Diving Headfirst Into the Unknown
It began with an invitation – an invitation to dance with strangers and end up sharing stories around a campfire about the wonderful humans those strangers turned out to be. The Immersive World Adventure was an immersive summit and four-day live theatrical experience in the Riviera Maya, and let me tell you, it was anything but ordinary.
As I try to unpack this wild, unexpected, multi-cultural journey through the Tulum jungle, I can’t help but start with Miro. In a flustered, energetic purge, I began to exhale moments, memories, thoughts, and questions into a sea of brightly colored post-its. And as I slowed down about 48 moments in, I started to tag, categorize, re-tag, and re-categorize these moments in a desperate attempt to make sense of what I had just experienced and why it mattered.
I mapped the state of immersion – physical, psychological, ontological, and social-empathic – and the impact size versus personal impact for each of these moments across time. This method was extremely helpful in my processing of the experience, but I still felt like something was missing – something that could translate my moments into our moments. It won’t be perfect, and there’s no way in hell it will be comprehensive, but it will be full of heart. So here it is, my heart. For you. Please be gentle with it, and with your own. We are, after all, only human.
Feeling Cared For
Diving head-first into a jam-packed, experimental theatrical experience with a bunch of strangers in a foreign country is a lot to ask of your guests. And when your ask is big, you need to be prepared to give big. Here are just a few of the ways I felt cared for during this experience.
On the morning of our first day together, Joanna Garner, the former Meow Wolf Senior Story Director, led us through a workshop designed to help us bring our whole human body into this experience. She had us moving around each other, still very much strangers at this point, to the tunes of Dolly Parton and Rihanna, exchanging embodied movement energy, eye contact, and touch. We practiced giving and receiving attention with each other and discussed how difficult each of those felt. Joanna emphasized our dependency on one another and encouraged us to reach out to each other whenever we found ourselves in need of co-regulation throughout the experience. This workshop had a profound effect on each of us, and because of it, I have no doubt our connection to each other and to the experience went deeper. We were in this together.
For something so experimental and unknown, the decision to make sure we always knew when we were and were not in narrative felt like such an intentional act of care. Being sung in and out of story by the bard was a beautiful and clear indicator of stepping into and out of frame, and it only grew more significant as the experience progressed. It felt as though Sebastian truly was our guide to the underworld. I began to feel comforted by his presence, his vulnerability in sharing his voice with us, the way it cracked or didn’t come across over the mic sometimes, and the confidence he seemed to gain as the days went on – all such beautiful depictions of the human experience and the power of being seen.
Immersing Deeper
On the first night in narrative, we walked back into the palapa and were greeted as warm wedding guests and lifelong friends of the bride and groom. This simple decision for the actors to enthusiastically hug each of us as we walked in and invite us to dance with them created a welcoming permission to lean into the narrative right from the start. The warm welcome helped us to feel part of the festivities, even though none of us knew what the hell was going on at this point. And to me, it felt like the perfect amount of pressure to play along. Too much, and I may have shut down; too little, and I might have convinced myself not to engage. But this? This felt perfect.
On our last night, due to a miscommunication about bus times, we arrived in the jungle two hours before we were expected. And though we were perfectly capable of continuing to entertain ourselves for a couple more hours, Sean Stewart, the NY Times bestselling author and ARG pioneer, came over in full makeup and costume to where we had gathered and facilitated a follow-up to our panel discussion that morning. His decision to use this time to share his industry expertise with us, rather than use it to continue preparing for the production itself, seemed to encapsulate this entire experience and who it was for. This wasn’t about creating a performance to be consumed and awed after, though we most certainly did that too. It was about connection, about choice, about us.
And on that last night, as we gathered around the bonfire, Steve Boyle of Epic Immersive, the mastermind behind this experience, dressed in a red robe, full face paint, and a gold laurel leaf crown, circled the fire, looked each one of us in the eyes, and said, “Thank you for being here.” There was something about the intimacy and vulnerability of this moment that will stick with me. To be in awe of someone and have spent the last three and a half days, roughly 11 months in immersive time, so deeply immersed in their work, a guest in their mind, to have gained such respect and admiration for this grand experiment they’ve brought to life, and to feel so cared for, even significant, in this moment – there was this beautiful sense of recognition that this world would not exist without each one of us, without me.
Aftercare and the Beauty of Being Human
On the morning of my last day in Tulum, Jonathan, mi mejor amigo, created a “Welcome back to America” support guide to help ease my reintegration. This gift was so unexpected, so completely in character, and it absolutely blew me away. Playing the audio track for the first time, and every time since, made me feel seen and cared for in a way I couldn’t quite comprehend. The absurdity of his humor complemented his depth of realness in a way that felt like a perfect metaphor for what we just experienced together, and it cut through. It was two minutes and sixteen seconds of giggles and tears and more love than I knew what to do with – emotions it turns out I would continue to experience in full color over the coming weeks, months, years.
This sweet gift got me thinking a lot about aftercare for immersive, and particularly for transformative, experiences. How might we expand our frame of care to include the come-down as well? Speaking of come-downs, just over a week after the experience concluded, Steve and the team held a debrief call on Zoom. Considering the depth and breadth of emotions we were all wading through, as witnessed by our explosive WhatsApp and Slack threads immediately after the experience, holding that space for all of us felt really important. I mean, how many events, experiences, retreats, or summits have you been to that included a debrief afterward? How many times have you felt truly cared for as a participant or audience member after the experience has ended? What I had anticipated being a very structured post-mortem ended up being this really fluid, beautiful container for us to just be together, to see each other, to hear each other. It was the aftercare I didn’t even know I needed. And like Donna beautifully said in the voice note she sent to me immediately after we signed off, “It felt like validation that this was real.”
Throughout this experience, I was constantly reminded of the beauty of being human. From Steve’s personal story that opened our first morning together, to Tom Pearson’s workshop on space and movement that pushed the boundaries of our connection to the space and to each other, to the unexpected moment when Michael joined Steve on stage to collaboratively recite the prologue to Henry V – these were all instances that showcased the humanness of the creators and the participants.
One Instagram post I came across captured this sentiment beautifully: “Sometimes you walk down a dark staircase into a beautiful candlelit cenote with a bunch of people in robes and masks, and you have a feeling a transformation is coming. And sometimes it sneaks up on you.” This experience was full of those moments – moments that were crafted with intention, but not so overly designed or produced that they didn’t leave space for us to make them our own. A wonderful metaphor for how the remaining four days took shape.
And then there were the moments that felt so familiar, like I was certain we’d been there before, but I knew I was a different person then. Toward the end of our last night together, we gathered around the fire when the drums started to play a familiar rhythm, and the Mayan dancers started to tap their feet. In that moment, we realized the fire dance the Mayans were setting up to perform was the exact one they had taught us earlier that morning in a beautiful, out-of-narrative workshop. It was an invitation designed specifically for us – an invitation to move from the role of student or guest or annoying tourist in the earlier workshop to one of active participant or even family.
As I sat in the sand, sweaty, depleted, but so full, surrounded by humans that were strangers only days ago, I felt a sea of emotions swell up within me as we all experienced this story coming to an end together. But like the fire that wouldn’t go out, another insane example of those surreal moments you just can’t design for, I think we all knew this would not be the end. Not really anyway.
Passing the Baton
On our last day together, our brilliant panel of experts spoke about passing the baton of this industry to the next generation. Since then, I can’t stop thinking about the weight of that baton. I can only hope that I one day can do justice to the amazing work that came before me.
John Piper once said, “Worship is a continual Spirit-enabled response to God’s self-revelation that exalts his glory in Christ in our minds, hearts, and wills. It doesn’t require music and can’t be limited to the realm of feelings, but can certainly involve both.” And as I reflect on my time at the Immersive World Adventure, I can’t help but see the parallels between what Piper describes as worship and what I experienced in Tulum.
It wasn’t just about the production, the narrative, or the spectacle. It was about connection, about choice, about us. It was about showing up as our whole, messy, imperfect selves and letting that be enough. It was about creating space for transformation to sneak up on us, for awe to take precedence over cynicism, for our heartbeats to ripple out into the world.
So, as I hold this baton, this responsibility to carry on the legacy of those who have come before, I’m reminded of the words of Joanna Garner: “Do the work. If you wait until the right moment, it will never be the right moment.” And I can’t help but wonder, what is the one thing I’m nurturing? Because as Alexandra Dawson and Rafa Gaytan Ordoñez so eloquently put it, “Tend to it, because it will come back to feed you.”
So, here I am, standing at the precipice of this new chapter, infusing my voice with emotional truth, and inviting you, dear reader, to join me on this journey of vocal storytelling at the Musical Theater Center. Together, let’s dive headfirst into the unknown, trusting that the universe knows what she’s doing, and that the beauty of being human will continue to reveal itself, one moment at a time.
