Imagine waking up to find yourself immersed in a performance that is all about you

When she applied to receive an Odyssey, Tiu de Haan had already lived many lives. While currently, she was a ritual designer and creative coach, Tiu had been dreaming of establishing a residency for experiential-focused works. She embodied the essence of “pronoia”–the sense that the universe was conspiring to do good things for her–and even though she didn’t have a romantic or business partner, living parents or children, she was surrounded by incredibly rich friendships.

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One month before her Odyssey, she was set to turn 50 and surpass the age her mother was when she died of cardiac arrest. Her Odyssey centered around the question of how we could help her begin to picture her life when she no longer had templates of what it might look like from within her own family. How could we help her plant the seeds of the legacy she had been dreaming of for years, and find a balance of her intuition and will to make it happen?

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As a counterpoint to her pronoia, her Odyssey began with a series of ridiculous failures. A sculpture of toilet paper that spelled TIU. A shitty picnic (or the “shit-nic”) with squished strawberries and pre-packaged croissants. As the chaos faded, Tiu was spoiled like a Queen and given her dream breakfast in a charming waffle kitchen in the back of a camper van. There she was invited to tend to the vision of her residency and clarify her role. From there, she was brought to an arboretum where she learned about the vision of the two proprietors who had been slowly tending to their vision over many decades. Through a series of challenges, she was sent on a quest to fortify her persistence, before she planted a tree of her own in the arboretum.

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In the final scene of Tiu’s Odyssey, she arrived at the residency she had dreamed of, celebrating its 20th anniversary. Tiu would be 75. The dinner was honoring Tiu’s legacy and had an eerily real feeling. It did not feel like an exercise in imagining the future, or a game of pretend. There was truth in this future: the team who made her Odyssey had become a community of artists and collaborators in their week together, bound by that place and by Tiu. Her legacy was already unfolding and had been her whole life in the way she affected people.

Jude’s Odyssey was delayed, as so many things were, by the Coronavirus Pandemic. He had filled out our questionnaire in 2019, hoping for an Odyssey in 2020. Two years later, after changing his name and his pronouns, and reexamining his way of life, Jude filled out a second questionnaire.  This new questionnaire spoke to a wish to find a new way of making community and a love of the mysterious lives people live in underground spaces. When he left ridden New York to meet us in Lisbon, it was this interest in the alternative worlds one must seek by traveling to underlands, to unmapped places, to hidden communities, that would drive the development of the Odyssey.

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TAZ (pronounced tadj) is the Temporary Autonomous Zone. We are all, in some way, searching for TAZ because if we are searching for something, that’s what TAZ is. When Jude arrived in Lisbon he was already searching for TAZ, and the Odyssey was a journey of guides and signposts and fellow travelers. On his first night he showed Abraham his new tattoo, a tattoo of a bug that he had just gotten from a famous queer tattoo artist in the city. It was met by a menagerie of other tattoos by other queer tattoo artists from around the world. “My body is becoming a map of this community”, he reflected. He later discovered an old, beautiful book in his AirBnB library marked up with notes about play, mystery, and the search for TAZ. The next morning he encountered an Eastern European man beginning his journey to TAZ, a busker joyfully singing the song that had inspired the bug tattoo, and an Indian photographer desperately seeking the perfect photograph for his last three exposures. A grieving woman singing wistful Fado from her balcony offered him a train ticket to TAZ, and the city bloomed with signposts and a symbolic language legible only to those who had learned how to read it.

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Jude’s encounters – in the city, on the train, hitchhiking in cars, and in the fields and cork forests of central Portugal – drew him into a community of searchers, each looking for their own understanding of TAZ. Though each knew it was a metaphor, a cypher for the life they wished to live, the community they wished to create, the artist they wished to be, they also knew they needed to seek the castle in the valley that could be found on no map but was as real as Lisbon or New York. More real, perhaps.

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Eventually, navigating by seeking thin places and the doorways opened by storytelling, Jude found his way to TAZ. There he discovered a community continually inventing itself, engaging beauty, believing in play. It was an emergent community, generated from the combined searching of everyone who had found their way there. TAZ, by definition, is temporary, and the next day it faded from the map and Jude ended his Odyssey back in the ordinary world, waiting at the airport for his plane back to New York.

A bespoke, participatory experience for two about the stories that connect us.An immersive journey with a friend deep into a story custom built for the two of you. Step into an entirely new kind of remote performance.

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO,” ASKS THE VOICE ON THE PHONE, “IF YOUR FRIEND WEREN’T IN YOUR LIFE ANYMORE?”

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It’s the last question in the interview, the one the interview has been building towards. You answer, knowing that everything you’ve offered will be used to design your friend’s journey and that your friend is now answering the very same questions for you. And then the experience begins. You in your home, with your computer and your phone; your friend in theirs. You step into a bookshop, find The Book, then fall through its pages into the story of a land beset by a Curse of Separation. Will you be able to find a cure? Will your friend?

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The Book of Separation offers both a poetic meditation on what makes us close and an exploration of how we return from this year of separation.

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Each person's journey is unique, custom built based on a phone interview. The ticket you purchase is for two people - you and a friend (or partner, family member, juggling team mate - someone who matters in your life.) Your friend may be in the next room or on the other side of the world - the experience will work equally well. You will take the journey at the same time, following separate but intersecting paths. Plan for a 90 minute experience, though you may be done sooner.

Just weeks before Josh’s Odyssey, he and his wife, two kids, mother and father moved across the country from California to New York to make a better life for the family. It was an idealistic leap of faith, one designed, hopefully, to allow his family to be freer and more expansive and to give him more time to write a long-dreamed of novel. In the process of packing, he rediscovered many items of significance. Meaningful rocks he’d collected over the years. A collection of pictures of meaningful objects. A pile of post-apocalyptic books.

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On the evening before his Odyssey, Josh drove himself to an address outside Ithaca, NY where he would spend the night in a log cabin deep in the woods. There was a mysterious letter for him, photos all around, and fascinating books on the shelf. Slowly he began to realize something strange. Each of the books was missing its first chapters.

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When he awoke, Josh found himself in his own subtly post-apocalyptic world. In this world, every object contained a story and stories had become the currency of the land. As he journeyed (and he would travel, in the end, hundreds of miles) Josh encountered individuals and communities, all of whom were in search of the right stories. A community of people traded stories in the waterfalls of Ithaca. Farm stands along the roadside in upstate New York accepted stories rather than money in exchange for goods, and the narrative of Josh’s own travels was a story of moving from fiction to reality and watching as they intermingled.

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Halfway through the day, Josh found himself at an intentional community (reminiscent of one he had grown up in) built around the collective search for the First Chapter. Each day, members of the community woke up and began writing their First Chapter. They worked together and alone, searching by dancing, by conversing, by writing, even by cooking. He joined them in the search in various ways throughout the afternoon, having conversations about creative urgency, community, and seclusion. At the end of the day, the community came together to share their First Chapters. By this time, Josh had become part of this community, and he, too, had written his First Chapter. Then, like every other resident, he went to sleep and woke in the morning to begin the search again.

Just weeks before her Odyssey, Suldano Abdiruhman graduated from MICA, in Baltimore, where she had lived almost her entire life. She was an African American woman, raised in a Muslim family, had a degree in fiber arts and a plan to move to Philadelphia. Now, so much was thrown into question: what is it to be an artist? What is it to create and live in real community? What alternate life paths had she not chosen, or could she now choose?

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Suldano’s Odyssey took place entirely in Baja California, Mexico, and the long flights from Baltimore and back served as mythic passages from the ordinary world to the dream world. When she arrived in Baja, she was met by an artist and driven to Todos Santos, a small town an hour and a half away. On the ride, the two talked about weaving as a way of writing, fabric as an extension of the body, clothing as a identifier and costume. Along the drive, they stopped at a weaving workshop, where the matriarch of a long line of weavers taught her to use the family’s loom. When she arrived at her cabin that evening, tucked away in a mango grove, she discovered that in her bag were a collection of gifts from her friends and family, who each played different roles in her sense of identity. The gifts included skeins of yarn, fabric, and other materials that were meaningful to Suldano. As her Odyssey progressed, she would be weaving each in with threads from Mexico, making an entirely new design that integrated the Odyssey with the important people in her life.

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The next day she would follow many threads of many different possible lives and visions of community. She walked to the dusty edge of the village, where a strange man invited her to run away with a traveling circus. Past a palm forest, on the cliffs by the ocean, she met creatures wrapped costumes crafted from natural materials from the landscape who affixed new appendages to her body and invited her to become one of them. After a long walk with an architect, she discovered a pair of shovels along the beach. For hours they dug and built a home for a new kind of community. As they worked, slowly people joined them, bringing materials to help build the house and contributing to the construction in a moving crescendo of support. All the while, sounds of Suldano's life layered on one another through recordings: the clack of the loom, the thunderous crashing of the waves, inhalations and exhalations, the sound of wolves that were present at her birth, laughter at the circus. As the day passed, Suldano wove a literal and metaphorical fabric – the real world interwoven with the performed world, the present world interwoven with the possible world, the self that is interwoven with the self that could be.

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That evening, she spent the night at an elegant estate, where the community celebrated her with a dinner party. It was the dream of the community she might build, complete with the food and music she loved, guiding her gently from the world that could be to the world that will be.

Before her Odyssey, Ayden LeRoux and her partner went on a life-changing tour of the land art of the American West. The Odyssey Works team saw in this and in the huge changes she was facing in her life—moving, leaving a job, seeking a new career, schooling, and reckoning with health challenges—as a clear call for something she had already been fascinated with: a Pilgrimage. Before her Odyssey she had received a series of letters written between a pair of women on their own pilgrimages; the letters described a mystical place they called The Place of the Fallen Star. Though she didn’t know it, this described Dark Star Park, was a piece created by land artist Nancy Holt in Arlington, VA.

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Ayden’s pilgrimage would lead her from Brooklyn to Manhattan and on to Maryland and Virginia. On her final day in New York City after eight years living there, she encountered friends, family, and strangers, gathering strength from various sources of power, ultimately finding herself at Brooklyn Bridge Park. There, a crew of dancers led the public in a choreographed scene in which she was enveloped by the group and wrapped in a cocoon of sheets inscribed with people’s hopes and dreams. In this cocoon, she was transported southward, away from her home and toward her future. She arrived that night in a strange house filled with pilgrims who joined her on her journey. Together they baked bread and then began a fast.

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What followed was a long and arduous journey with many beautiful encounters. Ayden traveled by foot and train and car, covering many miles as she headed toward the Place of the Fallen Star. As she approached the pilgrimage site, she was given a pilgrim’s tunic, regalia made by a Native American woman who had faced similar health issues, and talismans inscribed with the wishes of friends and strangers.

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At the end of her journey—sunset at Dark Star Park—she joined the other pilgrims as they left their offerings along with their petitions. The offering was both collective and personal, and as the night overtook the moment, the group dispersed and went on the rest of their life journeys, and Ayden did as well.

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For a more in depth story about Pilgrimage, read more from Newsweek and Baltimore City Paper, or listen to her discuss the experience on WYPR.

The Dariad began at the Bernal Heights Farmers Market in San Francisco. Dare Turner, who went every Saturday to the market, made her usual circuit with Abraham Burickson. At the end of the her ordinary route, however, the woman who usually sold her apples handed her a greek coin with a picture of Odysseus’s ship on it. Her Odyssey was beginning; she looked around and saw a pink blur in the distance—the blur accelerated and then it was upon her—her closest friends, all wearing pink onesies. She had entered into the realm of the absurd.

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The next few hours would see her approaching the forms of her life in strange and oblique ways. She would find herself walking through the Mission district, focusing on images of fire, then entering into a friend’s house where a noir-ish poker game was taking place. All through the day, certain images recurred—fire, faces, frames. She visited a house where a woman had fled a conflagration while carrying her newborn, she wore a necklace of matches, and she touched the faces of her friends and lovers. Eventually, Dare found herself in the woods of Golden Gate Park, where frames floated in the air and she took the landscape in like a series of photographs.

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These three recurrent images returned at the climactic scene at the DeYoung Museum in Golden Gate Park.

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Dare is a woman who spends long periods of time with art and usually goes to museums to spend 30-45 minutes with a single piece of art. This is not how most people engage with museums, so she is usually the odd woman out in such institutions. When she arrived at the DeYoung that day, however, she met a tour group let by a museum guide who led her group through the building at Dare’s tempo. The group looked at three pieces of art—a face, a framed landscape, and an installation made from the remains of a church destroyed by arson. At the first piece, the group spent five minutes, at the second, fifteen minutes, and at the third, thirty. The forty or so members of the group disrupted the rhythm of the museum, and brought to it a meditative attentiveness.

Between the months of July and September 2013, Odyssey Works created a performance for Rick Moody, an author living in New York City. It began one evening when Rick's priest gave him a children’s book titled "The Secret Room," to read to his daughter. This book, which appeared to have been written in the fifties, was actually a creation by Odyssey Works.

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Shortly after this, Rick was given an invitation to visit Sid’s, a vacant hardware store in downtown Brooklyn. The store became his own secret room, and he continued to visit it weekly for the rest of the summer. In the space, he encountered a variety of objects foreshadowing moments to come in his Odyssey. Among these was a notebook detailing the story of a man searching for a cellist whose music deeply moved him, a recording of string music, and a photograph of a prairie. One day after visiting Sid’s, Rick was brought to the airport and given a plane ticket to Saskatchewan, Canada. When he arrived, he was driven to the prairie in the picture where he found the cellist from the story performing a variation of the music he had been listening to for weeks.

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After this, other aspects of the performance began to manifest in Rick’s everyday life. Dancers in red appeared in the streets, on the subways, on the Brooklyn Bridge. A review of the story about the cellist appeared on NYTimesBooks.com. When meeting new people, it became increasingly hard for Rick to distinguish whether they were performers or just people.  The border between the quotidian and the performative became inapparent. Rick found his life completely overtaken by Odyssey Works' actors, dancers, musicians, and set designers.In the culminating days of the performance, actors guided Rick between locations in Brooklyn, an experience that allowed him to meditate on the symbology of home. On the final day of his Odyssey, he awoke in New Jersey and a chain of his family and friends led him back to Brooklyn.

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Read more about Rick's Odyssey on Vulture, Urban Omnibus, or the Marina Abramovic Institute's Immaterial.

In 2012, Odyssey Works selected Carl Collins, an information architect living in Brooklyn, to be the recipient of an Odyssey. Carl was enveloped in a fast-paced world of ideas: working three jobs, constantly reading multiple books, learning about mapping, and spending time with a tight-knit group of friends. Carl’s obsession with mapping became a key to his Odyssey as it would become the lens with which he could link the high pace of his brain to bring himself more into his body.

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A number of weeks before his Odyssey, Carl received a beat up paperback copy of a book that was allegedly written by Jorge Luis Borges, one of his favorite authors. Many of the stories had to do with mapping and other themes that were resonant with his life, and the margins were filled with notes. He also began encountering a man wearing a goat mask here and there around the city. The Goat Man would antagonize him: squirt him with water, throw a pie in his face, hand him strange objects.

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On the day of his Odyssey, Carl awoke to a clock radio show about mapping and a series of text messages from his friends telling him that his friend Miles was missing. He embarked on an urgent hunt find Miles and map the city. Throughout the day, he encountered a character from the Borges book, was chased by the Goat Man, and finally arrived at Central Park where he met a choreographer that he had met several weeks earlier. From there he began walking south carrying a stone a la Sisyphus all the way to a small community garden in Alphabet City. Carl was exhausted; his brain was no longer busy. Here he was blindfolded and kidnapped by the Goat Man and brought to the woods upstate where he was set to burn at the stake like Joan of Arc. Just when he felt the fire crackling at his feet, his friend Miles released him, and a wild Bacchanal ensued. Carl’s high energy was brought from his brain into his body as his danced, feasted, and sang around the fire. He went to bed and when he awoke the next morning, he found himself in a new life in a new home somewhere in the country and was given a typewriter. After lunch, and a day writing in his outdoor studio, which overlooked a gardener and an artist as they worked, he had to hitchhike and find his way home to his friends.

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Read more on Carl's Odyssey from Newsweek and ArtInfo.

Laura Espino was extremely well attuned to the sense of sound. She was unusually attentive to narrative as well, always able to contextualize her lived experience within a larger story. Perhaps it was her personal history of being an illegal immigrant from Argentina, or the way in which she came out to friends and family.

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In the course of the month leading up to her Odyssey, Laura had a number of encounters with four new people, each of whom involved her in their lives, in stories that were related to her own stories. One was a businesswoman, trying to make an impact on the world. One was a woman who was getting in touch with her Jewish identity. Another was a silent film editor, and the last was a woman who was struggling with the challenges of family.

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Laura began her Odyssey in the public library in Oakland on a search through the stacks for books that were linked to narratives in her life. Each of the Odyssey Works actors whom she spent time with came to be linked with a particular narrative, and each narrative was linked to a sound: scissors cutting a strip of film, pages of a book turning, a finger circling the rim of a wine glass until it hummed, and crumpling paper. Over the course of the first day of her Odyssey, Laura moved in a spiral cycling through encounters with each of the four actors. With each encounter, narrative became stripped away bit by bit until on her last meeting with each of them, only the minutest sound remained in each.At the end of the first day, Laura found herself, quite literally, in a sound bath of these stories, where speakers attached to the base of the tub and above her head played the sounds of each of these narratives. It was a distillation of all the stories she had heard. Then she left them behind and began a new life, far from her own stories, on a farm in Sonoma County.

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When she returned home, to her city, to her life, to her stories, the piece concluded in the Mission where Laura met her mother in a coffee shop. Her mother got up to leave, and, slowly around her, everyone in the shop began to create a crescendo of the four sounds.

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Read more about Laura’s Odyssey from the New York Times.