One of the city’s top immersive theatre companies, Outside the March, will present a remote production of The Ministry of Mundane Mysteries: Summer Passport to kick off the SummerWorks festival’s season of virtual works to run through September.
Outside the March has been doing some fantastic work in the city as of late, including turning an old Annex video store into the setting for the immersive work The Tape Escape and turning the Crow’s Theatre into an old-timey cinema in The Flick.
The Ministry will be in session beginning June 8 until July 4.
The remote experience of The Ministry of Munday Mysteries is described as “a personalised and improvised narrative experience that unfolds over a week’s worth of short daily phone calls. The Ministry’s intrepid private investigators delve into participants’ very own micro mysteries using the investigative power of good conversation.”
“SummerWorks has been a touchstone for both innovation and accessibility for as long as I’ve been making theatre,” adds Outside the March Artistic Director and Ministry Co-Creator Mitchell Cushman. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to be partnering with SummerWorks to make The Ministry’s services freely available to audiences and to share the piece internationally for the first time.”
The personalized phone experience is designed to be highly responsive to each audience member and be customized for individuals and family members of all ages.
“Outside the March are an important SummerWorks alumni company who we are always excited to collaborate with when we can,” says Laura Nanni, artistic and managing director at SummerWorks. “They are visionaries and creative risk-takers, who continually reinvigorate and redefine what is possible in the realm of immersive and site-specific performance in Canada. I was so impressed by how they responded in this moment to the challenge of social distancing. Amplifying and giving this project a wider reach felt really appropriate for SummerWorks to do.
Other collaborators contributing to SummerWorks programming this summer include the AMY Project, Artery, Art Spin, Generator, School of Toronto Dance Theatre, Stratford Festival Lab, The Theatre Centre, and Toronto Fringe Festival.