Boca del Lupo takes a plunge into immersive technology with LivePerformance360 series
Program launches with Swimming Home, a play for one set in your own bathroom
Boca del Lupo presents Swimming Home from February 23 to 27 as part of LivePerformance360, which runs to June 2022. In addition to the theatre component, Boca del Lupo has set up the Fishbowl as an education and demonstration centre on Granville Island.
AS THE PANDEMIC hit and public pools began to shut down, Italian-born, British-based theatre artist Silvia Mercuriali tried to imagine a way to bring the art of swimming into people’s homes. The obvious place to start? People’s bathrooms.
The result, Swimming Home, gives new meaning to the term “immersive theatre”.
It’s a unique mix of audience-participation play and smartphone technology. Conjured through a phone app, it requires the participant to don a bathing suit and grab their swim goggles and a towel, then head to their shower or bath. From there, this audience of one follows the gentle directions and listens to underwater recordings, bits of songs like “Row, row, row your boat”, and interviews with everyone from swimmers to coaches. Together, the elements provide a deep yet fun dive into our attraction to water and the experience of the public pool (to the point where you can almost smell the chlorine).
The genre-defying work—which goes far beyond an audio play—is part of Boca del Lupo’s new, five-month LivePerformance360 project. Co-curated by Boca artistic director Sherry J Yoon with Jo Mangan, of Ireland’s form-pushing Performance Corporation, the programming breaks into bold new experiments in accessibility, live performance, and technology. At the same time, it expands on work Boca has already done to blur the lines between performers and audience, from Red Phone (in which participants engage with an unseen partner in a phone booth) to Plays2Perform@Home (script kits that the company mailed out to folks during lockdown).
Yoon says the series was a result of the theatre company stepping back and reflecting during the pandemic. “We were determined to not just have things look the way they once did,” she begins, “but also we wanted to find how this could expand and widen and deepen what we do. We asked, ‘What are works we can showcase pushing the idea of what immersive technologies are?’”
In the series that unfolds with one show per month until June, the answers includes Mercuriali’s pre-recorded, intimate “autotheatrical” endeavour, but also live-theatre trips into interactive video and virtual-reality theatre by local, national, and international artists.
Co-curator Mangan brings a direct connection to the exciting work being done in Europe at the intersection of new technologies and theatre. “Jo is so knowledgeable and has such a breadth of diversity in immersive work,” says Yoon. “She’s really taken on work where audiences can experience it in real time as well as live with pre-recorded technology.”
Sherry J Yoon
Yoon hopes to draw on that connection but also carve out a series that’s “uniquely Canadian”. She’s especially interested in making new platforms like VR as accessible to theatre artists as to audience members. Delving into the platform over recent years, she’s become excited about its ability to connect. “You can spend 10 or 15 minutes in someone else’s shoes,” says Yoon. “It tells us something about humanity.”
Swimming Home becomes a perfect way for Boca del Lupo to take a “plunge” into the new possibilities of enjoying theatre at home—far beyond the experience of watching a streamed play on your laptop or TV. Using everyday props and a technology that we all have handy, it turns a familiar domestic space into something surprisingly poetic. (The show plays out via Mercurious NET – National Ear Theatre, a sound-based interactive theatre app.)
“It’s a narrative that pulls you in a different direction and creates an environment that you would not expect,” Yoon says. “It has the ability to leave enough surprise that you do feel transformed. You’re seeing an experienced artist give you something so simple that anyone can connect with something really magical. It brings about things you would never expect to happen in your own bathroom.
“And she’ll never get feedback!” Yoon marvels. “You're making this beautiful gift and just giving it away. And I think there's something very special about artists who just want to do that.”
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