Door into the Dark

This is a labyrinth.
All you have to do is follow the rope.

Door into the Dark is an immersive experience about what it means to be lost in an age of infinite information. 

Winner of the 2015 Storyscapes award at Tribeca Film Festival and selected for the Digital Dozen Breakthroughs in Digital Storytelling by Columbia University in 2015.

Door Into The Dark brings together captivating documentary stories and visceral physical experience. Blindfolded, shoeless and alone, you feel your way into the dark along a taut length of rope that leads into a vivid aural world of real people who have been profoundly lost, and irreversibly changed.

Your encounter with these characters takes you deep into their world of sensation, risk and illusion. To find your way back out into the light, you must surrender to the unknown.

With a binaural soundscape to heighten the sense of total immersion, recordings triggered by iBeacons carve out the participants’ pathway through the piece. As you inch your way through a dark and unknown space, stories, soundscapes and instructions are triggered at specific moments. 

The audio includes interviews with three people: John Hull, author of Touching the Rock, who describes the impact of losing his sight on his relationship with sound and touch; David Riley, a mountaineer who had an intimate brush with death; and Bryan Morrison, who took to walking the streets at night to lose himself and ended up in psychiatric care.

As you navigate the set – encountering forests, grass, a suspended bridge, walls that envelop and carry you, and much more besides – you listen to these individuals narrate their experiences. Each physical moment finds its match in the story; you embody what you hear.

DATES & LOCATIONS

2017
STRP / Mu gallery, Eindhoven

2015
Tribeca Film Festival 

2014
iDocs (work-in-progress version)
Sheffield DocFest 

PRESS

“The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all… setting a high bar for future generations of interactive art.”
Filmmaker Magazine

“Door into the Dark was like encountering a foreign country, using a language I’ve lived with for years but will never quite understand.”
The Verge

“Are you horizontal? Or upside down?”
New York Times

“Hand over hand, you wind your way through a 6,000 square foot labyrinth with no sensation but those voices, cool air on your skin, the ground beneath your feet, and the rope you are clutching in your hands to guide you. And then the rope ends.”
Vice

QUOTES

“My favourite interactive installation to date… achieves a level of emotional empathy to the subjects’ stories rarely experienced in interactive work”
LOC DAO, NATIONAL FILM BOARD OF CANADA, HEAD OF INTERACTIVE

“Door Into The Dark is incredible. Really blew my mind. Kind of experience where the world feels different afterwards.”
INGRID KOPP, DIRECTOR OF INTERACTIVE, TRIBECA FILM INSTITUTE

“A unique and unforgettable experience that combines non-fiction narrative and audience interaction in a ground-breaking and deeply personal way.”
LAURA POITRAS, OSCAR-WINNING FILMMAKER

“In an overwhelming media environment in which we struggle for control we recognise a work that viscerally reconnects us with the value of letting go. Door Into The Dark offers a meticulously crafted storyworld that allows us to cerebrally, emotionally and quite literally leave our baggage behind and step into the void. In that void we become disoriented, take risks, make choices and find ourselves again, changed. Ambitious, simple and profound, this work marks a fresh and promising direction for the field of immersive theatre. It evoked a euphoria that stayed with us long after we left it.”
TRIBECA STORYSCAPES JURY; SHARI FRILOT, ANDREW GOLIS and CHARLIE PHILLIPS

“I found Door into the Dark to be a transformative experience. When I exited, I had a whole new relationship to my body and my other senses. I have been through many immersive experiences at festivals and Door In the Dark definitely stands out as one of the most powerful. I will never forget it.“

SARAH WOLOZIN
DIRECTOR OF MIT OPEN DOC LAB
 

CREDITS

Conceived, written and directed by:
Amy Rose and May Abdalla

Set design:
Felicity Hickson, Tabitha Pope and Aaron Robinson

Set construction:
Aaron Robinson and Dan Halahan

Sound design:
Jonas Andreas Jensen

Stage management:
Hannah McMahon Major and Alice Russell 

Voiced by:
Caroline Williams
Featuring John Hull, David Riley, Bryan Morrison