*Note: David Byrne will not be performing in Theater of the Mind. Your one-of-a-kind experience will place you, your fellow audience members, and your Guide at the center of your journey.
Co-created by Academy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning artist David Byrne* and writer Mala Gaonkar, Theater of the Mind is a new theatrical experience you’ll see, feel, taste and hear. Inspired by both historical and current neuroscience research, the show takes you on an immersive journey inside how we see and create our worlds. Peer behind the curtain of the physical realm and marvel at the wonders of your mind. Follow your Guide as they revisit key moments in their life in a surreal, 15,000-square-foot installation with a group of just 16 audience members.
Over 75 minutes, you’ll move through a series of rooms where you’ll participate in thought-provoking neuroscience experiences. You’ll learn how easily your own senses can deceive you. If perception and memory are both malleable, then perhaps even your identity is less fixed than you think… You may not be who you think you are. But we’re all in it together.
*Note: David Byrne will not be performing in Theater of the Mind. Your one-of-a-kind experience will place you, your fellow audience members, and your Guide at the center of your journey.
Caution: The brain may wander. Side effects may include a distrust of your own senses, a disorientation of self, and a mild to severely good time. You may not be who you think you are. But we’re all in it together.
Mala and I have been fascinated by the science behind these experiences for a number of years, and though reading about the phenomena involved is exciting, I sensed that it’s one thing to read about something and quite something else to actually experience it. An experience is a different level of understanding and a different kind of knowledge—it’s visceral, immediate and profound. The film and theater adage “show, don’t tell” became a guiding principle in discovering a way to include these experiences in an entertaining and engaging show. A show in which the audience makes many of the inferences for themselves, without being told by us what it means. For me, the broader implications that these phenomena have in our lives, our sense of the world and our sense of self is key. We decided that a kind of narrative, the life of The Guide, told backwards, might be a way to connect these experiences to our daily living… and it might introduce an emotional connection as well. We began referring to the project as a Neuro Funhouse, but as we worked on it we came to realize that it was evolving to be something more than that. It has made us rethink some of our own beliefs and assumptions, to see ourselves and the world in a different way, and we hope that it might have a similar effect on our audience.
