Theater of the Mind

“We began referring to the project as a Neuro Funhouse, but as we worked on it we came to realize that it was evolving to be something more than that. It has made us rethink some of our own beliefs and assumptions, to see ourselves and the world in a different way, and we hope that it might have a similar effect on our audience.”

—David Byrne

Theater of the Mind was an immersive theatrical experience that ran for four months in a 15,000-square-foot industrial building in Denver’s York Street Yards, a World War II-era medical depot that has recently been adapted for makers and entrepreneurs. Created by the musician David Byrne and the investment manager and philanthropist Mala Gaonkar, the project built on their previous collaboration at Pace Art + Technology, The Institute Presents: Neurosociety, which contextualized contemporary brain research in an art gallery setting in Silicon Valley. With Theater of the Mind, guides led small groups of attendees through a series of sensory experiments that demonstrated how fungible our consensual reality actually is.

Directed by immersive theater director Andrew Scoville and presented by the Off-Center program at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Theater of the Mind took the form of a narrative and emotional journey, with eight stops along the way that presented distorted memories from Byrne’s past. Each of these eight rooms was constructed to bring you on a narrative and emotional journey, but also to create the right conditions for certain neurological and perceptual phenomena to occur. One was based on a study called “Being Barbie” where you experience being inside a child-size body. For another, the team blasted photo lights into a light-sealed room at specific time frames to generate ghostly afterimages in the participants’ retinas.

Mala Gaonkar is the founder and chairwoman of SurgoCap Partners, an investment firm focused on the disruptive effects of technology within broad industry categories. Prior to SurgoCap, she was a founding partner of Lone Pine Capital in 1998. At Lone Pine, she was portfolio manager for the firm’s technology, media, internet and telecommunications exposure and co-portfolio manager of its long-only funds.

Before joining Lone Pine, Mala worked for The Boston Consulting Group. She attended Harvard University and Harvard Business School. She is a founding trustee of Ariadne Labs, a center for health systems innovation at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and a trustee of the Tate Foundation, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and Surgo Ventures, a non-profit organization focused on developing open-source analytical tools supporting public health solutions.

David Byrne’s previous works include the Broadway debut of David Byrne’s American Utopia (2019); the launch of Reasons to be Cheerful, an online magazine focused on stories about problems being solved all over the world (2019); the solo album American Utopia (2018), which was nominated for Best Alternative Album at the 61st Grammy Awards; Joan of Arc: Into the Fire, a theatrical exploration of the historical heroine which premiered at the Public Theater in New York (2017); The Institute Presents: Neurosociety, a series of interactive environments that question human perception and bias, created in conjunction with Pace Arts + Technology (2016); Contemporary Color, an event inspired by the American folk tradition of color guard and performed at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and Toronto’s Air Canada Centre (2015); Here Lies Love, a 22-song theatrical production written in collaboration with Fatboy Slim about the life of Imelda Marcos, which premiered at the Public Theater (2013), traveled to London’s National Theatre (2014–15), and was restaged at the Seattle Repertory Theater (2017); Love This Giant, a studio album and worldwide tour created with St. Vincent (2012); and How Music Works, a book about the history, experience, and social aspects of music (2012).

A co-founder of the group Talking Heads (1976–88), Byrne has released nine studio albums and worked on multiple other projects, including collaborations with Brian Eno, Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Jonathan Demme. He also founded the highly respected record label Luaka Bop. He has published and exhibited visual art, including photography, filmmaking, and writing, since his college days at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Theater of the Mind

Medium: Interactive Theatre

Created by: David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar

Country: United States

Date: August 2022

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