Gargantuan: The Thrills and Challenges of Creating Immersive Theatre

Mark Hopkins, Co-Artistic Director of Calgary’s Swallow-a-Bicycle Theatre, reflects on the company’s attempts to create an immersive theatre production, Gargantuan, focused on individual and collective complicity in existential global challenges like climate change, social and economic inequities, resource depletion, etc. The article outlines Gargantuan’s development from 2015 to 2016, and the many difficulties that Swallow-a-Bicycle encountered in creating immersive theatre.