La Jolla Playhouse’s annual WOW — or Without Walls — Festival returns to the UC San Diego campus for the third year. It’s a four-day celebration of immersive, interactive, innovative and site-specific art experiences.
What is WOW?
WOW is all about diversity. Artists come from all over San Diego, across the nation, as well as around the globe. The artists reflect a wide array of backgrounds, leading to an enticing variety of themes, styles and content. It is also the perfect event for any type of theatergoer, from the wildly adventurous to the person who maybe has never stepped foot in a theater before.
For the theater newbie, you can just walk down Warren Mall, never have to buy a ticket, and experience "Suzik" from South Korean company FORCE — a three-person team that practices Chinese pole performance to show the value of cooperative harmony. You might also find the Chicago-based company Mucca Pazza liberated from the confines of a stage, dancing around Warren Mall inviting bystanders to join "Mucca Pazza Plays Around." Or you might discover a singer standing in a grove of magnolia trees as Project [BLANK] performs "Sung Forests," one of four WOW installations that will be running all day throughout the festival.
Attendees can also purchase tickets for unique experiences such as "Deep Fake," where you are an audience of one in an immersive theatrical experience in which you interact with co-workers via video chat and have to decide on the appropriate use of AI. It's described as "part puzzle room, part quiet horror story."
Ontroerend Goed, from Belgium, has an intriguing project called "Handle With Care," where a box is mailed to a theater with instructions and the challenge is whether you can create something meaningful, while San Diego-based Blindspot Collective invites you into a neon-lit karaoke bar for "Karaoke Dreams," where every song tells a story.
WOW has shows running continuously at multiple venues on each day of the festival. I highly recommend downloading the schedule grid to help plan your experience. There are helpful maps online as well as guides on campus to help direct you from one show to the next. There are food options on campus, but if you plan an intense schedule with back-to-back show, I highly recommend packing snacks and water, as well as a jacket if you plan to stay late, and sunscreen if you have multiple outdoor shows.
The biggest challenge, aside from trying to decide what to see, is parking. As a UC San Diego alum, I know parking is not easy, and you do have to pay. But you can find information here or use public transit to get there.
Show highlights
I hate to mention the show "Night Watch" because although it is at the top of my list for what to see, it is also already sold out. The good news is the folks who created it — Sara Biel and K.J. Knies of L.A.-based Bee’s Knees — plan to tour the show, so you will be able to find it if you follow them.
Knies was inspired by games like "Firewatch," "Gone Home" and "Her Story" and thought, "What if you had a walkie-talkie? And then what if you could use that walkie-talkie to then talk to an actor who is actually on a TV screen, and then you would see essentially how a game would play out in front of you using TV screens? And that was kind of the inception of the idea — that mechanic, walkie-talkie and TV screens."
And then what if the whole show was in a van with just four audience members? His wife and creative partner, Biel, added the horror element.
"We wanted to create a show that was very mobile that we could just kind of pop up and take places," Biel said. "But what's actually the story that we're going to tell in this van? And I was like, you know, it'd be really cool if we made this a horror experience. And so then it became the prompt of what if we made an immersive monster movie in a van? So that was kind of the breeding ground of what became 'Nightwatch.'"
This show is so up my horror alley that I had to highlight it, and I apologize that it is sold out. But you can still get tickets to the festival’s most accessible show from San Diego artist Casey Hall-Landers.
"'My Body's Wake' is an accessibility-driven show, so access is integrated into the artistic practice and design elements, as well as front of house and production," Hall-Landers explained. "My show is a tender exploration of disability through multimedia, live violin, dance and body painting. It is a love letter to our disabled community and invites you in to witness our resilience, our dark humor and our joy. We fuse dance and violin in a live sense with elements of theater and dialogue, experimenting with generative technologies and live body painting, working with interviews. So it really doesn't fit into one category. It's not a dance concert, it's not a music concert, it's not really a play — it's something else."
Hall-Landers became disabled while in New York University's Tisch Dance Program.
"I could no longer continue with the rigorous technique classes but still wanted to perform and still wanted to dance, and dance was still my salvation for my body — to find comfort in ways that pedestrian movement was actually causing pain," Hall-Landers said.
Another local artist is Jesca Prudencio. She is a WOW veteran as well as a professor, and her show is "With Honors."
"'With Honors' is a ceremonial dance party experience where everybody gets to graduate," Prudencio said. "It is a cross between a nightclub dance party and a graduation, except when you walk in, everybody's treated like a graduate, and we give out made-up degrees throughout the night. So there's a live DJ, there's a host of dancers called the Masters of Fine, and we celebrate all the audience members throughout the night through dance, through picking specific people to be brought on stage and given made-up degrees — degrees such as a Ph.D. in bossy, bountiful beauteousness and others. So we want people feeling celebrated, appreciated. We want people to leave feeling important, that they're very accomplished exactly as they are."
Noa Barankin of DrumatiX is also from San Diego.
"We're bringing 'Rhythm Delivered' to the WOW Festival, and it is all about creative exploration of rhythm and how it can be found and made through our bodies, found items and different other instruments," Barankin said. "We're going to be pulling out things from the set, from boxes, and finding ways in which we can creatively make rhythm and music with those items. And then we can combine that with tap dance, body percussion and drumming."
Once again, WOW is showcasing work from its own POP Tour — or Performance Outreach Program. Bridget Cavaiola Stone is director of learning and engagement at the Playhouse. This year’s POP Tour is "Colorín, Colorado."
"It's such a beautiful story about a young fifth grade girl who is having some struggles in her class with reading. Meanwhile, her grandfather — her Tata, which is like her ride or die — experiences a bit of a health emergency," Cavaiola Stone explained. "When she's in the hospital with him, she remembers that he used to tell her these stories when she was a kid. And she wants to read the story to him that he told her, but she's struggling with it. So she enlists this sort of wild new friend she meets at school, Inés, who happens to be really good at reading. And so the two girls form a unique friendship with each other. And we also get this beautiful story within a story of 'Goyo and Gato,' twin bat-cat alebrijes who make a voyage from the South to El Norte, and we discover a little bit later on in the story that this is probably the story of Georgie's grandfather and his twin brother coming to the United States. It's a beautiful bilingual Spanish-English play."
Another international artist at WOW is Josette Lépine — half of the Kif-Kif Sisters. She is French Canadian, and her show relies more on visual and physical humor than language.
"The show 'Jam Side Up' is about two twin sisters, which we are, so it's our real relationship," Lépine said. "The game is to make a show out of nothing, out of household objects, and it's about having fun and inventing stuff with everyday objects. Like we have a tennis racket and we cut potatoes into french fries. This kind of invention, a lot of fun with objects and with this twinship. Coming from a strict, disciplined environment and seeing all these people in the public space, we said we can put a bit of art and chaos there, and create a bond between strangers — an experiment between strangers. But it started from a challenge and a passion for the public space."
Heading outdoors for the first time is the L.A.-based Freak Nature Puppets with "Out of Body Expo."
"Big puppets love being outside," Aubrielle Hvolboll said as she swayed back and forth inside a giant hand puppet. "We are a six-person puppet collective. We make large pageant-style DIY puppets using found, reused and unloved materials. We're bringing to life a giant body by making puppets of the different body parts and bringing them to life. We're excited to have a big space to play around with and fill up."
Their show is free on Warren Mall.
"It's a series of sort of surrealist sketches," said puppeteer Matthew Sater. "Since our approach is very scrappy, we hope to sort of have a positive connotation to, 'Oh, I could do that.'"
Hvolboll agreed: "We like it when people come to our shows and think that now they can make puppets. And they can look at different scrap materials around them and put them together into art because that's how we started."
The company Enemies of Time is ambitiously bringing two shows. The tagline for one of the shows is "Gentle Parent of Poltergeist" and it’s an immersive, interactive show where a ghost tour goes a little off the rails.
"That one is 'Molly Went Missing,' which, unfortunately, is sold out, which is the good news and the bad news," said "enemy" and company member Lyra Levin.
But you can still attend their second show.
"Our other show is a self-paced walking adventure called 'Message in a Bauble,'" Levin added. "That one cannot possibly sell out because it happens on your timeline. You start the adventure by finding a bauble machine that an emerging sentient being has been caught in and they need your help. So, are you gonna help them?"
Michael Feldman is another enemy.
"You get to text back and forth with these characters and you end up in the middle of a debate between them," Feldman said. "And so you get to make choices, and those choices matter and affect the story and affect the way that things move forward."
Karen Castelletti is another one of the enemies and she loves what WOW offers artists.
"In the Without Walls Festival, we see a really beautiful and somewhat unusual investment by a traditional arts venue in a more emerging field of immersive theater, experimental theater," Castelletti said.
Sandra Portal-Andreu will be staging her show by the Stuart Collection’s famous "Bear."
"'Terra Firma' essentially translates to land signatures," Portal-Andreu explained. "It's a site-specific performance and also a community activation that centers on memory, land and our relationship to home."
The community activation involves a time capsule that audiences can contribute to. And to bring the festival to a fitting conclusion, there is "The Tea Party at the End of the World" created by Jessica Creane.
"It’s an interactive tea party where a small audience comes together and we drink loose leaf teas. We talk about tea. We also talk about death and the end of the world and what the scale of the end of the world means to us from polar to personal," Creane said. "I think one of the core narrative threads of the piece is that we all experience the end of the world and the ends of various worlds at different times and at different scales. It feels like a wild gift to perform it in 2026. It feels incredible and devastating at the same time."
I hope this sample of offerings whets your appetite to venture outside the traditional bounds of theater for your chance to be WOW-ed.
