David Byrne is planning to move on from his currently running Broadway show American Utopia onto a new project based in Denver meant to be a fully immersive theater/project space called Theater of the Mind. It sounds incredible at first glance.
Here’s what we know:
Theater of the Mind will be a 15,000-square-foot “immersive experience taking just sixteen audience members at a time through a journey of self-reflection, discovery, and imagination, inspired by and grounded in neuroscience.”
The show will be based at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and will start next summer in August, 2020. According to Byrne, the idea is more that the show itself will operate like a museum tour with a set flow and follow-path that you’ll take if you’re at the show when others are.
Led by a Guide whose stories are inspired from the creators’ lives, audiences will explore how they perceive the world through sensory experiments that reveal the inner mysteries of the brain.
Further, “when they leave one room, another group goes in there. That way, you can get 400 people in from 6 p.m. to 10. You get the same number as if it were a theater show, but you get more in small groups,” he told Rolling Stone.
Always the innovator, and still never boring, I guess this sadly means we won’t be seeing that Talking Heads reunion anytime soon (which we already knew anyway).
An original version of this popped up in New York City a few years back, but so this will be an extension and innovation of that. Head to the official site for more info.
