Latest news with #SleepNoMore
Express Tribune
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Zoe Kravitz and Austin Butler spark dating buzz after NYC theater outing
Zoe Kravitz and Austin Butler were spotted attending an immersive theater experience together in New York City, reigniting ongoing rumors of a real-life romance. The duo, who co-star in the upcoming film Caught Stealing, were seen at 'Viola's Room' by immersive theater group Punchdrunk at The Shed in Hudson Yards last weekend. Multiple sources confirmed the actors arrived and left the show together, accompanied by their Caught Stealing director Darren Aronofsky. The sighting adds new fuel to reports that Kravitz and Butler grew close during the filming of their movie, where they were seen kissing on set in October 2024. The rumors first emerged in April 2025, shortly after Kravitz ended her engagement to actor Channing Tatum following a three-year relationship. Butler also reportedly ended his long-term relationship with model Kaia Gerber around the same time. 'Viola's Room,' created by the team behind the popular show Sleep No More, is a dark, immersive experience that features a barefoot audience and narration by Helena Bonham Carter through headphones. Known for drawing celebrity attendees, the show's intimate format adds to the intrigue of Kravitz and Butler's joint appearance. While Butler's representative has previously denied any romantic involvement, neither star has addressed the rumors publicly. Their upcoming film, Caught Stealing, is based on the novel by Charlie Huston, who also wrote the screenplay. Butler plays a washed-up baseball player caught in the criminal underworld of 1990s New York. With public appearances like this adding to speculation, fans will be closely watching the duo as the film's release approaches.
Miami Herald
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
‘Paranormal Activity's Terrifying New Stage Show Sets Opening Date
If Paranormal Activity proves anything, it's that the enigmatic ghosts and demons at the heart of the series don't stay dormant for very long. Four years after the seventh and most recent entry in the long-running horror series (2021's Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin), the famed supernatural horror series is set to return in grand fashion. Only this time, it'll be through a wildly different medium. (And no, we're not talking about spiritual mediums.) In an interesting new development for the popular horror franchise, Paranormal Activity is set to make its pulse-pounding debut in the theatrical world with their new stage play. Scheduled to arrive in London's West End theatre district later this year, Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Stage will offer a suspenseful new take on the series' supernatural universe, introducing a new story based on its cinematic precursor. The play will follow a young couple, James and Lou, who move from Chicago to London only to discover a mysterious, otherworldly entity is haunting their new home. Directed by Sleep No More's Felix Barrett and penned by Levi Holloway of Grey House fame, the show will offer up a bold new spin on the traditional ghost story, featuring an "unsettling intimacy only theater can provide." "I'm so thrilled that Paranormal will have a chance to ensnare and unnerve audiences in London later this year," said Barrett. "From seeing the advertising campaign of the film 20 years ago, where you watched cinema audiences leap out of their chairs in horror, I have long wondered how you could recreate that visceral reaction in a theater setting." "How do you bring one of the most frightening films to life?" How do you break the inherent safety that a plush West End theater offers?" the director continued. "It's been an incredible challenge, and we cannot wait to see how London audiences respond." Paranormal Activity: A New Story Live on Stage will open at London's Ambassadors Theatre on December 5, with a scheduled run of 12 weeks into 2026. Copyright 2025 The Arena Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Vogue
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
I Survived ‘Viola's Room,' a Spooky New Immersive Show Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter
The real world is plenty scary right now. Forget turning on some gruesome horror movie: reading the daily headlines is enough to make just about anyone scream. All the same, I couldn't resist doubling down on the fear factor and checking out an eerie, immersive new art experience that opened in New York City this week. On through October at The Shed, the show, titled Viola's Room, is directed by Felix Barrett and produced by Punchdrunk, the award-winning theater company behind Sleep No More. An interactive, hour-long journey, it has guests weave barefoot through a labyrinth of darkened rooms and halls (by designer Casey Jay Andrews), while a delightfully spooky Helena Bonham Carter narrates a fable, based on the 1901 story The Moon Slave by Barry Pain, through provided headphones. Even with no live actors or jump scares, it makes for an intensely effective—even somewhat poetic—haunted-house experience. Guests walk through Viola's Room. Photo: Marc J. Franklin When I arrived for my prescribed time slot, I was surprised to find that there was only one other brave soul in my group. (Viola's Room is designed to be experienced by no more than six people at a time.) Our instructions were simple enough: do not lose sight of each other, and follow the flickering lights from space to space. (I was more than happy to let my partner lead the way.) In the first space—a teenage girl's bedroom, its walls adorned with Tori Amos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters—Carter instructs us to lie down as she begins to tell the gothic tale of a princess who disappears from her castle, abandons her prince, and mysteriously journeys into the night. In time, the room around us was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from inside a blanketed fort in the corner. When, skeptically, we crawled into that fort, we immediately entered into a brand-new space: a maze of hallways lined with ghostly, draped white sheets. As Carter's narration goes on, she describes the princess's descent into an enchanted and ominous forest—just as we, too, were taken through ever more otherworldly settings. Walking barefoot, we traversed terrains that felt alternately grassy, sandy, and like concrete, our surroundings ranging from a forest landscape to a high-ceilinged chapel featuring stained-glass windows suffused with a foggy light. Another room with a giant dinner table had balloons lining the ceiling, though in the darkness their strings felt more like vines, or even spiderwebs.
Miami Herald
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
Miami workshop seeks to answer the question ‘what's really immersive'?
Projected renderings of the works of Van Gogh, Monet, and Michelangelo surround the museumgoer. Bubbles release cloud forms covering participants at another museum. A theater performance in a motel brings the audience in as part of the play's world putting them in active role that furthers the story. Dancers create choreography in step with the ocean communing with the environment. These are the new wave of arts experiences and the buzzword is everywhere — 'immersive.' Some are true to form while others merely borrow elements from the immersive playbook but don't fully deliver. Tanya Bravo, who began Juggerknot Theatre Company in 1999 in Miami, has been focused entirely on producing immersive theater for the past 10 years. Now she's hoping to make Miami a center of learning for the future of the arts genre. From Thursday, June 26 through Sunday, June 29, Juggerknot Theatre Company and Live Arts Miami Dade College will co-produce the first annual 'Miami Immersive Intensive (MMI)' with most programming taking place at The Idea Center on Miami Dade College's Wolfson Campus. 'We want to position Miami as a global hub for immersive storytelling,' says Bravo. 'That's not happening anywhere else. We have the people here who want to learn it, but you also have the people here who want to teach it.' While workshops and speakers are mostly relegated to those participating in the MMI conference, there are some opportunities for the public to get a feel for what true immersion is about. On opening night, Thursday, June 26, a multimedia experience, created by the French transmedia collective Le Clair Obscur, places the audience in a suspended space-time at the Frost Museum of Science in collaboration with another 'putting Miami on the map' organization, FilmGate, who each year produces a convergence of the latest happening in film and technology during Miami Art Week. Other open-to-the-public activities are a virtual workshop from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Friday, June 27, with Lauren Storr, senior producer at Punchdrunk, the creators of the groundbreaking 'Sleep No More.' The reimagining of Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' invited audiences to explore a story at their own pace wandering throughout New York's McKittrick Hotel. After a 14 year run, 'Sleep No More' closed in January but it is legendary for how it attracted return audiences in a true-form immersion experience where no two experiences were alike. At 6:30 p.m., Saturday, June 28, in The Art Lab at MDC Wolfson Campus is a screening of the documentary 'Meow Wolf: Origin Story,' about the mind-bending art collective that has become a phenomenon. With its flagship installation 'House of Eternal Return' in Santa Fe, which combined art, technology and storytelling, they've now expanded to Las Vegas, Houston, and Denver, with more exhibition spaces on the way. Alexandro Renzo, 'Meow Wolf's' creative director will be part of a question-and-answer session. 'They were a group of scrappy visual artists in Santa Fe who were creating these immersive walk-through visual experiences that have completely blown up. This is the story of how the collective started,' says Bravo. It was from her own experience in New York participating in the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman's LAByrinth Theater Company's week-and-a-half-long workshop that the idea of an intensive such as MMI brewed for years. Bravo had taken a break from theater, working in corporate America, when she attended LAByrinth's intensive. She ended up being in a show produced by PopUp Theatrics, run by the now Yale School of Drama program chair Tamilla Woodard. 'It was this one-person-at-a-time immersive show that took place in the Lower East Side in Manhattan, and you would go through retail locations and different spaces and learn about them. And when I experienced that, I was like, this is what I want to do. This is the future of theater. This is what we need right now.' She returned to Miami, connected with an old friend Juan C. Sanchez, who had written a play called 'Paradise Motel' and they turned it into the immersive real-time theater experience, 'Miami Motel Stories.' Woodard was enlisted to direct. 'It was the first immersive piece that we did and then after that it was five years of non-stop Miami motel stories,' says Bravo. She believes that now is the time to present a deep dive for presenters to get to the core of what constitutes an immersive production. 'We are at a point where everyone wants to create 'immersive.' So, then there's a responsibility, as an organization, to train (them), we need to understand what immersive really is,' says Bravo. While there are events open to the public, the intensive is focused on those who are interested or working in the field of immersive work. 'I'm hoping that we take that buzzword and we make it a little bit more concrete for creators on how they actually do immersive,' says Bravo. For the first MMI, Bravo says about 85 percent of participants are local but they've already started planning for next year. Plans are for the MII to be held each summer to grow it into a training ground for those who want to work, or who are already working, in the immersive space. 'We are hoping it can be a magnet for people to come to Miami from everywhere,' says Kathryn Garcia, executive director of Live Arts Miami, who is co-producing the MMI with Juggerknot. 'We want to create that next level for people who are working in this field, who are trying new things and deepen their skill sets.' In additional to national speakers including keynote speaker and workshop leader MiKhael Tara Garver, founder of Culture House Immersive and director of Disney's groundbreaking 'Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser' experience, local 'experts' including Octavio Campos, choreographer and director of intermedia performance, Pioneer Winter, artistic director of Pioneer Winter Collective, France-Luce Benson, playwright, 'Miami Bus Stop Stories,' Natasha Tsakos, known for live performance in microgravity and Bravo, will be presenting workshops. Garcia stresses that with the breadth of speakers and presenters they've enlisted, there's an opportunity for variety. 'That's intentional because there's something great that happens when you let go of the borders of discipline and just bring artists together for a common person. Everyone who will be involved is interested in this particular way of storytelling, whatever the form may be,' says Garcia. 'But I also think that this genre is still growing and defining itself and maybe that's what we learn, which will keep things exciting for audiences.' If you go: WHAT: Miami Immersive Intensive: MMI WHERE: Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, 315 NE 2nd Ave., Building 8, Miami WHEN: Begins at 2 p.m., Thursday, June 26 through 5 p.m., Sunday, June 29. COST: $350, MII four-day pass, $40, Punchdrunk Live Stream, $10, 'Meow Wolf Film Screening and Q&A. Does not include fees. INFO: Complete program guide at tickets at is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don't miss a story at
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter
Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: 'Viola's Room.' Didn't see 'Viola's Room'? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of 'Viola's Room,' then called 'The Moon Slave,' at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators. 'It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,' Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has. A reconceived 'Viola's Room' began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas ('Sleep No More,' which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater. 'It's all about trying to do things that our audiences aren't expecting,' Barrett said. 'Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
