A New Stage
For Erotic Play:
Immersive
Kinky Theatre

In a 2bdr in Midtown Manhattan, on a makeshift altar, a naked Eros — Greek god of love and lust — was edging towards his rebirth. Seductively undulating under a sheer silk veil, he urged the onlookers to ride the vibe. “Pleasure yourselves, my children!” he called. “Break the chains of shame and judgment! Reach between your legs and set yourselves free!”

We, the onlookers, complied. Hesitantly, at first. But within a few minutes, the already heated atmosphere in the room combusted into a full-on Bacchic frenzy. It didn’t matter that we were mostly strangers, who hadn’t met before tonight and probably won’t again. We were in it. And “it” wasn't an immersive theater piece anymore, or a themed kink party, or an orgy. Drawing upon all of the above, the resulting experience was something entirely new.

“The Edge: A Descent Into Rapture” was part of an ongoing series of signature, story-driven events, produced and hosted by the group Pagan’s Paradise. Billed as “Kinky immersive theater,” this hybrid may represent “a new step in the evolution of immersive art,” said Sirenatrix Nix, the event's co-creator and playwright. “Kinky immersive theater combines theatrical, somatic, and emotional experiences that draw people into the story with their bodies, minds, and souls. What’s unique about it is how all-encompassing it is.”

Injecting immersive theatre into kink parties can help shape them into something more communal, said Dominus Eros, Pagan’s founder and the evening’s lead actor.  “Kink interactions tend to be localized. They can happen between myself and my partner, or maybe I go to a community and we all do the same things in the same space, but we're still focused each on our own thing,” he explained.  In contrast, “when I go to a music festival, and we’re all moving to the same rhythms, singing the same lyrics and experiencing the same emotions, there's this hive mind thing that happens. If I take the same thing that performance art does to get to that point, and infuse it into erotic play, everyone in the room will have the same shared experience, whether they're actively participating [in erotic play] or not.”

 “The beauty of this immersive stuff is that everyone gets drawn in, and we all become part of something bigger,” he added. “Nobody’s left behind. Nobody's standing in the corner by themselves.”

The next kinky immersive theater event, which takes place on Friday, April 4th, is titled “Nightfall2: A Sexy Game Of Jazz And J!zz”. It was produced in collaboration with Phoenix Events, a newish production duo specializing in kink and play events "that challenge our creativity and step outside the box."

Nightfall2 is a LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) event, in which attendees not only participate but also direct and act out their own kink scenes, as characters integral to the plot. Much like a “A BDSM themed D&D game,” explained Nix. "The intention is to create an experience of a world of its own," added Phoenix Events, in an email interview. The LARP format "provides exciting and engaging stories, and also helps people explore kink in a playful way."

Set in New Orleans of the 1920s, Nightfall’s plot follows the emotional tug of war between the playboy & death doctor Drago, and Nix, a clingy corpse he’d reanimated. The LARP is divided into several cycles of “day” and “night”, with the “days” being timeframes devoted to meeting and negotiating BDSM scenes with other participants, and the “nights” a period dedicated to actual BDSM play: with and as zombies, death doctors or humans.

"Nightfall2 features themes of life, death, rebirth, connection and attachment, all of which have recently played out in my life,” said Nix. “It came to me in a time when I was putting an old life to rest, and starting over in this new world of desire.”

For Dominus, the most tender moment came on the heels of their last production, “The Edge”. 

“When I was younger, my biggest dream was to be an actor,” he said. Though he eventually abandoned this aspiration, as a pro-Dom Dominus found faint echoes of it in role-play, and even louder ones in the more recent immersive productions -- with The Edge representing a new pinnacle. “To see the audience fully lose themselves in the moment, to have them see me in my art, my craft, the joygasm of what we were doing… at the end of the show, after we took our bows, I hugged my partner and said: ‘I'm a real actor.’  and I started crying, because I’ve felt like a failed actor for so long. To be healed in that moment was magnificent. It showed me the power of what we’re doing, and it makes me want to do more.”