Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but alternate dimensions are hot right now. Practically everybody, from Yayoi Kusama to Meow Wolf to Doctor Strange, is cracking open rifts leading to worlds beyond our own. It was only a matter of time before such a rift appeared in Downtown’s Arts District, where artists, performers and musicians have been hammering away at that dividing wall for years.
Particle Ink: Speed of Dark, an interactive show created by entertainment technology firm Kaleidoco, launches April 16 in a nondescript warehouse across the street from the recently opened English Hotel. The limited-run show has an impressive pedigree; its creative team includes alumni of Cirque du Soleil and New York’s acclaimed interactive theater production Sleep No More, working in concert with secretive, Vegas-based visual art collective The Light Poets and a dozen or so other performers we’ve seen and enjoyed in other local, non-multiverse productions including Molodi’s Jason Nious, Bleach’s Darren Pitura and handbalancer/contortionist Natalie Rhae.
I’m hesitant to share too many specifics about Speed of Dark itself, because nearly the entire hourlong production is built on discovery and surprise. Executive Producer Cesar Hawas describes the show as “the place where the veil between our dimension and the third dimension and the 2.5th dimension is at its thinnest. By walking past the threshold at this place, you find yourself in a world that is inhabited by beings of pure light … The idea is that you just totally lose yourself to the experience, and explore at your leisure.”
What Speed of Dark is, at its heart, is a classic hero’s journey, with villains lurking in unexpected corners. Performers range all over the space, at one point literally running up the walls. Laser-light rain cascades from the ceiling; characters materialize in handheld mirrors; someone actually rides a unicorn. And if at any point in the show, you become aware of the stagecraft being used—puppetry, augmented reality displays and projection-mapped imagery closely interact, complementing and feeding off each other—it’s only a matter of seconds before something new draws your attention.
The interplay of technology and performance is impressive, but it’s not the point of the show, says Jennifer Tuft, Particle Ink’s co-CEO (with Cassandra Rosenthal). It’s all about where that interplay takes you.
“It’s not, this is a really cool technology; let’s use it in the story,” Tuft says. “It’s, what is the impetus of this story? What is the heart of the story, and how does that best prove itself through technology that is virtual in its nature but communal in its actuality? You’re not putting any middleware on; you’re holding the hand of your loved one, and you’re watching something together, experiencing the magic of what entertainment technology can bring to the surface.”
Particle Ink: Speed of Dark is scheduled to run 12 weeks, concluding on July 17. But the story might not end there. The show’s website calls Speed of Dark “the first original live immersive experience from the Particle Ink metaverse,” implying that more portals to this universe might open, someday, somehow, somewhere.
Or, Hawas suggests, this portal could linger, if enough explorers run through it.
“We hope that the community rallies around us and that we can stay a bit longer,” Hawas says. “It’s a pop-up installation that we hope to find a home for, here [in the Arts District] or somewhere else in Vegas. But we’re hyper-focused on the next 12 weeks.”
Particle Ink: Speed of Dark Thursday-Sunday, 7 & 9 p.m., $49.50, 918 S. Main St., particleink.com.
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