La Jolla Playhouse announces WoW Festival for downtown

For its third festival incarnation, WoW is heading south.

The Without Walls Festival — La Jolla Playhouse’s celebration of immersive, site-specific and otherwise boundary-busting performance art — will unfold this time around in downtown San Diego, running Oct. 19-22.

The two previous WoW fests, in 2013 and 2015, both took place for the most part around the institution’s home base in the Playhouse/UC San Diego Theatre District.

Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley says the move downtown promises to lend the festival access to new venues, as well as offer opportunities to forge fresh partnerships and reach a greater diversity of audiences.

As the first two WoW Festivals evolved, Ashley says, “we kept coming up with projects that really needed a more urban environment. So we decided this year to experiment with the downtown location.”

Ashley cites the example of an ambitious project by the artistic collective the Gob Squad that will be part of this year’s fest: The piece, which involves on-the-fly location filming, “really requires a density of population that only happens in an urban environment.”

The 2017 Festival will essentially have four hubs: the San Diego Public Library’s Central Library in the East Village; the Horton Plaza area; the New Children’s Museum; and the Barrio Logan/Logan Heights communities. One project also will take place at UC San Diego-based ArtPower.

“It’s a bold experiment for us, and it was kind of simultaneous with naming a festival director, Meiyin Wang, who I met when she was co-director of the Under the Radar Festival, which is a premier American contemporary-performance festival” based at New York’s Public Theater.

“And she was just moving to the West Coast, so it was the perfect time to catch her. It really helps to have one person whose eye is on that festival straight through.

“And I have tremendous respect for both her eye and her contact list — she knows everybody in international performance. I know a lot of the amazing local performers, but she really rounds out the national and international knowledge.”

The WoW announcement comes at a time when immersive and site-specific programming seems to be gaining more traction in the United States, particularly with the Broadway debut of “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” an immersive show that was a sensation off-Broadway several years ago.

“Natasha” earned 12 Tony Award nominations this year, the most of any production — and among this year’s WoW artists is Mimi Lien, who won a Tony for designing that musical’s set.

The complete WoW fest lineup is still coming together. But the Playhouse has confirmed several prime happenings, and offered a peek at the fest’s venues and partners.

The festival grew out of an initiative that was launched in 2011 and at first centered on stand-alone, one-off productions presented in locations around the county.

Besides the two festivals, past WoW projects have included “Susurrus,” performed at the San Diego Botanic Garden in Encinitas; “Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir,” which unfolded at Martini’s Above Fourth in Hillcrest; “Accomplice,” which had two roving, audience-participatory editions in Little Italy and at the Lafayette Hotel in North Park; and several incarnations of “The Car Plays,” staged inside actual cars.

Tickets for the 2017 WoW Festival productions will range from free to $29, and will go on sale this summer; for more details, call (858) 550-1010 or go to lajollaplayhouse.org.

Ashley says that as with the past WoW events, family-minded programming will be part of the mix.

Here’s a look at the projects and locations announced so far for WoW 2017. (Quoted descriptions are provided by the Playhouse.)

“Super Night Shot,” Gob Squad: The British-German collective’s show is “a unique multi-screen movie which is shown only once. Filming begins exactly one hour before the audience arrives at the theater, when Gob Squad takes to the city streets, cameras rolling. The streets are turned into a film set where cigarette butts, graffiti and cars serve as props and facades and the local people become potential lovers, liberators or friends.”

The piece, which premiered in Berlin, “continues to wage its war on anonymity in various cities all over the world with over 250 shows on six continents.” The WoW edition will take place at the San Diego Public Library’s Central Library.

“Model Home,” Mimi Lien: This piece from set designer and MacArthur “genius” fellow Lien is “an urban intervention/installation situated in downtown San Diego, anchored by a large construction crane hoisting a brightly colored, archetypal house, high up in the air. At once incongruous and familiar, the performative installation reflects the shifting infrastructure of a changing city, and asks, ‘What makes a home?’”

Lien’s many design credits include “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812,” for which she just won the Tony. Her WoW piece will be situated at Horton Plaza Park.

“Under Construction: An American Masque,” Sledgehammer Theatre: Sledgehammer has deep roots in San Diego as a groundbreaking alt-theater outfit whose members came together at UC San Diego. Although the troupe was long dormant, it has staged two shows here in the past few years — including a sprawling, spectacular outdoor staging of Charles L. Mee’s “Heaven on Earth” for the 2015 WoW Festival.

Now the company returns to Mee and to WoW with “Under Construction.” The piece, taking place at Bread & Salt in Logan Heights, is “set within a contemporary banqueting hall, where spectators will be served a light repast while immersed within a collage of America today — scenes and songs and dances inspired by Norman Rockwell of the fifties (as well as by) the installation artist whose work most resonates in today’s culture of sociopolitical corruption and moral degradation, Jason Rhoades.”

The piece will be produced in association with UC San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance.

“Incoming: Sex, Drugs, and Copenhagen,” So Say We All: This new piece, set for Border X Brewing in Barrio Logan, “showcases the voices of military veteran writers and their true stories related to the coping mechanisms they depended on, both in the service and while reacclimating to civilian life.”

The work from the So Say We All Veteran Writers Division “will surprise audiences and confound stereotypes related to service members,” and promises to be “hilarious and poignant all at once.”

So Say We All is a nonprofit dedicated to helping people tell their stories through publishing, performance, and education.

“The Quest 3.0,” La Jolla Playhouse and the New Children’s Museum: This is a new version of an interactive family adventure that was part of the 2015 festival. The work “challenges participants to gather clues as they embark on a great adventure—exploring artifacts, engaging in clandestine meetings and solving peculiar puzzles—in order to discover a surprising truth” in league with the fanciful Society of Creative Thinkers. The piece unfolds at the New Children’s Museum downtown.

“In Plain Site,” ArtPower: This site-specific work, created for the UC San Diego campus by Trisha Brown Dance Company, was in planning before Brown’s death earlier this year. “The company will adapt Brown’s signature works around the campus, honoring her commitment to the presentation of performances in nontraditional venues, a format she helped pioneer.”

Additional WoW Festival projects and partners, as well as performance times and locations, are still to be announced.

Twitter: @jimhebert

jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com