The Frontera Project by Tijuana Hace Teatro and New Feet Productions offers a glimpse into life along the US-Mexico border.
Cristina Byrne
In 2013, a 20-foot Aphrodite-turned-sea-monster emerged from the water at La Jolla Shores. In 2017, a small house suspended by a crane swung around gracefully to “What a Wonderful World.” In 2021—things went digital.
Now, one of the most innovative cultural happenings in the country—the WOW Festival, where La Jolla Playhouse turns various parts of the city into stages for wild performance art—is back in full swing for the first time in three years.
Since its inception in 2011, the WOW Festival (short for Without Walls) has recruited local, national, and international artists to create site-specific, medium-defying works. Theater, dance, music, circus—all morph and merge together. It’s an emancipation of expression, which resonates strongly now, after two years of retreating to our safest spaces. Amy C. Ashton, Playhouse producing associate, says the festival’s key intention is to reimagine the way performances are presented and viewed.
La Bulle by Toronto company Corpus Dance Projects, depicts pantomime antihero Pierrot inside a large, illuminated bubble
Robert Deleskie
“What’s special is the shift that happens when you break outside traditional performance experiences of being inside a theater, sitting down in your seat, having a drink at intermission,” she says. “When those comforts are challenged, it changes the experience for the audience.”
This year’s event will encompass over 20 projects, featuring hundreds of artists and performers from around the globe in a four-day lineup that fully re-embraces live, in-the-moment performance and rediscovers the communal, connecting aspect of outdoor art. There are family-friendly shows (Hoopla!, Ants), video projection, and world premieres surrounding a special new hub at the center of the festival space.
On Her Shoulders We Stand by San Diego-based TuYo Theatre
La Bulle, by Toronto company Corpus Dance Projects, is a can’t-miss performance at the center of that hub. It features a Perriot—the iconic antihero of pantomime, face-painted and forever alone—living inside a large-scale, illuminated bubble, trying to communicate with the audience through movement, gestures, and text. Part commedia dell’arte, part Truman Show, it uses Corpus’s signature combination of lyricism and humor to explore themes of solitude, privacy, and transparency.
Monuments, by Australian installation artist Craig Walsh, digitally projects massive faces of community members and icons onto trees in the dark—creating an effect similar to the Wizard of Oz’s lording green hologram, and expanding the viewers’ perception of what public monuments can represent. The Frontera Project will create an interactive experience that offers viewers a glimpse into life along the US-Mexico border.
Lessons in Temperament by Outside the March is part of this year’s La Jolla Playhouse Without Walls Festival
Local artists include the San Diego Opera, Latinx company TuYo Theatre, and Blindspot Collective, which will stage their new work Black Séance: a magical and immersive theatrical show in which a bartender-slash-amateur-magician channels Black icons including Josephine Baker, Frederick Douglass, and James Baldwin as he uncovers his own family history.
Ashton says that this year marks the first that La Jolla Playhouse will produce Without Walls on an annual basis: “One of the dreams is that the work created in this festival will also become a part of the larger arts landscape outside of San Diego. That we’ll see shows that premiered at WOW popping up in festivals around the world.”
