Box, the obscenely decadent (or decadently obscene, depending on your point of view) burlesque-infused nightspot with locations in New York and London. Hochwald and Weiner teamed up with New York real estate impresario Arthur Karpati to find a Manhattan home for Sleep No More, following the concept of London immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle.

"I don't think any one of us could have done this on our own," says Hochwald. "In fact I'm quite certain that we couldn't have -- it required that three-faced approach to pulling it off. And then you add, obviously, Felix and Punchdrunk and the sort of creative geniuses that came from London and had perfected this new art form. It was a great combination."

Finding a space was a long and difficult road. "It was quite a long exhaustive three year search for the right building and a cool landlord that would be willing to let us do this and embrace this," says Hochwald. "Then it was an extraordinarily long and complicated and expensive build."

The trio won't talk specifics about fundraising, but do say they raised a friends-and-family round with some extra cash coming from a few private investors and theatre producers. It was "definitely too out-of-the-box to go down the traditional fundraising route," says Hochwald.

"It was really uncharted territory," he says. "But we just believed that it would be remarkable enough and outstanding enough and different enough that it would capture the fancy and attention of really creative people, which the city is full of."

Hochwald says they knew that it was going to be expensive. "Obviously you're dealing with Manhattan real estate -- and a lot of Manhattan real estate -- because this is 100,000 square feet in Chelsea. They're big numbers and we knew it was going to take a lot of people to operate it and to be a part of it."

Emursive relied solely on word of mouth to get audience members through the door. "New York is filled with people who want to embrace things that might be avant garde or out of the box," says Hochwald. "For us there was just the thrill of seeing that come to life and believing right from the beginning that it would be about word of mouth as opposed to the traditional thing in New York which would be to advertise heavily and create hype."

"It was really about hoping that two people would come and their minds would be blown and then those people would tell two people and they would come and it would build very organically - audience member by audience member. That's very much what happened except that it happened a lot faster than perhaps we would have imagined."

Minds were indeed blown. A subculture of superfans grew up around the production with some going to see Sleep No More over 70 times. Some went so far as getting tattoos of the McKittrick's emblem, a thistle.

Kevin Cafferty, a filmmaker and web designer, first saw Sleep No More in its earlier pre-Emursive incarnation in Boston in 2009. He revisited the production another 19 times.

"It was like my brain exploded," said Cafferty. "The only thing I can compare it to is listening to punk rock for the first time when I was 13. I never thought I would have that reaction to art as an adult."

In an increasingly screen-centric world, immersive theatre offers an alternate reality that is dreamlike and escapist but at the same time visceral and challenging. As Evan Cobb, who visited the show around 50 times, put it, "I liked who I was when I was there. It allowed me to do all these things I am terrified to do. With the actors I can become a more flirtatious, suave, debonair version of myself."

Audiences in immersive productions respond very differently than they would to traditional theatre performances because the experience is intense and immediate, making people "on edge, uncomfortable or at least very keenly aware" of their surroundings, says Zach Morris, one of Third Rail's co-artistic directors of Then She Fell, an interactive performance set in a Victorian Alice in Wonderland asylum in Brooklyn.

"In the wake of our increasingly digitized world, it's becoming really clear that people are craving experience," says Morris. "This type of work can hit you at such a gut level and you don't have a fourth wall."

The major difference that's kept people coming back to Sleep No More is that "it never looks back, it continues to evolve," says Hochwald. "That's what makes it very different from most other entertainment theatrical propositions - normally you lock it at a certain point and the idea is the exact same every time."

Punchdrunk's creative team, led by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle frequently come over from London to tweak elements of the play. "It's really been this very organic evolution. The building itself continues to change, constantly adding not just scenes but also rooms and environments, new reasons to come back. We all want to keep evolving, keep it moving, not let it become stale, not let it become a retread but continually reinvest and reimagine," says Hochwald.

The challenge for Emursive now is to expand the McKittrick's clientele without alienating the underground fans that helped them grow. "I don't see The Heath developing an avid following like the show did," says Cobb. "It's nice, but it's not knocking the old regulars' socks off. To me, yes, it's partly them cashing in, but it doesn't really bother me. The show is there mostly unaltered so if I want to go have that good old time, I still can," he says.

"I'm attached to the sections of the building that were around in what for me was its heyday - lots of great memories and still full of the magic that drew me there in the first place. The newer stuff, not so much," he adds.

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Meet Emursive, The Company Behind 'Sleep No More,' The Off-Broadway Production That's Been Sold Out For Three Years

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Jonathan Hochwald, Randy Weiner and Arthur Karpati formed production company Emursive with the goal of bringing Macbeth-inspired immersive-theatre-dance mash up Sleep No More to New York City. One might think that such an unusual production, where audience members wear plastic Venetian masks and follow the actors around a vast and [...]

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The part about how the designs and appearance of an organization would tell people to come in or stay out is very interesting. Reminded me of the positive and negative cues in the experience economy piece but even before the experience started. Have to keep in mind that how an organization appears on the outside is also a key selling point for people to feel inclusive and relevant.

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The Art of Relevance | Nina Simon | TEDxPaloAlto

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The part about adding exhibition about characters' story as audience enter the theatre and provide QR code for people to read on their phone could be very useful for audience that does not possess a hard-core theatre background. Considering how many people just skip right over the preparation arc, this could be one way to enhance experience through helping the audiences do some "homework" before a show star.

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A High Touch Theatrical Experience for a High Tech World.pdf

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Getting In On The Act - The James Irvine Foundation

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Expanding opportunity for the people of California