The Whale

Created by artist and creative director Jack Hardiker-Bresson (Office of Everyone and Royal College of Art) and writer and theatre maker Sharon Clark (Raucous and University of the West of England), The Whale premieres at FRAMELESS 6-8th March. Designed for audiences aged 12+. Audiences are immersed inside a 180° panoramic projection with spatial sound, live actors, and a striking physical set. The work surrounds and engulfs the audience, creating something closer to an encounter than a traditional performance. What makes this project particularly significant is that it introduces, for the first time, a new form of spatial creative captioning, developed in collaboration with deaf, deafened and hard of hearing communities. Rather than captioning as an addition, access is embedded as an artistic language within the piece itself. Spatial/immersive theatre has yet to attempt captioning that moves around a space. Our piece opens immersive performance to audiences in ways not previously explored, and reframes creative access as a central storytelling tool. This showcase event takes the form of a dynamic 20‑minute performance that spotlights the project’s vision and ambition. The learning from this experimental iteration with a live audience will inform and drive the creation of the full‑length production. Inviting audiences to step inside the story, The Whale transforms the experience of passive viewers into active participants within an unforgettable immersive world of theatre. The Whale was one of nine projects awarded in the Expand category of the Immersive Arts Prize, a new initiative designed to support creative XR work in the UK. A total of 2,517 applications were received, ranging from major XR institutions and developers to independent artists.