Strange lights, a body slowly swallowed into a bed, eerie doubles, a naked man with his head engulfed into a pregnant woman’s belly. Craig Quintero’s 30 minute Just for You trilogy (featuring All That Remains, Over the Rainbow and A Simple Silence) was truly an interesting experience, blending reality with a world of imagination through bodily movement and art.
When you enter the PHI Centre, guests are guided to 360-degree rotation chairs with a VR headset and a pair of headphones. After selecting your preferred language, the first show, All That Remains, begins with a woman opening her palm for us to read “Believe everything you see,” setting the tone upfront that the show would be blurring the lines between dream and reality.
You will see a painting with someone sipping orange juice, and in the next scene, someone slides the very same glass of orange juice over to you. Yes, you are a spectator, watching attentively, but you experience the show unlike any other film; at times, it feels like you shouldn’t even be watching, and at others it feels as if the actors are actually watching you.
“It’s like as if you were watching a theatre performance,” says Pierre-Olivier, communication manager at the PHI, “but you are the only spectator that’s part of the show with these people”
During one scene, you are on stage in front of a crowd, surrounded by 10 women in black dancing around you. You have to spin around in your chair to see everyone, and again, they are all watching you. You feel at the very centre of the show, so vulnerable, and it’s easy to forget that it’s just virtual reality, that they don’t actually see you. There is something eerie about the intimacy and the total immersion of the virtual reality experience, but also something exciting. I am not used to such intense eye contact with strangers, staring, daring, sometimes from far away, sometimes from so close.
Each person experiences this trilogy differently. Everything is slow, deliberate, giving you the time to imagine what can happen next. However, no matter what you imagine or don’t, it never gets boring because you are completely immersed in these always-changing settings, immersed visually within a virtual world with the characters of the films, and audibly with instrumental music, nature sounds of birds chirping or streams, and occasionally by dialog and singing.
If you are looking for something new and you enjoy more abstract films that leave room for interpretation, Just for You at the PHI is just for you, because I can guarantee that as you leave, you will be trying to decipher what you just experienced and what it means.
Just for you is playing is playing at the PHI from July 23rd to September 7th, from 12:00 to 18:15 on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, and 11:00-17:15 on weekends. Find more information and tickets HERE.
