There is a Portal pushes the boundaries of what performance can be in the digital age, by combining interactive storytelling, personal narrative, and generative music into a deeply moving exploration of the immigrant experience.
Originally conceived in 2017 as a live one-woman show by Kayhan Irani, “There Is A Portal” was re-imagined as a participatory digital performance during COVID.
The project now includes live story-sharing workshops as well as community-building materials to re-imagine belonging in im/migrant and refugee communities.
There is a Portal demonstrates how a hybrid arts approach to theater can make it more accessible to audiences left out of traditional theater spaces.
Within the digital story, Kayhan Irani brings to life her own journey of displacement and struggle for belonging through four non-linear chapters: Loss, Hate, Regret, and Connection.
From the streets of Tehran during the 1979 revolution to the ash-covered streets of Manhattan on 9/11, from cycles of migration to cycles of family violence, the narrative weaves between past and present, personal and collective experience, to create an intimate, multi-sensory exploration of the immigrant experience.
“The kids on the playground nicknamed me barbarian, and I wore that name with pride.”
The work uses technology as an integral part of the storytelling process by including the digital architecture as an actor in the performance.
Based on Brian Eno’s generative experiments on his 1978 album Ambient1: Music for Airports, There Is A Portal uses random inputs to to build a unique musical collage.
Throughout the story, users are asked a series of multiple-choice questions reflecting on the state of mind of the narrator, connecting artist and viewer in a call-and-response.
Each individual answer and interaction randomly selects a loop of short musical phrases played on a variety of instruments.
As the user progresses through the journey, the system layers these sounds together, creating a unique and continuously looping sound scape for each user.
The resulting piece of generative music can then be shared.
Process
In 2017 Kayhan Irani started writing a live, participatory theatre piece that explored what it meant to be an immigrant.
The piece was an intensely personal one-woman show expanded Kayhan’s own story as a second generation immigrant in New York City, into a universal meditation on love and belonging, place and memory.
By January 2020, the piece had grown into a full-stage production, complete with video projections and music. It had premiered in Philadelphia and NYC, and was now ready for touring.
And then, COVID.
With live performances on hold for an indefinite period, Kayhan approached us to reimagine the piece as an online experience.
With live performances on hold for an indefinite period, Kayhan approached us to reimagine the piece as an online experience.
This presented a number of conceptual as well as logistical challenges to overcome. Travel restrictions and quarantines were uncharted territory. Not only were live audiences impossible, but the process of creating theatre had up until that point required artistic collaborators to be in the same space at the same time.
Working with these limitations forced us to reimagine what a performance could be, and how to engage an audience that wasn’t physically present.
In the end it would take over two years, well past the height of the pandemic, to complete the final version of the experience.