Theatre director, Enrique Vargas (The Echo of The Shadow) and Artist and Filmmaker, Lynette Wallworth (Collisions) both create immersive works that explore bold new ways of telling and experiencing stories. In The Echo of the Shadow, Vargas invites the audience to enter a sensorial labyrinth, a singular experience of looking, listening, smelling, tasting and touching. In Collisions, audiences are taken on a virtual journey to the remote Western Australian desert where Martu elder, Nyarri Nyarri Morgan shares the story of the 1957 impact of the atomic bomb testing on his homelands.

Join Enrique and Lynette in a conversation moderated by Artistic Director Jonathan Holloway about creating immersive worlds, audience interaction and experiential storytelling and their most recent works showing at ACMI as part of the Festival.

Lynette Wallworth

Lynette Wallworth is an acclaimed Australian artist and director whose immersive installations and films reflect connections between people and the natural world as well as explore fragile human states of grace. Her work uses immersive environments, interactive technologies and narrative long form to engage with viewers. Her works Invisible by Night, Still: Waiting 1 Terra Alterius, Still: Waiting 2, Evolution of Fearlessness, Regarding Fear and Hope, Hold: Vessel 2 have screened at World Economic Forum (Davos), Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian, Adelaide Biennial, Vienna Festival, London Film Festival and Margaret Mead Film Festival.

Enrique Vargas

Enrique Vargas is a Colombian dramaturge and anthropologist who is renowned for his immersive and experiential theatre works and his enormous influence on contemporary theatre.

As a young man, he began inventing games in the intricate and labyrinthine coffee plantations typical of the Andes surroundings where he grew up. He subsequently dedicated 15 years to the research on games, rituals and myths in the Colombian Amazonas. He has created theatre works of great international impact, such as Ariadna’s Thread, Oraculos, The Memory of the Wine, The Echo of the Shadow, Inhabitants project, Small Exercise in a Dying Well, Fermentacion, Heart of Darkness, Rebirth among others. These have shown at Taipei Performing Arts Center, Taipei, World Theatre Festival Shizuoka, Japan - London International Festival Theatre, LIFT, London, Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, Colombia.