“We’re a company of superfans making work for superfans.” Sebastian Huang and Maya McQueen, from new immersive theatre company, Sleepwalk Immersive, know what they like, and are keen to translate their passion for a wide variety of immersive, dance and experimental theatre into creating fresh and exciting work. They join us in the voidspace today to talk about the origins of the company, their first show, Bacchanalia, and the importance of creating a sense of intimacy in their theatrical experiences.
voidspace:
Welcome to the voidspace! First of all, we’d love to know a bit more about who you both are and what you do.
Sebastian Huang:
Thank you so much for having us. I’m Sebastian Huang, and I’m the artistic director at Sleepwalk Immersive.
Maya McQueen:
Hello, I’m Maya McQueen, and I am one of the associate directors at Sleepwalk.
voidspace:
Tell us a bit about Sleepwalk, and what you’re planning to do, as a company.
Sebastian Huang:
We’re a very young, new immersive theatre company. We were founded in September last year. What we really want to do is make work for audiences. We all met working in the industry, we all love immersive theatre, so we just want to make some more of it, because we have so much fun doing it.
Maya McQueen:
Especially because we met within the industry, there are so many different parts from all these different experiences that we’ve all had, and we have all come together and said, “Okay, we like this, and you like that, and we like this. So, let’s put this all together and let’s just make our own version of it.”
voidspace:
That sounds great. What are the different kinds of influences that you’re bringing together?
Sebastian Huang:
We draw our influences from all over the place, really. We all have quite diverse backgrounds, within our lives, but also within our training and what kind of theatre we come from. I personally have been raised on immersive work and dance pieces, so I think you might see a lot of that come into our work. Everyone at Sleepwalk loves a different aspect of immersive, and theatre in general.
Maya McQueen:
We’ve been influenced by lots of different things, definitely. We’ve got influences within the company from puppetry and immersive, as well as companies that make more site-specific theatre. We’ve all been raised going to all sorts of different kinds of immersive theatre, travelling all over the place to see all these crazy things. It’s come from is a lot of experimental theatre as well, a lot of physical stuff.
voidspace:
There’s Punchdrunk in there, isn’t there? And, Maya, you’ve also done some work with Parabolic in the past as well.
Maya McQueen:
Just looking at both those influences – they’re almost the polar opposites of each other, within the sphere of how they’ve decided to take on the question of what immersive means and how we interact with our audiences, and both of them are great. So for us, it’s a matter of looking at them and trying to find where we fit, what works best with us, for how we want to interact with our audiences, and what we want audience experience to feel like when you come to a Sleepwalk show.
voidspace:
You’ve got two absolute titans there, but very different ones. Where have you got to, in terms of your ideas of what you want the audience experience, and that interaction, to be like?
Sebastian Huang:
Something that we really love about just the whole immersive industry are the levels of connection you can get between performer and audience, between the set, and the atmosphere, and the sound, and everything. What we really want to do is create a show that is completely centred around the audience. We feel like we are achieving that sense of intimacy, and we want it to be a personal experience.
Maya McQueen:
It’s great that our first show can be quite intimate, and we’re trying to see how many opportunities we can get for the audience who come to have these small, personal experiences. Because I think that’s, for all of us, what is most memorable about all the immersive experiences that we’ve had, from Punchdrunk, where it’s physical, to Parabolic, where you’re having these discussions with audience members and with actors, and you really get to have your say. It’s those small, tiny moments which are personal to individual people. When you go in a group to an immersive show, and everyone comes out feeling like we’ve all had a different experience. I think it’s those little personal touches, human to human, but also sensory experiences, that we can explore.
voidspace:
Tell me a bit about your first production, Bacchanalia.
Sebastian Huang:
We’ve been working on Bacchanalia for a number of years now, and it’s grown from this tiny little one actor, one audience member experience that we did just over four years ago, into a full-on show. It’s an adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides, but set in a 1960s, a hypnotic, psychedelic world. For us, it’s all about the audience experience. We’ve written this from the perspective of people who love to go see this kind of work, so hopefully we’ll achieve a personal, intimate experience for a small number of audience members.
Maya McQueen:
It’s definitely been a slow running thing, which it has to be, because these shows are so big, and I think it’s very important for us to have been taking baby steps, where it started with that first experience with just one character, and slowly grew. Last year we had our first R&D, where we expanded the world, bringing in multiple characters. We created a 20-minute version of the piece, and started working on big set pieces, and the bigger scenes. It was a great starting block, to get feedback and to start diving into the world, and thinking about the characters and how things can fit together. This is the first version of Bacchanalia as a more fully realised production, but still a fraction of what we’ve fully imagined.
voidspace:
What have you learned so far from those initial forays into R&D?
Sebastian Huang:
We learned a lot. I think the last one we did, we managed to get this amazing space on Bond Street, and from that we really learned that there’s a hunger for this kind of work, and we got really great feedback. We were oversubscribed for it. Unfortunately, not everyone who wanted to see it was able to come see it. Even this production here has been a massive learning experience for us. We’re still a very young company, and we’re figuring out where we lie in this space. We’ve learned a lot, from creative issues to more logistical things, and actually putting on a show.
voidspace:
What kinds of things, or are they all veiled in secrecy?
Sebastian Huang:
I think something that we’ve learned on the creative team is just to be calm, and trust ourselves that what we’re doing is right. Also just focusing on the art, really, and making sure that we’re putting on a good show, making sure that it holds up and really putting that above other things.
Maya McQueen:
Definitely. It takes a lot of patience, as well. We’ve been learning, because so much of the time is spent before a rehearsal period mapping everything out in your head, how each bit is going to run, and what’s running side by side with it. Then, of course, the first time you put all this stuff on its feet, the timings are never going to work out how you want to. It just takes patience to jump in and be very brave with it, and then fix it and figure it out. You know that along the way it’s going to go wrong, because so much of how immersive theatre works is that it’s this big puzzle, with pieces that all have to be able to fit alongside each other, and we just have to be patient to make sure that everyone and everything can fit at the same time.
voidspace:
We’re used now to Punchdrunk shows being these huge enterprises, in massive spaces. How have you found the process of trying to work out how to make that sort of experience work in a much smaller space? I know you’re at Crypt in Bethnal Green, and that is obviously a brilliant space.
Sebastian Huang:
Personally, I absolutely love it. I love the challenge of it. In all the spaces we used, that’s part of the process I think we found a lot of fun in, just taking a space and thinking “How is this going to work, then?”
What we’ve done for Crypt, is we’ve made the show smaller. We’ve limited it just to six characters, which is obviously not as many as the full show we’ve written, we’ve cut down the number of rooms, and cut down the number of performers. But also, it’s been great working with the venue. The people at Crypt, like Owen Kingston, they’re really, really lovely people, and they’ve been very helpful and really guided us through this as well.
Maya McQueen:
Yeah, they really go above and beyond. A space like Crypt is also great because it’s got such an inherent atmosphere to it. It’s nice that that even does some of the work. You step in and you feel like you’re already in this other world. It’s now our job to tailor the set to what is already there, what we’ve already been given. It’s very important to us to bring in those site specific elements.
We really didn’t want to take a show that we’d created and just throw it into this space and hope it works. We really want to be thinking “How is the best way to do this scene in this room? How can we use the physical space that we have to the best of its advantage?” I think that in the immersive world, working with the space that you’re in, is so, so important. I think it’s all right that it’s small. I think you can still get that sense, even in the wider Punchdrunk spaces that feel so huge. So many of the beautiful moments are in those tiny rooms with just a performer in a smaller role.
voidspace:
That’s good to hear. You’ve said that you’re keen create that sense of intimacy, and those personal stories. If it’s not spoiling anything, how have you, in your process, tried to privilege that sense of intimacy?
Sebastian Huang:
I don’t know how we’re going to do that without giving too much away!
voidspace:
Okay, maybe we’ll have to wait and see.
Sebastian Huang:
I think that there are certain things that you’ll see in the show that we’ve implemented which should help achieve those more intimate levels. The play is about people, and it’s about interactions, and I can’t say too much without spoilers, but there are definitely more intimate scenes. You won’t always be as one big group for sure.
Maya McQueen:
We’ve definitely been trying to play with how we can use intimate scenes within bigger spaces as well. Within the process of creating that, it’s trial and error within each other in the rehearsal period, coming up with different ideas. No matter how weird and wacky, just trying it, just doing it as a creative team and seeing how we feel about it and whether it works or not. That’s mainly been our approach to trying to get the experience to feel as intimate as possible.
voidspace:
The good thing is you’ve got that experience, you know what you like, and you can follow your gut to an extent as well.
Sebastian Huang:
Absolutely. That’s definitely what we’re doing, because we’re all just big fans of the industry. Between us, we’ve seen a lot of different works and that’s something that we really have as common ground between us, as we all love those more intimate, personal experiences.
voidspace:
I think it’s great when you’ve got a team making this kind of work who are all really passionate fans of it, at the same time. I think that really helps because it means that that vision, and what excites you is going to translate, hopefully, into the audience experience as well.
Maya McQueen:
Completely. We can really go, “Okay, what would I love to see? What would be my dream experience within this? What would I have loved? What would I watch in this and be raving about, coming out?” Because we’re all such big fans. Completely.
Sebastian Huang:
We’re a company of superfans making work for superfans.
voidspace:
That’s the dream, isn’t it? It’s very exciting to see you guys working from the ground floor, your first public production. What are your hopes for what you’d like to do in the future?
Sebastian Huang:
What you’ll see in November is just a small fraction of the Bacchanalia project, and the amount of work we’ve done. It is designed to be a bigger show in the long run. So, in terms of the immediate future, once this run is over, we will immediately start work on putting on Bacchanalia again, hopefully a bit bigger, and just keep progressing that project until we’re happy.
voidspace:
In the future, when the big version is a hit and everyone’s talking about it, a select few of us will be able to say, “Well, I remember the Crypt version, and that was something you had to be there for.” It’s like the equivalent of the Boston Sleep No More, or the London Sleep No More, even. The Bethnal Green Bacchanalia. That’s the OG.
What advice do you have for people like you, like aspiring creators in the interactive arts space?
Sebastian Huang:
The big one is that no one else is going to put on the play that you want to put on. You want to, so you do it. Do it the way you want to do it. I think it’s important artistically just to maintain that integrity, and make work that really resonates with you. Then hopefully, if it can mean a lot to you as a creator, that will then resonate with the audience as well.
Maya McQueen:
I definitely agree with that. I think I’d advise people just to do it, just to take the leap and to not be put off by the technical elements. I can understand how it could be easy to go and see a big Secret Cinema show, or a very technologically advanced Parabolic show and think, “Oh, God, how did they do that? This feels so beyond my level.” But actually, a lot of immersive theatre starts very simple. The first version of Bacchanalia that we created was just in a basement. One small scene. You can start with what you have, and trust that you know enough about how to make an atmosphere and a story with what you’ve got, to just start with something, put it on, and trust that it will slowly start developing from there.