UCA students, staff and theater lovers around Conway were invited to enter the world of Resanon, a perfect community hiding a sinister secret, in UCA Theater’s production of “GUILT/LESS” from Feb. 25 to March 1.
“GUILT/LESS” is an immersive theatre experience brought to the stage by director Chad Bradford and the UCA Theatre. The show was created for UCA’s Artist in Residence program, a program that featured Bradford as a guest speaker in the weeks prior to “GUILT/LESS.”
Bradford was hired to create a project centered around transmedia storytelling and immersive experiences, but he wasn’t alone in creating “GUILT/LESS”.
“The cast was instrumental in putting together the show. Each cast member could be considered a playwright,” Bradford said.
“GUILT/LESS” also had a creative team of six students: AB Dickson, Dean Prince, Ari Beaudoin, Harlie Gann, Lexi Jones, and Jeffrey Oakley.
“These six students not only helped craft and write the story, they also worked on set design, marketing, social media, directing, stage management, among other roles. We met weekly in the fall to plan for the show,” Bradford said. “Students put forth ideas, and we worked collectively to craft these ideas into a cohesive story and plan, all with the aim of telling the story in an immersive environment with transmedia elements. Thus, you get moments of traditional theater, music, dance, film, prose and audience and performer interaction, all in an immersive environment.”
The team followed the seven core principles of transmedia storytelling coined by MIT professor Henry Jenkins and researched the immersive theatre company, Punchdrunk, for clues on how to put it all together.
“GUILT/LESS” welcomed audience members to the curious community of Resanon and encouraged them to join the group’s “guilt-free celebration.”
Specific elements of the plot were not advertised to the public so audience members could go into the performance blind and without expectations of what was to come.
Unlike most traditional theater performances, audience members were invited on stage to interact with cast members. There was a maze, a library and a temple to explore, as well as QR codes located around the set that viewers could scan for secret messages.
Audience member Lacy Allen, a sophomore at UCA, attended the Saturday night performance of “GUILT/LESS” and said the experience was nothing like she thought.
“I was expecting to be sat in an audience and have the cast members pull people out of the audience. It was not like what I thought because there wasn’t really a main plot, and we were actually up moving around with the cast,” Allen said.
Bradford said, “The experience is better if the audience doesn’t really know what they are getting into.”
To ecnorporate aspects of Transmedia Storytelling, UCA Theatre created mysterious social media accounts for Resanon and characters from the production to spark interest in the show without giving away too much information.
“Social media is the way many people get news and learn about events, especially Gen-Z and millenials. It only makes sense to use it as a way to not only market the show but also extend our story. Transmedia storytelling is about spreading integral parts of a story across a variety of mediums,” Bradford said. “So if you follow Resanon on social media, you get little bits of the story that you won’t necessarily get when you just read the Lore or experience the show.”
The performance was held on the Bridges Larson Theatre stage in the Snow Fine Arts building. Admission to the event was free, but donations to the UCA Theatre Foundation were encouraged.
