Austin, TX
The VORTEX Odyssey
A Drive-Thru Performance Installation
The VORTEX presents a whole new experience with a drive-thru performance installation quest: The VORTEX Odyssey. For 2 weeks only, October 1-10, 2020, the resilient artists of The VORTEX are using safety and distancing while creating something LIVE that we all need so much right now. We join together to offer an artistic journey through contactless installations over the two weekends when Austin would have normally been bustling with Austin City Limits Music Festival. These urgent, unashamed performances view stories and characters from The Odyssey through an anti-racist, post-apocalyptic lens. We lift up the crucial themes of our shifting age: Black Lives Matter, Systemic Racism, Grand Uprising, Pandemic, and Climate Crisis. As we drive-thru the Manor Road IBIZ district, viewing the performance installations from the safety of our cars, we are guided by Athena and challenged by Poseidon. We must try to resist the seductive powers of Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens. We might be captured and eaten by the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis or the giant one-eyed Cyclops. With our family units/quarantine mates, we are the Voyagers, traveling from island to island on a journey with a puzzle component that will finally bring us home.
Audience Role
Audience members are in their vehicular 'boats' as they drive through guided performance installations with a three car pod of other voyagers. As they journey from place to place, they try to find the hidden clues in each performance to unlock keys to a contest.
Ages: All ages
Content Advisories
Interaction Advisories
Mobility Advisories
2
Events
6
Years on EI
About The VORTEX
The VORTEX creates and presents new, innovative performances—world premiere plays, operas, musicals, ritual theatre, and devised collaborations. The VORTEX transgresses conventional theatrical forms with multidisciplinary performances from diverse traditions. Music, film, dance, opera, aerial arts, puppetry, and performance art contribute to our vibrant theatre. We are an artist-owned and operated theater and have produced over 350 productions. We are proud to have always engaged in non-traditional casting. The VORTEX has presented work by dozens of famous cutting-edge artists and is internationally renowned as a haven for alternative performance. Our work has received more than 100 major awards and hundreds of nominations for artistic excellence in production, design, acting, performance, directing, playwriting, choreography, and musical composition.