On Oct. 3, 2013, La Jolla Playhouse opened its very first Without Walls Festival at UC San Diego.
Among the dozen international, immersive and site-specific shows at that first WOW Festival were a series 10-minute plays performed inside a row of parked cars; a site-specific outdoor concert complete with balloons and a squeaky gate hinge; an elevator-based play with performances on three floors; and a giant puppet play performed on a nearby beach.
WOW, as the fest was affectionately nicknamed, was an instant success. In the years since, the Playhouse has transitioned the popular event from every other year to annually and it has made the festival free to the public. It has also taken WOW on the road to Downtown San Diego, Liberty Station, The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. During the pandemic, the festival carried on, with all of its shows presented either online, by phone and by mail.
Now, for its seventh iteration, WOW has returned to its roots. From Wednesday through next Sunday, the festival will be presented once again on the UCSD campus. And, for the first time, two of the 25 featured shows will be the creation of UCSD undergraduate theater students enrolled in a new Advanced Studies in Performance class known informally as the “WOW class.”
La Jolla Playhouse and university officials say that both the WOW class, and the festival’s return to campus, celebrate the long partnership between the university and the Playhouse, which has made its home on the southwest corner of campus since 1983. At a press conference on Feb. 29, UCSD Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla said he wants the campus to be a destination for art and culture and the presence of the Playhouse and this year’s edition of the WOW festival is a big part of that experience.
“We are delighted to welcome the WOW Festival back home to UC San Diego,” Khosla said. “The festival exemplifies the uniqueness of our campus community as it celebrates innovation, pushes boundaries and stretches our thinking.”
This year’s WOW Festival features theater, dance, visual and performance art companies from throughout the U.S., Canada, France, the Netherlands and Taiwan.
Theater of the present and future
One of the highlights of the 2015 WOW Festival was “The Bitter Game,” a solo play about racialized police violence performed under the moonlight on a basketball court at UCSD. It starred Keith A. Wallace, then a UCSD grad student, who co-created the one-act with UCSD theater professor and playwright Deborah Stein, who directed the premiere. It has since gone on to acclaimed productions worldwide.
Stein said collaborating with Wallace on “The Bitter Game” was a “transformative” experience for her, both as an artist and a teacher. But the extensive amount of time it took to develop and stage the piece was overwhelming.
“It changed my life, but it wasn’t the kind of time I had to donate on top of my responsibilities as a full-time faculty member,” she said. “I wanted to figure how to make this work as part of my work as a teacher with UCSD Theatre & Dance, and I also wanted to bring it into the curriculum. … We have a number of artists on the faculty who are specialists in making these more audience-focused, experiential performances.”
Developing the class was slowed by the pandemic, but the discussions for inaugurating the WOW class began in fall 2022, when the Playhouse announced internally that it was bringing WOW back to campus in 2024. The first WOW class began Sept. 25, 2023, with an inaugural enrollment of 17 students. Designed to be taught over the fall and winter academic quarters each year, WOW students will develop ideas in the first quarter and then winnow the list down to the two best candidates and present them in quarter two.
Stein is co-teaching the WOW class with professor Christopher Kuhl, a lighting, scenic and installation designer who has a specialty in working on new, nontraditional, site-specific work like that done at the WOW Festival.
While WOW shows have been described in past years as cutting-edge and avant-garde, Stein said theater is moving quickly in the immersive and experiential direction, and the students in the WOW class are learning skills that will be highly marketable for them in the future.
“I used to say this type of theater-making was the future of performance. Now I say it’s the present and future of performance,” Stein said. “As our lives become more isolated and siloed on screens, what theater can offer is this communal, ephemeral moment of togetherness.”
Kuhl said the WOW class isn’t just about teaching students to make interactive work. It’s also about “studying the practice of making this work.” One thing he has discovered as a teacher in the first year of the class is that the students are learning more than theater-making. They’re learning how to work together to build an ensemble.
“Sometimes collaborative theater has challenges. We could incorporate more about conflict resolution or helping people whose voices haven’t been heard. I think this does teach people how to think creatively when solving problems,” Kuhl said.
This year’s WOW class students have created two shows for this week’s WOW Festival. Both were inspired by the students’ experiences of life on campus.
The first is “Fallen Star(s).” It will be staged inside UCSD’s rooftop art installation “Fallen Star” by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh, which is a topsy-turvy cottage hanging precariously off the roof of the university’s Jacobs School of Engineering building. A group of social media influencers will get locked inside the cottage and problem-solve to figure a way out. The audience will watch via video screens from the lawn at the foot of the building.
Stein said eight students in the class, all in their early 20s, devised the piece as a statement on the price of fame, the impact of technology on society and how to understand and engage intellectually with art.
The second piece is “Letters From Home.” Staged on an outdoor deck of the Mandell Weiss Theatre at La Jolla Playhouse, it’s about a group of college students moving into a home together. They will enlist the audience to set up the furniture and décor, and the audience will decide — with the help of letters and a soundscape — how to change the furnishings as they learn more about how the students’ lives and needs are changing.
Stein said the play is about the relationship between memories and home. And because some of the students creating the piece are U.S. immigrants, home has another layer of meaning.
“They’re all interested in space and how your relationship to space changes over time,” Kuhl said.
Andy and Jeff Crocker of Mister & Mischief are presenting “The Apple Avenue Detective Agency at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of Mister & Mischief)
Memories come alive
Another of the shows at this year’s WOW Festival “The Apple Avenue Detective Agency,” created by husband-and-wife “experience designers” Jeff and Andy Crocker, whose company is called Mister & Mischief.
Their interactive show “40 Watts From Nowhere” — where audience members assembled and operated a pirate radio station — was a highlight of the 2022 WOW Festival at Liberty Station.
“The Apple Avenue Detective Agency” was inspired by Andy Crocker’s real-life hobby of solving neighborhood crimes with her girlfriends when she was 11 years old. Although the show is about a group of girls, it is designed for adults and teens, who will solve mysteries around campus with the help of magnifying glasses, measuring devices, compasses, disguises and bubble gum.
“This is a story that I’ve shared for years and only recently realized this is the origin story of a person whose life’s work became helping people play pretend and the importance of that beyond childhood,” she said in an email. “I had lost touch with the real girls from Apple Avenue, but through this project, I got to reconnect with them, and I saw this part of my life in a whole new light. … In the end, it’s a story about imagination and collaboration — and there’s no better way to tell that story than by having the audience do just that all together.”
If you know, you know …
Blindspot Collective’s 2024 WOW Festival show “ifykyk” (an acronym for the secretive “if you know, you know”) is the San Diego theater company’s sixth collaboration with La Jolla Playhouse. Blindspot’s all-original, site-specific work is an ideal fit for WOW.
Blake McCarty, Blindspot’s director of artistic development, and Shellina Hefner, producing artist and communications/education coordinator, are co-directing and co-producing “ifykyk” at UCSD’s Che Cafe.
An homage to Che Cafe’s history as a center for protest and counterculture thought, “”ifykyk” will feature 10 new theater, music and dance works centered around the theme of protest, seen through a seriocomic lens.
McCarty said that when audience members arrive, they will be treated as students and offered the opportunity to make protest posters and learn about some local causes. Then they’ll be divided into small groups and sent off into various rooms or to the outdoor amphitheater to experience a variety of performances. The order and program of performances will be unique for each visitor.
WOW Festival lineup
Check schedule for showtimes. Many reservation-only shows are full.
“59 Acres”: Los Angeles-based international theater artist Marike Splint is creating a site-specific, immersive sound walk that sends headphone-wearing audience members on a tour of the Playhouse and UCSD campus. La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive.
“Abeba in the Tall Grass”: La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 POP Tour play for grade-school audiences is about a fifth-grader whose passion for gardening helps her connect with her community and the environment. Revelle Plaza near Galbraith Hall, La Jolla.
Mister & Mischief’s “The Apple Avenue Detective Agency” will be presented at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival at UCSD April 4-7.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“The Apple Avenue Detective Agency”: Los Angeles-based theater-makers Mister & Mischief are creating a family-friendly show, where children will work together to solve a coming-of-age mystery set in a backyard clubhouse. Revelle Plaza.
Seen from below, BANDALOOP company members doing vertical dance on the side of a building. BANDALOOP will perform April 5 and 6 at La Jolla Playhouse’s Without Walls Festival on the UC San Diego campus.
(Courtesy of Basil Tsimoyianis )
BANDALOOP: “Downstream (tributaries)”: This Oakland-based vertical dance troupe has been performing high-flying choreography on buildings and cliffs around the world since 1991. They’ll be performing excerpts from a new show that explores our relationship with water, land and another and visualizes stories about flow, saturation, flooding and restoration. 4:30 and 6 p.m. Friday; 3:30 and 6 p.m. Saturday. Exterior of the Design and Innovation Building, 9510 Innovation Lane, La Jolla.
France’s ADHOK theater and dance company presents “Beautiful Escape: Emergency Exit” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of Patrick Dordoigne )
“Beautiful Escape: Emergency Exit”: ADHOK, a theater and dance troupe based in France, has created this trilogy of pieces about the challenges and mysteries of aging, featuring seven performers ages 60 to 80. Revelle Plaza.
A saliva bar with samples of donated saliva in “Saliva,” part of artist Lauren Lee McCarthy’s two-part exhibit “Bodily Autonomy” at UCSD’s Mandeville Art Gallery.
(Courtesy of Carla Schleiffer)
“Bodily Autonomy”: At Lauren Lee McCarthy’s interactive art exhibit, visitors can fill a vial with their own saliva and trade them with others at a “saliva bar.” The exhibit explores the dangers of bio-surveillance and government monitoring. Mandeville Art Gallery 9390 Mandeville Lane, La Jolla.
“Bring Back the Happening,” by the Netherlands theater troupe Nineties, will be presented at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“Bring Back the Happening”: Nineties, a contemporary theater company from the Netherlands, will create 1960s-style “happenings,” described as interactive, high-spirited, connective events with music and possibly dinosaurs. Mandell Weiss Theatre, La Jolla Playhouse.
France’s Cirque Inextremiste presents “Damoclès” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“Damoclès”: France’s Cirque Inextremiste presents this interactive balancing show where the actors and the audience must work together to avoid a dangerous situation. Revelle Plaza.
Taiwan’s 0471 Acro Physical Theatre presents “Duo” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7.
(Courtesy of Byeonggon Shin )
“Duo”: Taiwan’s 0471 Acro Physical Theatre presents this dance-infused acrobatic circus performance. Two performers use their athletic skills to tell a story about the shifts, twists and turns of an ever-changing relationship. Revelle Plaza.
“Erin the Caterpillar → Butterfly”: San Diego’s Friendly Futures design studio will build an all-ages play sculpture named Friendly Wall v0004 that can be transformed in myriad ways by the audience. Revelle Plaza.
Fallen Star, 2012 by Do Ho Suh for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego.
(Philipp Scholz Rittermann)
“Fallen Star”: South Korean artist Do Ho Suh built this seemingly teetering, off-kilter cottage on the roof of UCSD’s Jacobs Hall engineering building in 2012 as part of the university’s Stuart Collection of public art. It will be open to WOW visitors during festival hours. Jacobs Hall rooftop, 9736 Engineers Lane, San Diego.
“Fallen Star(s)”: UCSD theater and dance students will stage this new theater piece at the “Fallen Star” cottage. A group of irreverent, clout-chasing social media influencers get trapped in the cottage and have to figure out the clues to escape. Written by and starring the students, it’s a commentary on the sensationalism of social media. Jacobs Hall lawn, Jacobs Hall.
“Fish Phone Booth Playtest”: This interspecies communication prototype uses interactive audio and sensory media to engage the public in studying sound and fish behavior underwater. Design and Innovation Building.
Origami Air Co. presents “Folding Futures” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“Folding Futures”: Origami Air Co., a UCSD performance group based at the campus’ Design & Innovation Building, will offer time-traveling guided walking tours to Earth in the year 2065. Design and Innovation Building.
“Inertia”: New York theater artist Drew Petersen will create humorous interactions that explore the role art plays in our individual and communal stories that might include a balloon, a bear costume and Kandinsky at the opera. Suitable for ages 8 and up. Seuss One Room, La Jolla Playhouse.
“iykyk”: San Diego’s Blindspot Collective will create a multi-event show (the title is an acronym for the secretive “if you know, you know”) inside the campus’ Che Café that celebrates the building’s history as a center for counter-culture protest. Che Cafe, 3035 Theatre District Drive, La Jolla.
“Letters to Home”: UCSD theater and dance students will create this interactive story about memories and change. The characters must decide what items to leave behind, what to take along and how to decorate their new space. Mandell Weiss Theatre deck, La Jolla Playhouse.
Toronto’s CORPUS performance troupe will present its sheep-themed show “Les moutons” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“Les moutons”: The Toronto theater troupe CORPUS presents this humorous show where three ewes and a ram perform sheepish behaviors with the help of the audience, including feeding, milking, shearing and more. Location will change each day.
“Pásale Pásale”: San Diego’s TuYo Theatre presents this immersive show that re-creates the sights and sounds of the National City Swap Meet, where multicultural vendors are worried that the landlord’s plan to raise booth fees will put them out of business. Weiss Lawn, La Jolla Playhouse.
“Pigments of Imagination”: This virtual reality aural experience chronicles a child’s journey to the moon with ambient-electronic, hip-hop, soul and blues music. Design and Innovation Building.
“Princess Lockerooo’s The Fabulous Waack Dancers: The Big Show” will be presented at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
“Princess Lockerooo’s The Fabulous Waack Dancers: The Big Show”: ArtPower at UC San Diego will transform the stage of the new Epstein Family Amphitheater into a post-modern disco saloon, where a live music and dance show will honor the queer Black street dancer and “Soul Train” legend, Tyrone Proctor, who died in 2020. Epstein Family Amphitheater, 9480 Innovation Lane, La Jolla.
“Reflexion”: San Diego’s ArtBuilds will create this art installation where audience members can manipulate mirrored columns and rotate prisms to create light animations and shifting perspectives. Location TBA.
New York dance company Monica Bill Barnes & Co. will present “The Running Show” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of Paula Lobo)
“The Running Show”: New York dance company Monica Bill Barnes & Co. will present this documentary and performance with a large cast of dancers ages 12 to 80 in a dance story that explores the life of a dancer over a 40-year period. Epstein Family Amphitheater.
Silent Disco for ALL!: Put on these pre-programmed headphones and groove to the music at an outdoor dance party for all ages. Epstein Family Amphitheater.
“Spectrum: Society of Wonder”: San Diego’s Animal Cracker Conspiracy, accompanied by a string quartet, will present this puppet show for all ages about four celestial entities who conjure mythological beings to regenerate the Earth. Galbraith Hall Lawn, in front of Galbraith Hall, La Jolla.
San Diego’s Animal Cracker Conspiracy presents “Spectrum: Society of Wonder” at La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival April 4-7 at UCSD.
(Courtesy of La Jolla Playhouse)
La Jolla Playhouse’s 2024 Without Walls Festival
When: 4 to 10 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 7
Where: Multiple locations on the UC San Diego campus, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla. Venue details at lajollaplayhouse.org/wowfestival/venues.
Admission: Free. Some shows require reservations, and many have already booked up, but walk-ups might be accommodated in the event of no-shows.
Transportation/parking: Only paid parking via the Parkmobile app is available on campus, so ride-share services, MTS buses or the Blue Line Trolley (which stops at Epstein Family Amphitheater on campus) are recommended. Details at lajollaplayhouse.org/wowfestival/plan-your-visit.
Schedule, reservations and details: wowfestival.org