A few months ago, Wanderlust organized a series of discussions called The Wanderlust School of Transgressive Placemaking. You might know Wanderlust as the group that organized The Night Heron, an illegal speakeasy inside a New York City water tower. (I had the rare and unfathomable fortune of attending The Night Heron but that is a story for another time.)
The third of four parts of the Wanderlust School was all about designing experiences, especially in public, especially without permission. The full talk and a transcript are available online. There was a fascinating and lively discourse about the right to use a public or semi-public or straight-up private space for unusual purposes, the precedent for doing so, the opportunities availed, and the potential benefits. If it's something that interests you in any way then I highly recommend watching the video. It's a tremendously inspiring fountain of information.
The website suggests otherwise but I've hardly stopped thinking about The Stag with Silver Antlers since I started working on it almost a year ago (after letting the idea roll around in my brain for close to a decade). My arbitrary deadlines have slipped (probably because they were arbitrary) but I am still very committed to executing this idea, as well as a handful of others in rapid succession. The best part of this talk (which I attended in person back in June) was learning about just how much of this sort of thing is happening all the time, in this city and others. Learning about Jeff Stark's IRT: A Tragedy in Three Stations inspired me to move Antlers from a hypothetical banquet hall transformed into a fake forest into the genuine article, borrowing a slice of Central Park, say, for twenty minutes over a handful of nights.
My research since then supports the notion of attempting such a risky feat with success, providing appropriate affordances for a covert operation: headphones instead of speakers, flashlights instead of floods, prop-like costumes instead of sets. If Jeff Stark could turn the 59th Street 4/5/6 concourse into a ballroom, surely I could build a castle in a clearing. It's an idea I'm not settled on but I am certainly leaning into it.
In my copious free time (this is a joke) I've decided to immerse myself in the immersive/experimental/interactive theatre world(s). I knew about Sleep No More and Then She Fell but I wasn't aware of The Drowned Man or the work of Shakespeare Shakedown or Feral Productions or a handful of others that were right beneath my feet all this time. I'm learning. And the stag will appear in the Spring.
Somewhere.