The Cortège is an outdoor theater experience that transforms storytelling into an experiential, multi-sensory journey. More than a performance, it is a mythic voyage where the audience becomes active participants, or "passengers" who embark on a collective rite-of-passage.
Through its deliberate use of nonverbal storytelling, The Cortège transcends linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Instead of dialogue, it speaks through symbolic visuals, archetypal characters, emotive choreography, and an evocative soundtrack, making the experience universally accessible.
Children, elders, locals, and visitors from around the world are able to connect with the story on their own terms and bring their own meaning to the narrative. It is this invitation to feel rather than to decode that allows The Cortège to resonate so powerfully with such a wide and diverse audience.
At its heart, The Cortège tells the archetypal story of the Everyman, an eternal journey through loss, transformation, and renewal. His passage unfolds across a vast field transformed into a ceremonial stage, coming to life at dusk through symbolic movement, large-scale puppetry, interactive robotic elements, drone apparitions, and choreographed dance.
The experience is realised through a carefully integrated combination of elements:
- Drone apparitions by Studio Hock, flown on the Nova Sky Stories platform, underscore emotional peaks in the performance, transforming the night sky into a canvas for storytelling.
- Interactive quadruped robots that respond to human presence, blurring the line between contemporary machine and mythic beast.
- Simulcast headsets delivering a binaural, cinematic score directly to each passenger, bypassing linguistic and analytical processing. Without verbal or written language, the performance remains accessible to audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities. The score features music from El Búho, TOKiMONSTA, Boreta, and others, interwoven with a live ensemble to create a hybrid analogue-digital sound ritual.
- Mythic costumes and large-scale puppetry that transform performers into timeless archetypes, magnifying emotion through visual scale and symbolism.
- Dance as a universal language, integrating the raw power of street dance within a mythic framework, performed by a cast of eight street dancers.
- The Afterlife Tent, a communal space for tea, ambient sound, and reflection, allowing individual grief to be met with collective care and transforming sorrow into shared connection.
The Everyman is not confined to one identity, gender, culture, or era and his story is designed not only to be seen, but deeply felt. He represents the shared human experience of grief, loss, transformation and transcendence - a story ancient as myth, understood and interpreted by each passenger in their own personal way.
With loss being a central pillar of the story, The Cortège includes a “Reading of the Names,” where passengers are invited to submit the names of lost loved ones to be honored during the procession, creating a personal thread within the collective story. This ritual transforms remembrance into presence, allowing grief to be held, witnessed, and shared.
During the performance finale, all passengers are invited onto the field for a cathartic group dance offering a moment of joyful communion and a shared emotional exhale, before entering the Afterlife Tent, for shared tea and reflections, allowing individual sorrow to be met with collective care.
Through these elements, The Cortège inspires not only awe but intimacy and collective ritual alike. It invites people to carry the experience with them long after the performance ends.
Partners
- Vismonia
- Brilliant Work
- Studio Hock
- Nova Sky Stories
- Unitree
- Sound Off Experience
- [namethemachine]
- Black Magic Factory
- Los Angeles Equestrian Center
