The Whale at FRAMELESS

A 525-page novel has been transformed into a powerful 25-minute experience, blending live performance with immersive technologies to create a strange and unfamiliar world. Audiences were surrounded by 180° projections, creative captions and spatial audio, with live performers at the centre.

The creative captions – developed by Ben Glover – integrate text into the environment, making the storytelling more accessible. Each performance across the three-day run was fully booked, and the team were delighted by the strong audience response. It marks an exciting moment for the project, with valuable learning gained from these first performances.

Michelle Rumney (Immersive Arts Producer working with The Whale team) reflects:

“Actors and audience, we were all immersed together inside the projected world they’d created. Sometimes we saw the whale in the visuals and sometimes we didn’t, but we knew it was coming – the actors brought it alive for all of us. That interplay between imagination, visuals and acting was really powerful. Seeing it in this physical space, with the lighting, the immersive soundscape and the response from different audiences, was literally fantastic.” 

Verity McIntosh (Immersive Arts Director & Principal Investigator) said:

“It was incredibly exciting to see artists grappling with a whole new creative form. Bringing live theatre into a projection space at this scale has rarely, if ever been attempted, and Sharon, Jack, Ben and the whole team have done some transformational work figuring out how to combine stage-craft, animation, spatial sound, performance vs projection lighting, creative captioning and audience choreography into one powerful and compelling piece of theatre. I am almost envious of those who get to follow in the footsteps (or I guess for a whale it would be the slipstream?) of this team with this extraordinary first sharing.”

We’re all looking forward to seeing how they develop this project and where they take it next, visit The Whale Project Page.