Client: De Kubus Lelystad
Location: Atolplaza (community centre) and Lelystad Natuurpark
Event: Location-based immersive theatre events

Assignments: The arts organization of the city of Lelystad wanted to celebrate the opening of a new multifunctional building with a cultural event that would show off the building but also involve the citizens. The second assignment, a year later, was to design something interactive that would turn the small planned location-based theatre performances in the local nature park into one coherent event.

Verrassing added an immersive touch to this location based theatre festival and made it into one coherent event. Several actors, who weren’t immediately recognizable as such, interacted with the audience as they went from location to location, trying to trigger them to think about their role in the group of spectators and challenging their role as a passive audience member. Because there was no possibility to add set pieces to the walking routes, this was the most fitting way to design the space in a coherent way; you could say that the set pieces sort of walked along with the audience. This was also a nice contrast with the different theatre/dance performances the audience would visit, since they were static and set, and always built in a traditional stage/(sitting) audience set-up.

Als een Vis op het Water was a theatre production developed to immerse the audience into the newly built community center. Spectators were led through the building by an actor who asked them to actively engage in the different rooms and stories, and to develop their own personal story. Everything revolved around the idea of feeling at home, because the new building was supposed to be a ‘living room’ for the people living in the neighbourhood. For this reason, we kept the rooms mostly intact, to show them off in all their glory and purpose, but added a fairytale-like story to all of them, to elevate the building from the normalcy. Since the main area wall was decorated with fishes, we chose that as a theme and starting point, used it for the title of the piece (the building is named ‘Atol’, which inspired the other part of the title) and enhanced the area with even more fishes, hanging from the ceiling, knitted by the knitting-group that would also reside in this new building.