After a wildly successful first year, Immersive Homecoming is returning in 2022 with jaw-dropping headliners: the illustrious Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Felix and Maxine are the founder and choreographer, respectively, of the world's leading immersive experience company, Punchdrunk , co-directing many of their shows including the iconic Sleep No More. This June, they'll be joining us at the amazing AREA15 in Las Vegas, where they'll celebrate and share their journey launching The Burnt City, Punchdrunk's first London mask show since The Drowned Man, and their largest-scale show to date.
Who else will be there? More announcements will roll out in the coming weeks. Last year's event featured luminaries from around the world, including from from Secret Cinema, Meow Wolf, Marshmallow Laser Feast, David Byrne's Theater of the Mind, Broadway, Swamp Motel, Delusion, Mycotoo, AREA15, Boomtown Fair, Les Enfants Terribles, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and The Museum for Black Girls, with speakers joining us from the Americas, Europe, Japan, China, Singapore, India, and Russia.
You can expect another star-studded and global lineup. Tickets will be available in early Spring, with two options: live and virtual. All live ticketholders will have access to the stream for added flexibility. COVID policies will also be announced in the coming weeks, but expect a stringent policy requiring both boosters and a negative test; this policy will evolve to match the conditions at the time, always prioritizing community health. Masking policy will respond to conditions closer to the event.
We'll see you June 26th and 27th in Las Vegas!
Images of Immersive Homecoming by Annie Lesser.
In alphabetical order.
Felix Barrett is the founder and Artistic Director of Punchdrunk, a company whose work is recognised internationally as pioneering game-changing ways for audiences to experience culture, in both digital and literal worlds. Punchdrunk’s site sympathetic productions include: The Firebird Ball; Faust; The Masque Of The Red Death; It Felt Like A Kiss (a collaboration with documentary film-maker Adam Curtis, and musician Damon Albarn for Manchester International Festival); The Duchess Of Malfi (with English National Opera); The Crash Of The Elysium (Manchester International Festival and 2012 Cultural Olympiad); The Borough (with Aldeburgh Music) and The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, and The Burnt City (opening in London March 2022). Felix is the co-director of the company’s award-winning production of Sleep No More. First experienced by audiences in London in 2003, it has since travelled to Boston and New York, where it has been running for over a decade. The show has been playing in Shanghai since 2016, making it the longest running show in the city’s history. Felix is a graduate and Honorary Doctorate in Drama of the University of Exeter, was one of the first recipients of a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Fund Award (supporting exceptional arts practitioners in the development of their vision) and was appointed Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to theatre.
Maxine Doyle is an independent choreographer and director. Since 2002 she has been Director and Choreographer for Punchdrunk, with whom she co-directed the multi-award winning Sleep No More (London, Boston, New York, Shanghai), The Drowned Man, The Firebird Ball, Faust, Masque of the Red Death, Tunnel 228, The Duchess of Malfi (an operatic collaboration with English National Opera and Thorsten Rasch) and The Yellow Wallpaper. Maxine has an MA in choreography from the Laban centre and is a recipient of the Bonnie Bird Choreography Award. She was Artistic Director of First Person Dance Company from 1996 - 2003 touring works such as Déja Deux, In the Face of a Stranger, Plastic Chill and It's Only a Game Show. Maxine has created work for The BalletBoyz (UK), The Martha Graham Company (USA), Verve (UK) and Johannes Wieland Company (Germany). In 2019 she created the award winning Sunset (Australian Dance Award) for Strut Dance and the Perth Festival. Here Not Here, her collaboration with artist Es Devlin and Göteborg Dance Company, Sweden premiered in Jan 2022. Future projects include a major new site-specific dance theatre work with Australasian Dance Collective and the Brisbane Festival. Maxine is also a regular principal artist at Springboard Dance Montreal, B12 Festival in Berlin and has mentored for the iconic Jacobs Pillow Dance Season. Work for film and television includes Mari (dir: Georgia Paris),The Third Day – Autumn (Punchdrunk), Brave New World (dir: Owen Harris) and 20:20 Vision (dir: Jake Polonsnky).
AREA15, located minutes from the Las Vegas Strip, is the world’s first purpose-built experiential entertainment complex offering live events, immersive activations, monumental art installations, extraordinary design elements, unique retail, ground-breaking technology, bars and eateries and much more. With a growing collection of dynamic destinations including Emporium, Oddwood Bar, Dueling Axes, Lost Spirits Distillery, a culinary experience by Todd English and its anchor experience, Meow Wolf Las Vegas, AREA15’s ever-changing art, retail and entertainment attractions draw locals and tourists of all ages.
AREA15 represents a collaborative venture between real estate development firm Fisher Brothers and creative agency Beneville Studios, both of New York.
Steve M. Boyle is the founder and CEO of Epic Immersive. Under his leadership, Epic Immersive has created immersive experiences with 14-acre real-world fictional cities and 100+ actors, crafted immersive journeys in China and Paris, built neighborhood-scale cultural and civic festivals, and designed experiences for Silicon Valley companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. At Epic's imaginative events, guests have slid through slides in fireplaces into underground wonderlands, crawled through Dante Alighieri’s vaults, descended into replica London Underground stations, launched into mixed reality experiences from inside of Victorian mansions, and joined masquerades from revolutionary France on the docks of San Francisco.
Before founding Epic Immersive, Steve M. Boyle built immersive installations for Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s venture capital firm Innovation Endeavors, helmed San Jose Rep’s Emerging Artists Lab, produced and directed off-Broadway, trained in global theatrical techniques across South and Southeast Asia, and ran the digital half of the million dollar funding campaign that saved Santa Cruz Shakespeare and attracted Sir Patrick Stewart to its Advisory Board. With Epic, he has continued his work with multicultural and multidisciplinary collaborations that unite historic spaces, cultural performance, and bleeding-edge technology. During his tenure as CEO, Epic has worked with a diverse slate of artists including taiko drummers, hip-hop artists, Ballet Folklorico dancers, ASMR specialists, escape room designers, mixed reality developers, swing dancers, and circus performers. In every year that Epic has existed, more than half of Epic's artists have always been women, and more than half of Epic's artists have always been artists of color.
Kimberly Flynn is a multi-talented immersive creator, performer, and producer. As the Associate Producer for Epic Immersive, she has been instrumental in bringing large-scale immersive experiences to life for the public and for Silicon Valley, and is co-producing The Immersive Industry Homecoming Summit, a gathering of the immersive community at AREA15 Las Vegas featuring leaders from the worlds of immersive theatre, virtual reality, theme parks, immersive art environments, and everything in between. For Epic, Kim ran the Underland initiative, a residency program and incubator for immersive artists from underrepresented backgrounds. All told, Kim produced 30 Underland shows and experiences in 12 months, supporting artists on projects as diverse as Japanese tea ceremonies, butoh rituals, immersive theatre, food-based escape rooms, and more.
Across her years with Epic, Kim has held creative roles in more than 60 immersive experiences, drawing on her 20+ years of experience in events and entertainment. Most recently, Kim designed and built a 10,000-square-foot, multi-theme immersive environment for Epic Immersive's Bohemia as part of Epic's residency at the Hotel Whitcomb in San Francisco. In her years at Epic, she has worked as a story creator, script-writer, actor, designer, production manager, and producer on projects ranging from story-centric immersive theatre to marketing activations to spectacular corporate parties to bespoke team-building events. Throughout her work, Kim has been an outspoken voice for equity, diversity, and empathy in artistic producing. Creatively, she is most drawn to exploring the healing power of art and developing transformative experiences filled with authenticity and playfulness.
2021's Immersive Homecoming featured luminaries from around the world, including from Secret Cinema, Meow Wolf, Walt Disney International, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, Marshmallow Laser Feast, David Byrne's Theater of the Mind, Broadway, Swamp Motel, Mycotoo, AREA15, Boomtown Fair, Les Enfants Terribles, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Museum for Black Girls, Adventure Lab, and many more, with speakers joining us from the Americas, Europe, Japan, China, Singapore, India, and Russia.
2021 Speakers
A digital series featuring metaverse networking, This Immersive Globe featured leading artists and producers from London and Shanghai's Alice's Adventures Underground, Los Angeles' Delusion, London's The Great Gatsby, Baobab Studios, New York's Queen of the Night, Chicago's Nevermore Park, New York's Sweeney Todd, Denver's David Byrne's Theater of the Mind, Los Angeles' Mycotoo and Giant Spoon, Germany's The Room, Paris' Helsingor, India's Crow, South Korea's Scarecrow, and many more, plus a special session focusing on the Chinese immerisve scene.
2020 Speakers