TIFT's Immersive Experience THE CURIOUS VOYAGE to Open in Toronto

On the heels of a triumphant premiere in London, UK, Talk Is Free Theatre's The Curious Voyage, the innovative audience-specific immersive theatrical experience, will transfer to Toronto in spring 2020. The upcoming version of The Curious Voyage will offer two-day and one-day experience options created especially and uniquely for each individual patron, whereby who they are or what they each bring to the journey will influence the artistic outcome.

"It happened! We nurtured a seed of an idea for The Curious Voyage, into the remarkable success and extraordinary reviews we've achieved in London. I'm thrilled we will be transferring the experience and redeveloping it specifically for Toronto," says Arkady Spivak, TIFT's Artistic Producer. "Building on my concept, the successful site-specific practice of director Mitchell Cushman and the audience-specific work of creator and director Daniele Bartolini, along with some of the best and most reputed Canadian and British artists, we've created an immersive theatrical experience on a scale truly not seen before."

In The Curious Voyage, each patron is integrated as a protagonist in the story they are watching, rather than fulfilling the traditional functions of passive observers. Each patron ventures on the journey through many selected sites, beginning in Barrie, ON, starting on their own, only gradually becoming part of a group. They interact with strangers without knowing who is who - their fellow patron, an actor or a regular civilian totally unaware they are even part of this experiment. Eventually, patrons are led to a mystery site-specific location to watch a secret musical, complete with a stellar Canadian cast.

Talk Is Free Theatre (TIFT) is based in Barrie, Ontario, a smaller city of 160,000 residents located in the centre of Simcoe County. We are Central Ontario's only professional Equity company with a full winter season. Our mission, both in our home seasons and with our touring endeavours, is to produce cutting-edge theatre works, such as are typically only presented in major urban centres, and connect them with as wide an audience as possible.

Every year in Barrie we create a full season of four to five esoteric, rarely produced pieces for a growing local audience. We tackle a broad range of programming ranging between new work, neglected classics and drastic reinterpretations of established repertoire.

Our central programming priority, and by extension the main contribution to the Canadian theatre ecology, is the development and production of new and experimental works of musical theatre and new types of immersive, interactive, site-specific and audience-specific theatre formats.

Photo by Claudia Brookes 2018

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Best Book of a Musical - Top 3

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