Darkfield, a box I still hadn't ticked on my bucket list
I don't remember exactly when I first heard about it, but from that moment on, a visit to Darkfield sat high on my bucket list. A traveling experiment that pops up at festivals all over the world and was now about to land in London. I had to go, and although I had no money and no time, I booked tickets. Sometimes you have to set priorities.
In search of the secret
Ever since DarkPark began, I've been searching for what exactly it is I want to make. That goes beyond escape rooms, although I do try to stretch what an escape room can be. I see an escape room as a form of theater, but instead of you sitting in a velvet seat watching the actors, in our escape rooms you play the lead role in the story yourself. As far as I'm concerned, that doesn't always have to happen within a fixed frame. If it were up to me, an escape room could be far more than anything we've seen so far. That search fascinates me. How far can you go? Where is the line, and at what point can you say with certainty that something is no longer an escape room?
As part of my research, I travel all over the world to visit forms of immersive entertainment in the broadest sense of the word. That might be escape rooms abroad, a museum with interactive elements or an experimental theater performance, but sometimes (and I hope for this every single time) you come across something you've never experienced before. It's magical, and sometimes even mind-expanding. Suddenly you discover something you not only never thought was possible, but that also fundamentally changes the way you look at life.
Those are the kinds of experiences I want to create too, but what touches one person deeply can be a shallow experience for someone else, and the other way around. We're all different. We each make our own journey, with our own pitfalls, fears, dreams, blocks and triggers. And yet there are things we share. Certain things touch everyone, or at least a large part of humanity. Extreme horrors, but beautiful things too. Those are the things I'm looking for. Those small nuances in theater, escape rooms, entertainment, theatrical experiments and extraordinary experiences that every human being is sensitive to. I'm looking for the secret.
I've found that secret many times already. It isn't one secret, it's a collection of small insights. Tiny gems that suddenly make you feel your heart opening. I try to catch those moments and translate them into the stories I myself want to tell. Is that stealing? I don't think so. My mother once told me, years ago, that all knowledge, wisdom and inspiration already exists; you only have to open yourself up to receive it. It belongs to all of us, there for the taking whenever we need it. That's how we build together on what others have already discovered, creating new forms of age-old ideas again and again. What I do with DarkPark isn't unique, the knowledge and ideas were already there, but the form I pour them into is.
Darkfield
So there I was, walking with my beautiful wife Sanne through a pitch-black park in London. At the far end of that park, a tick on my bucket list was waiting: a visit to Darkfield. And as we made our way through the dark, my expectations grew, along with my hope that I was about to discover a new gem.
Darkfield is a creative company that, just like me, is searching for new forms of immersive theater to let people experience something new, to make them feel something. They do it with sound, in gigantic shipping containers. Every Darkfield container has its own theme, concept and story. The only thing they have in common is that every experience takes place in complete darkness, so you depend entirely on what you hear. There are no actors; it all plays out inside your own head.
Sanne and I neared the end of the dark park and could already see, through the treetops, the strings of lights and the outlines of the bright white shipping containers standing in a circle. Together they formed a kind of courtyard, and in the middle stood two containers stacked on top of each other. ‘DARKFIELD’ was written on the top one in big, slender black letters. That's where the tickets were sold, but of course I'd had mine for ages. Nothing was going to come between me and my bucket list tick now!
Those same black letters were on the other containers too, so you could see straight away which Darkfield container you needed: EULOGY, ARCADE, FLIGHT and COMA.
It was cold, which didn't help, but with the strings of lights and the excited tension of everyone standing on the grounds, waiting expectantly for whatever was about to happen, it still felt like a festival.
EULOGY
Our tickets were scanned and we were each given a card with the name of our personal suite. EULOGY, you see, takes place in a hotel. My card said Alzheimer, Sanne's said Darkmoore. Strange names for hotel suites. We walked into the dimly lit shipping container and found ourselves in the basement of the hotel. Two long rows of roll cages lined the walls, bearing the names from our cards. I knew Sanne was nervous about this, so I was startled to discover that I had to leave her behind in a roll cage at the start of the row and go looking for my own spot, which turned out to be right at the very back. I sat down on the grating. A pair of headphones hung beside me. I put them on. The lights went out. I was alone.
'Welcome to Darkfield!' I said to myself. 'Bring on the spectacle! Blow me away! Live up to my expectations!'
It was silent. It was dark.
Footsteps sounded in front of me. A man started asking me questions, and I had to answer out loud into the little microphone attached to my headphones. ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ ‘A man.’ ‘Do you ever eat fish?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you afraid of speaking in front of a large group?’ ‘No.’
Suddenly a voice whispered in my right ear. A woman. ‘Don't be alarmed, I'm going to take you with me.’ While the man's voice carried on asking questions, I felt my roll cage being pulled backward and wheeled away from the others and from the man with his questions. I was probably put in an elevator, because I heard a ping and doors closing. The floor began to vibrate and the elevator took me down to a deeper floor of the hotel. A deeper layer of myself.
What followed was a journey, together with the whispering woman's voice, through the corridors of the hotel. Again and again we returned to the elevator to go one layer deeper.
Suddenly I noticed I was starting to worry about Sanne, all the way at the other end in the pitch dark, with no idea what she'd gotten herself into. How was she doing? Had she taken off her headphones and was she now sitting alone in the dark, waiting for it to be over? I couldn't go to her. It was pitch black and we'd been given clear instructions to stay seated. I had to surrender to it.
I don't want to give away any more of the adventure. The voice and the elevator took me to ever deeper layers of myself, and the answers I gave into the microphone turned out to be choices that shaped my journey. Suddenly the lights came on. In front of me sat a woman who was just as startled as I was, and clearly a little embarrassed about that one second in which I had seen her true self and she had seen mine, before we both quickly put our masks back on.
The roll cages were still in place, neatly in a row. I had never been anywhere else; it had all happened inside my head.
I walked outside and found Sanne with a glow on her face that I hadn't seen in a while. Full of enthusiasm, she started firing questions at me. ‘Were you taken away too?’ ‘Did you have to go in the elevator too?’ ‘Was it a man or a woman who took you?’ ‘What did you answer? Did you get that played back to you at the end as well? That was funny, wasn't it?!’ Sanne's heart had opened up! She hadn't taken off her headphones, hadn't sat waiting in the dark for it to be over; she had discovered a new piece of herself, and she was glowing.
I wasn't. I know that's not what you were hoping to hear, but for me the experience had been different. I had looked forward to this visit for years and imagined all sorts of things I was going to go through, but none of them had come true. I had fallen into the trap of expectations. I hadn't gone in with an open mind, and of course the experience could never have lived up to what I'd hoped for. Stupid! On top of that, I'd been sitting there worrying about Sanne. Needlessly, as it turned out, but still.
Luckily we had three more chances.
ARCADE
When, after fifteen minutes of shivering in the cold, we stepped into the second Darkfield container, we found a long row of arcade machines. You know the ones, those big cabinets you find in gaming halls where you can play old-school games like Pong, Pac-Man or Prince of Persia. Luckily this time I was standing next to Sanne. That felt safe. At least I didn't have to worry about her anymore, and besides, I'd learned to leave my expectations at the door and focus on what was about to happen.
Once again I put on a pair of headphones. The lights went out and I was asked to explore the arcade machine with my hands, by touch. I felt a slot that would fit a coin. Below it a tray, with no coin in it. Right in front of me was a button. If I pressed it, my answer would be ‘yes’. Not pressing meant ‘no’.
Once again I met the characters of the adventure. A Western this time, and my name was Milk. I was asked questions, and with the button I could answer them. After a while a coin dropped into the tray, and I had the choice of putting that coin in the slot in exchange for a revolver with one bullet, or not. I didn't. A little later I got the same choice, but this time my coin was worth a revolver and a whole box of bullets. Now that was a better deal! I noticed that the answers I gave with my button and the moments I spent my coins influenced the story, and with the disappointing previous experience still fresh in my mind, I decided to go all in. I used my revolver to take out a corrupt politician, I kissed a woman passionately (sorry Sanne) and in the finale I shot an innocent child dead. Oof.
The lights came on. Sanne's button had disappeared. Mine hadn't, so I accused her of pressing too hard and declared that you should treat things with respect (old pain from my experience with rowdy players wrecking my escape rooms), until I saw that about half of all the arcade machines no longer had a button. Those players had made different choices, lived a different adventure, and the result was that their button was gone. I had murdered a child; how far had they gone, then, to have their freedom of choice taken away?
Sanne's eyes were shining again. She hadn't killed the child, she'd taken it to the candy store. The woman I'd kissed? Sanne had gone to bed with her.
FLIGHT
This was the Darkfield container Sanne dreaded most. She already gets carsick when she isn't the one driving, and in FLIGHT the seats were going to move…
The moment we stepped inside, we forgot we were standing in a shipping container. We were in an airplane. A real airplane. We sat down (next to each other again, thankfully), put on our headphones, by now a routine, and fastened our seatbelts.
A flight attendant appeared on the display, or should I say ‘two’ flight attendants, taking turns with quite a few glitches in between. FLIGHT, it turned out, was an adventure with several possible scenarios. One scenario in which the plane would crash and (thankfully) hundreds of scenarios in which we would land safely. There was one problem: this time we had no influence on the story. No button, no microphone, nothing. All we could do was surrender to the darkness and trust that the pilot knew what he was doing.
It was 20 intense minutes in the dark, and I can easily imagine some people never daring to board a plane again after this experience, but I thought it was awesome!
Precisely because I didn't have to make any choices and could simply give myself over to whatever happened to me, this was the Darkfield adventure where I most forgot that it wasn't real. I was even dreading the real flight home in two days' time a little. For Sanne, this was the least enjoyable of the four. Not because she'd gotten sick (she hadn't), but because she hadn't been allowed to make any choices, had had no influence on the story, on her fate. People are different. Things are experienced differently. Imagine being an experience designer and having to give everyone the same experience. Good luck…
COMA
The last of the four. I had deliberately scheduled this Darkfield show after FLIGHT so that Sanne, if she had gotten sick after all, could recover here for a bit. On the other hand, the theme of this experience worried me a little, but well, the doors had closed behind us by then. There was no turning back.
We found ourselves in a research center. To our left and right were long rows of bunk beds, three high. With some effort I squeezed my long body into a cubbyhole and laid my head on the neatly cleaned faux-leather pillow. Sanne had crawled into a bed across from me, but because we were lying down, we couldn't see each other. I put on my headphones and was immediately told I still had to take my pill. A red light lit up on a small stainless steel tray mounted on the wall. There was a pill in it. A fairly large pill. Sometimes you just have to trust people, but imagine for a moment that it wasn't a placebo lying there in that tray. Fuck it, I thought. I tossed the pill to the back of my throat and down it went.
I don't know how long I lay there, or whether I was awake the whole time, but when the lights came back on it felt like waking up from a lifelike dream.
I think this last experience came closest to the expectation I had when I stepped into the first Darkfield container of the day. Even though I knew that all I was hearing was sound, it felt as if someone was in the room with me. It felt real. I had been completely absorbed in the experience and had, if only for a very short while, completely forgotten myself.
Final verdict
Oh yes, now let me tell you, nice and dry, what I thought of my experience at Darkfield. Give my opinion. Be good and critical.
No, that's exactly what I'm not going to do. Was this experience what I expected of it? No. Was that the experience's fault? No. That's the biggest lesson I learned here (again). Every experience is personal. Sanne was touched most by EULOGY. Me least. I was most impressed by FLIGHT. Sanne wasn't. We both opened up at different moments, and closed again and opened again at different moments too. Sometimes together, at the same time, sometimes each in our own way. Just like in life. We all make our own journey. That's exactly what makes it so beautiful.
Thank you, Darkfield.
Darkfield has since left London again, on its way to new faraway places, but they'll surely be back at some point. Maybe even closer to home. If you'd like to stay up to date, this is their website: www.darkfield.org
