Horizon is a one-on-one immersive theater piece where an audience member is asked a series of questions by a 15-year old to imagine their future 30 years from now in 2052. It ends up being a world building exercise where the audience has to create an imaginal future for the next generation, but it also works as a broader metaphor for the intergenerational legacy that will be inheriting by future generations.
I found it to be both very challenging and confronting to translate my thoughts about the deep future that we’re leaving behind in a way that was very specific to one individual. We often think about the future in broad generalizations rather than how they may impact an individual’s life, and being asked to imagine someone’s story in an one-on-one immersive theater conversation like this was very striking and powerful in a way that both landed for me in the moment, but also really stuck with me.
There was also a podcast version of a Horizon performance that was shown during a IDFA DocLab Planetarium screening where the 9-minute podcast version played over images of the Earth. This was also a really powerful translation of this piece that for me evoked aspects of the overview effect given the immersive qualities of a full-dome experience of looking at our home planet from a third-person perspective. I was given permission to air a five-minute excerpt of this podcast version of Horizon in this episode in order to provide a bit more extra context for what this performance felt like.
I was able to catch up with the co-directors Joeri Heegstra and Samir Veen of Open Statement to talk about their creative process, working with young actors, and all of the various rules they created in order to creating this provocative and confronting piece that has the potential to change the way we think about our collective future.
Heegstra & Veen are having the actors summarize the futures that they’re receiving from the audience, and are interesting in bringing this piece to other places around the world or collaborating with other productions. Reach out to them via their site with contact information that can be found here.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
