Obvious Agency

Obvious Agency creates interactive live performances blurring the lines between audience and performer, theater and game. We partner with cultural institutions and universities to attract new audiences and create unique ways for your existing audience to engage more deeply in the work that you’re already doing. We also produce the creative work of our worker-owners.

Blending theatrical and digital arts, we create spaces where participants can co-create their own experiences through first-hand exploration of the worlds we create. Always serious, always silly, we believe that by helping create and define culture, we can create systemic and interpersonal change.

Our commitment to co-creative work stems from a dissatisfaction with “immersive” models of live performance. Instead of being pulled under and subject to other’s creative currents, we start from the assumption that people innately have both artistic impulses and the capacity to create art, and that our art is enriched by both their impulses and capacities. We create models of audiencing that help us think about familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways, that empower us to act in ways that might feel too transgressive in less controlled circumstances, and that imagine worlds in which we are empowered to make decisions on the bases of pleasure, not necessity.

Inherent in this imagining of new ways of being and creating is our governing and administrative structure. We are a worker-owned cooperative grounded in anti-capitalist, anti-racist, non-normative, liberatory, and feminist frameworks. Obvious Agency’s work is collectively authored and owned. We split labor and remuneration transparently and unanimously, on a project-by-project basis. And we love what we do.