The audience proceeds to wander through the space as they please and soon discovers actors who, mostly through dance, enact the story over the course of the three-hour performance. Audience members are masked upon entering the experience and instructed to explore but not to speak. The New York production is set in the fictionally named McKittrick Hotel, a converted warehouse with a set consisting of over 100 cinematically detailed rooms distributed over the seven story space. Currently running in New York City, the production tells the story of Shakespeare’s Macbeth intertwined with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation of Rebecca, based on the Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name. Sleep No More is a successful immersive theatrical production created by the innovative British theater group Punchdrunk. Further elaborations and next steps are currently being evaluated. The first version of the extended Sleep No More was offered to a limited public in May 2012. This project explored original ways of fostering meaningful relationships between online and onsite audience members, enhancing the experiences of both through the affordances that exist only at the intersection of the real and the virtual worlds. Pushing the current capabilities of web standards and wireless communications technologies, the system delivered personalized multimedia content allowing each online participant to have a unique experience co-created in real time by his own actions and those of his onsite partner. We developed an online companion world to this real-life experience, through which online participants partner with live audience members to explore the interactive, immersive show together. In the live show, masked audience members explore and interact with a rich environment, discovering their own narrative pathways. The MIT Media Lab collaborated with London-based theater group Punchdrunk to create an online platform connected to their New York City production of Sleep No More. They may interact with you and even lock you into a room and who knows what could happen.Remote Theatrical Immersion Extending Sleep No MoreĪrticle by Peter Torpey, Ben Bloomberg, Elena Jessop, and Akito van Troyer

So if you are going with a group of friends forget to be together.Įach floor has different spaces (a cemetery, a street, a hospital, a ballroom, etc.) and actors are in different locations. You get into an elevator and everyone is dispersed at different levels. This is to be differentiated from actors, that doesn’t wear a mask, while the atmosphere created with these masks is so intriguing. Before you enter, everyone in the audience has to wear a white creepy mask and you can’t take it out during all the show. You wait until you are called to enter the play. The waitstaff is accordingly dressed, beverages look like poison and there is even a woman that can read your future. You end up in a bar whose design is a mixture of late 1930’s American aesthetic with classic haunted house ornamentation. Then you get into a maze likely black corridor, pretty perturbed because you can barely see anything and there is still that deep music. They get your coats and you get your tickets. Waiting in the line outside the building can be like waiting for the line to enter a New Year’s party in a big disco, but forget about that, once you are inside you enter into a dim lit space with a very deep sound. It’s not cheap (more than $100 ticket), but it’s totally worth it because you are inside the play and you can move freely seeing whatever you decide. In the fictitious 1939 McKittrick Hotel, located in Chelsea district in New York City, you can experience a unique immersive theatrical play called Sleep No More !, based on Macbeth, by William Shakespeare.

Sleep no more masks