The Burnt City

One might say The Burnt City is a theological experience. A mix of ritual, mythology, symbolism, procession, and revelation, the event offers a kind of theatrical liturgy—a work of the people—that challenges and reforms how we might understand ourselves in a world where the Divine lures us into participation and co-creation. By dismantling and reorienting the theatrical enterprise, The Burnt City initiates a new way of looking at the world that awakens and enlivens us to possibility, adventure, and a more complete sense of organism.An immersive theatre event offered in London from Spring 2022 through Fall 2023, The Burnt City feels like a kind of hell. Punchdrunk, its collective creator, has made a name for itself—perhaps the name in immersive work over the past quarter century—as the proverbial ferryman that channels audiences into such hellscapes, perhaps most notably in their earlier production of Sleep No More, which played in first in London, currently contemplates closing in New York, and continues in Shanghai. Like Sleep No More, The Burnt City is something of a walk-through masquerade (known as a “mask show” in Punchdrunk parlance) meets modern dance exhibition meets a high-end haunted house. Unlike Sleep No More, which drew its inspiration and narrative content from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, The Burnt City bases its mythology in the Trojan War. Both productions take place in maximally designed wonderlands that show a patina of the past—high style of the Roaring Twenties and beyond into postindustrial Punk and Goth vibes. The Burnt City is a promenade production on steroids. At first, the promenade has audiences walking through a museum exhibition of Trojan and Greek artifacts that serve as an orientation to the mythology at play. Once through the gallery, the promenade divides, and masked audience members are free to explore an open world like one might find in a video game. This world features room after room of fully realized but still somehow heightened sets or even art installations—almost all functional—from the hazy battlefields of Troy complete with fully realized tent encampments and an oversized Czech hedgehog anti-tank construction to the seedy back alleys of a complete city. Neon lights adorn storefronts labeled “Palladium,” “Alighieri’s,” or an assortment of Chinatown signs throughout this multiroom, multilevel playground. Audiences wander through apartments, hotel rooms, bars, offices, shops, and cafes, across sandy ground behind battlements, and even among a room for storing would-be Trojan horses. Every piece of paper on a desk carries dramaturgical significance. Every art installation calls forth some kernel of narrative or idiosyncrasy of the characters who end up inhabiting them. Audience members are invited to play, to touch, to explore, and the labyrinth of hallways and connecting doors is vast. It is easy to get lost—in the enormous venue, in a moment of dramaturgical detail, in some tiny corner or drawer of some impeccably designed room, or in one’s own masked body. The traveling audience member loops back on themselves over the course of the night, always curious about whether they’ve been here before, down this path, around this corner, an incessant dance with deja vu. If this isn’t hellish enough, characters, played by silent, beautifully costumed performers—expertly trained modern dancers, aerialists, and bodywork specialists—appear almost like ghosts from out of the darkness or around some mysterious corner. They’ll occupy a space for a time and journey onward, sometimes meeting with other such ghosts fleetingly in a hallway or a small office or cafe table, sometimes meeting even larger groups in public squares or a battlefield formation. Each time the performers appear, they gather attention as one, two, or a dozen masked revelers from among the audience—now players all—follow and watch. The effect, if you squint a little and take in the organism wearing the gaunt opera masks issued to the audience, is of a flock of skeletal birds attending each character’s passing funeral procession, like birds of prey gathering over these human forms, waiting for death. The house indeed is haunted.Nearly wordless, The Burnt City takes place as much in our minds as our bodies. To the extent the text on a poster or in a logbook becomes the script, the audience member becomes reader, coursing through a choose-your-own adventure novel. Moments of exploration and improvisation of these texts—especially in the early going of the evening—are as likely to catch the eye as anything that feels like formal scripting. For instance, I might turn the corner into a small storefront and catch another masked figure—like myself—gazing curiously at some trinket or rifling through a detailed set of war correspondence. These moments are not merely spooky, though all are startling. With every member of the audience now a kind of character, we see their participation in the world as an invitation to our own engagement. “Well, if they are touching that thing,” we might say, “what can I get away with?” And so we try more doorknobs, perhaps. There are rules—enforced by house staff in corresponding black masks—and an overriding ethic of care that governs the space. In a world where everything carries meaning and intention, we participants are called to keep a kind of ecological balance: don’t destroy, don’t litter, don’t run, don’t speak, don’t go through locked doors, don’t touch other people without consent. Though these pre-show commandments do echo through our ears during the evening, eventually they fade and the silent social order takes over: don’t rush, watch your step, take it easy, you first. Each nod, gesture, or momentary lingering conveys or denies a sense of welcome into each succeeding moment. Space is made even for us.More than a central narrative or character, these moments serve as the DNA of Punchdrunk’s approach. To be clear, there is a narrative that broadly follows the Trojan War and its aftermath in its own underworld. There are characters. This one is Agamemnon. This one is Helen. This one Hades, maybe. Unless you come well-versed in Greek mythology or have been particularly astute in the gallery orientation, however, your guess is as good as anyone’s. Absent name tags and dialogue, the figures before us do emerge as characters, but we’re not always certain which one is which. Clarity begins only when they work in relationship with each other—a tense interaction in an office, a florid dance sequence in an alleyway, a gathering of soldiers, witches, or Fates in a public square. Even here, though, the meaning is hazy and constantly under reformation. A single character, accompanied by any number of masked audience members who flock with them, might linger in a given space or with another character for seconds or several minutes. At any time, an audience member might decide to follow someone else for a while, or go exploring again, or simply lose interest in the moment at hand. This constant disintegration and reintegration of moments over the course of the performance is the overriding experience. Audience members wanting a more linear narrative arc can commit to following a single character for a while or even for the whole performance. Generally, individual characters work slowly through a loop of predictable pathways with several predetermined moments of interaction and interplay with the environment or other characters. One might think of these loops as evocative of the circles of Hell given the contextual influence of Dante. As the evening wears on, some of these loops are broken and new action emerges. Characters spread all over the world converge, along with their flocks of audience members, and the night ends in a mass of people pushing toward the exit.The title points us to two ways to understand the experience: The Burnt City is both postwar Troy and Hell itself. The clues to the latter are everywhere, not the least of which is a small room resembling an old apothecary with gallons of water on the wall, some of which are labeled things like “Styx.” Another is The Burnt City’s most hellish feature: a raucous and noisy countercultural speakeasy called “PEEP,” which features cabaret-style performances from a house band with guest appearances from Hades, Persephone, and Orpheus, among others. It is here where the masses gather to exit nightly, a sea of humanity in a bottleneck. Pressed against each other, with cabaret noise blaring and alcohol flowing freely from the PEEP bars, we are forced to reconcile with a third way to understand what’s going on: Hell is, in fact, other people.The effect of such work is that the audience, performers, and environment work together to create what feels like a complete theatrical organism—one that is fully alive, responsive, and alluring. Perhaps in a more conventional theater setting, one where audiences might sit somewhat more passively in an assigned seat to watch a highly scripted narrative with plainly understood characters, we’d expect a full story of the Trojan War or Hell or the Pantheon. Instead of the authoritarian or didactic model, The Burnt City sees its enterprise as not merely the story or characters or even esthetic, but rather as an ecosystem that invites all its participants to take part. This ecosystem is perhaps Punchdrunk’s most clarifying theological and anthropological statement: come in, take part. As full partners, audiences stand alongside both gods and mortals, becoming part of narrative, character, and environment. Here, everyone gives and receives, and more than just applause. Our bodies fully participate in the body of the performance.This leads to perhaps the central criticism for Punchdrunk efforts like The Burnt City and Sleep No More. These experiences center—if not outright require—able bodies, especially among the audience. Have trouble breathing behind a mask? Wear eyeglasses? Have uncertain footwork? Struggle with seeing in the dark? Operate in a wheelchair? Though there are token accommodations, the experience is not made for everyone to access. Whatever sense of belonging we might experience in this world is therefore somewhat artificial—a collection of people mostly like each other.At the same time, Punchdrunk offers a different, nondual model for understanding the world. This model is not one where the answers are embedded in scripted dialogue and stage directions and rubrics in some ancient text, offered to us only by specially costumed performers in some too-precious space. Instead, we are here on the ground, touching, feeling, apprehending, taking part—fundamentally embedded in the ecosystem. When gods and mythological figures walk among us, we risk brushing up against the Divine. As we take up the ritual—common pathways tread by all—we participate in the Divine lures that lead us a little further along. Occasionally, one of those Divines will pull us, quite literally, into a secret room for a private performance, perhaps with some words whispered into our ear, while the rest of the world marches on.Punchdrunk is using very old techniques to address a contemporary embodiment problem confronting our theater and our humanity. Faced with detached and disembodied experiences, where audiences serve mostly as passive recipients of the artistic experience, Punchdrunk moves theater back to its roots in dance, ritual, and liturgy. In doing so, it activates passive bodies and enables us to co-author the experience as we go. I’m careful to say “experience” here because there is not a single thread we can pull without coming undone. To leave The Burnt City may mean we don’t get a single, cohesive story, a clear sense of character, or even have a chance to apprehend the whole at all. Did we miss a room? A sequence? A moment? Or nothing at all. In this way, the primary language of The Burnt City is not text, bodies, or atmosphere, but moments and processes. This unfolding of the possible is the quintessential Punchdrunk experience that invites us into a similar way of seeing the world.