Maybe things wouldn't feel so heavy if I could just…flow….
Cassie is at a crossroads. Frustrated professionally, her personal life in freefall, she hops a train to Buxton to dig into Britain's pagan past and try to kick-start something — anything — in her life again. But in the shadow of St. Anne's Well, something strange is about to surface. Something that might just change the entire course of everything.
It Flows is our first production built on the Raft platform — our own location-based theatre technology that turns a mobile phone into a portal to another world. Audience members wander Buxton at their own pace, and the story unfolds around them: triggered by where they are, what they're near, what they've already done. The town becomes the stage. The streets become the set.
This is theatre that gets out of the building.
How We Pulled It Off
Raft is a state machine we built from scratch to power exactly this kind of experience. It runs on a user's mobile device and reacts in real time to where they are, feeding out audio, narrative, and live cues as the audience moves through a real physical space. No venue. No seats. No fourth wall to break — because there wasn't one to begin with.
It Flows was also designed to be experienced safely at social distance, built and launched during 2020 when getting audiences into a room wasn't on the table. We adapted the constraint into the concept: a solo journey through a spa town, guided by a voice in your ear, reaching into something ancient and strange beneath the surface.
The Team
Written by — Harry Machray Sound — Findlay Claydon Music — Tammy Howarth Programmed by — Dylan Howells / Findlay Claydon Poster Image — Ameen Fahmy
Cassie — Karen Young · Alex — Elizabeth Hann
