Intermission: When It's Time To Press Pause
An Introduction To Riptide Theatre Company's Innovative VR-Based Show
I sometimes get emails addressed to me and ‘my team’. This always makes me smile — mostly my team consists of a kettle and a packet of gluten-free biscuits.
The solo authorship of most Substacks has led to a new convention. Every few weeks you just have to take a week off otherwise your life starts to disintegrate. So there won’t be a full newsletter today. But there is time to give you the heads-up about an upcoming interview I have scheduled with Alex Palmer, the artistic director of innovative, Leeds-based theatre company Riptide.
Remember the terrible early days of the Internet when digital art consisted of rows of AI-generated Christmas trees? A soap-writer friend with an interest in technology created an experimental website consisting of the plan of a Tube carriage — you clicked on the passengers to read their back stories. That was considered pretty cool back in the mid-1990s.
We are way beyond that now. Riptide specialise in using theatrical techniques to enhance immersive and VR-based experiences. Their online Project Intimacy, in which I participated, was a memorable and even life-changing feature of many people’s lockdown.
Now they have a new show opening on November 23. It’s called Intermission and it’s a therapeutic Virtual Reality experience based in Leeds. So watch out for my interview with Alex in next week’s edition of Yorkshire Theatre Newsletter. Nov 23-Dec 23, £44.
All the best
Liz x
Liz, laughed at your description of your team as you, tea , and a packet of biscuits. Just had a conversation these lines with another Substacker, a prominent professional who, like the rest of us, struggles to get people to pay for what they read. She said people ask her all the time why she doesn't hire someone to help. You know the answer: Because then she couldn't pay herself, and couldn't afford to do this work. Unless readers want a future of Artificial Intelligence and ghostwritten celeb fan sites, I suggest that anyone who can spare any amount at all (and that's most readers, yes, even now) at least chip in to some of those whose work they read.