IGNITE

Image: production photo from IGNITE

written by Miranda Allegar - December 23, 2020

Directed and written by Jonathan Edmondson, IGNITE: a Virtual Theatre Experience from Philadelphia’s Strides Collective brings to life an immersive world on a college campus as ten students’ lives interweave to tell the story of a fire. Told through audio recordings, phone calls, and recordings of video conference calls, IGNITE leads viewers through a self-paced and self-guided tour of the social landscape of fictional Alexandria College housed in an easily navigable website “database.”

The experience begins with a cryptic email delivered to the address used to register for the event, inviting viewers to enter the archives of an investigation. The viewer is then greeted with an accessible, easily navigable site detailing key terms used in the Alexandria College vernacular, a campus map, and profiles of each of our main characters. Each video or phone call adds another snippet to the story, told out of chronological order and spanning almost eight months. For the aid of audience members, each element also comes with a transcript to help follow the story, if needed. 

The self-guided nature of the experience allows a viewer to determine to what depth they will immerse themselves in the tale, how much of the story they need to sample before exiting the site and attempting to decipher what exactly happened one fateful night at the College. For this viewer, this style kept me wrapped in the world of the story for a comfortable two and a half hours or so as I constructed a timeline with key facts for myself, though the site promises some viewers will want to take far less time to view. As I moved deeper through the story, I felt attached to the many characters, weaving between their varying interviews and mapping my own hypotheses for the eventual ending. Being able to reclaim my attention span and move at my own pace matches this moment in theater beautifully, taking full advantage of the unexpected benefits of an audience of solitary viewers, each now able to determine their own artistic journey without having to match the pace desired by other viewers. The experience was, however, decidedly solitary as an audience member, situated more as a voyeur or an outsider-looking-in than anything else as I watched and listened to the lives of these characters I didn’t know. Ultimately, the piece presented a universe completely fleshed out and detailed, as vivid as any college campus might be expected to be. This detail is exactly what keeps the piece firmly situated in the realm of immersive, albeit individual, theater.

Further still, the audio-heavy presentation helps alleviate the screen fatigue and computer burnout we all feel more and more as the pandemic keeps us tethered to our devices. Being able to wrap myself in a story for an evening even as I stepped away from my laptop for a few minutes at a time felt like a luxury, one neatly packaged in IGNITE. The show adeptly touches on themes of homophobia, harassment, and racism without appearing overtly or unnecessarily moralizing.

IGNITE required audience members to navigate a website, listening to audio clips, watching videos, and reading text. The show ran from October 11th to October 25th of 2020. The Strides Collective is a Philadelphia-based group of diverse young artists, focused on bringing to life stories with social impact. They can also be found on Instagram at @thestridescollective