I’ve now moved into a wonderful community house in North London. We recently hosted a ‘room service’ party, which I think is a great format for an interactive event.
It is loosely inspired by an event of the same name I’ve been to a few times, put on by an immersive theatre collective based in the Bay Area, California. That one is far larger and more involved, is actually in a hotel, and involves actors, plotlines, and a lot of boundary pushing.
Our version is more humble. The concept is simple: all participants move through each room in turn, and each room contains a curated experience hosted by that room’s owner(s). Each room experience lasts roughly 20-30 minutes.
At the start of the evening (after a delicious dinner) we were each given a passport to prove our identity and to collect stamps throughout our journey.
Then we went through each room, spiraling up towards to the top of the house:
- Rage Release
- Divination Ritual
- The Library of Unnameable Objects
- A room of silence, tinfoil, and emergent play
- Overheard on the London tube
- Treasure Hunt Disco
We ended with a celebration in the top room.
Reflection
I like this format for a few reasons:
- It’s low to medium effort for any individual - you only have to focus on a single experience in a single room
- The constraints of a single room are ripe for creativity. You have people packed into a small space for a short time. The space is normally something else (a bedroom). The rest is up to imagination
- It’s modular: you can scale it depending on the space and number of participants. If there are more people, you can do shorter experiences, or have multiple experiences happening in parallel
- Everyone is involved. Ideally, everyone gets to be both creator and participant
- It allows for a range of emotional tone - rather than the entire event being a particular way, you can have joy, sadness, anger, whimsy, play, awe, reflection, and more in a compressed timeline. Physically moving space between each experience helps a lot to separate the containers
- It’s great for rapid prototyping
- It’s an excuse to finally rearrange and tidy your room (this helped me a lot!)