8 W E S T W O R D F a l l A r t s G u i d e 2 0 2 4 westword.com Immersed! HOW DENVER BECAME A CENTER FOR IMMERSIVE ART. BY TONI TRESCA “I have always found a place to do my work, but there is a part of me that wishes the immersive movement occurred sooner,” says Lonnie Hanzon, a nationally recog- nized immersive creator. “I’m 65, and it’s like, ‘Come on, guys! You couldn’t have had this happen a little bit sooner?’ That would have saved me from being the odd duck for years, but immersive is here now, and I see it as the next level of design.” Colorado native Hanzon began his creative career as a magician, dancer and singer who started out delivering singing telegrams. He soon moved on to costume, product and set design before receiving his first major commission for window displays. His breakthrough occurred in Omaha in 1987, when his “12/25: A Hol- iday Store” experiment became the first retail display to charge admission. From there, his career took off, and he worked on public art, immersive entertainment and visual merchandising projects in the United States and around the world. But he didn’t consider himself an “immersive artist” until recently. “I stumbled into immersive environ- ments by mistake in the mid-1980s,” Hanzon reflects. “I sort of had a big hit, but nobody knew what it was called, so it happened and it went away. In the 1990s, I worked in the theme park industry, hoping to make some of my ideas for art happen. The most recent period of im- mersive started in the 2010s. It is now a buzzword, but it is still very new. For me, it is less about the word and more about whether time stands still when you are there and whether the art could have existed elsewhere.” In recent years, “immersive” has emerged as a defining term for a wide range of artistic experiences, including Hanzon’s, and Denver has been hyped as an immersive center. But what does that mean? Instead of providing a one-size-fits- all definition, Hanzon suggests that the immersive world has multiple branches. “Escape rooms are one silo, immersive theater is another, haunted houses are another, and immersive environments, like Meow Wolf, are another,” Hanzon says. “There are also 360 video experiences, in which you are in a room surrounded by videos, like the Immersive Van Gogh; then there is VR/AR, or virtual augmented real- ity; the ARG world, an augmented reality game; and finally, LBE, or location-based entertainment, similar to the experience created at a theme park. It’s funny, because as I say this, I realize how different they all sound, but they are connected by audience immersion.” Charlie Miller, executive director and curator of DCPA’s Off-Center, also high- lights the role of the spectator. “Off-Center has defined immersive as an unexpected theatrical experience that places the au- dience at the center of the story unexpect- edly,” he says. “Immersive needs to be multi-sensory — it can’t just be something that you watch. It must engage more than one, and ideally all five, of your senses. Not all immersive has to have a narrative, but Off-Center is focused on theatrical storytelling.” David Thomas, co-founder of Im- mersive Denver, a community advocacy group, takes a broad view. “Immersive is the traditional fine arts funneled through the play aesthetic rather than the beauty aesthetic,” Thomas says. “What’s the play aesthetic? It’s established on a certain level of ambiguity that must be resolved through meaning-making by the audience. That’s why I have no issue saying Immersive Van Gogh or those selfie places are immersive, even if they maybe aren’t as thoughtful with the immersion as other creators.” While the term itself is relatively new, immersive experiences have been around for centuries. Hanzon gave a presentation at the 2022 Denver Immersive Gathering, hosted by Immersive Denver, that traced the genre’s origins through a fascinating timeline, pointing to immersive elements in Renaissance art, opera and even cathedrals, then citing more modern inspirations such as secret societies between 1850 and 1930, movie palaces in the 1920s and 1930s, Disn- eyland in 1955, Casa Bonita in 1974, Burning Man in 1985, raves in the 1990s, Meow Wolf in 2008 and Oclusu Rift in 2016. Amanda Berg Wilson, artistic director of Boulder’s the Catamounts and a frequent Off-Center collaborator, believes that the roots of immersive lie in Greek theater. “Immersive is a new iteration of theater that has existed since Greek times,” she says. “Greek theater used to be really about banquets, festivals and celebrations — it was a communal experience. A lot of that exists in the current immersive theater.” In Denver, a major turning point for immersive theater came in 2016, when Off-Center produced Sweet and Lucky. This large-scale, site-specific work, developed in collaboration with New York’s Third Rail Projects, immersed audiences in a series of dreamlike environments within a 16,000-square-foot converted warehouse on Brighton Boulevard, where they be- came participants in a story set inside an antique shop. An estimated 6,000 people attended Sweet and Lucky during its extended run, and the production became a model for im- mersive experiences in the city, influenc- ing creators like Berg Wilson and Patrick Mueller of Control Group Productions. Since then, immer- Meow Wolf Denver continues to draw crowds for Convergence Station. EVAN SEMÓN continued on page 10
