Realscape Productions have brought the DARKFIELD audiosensory experiences to Toronto.  Last night I took in both shows; FLIGHT and SÉANCE.  What they have in common is that they take place in the dark, in a specially equipped shipping container using binaural headsets for the audio and some sort of trickery for the other sensory effects.

Credit: Alex Purcell

FLIGHT worked the better of the two for me.  The audience sits in rows in airline style seats arranged as if the container is the cabin of a passenger plane.  It’s all conventional enough to start with with safety announcements and what not.  It’s totally dark.  One hears the crew going about their business, engine noise etc.  But there’s clearly something not right.  Gradually a commentary about parallel worlds develops.  In one world; the one we remember, our plane lands safely but in the other; of which we have no memory it doesn’t.  The “experience” mixes up a routine, boring flight with a series of frankly scary sensations of a plane in deep, deep trouble.  We don’t know which world we are in.  Onl;y an observer in one of the possibilities can make that determination!  It’s very well done.  The audio is incredibly realistic and the other sensory effects decidedly unsettling.  Run time is about 22 minutes which is long enough!

Credit: Axis Productions

SEANCE has the audience seated along the sides of the container with a table in the middle.  It’s the séance experience you expect.  The medium makes highly suggestive remarks backed up by banging, crashing and the odd flashing light.  There’s no ectoplasm!  Again the quality of the presentation is very high.  The audio is truly immersive and the other effects quite disturbing but it didn’t grab me the way FLIGHT did.  It runs about 16 minutes.

Credit: Jack Rintoul

The whole thing is set up right now at STACKT Market; a collection of dining and retail shipping containers, plus some other facilities; pub, dog park, gallery space, at Front and Bathurst.  It runs until November 9th.  There’s a short interval between the scheduled time slots of the two experiences so it’s perfectly possible to take them both in in about an hour.

There’s more information about show times, tickets etc here.