We recently connected with Ren Manley and have shared our conversation below.
Ren, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I’ve been studying theater pretty intensively and with singular focus since I was in high school, so over 20 years. But when I was in college, I took a class that culminated in an assignment called “The Universe Project.” We had to pick a piece of art, then create a performance that engaged all 5 senses and effectively created the artwork’s “universe.” It was such an inspiring experience I decided that was the type of performance I always wanted to create. This was around 2007, so Sleep No More hadn’t opened yet, and the term “immersive” hadn’t exploded in concept and popularity.
But by the time I started Audacious in 2016, it was clear that centering our artistic mission on engaging all five senses meant we were pretty firmly sitting in the “Immersive” theater genre.
Now, I had spent a lot of time learning about all the different aspects of building a more traditional theater production, but creating *immersive* experiences meant I had to learn a whole lot more about how to build a world that surrounds and engages audiences. And there wasn’t much of a playbook, because the whole scene was coming up at the same time we were. So, it was a lot of trial by fire. After every show, we would talk about what worked and what didn’t, and then we would try to apply those lessons to the next production. So, while, over time, I learned a lot about how to write more interactive elements into the shows, guide an audience through the experience, prepare actors for the unpredictability of audiences, and how to improvise over a longer period, I would say the most important skills are related to building a collaborative group of co-creators that can communicate honestly and passionately about how we can fix our mistakes and make better art.
Also, it’s been really important to me to always be “leveling-up” my skills. I really didn’t know as much as I wanted to know about literal world-building, so when Lonnie Hanzon was looking for people to help work on Camp Christmas, I jumped at the opportunity to learn from someone who is, I would argue, Denver’s top immersive artist, a literal world-builder with decades of experience. I learned so much from the couple of seasons I got to be in his workshop and it gave me so much more confidence to start doing some of my own world-building for Audacious.
And whenever I’m not sure how to do something I want to do for a show, like build a pop-up drive-in movie theater, or make blood effects that are guaranteed to splash all over the audience, or create a pepper’s ghost illusion, I do a lot of research and find the people who have the know-how to make it happen.
Ren, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Audacious Immersive creates interactive, theatrical experiences focused on fun. I started the company with the idea that I wanted to create theater that would appeal to people who don’t typically go to the theater. Like any kind of art form, theater can sometimes feel inaccessible to people that aren’t already part of that world. Our shows are more like a fun, interactive event.
On the other hand, we’re different from a lot of the other immersive shows and experiences in Denver in that we put storytelling at the center of what we do. Rather than putting you in the middle of a world, we try to put you in the middle of a story. But we also spend a lot of time considering how to make every interactive element of our events opt-in, so that you can be an active participant or passive observer and still get a full experience.
We’re also really varied in the type of shows that we do. We’ve done lots of bigger immersive experiences where we lean into building a whole world for the audience to move around in. We’ve also created a suite of interactive “trunk shows” that are smaller, and can pop-up in any location. We do public performances of these shows, but clients can also book our shows for private events.
Most of all, we’re a highly collaborative company in many senses of the word. Over the last 7 years we’ve assembled an incredible team of actors, designers, and creators that has been growing and developing with the company. Every year we work together we improve as a team, and the shows get better and better. We’ve also worked with so many incredible local businesses and built relationships with some of the very coolest places in town. It’s such a delight to be able to bring our audiences into these amazing places they might not have known were in their city, like The Lumber Baron Inn, Lumonics Light and Art Gallery, and Edgewater Public Market, or one of the many very excellent breweries we’ve performed one of our trunk shows in.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I mean, it’s probably kind of a cliche to bring up the pandemic, but realistically, the live events industry was one of the worst hit by lockdowns. For our company in particular, we weren’t even eligible for federal aid because the applications required your organization to perform in a traditional theater space to qualify, which is just not something we ever did.
Right before everything went into lockdown, we had been preparing to do an immersive production of Alice in Wonderland. We had a cast, poster art, venue, and had already been working on preliminary designs. But then we had to scrap the whole project without any idea of when we would be able to make theater again.
As we moved into the depths of lockdown, into the heat of summer, my brain started to get itchy. I lost my grandmother early on, had fallen into a depressive episode, and wasn’t working. The last time I had been that low, throwing all of my energy into a production was the thing that saved me.
So I started pondering how to create a live production that was pandemically-safe for everyone, actors and audience included. I came up with an idea and a title: Murder at the Drive-In. When I told my team about the concept, at least one member was deeply skeptical of our ability to erect a drive-in movie theater from scratch. NOT ME!
I reached out to a number of locations with large parking lots, until Edgewater Public Market finally responded with an enthusiastic heck yes to hosting us. I wrote a script that would let audience members stay in their cars while the story would unfold over their radio and the giant 25ft outdoor movie screen we planned to erect. We held virtual auditions and rehearsals, and divided the actors into small groups with individual directors for their own horror scenes to take place in the parking lot next to the cars.
When one of our lead actors had to drop out last-minute due to COVID, we were still able to use her voice over the radio, and our fight director stepped in to take her place in the live portion of the show with no one the wiser.
The tickets sold out for that show so quickly, I had to have another member of our team help me geometrically math out additional parking spots, so we could offer a few more tickets. To this day, our pandemic show is one of the most financially successful shows we’ve ever done.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Something about growing up as the middle child between two brothers, steeped in the girl power of the 90s made me a pretty fiercely independent person. The “I can do it myself” type. After being the only one in the group projects doing the work for, I learned the lesson, “If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself.” In a lot of ways, that has served me really well. But in other ways, it prevented me from asking for help that would have made my life easier and my business stronger. After reading Amanda Palmer’s book, The Art of Asking, I started to consider that asking for help or advice was not, in fact, a sign of weakness. That I could ask for help in a way that wasn’t a burden or presumptuous. And that, actually, there were people around me who might actually want to help me.
It took some time to get over my aversion to asking for help. But I made big leaps during the pandemic, when I was trying to figure out how to put together Murder at the Drive-In. I reached out to Patrick Mueller at Control Group Productions and he agreed to co-sponsor the production and help out wherever he could. When I couldn’t find a venue, I posted on Reddit and ended up meeting Natalie Brown, who suggested Edgewater Public Market and then very graciously had a virtual meet-up with me to discuss all the perks and perils of making immersive shows in and out of a pandemic. And when I had to figure out how to broadcast to car radios, I got in touch with Brad Smalling of Evergroove Studio, who had just figured out how to do precisely that for a pandemic show he did with Itchy-O. All of these incredible people, filled with expertise, experience, and talent gave me their time and advice simply because I asked.
Developing my ability to ask for help has also been crucial to the growth of Audacious. Theater is a team sport. My delegation skills had been developing very slowly for most of Audacious’s existence, but when I found out I was pregnant in 2021, I had to get on the fast track to spreading out my duties. The Core Audacious Team stepped up immediately, ready to and willing to take on the tasks that they knew would keep Audacious running in my absence, and ultimately, help us to grow as a company long term.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.audaciousimmersive.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/audaciousimmersive
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audacioustheatre
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AudaciousImmersive
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@audacious.immersi
Image Credits
Trent Emory
Shawna Urbanski
Tyi Reddick