The Garden Says …

The Garden Says… is a sublime space of deep listening: a rich, atmospheric darkness, lit by hand-painted projections – in which meetings between the audience literally change the world.

A small group of audience steps into a rich audio-visual landscape. Live ambient-electronic music is playing, animated projections (of hand-painted, textual landscapes) dance around the room. Participants can choose their place and perspective in the room. A performer appears and whispers a story – inviting audiences, if they want, to take on the VR goggles and be part of a collective imagining.

In the VR, the audience wanders through a growing garden. They recognize the other players represented as a cloud of moving particles and are encouraged to meet, interact and play together with the performers and other audience members. These interactions ignite emergent possibilities within the VR world and change the live audio visual world.

For the audience outside the VR world, the movements and interactions of the people in VR become a surreal and beautiful choreography, supported by the responsive audio and visuals. Thus, the audience in the VR become performers in a non-threatening, protected way.