Projects
The Whale
The Whale
A reimagining of Moby Dick, blending digital and physical worlds in large-scale projection environments, offering new ways for audiences to engage with immersive narratives.
The Whale is an immersive reimagining of Moby Dick designed for live audiences, brought to life by Jack Hardiker-Bresson (Office of Everyone) and Sharon Clark (Raucous).
This innovative project cultivates dynamic relationships between digital projection, physical environments, and spatial creative captioning, offering new ways for deaf and hearing-impaired audiences to engage with immersive narratives.
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£50,000
Aims of the Project
The Immersive Art Fund will enable them to realise the project’s first public iteration, fostering crucial creative collaborations with a team of interdisciplinary artists, working towards a proof-of-concept model.
They will develop and deliver a 25-minute performance, repeated several times over two days. This public presentation will provide an important opportunity to gather audience interactions and reactions, which will be critical in refining the work towards a full-length production.
It will also allow them to explore how this new form of creative captioning can function in a fully immersive space, collaborating with actors so the narrative is tethered to their performance.
How did they do that?
The work introduces a pioneering form of spatial creative captioning, offering new ways for deaf and hearing-impaired audiences to engage with immersive narratives that are not tethered to a stage or an interpreter. Led by Ben Glover, the captioning is dynamic, responding to and emanating from the performer or world.
Performances are inherently relaxed, with audiences encouraged to move around the environment and performers. With a blend of expansive 180° projection, dynamic physical environments, spatial sound, and live actors, it creates a collective experience that could be seen as a more communal form of virtual reality.
Meet the artists
Jack Hardiker-Bresson
Lead artist
he/him
Jack Hardiker-Bresson is an interdisciplinary Creative Director and Researcher. He leads the collaborative practice Office of Everyone, using emergent experiential techniques to tell unexpected stories and improve access to the arts.
Jack is a tutor and researcher at the Royal College of Art and a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Sharon Clark
Lead artist
she/her
Sharon Clark is a writer for theatre and screen and a dramaturg. She is the Creative Director of the immersive company Raucous, a resident at Pervasive Media Studio, and a research academic. Her work has won a Bruntwood Judge’s Prize for Playwriting and has been shortlisted for the Yale Drama Prize.
