A Walk on the WOW Side: Our Favorite Things at WOW Festival 2025

 By Lonnie Burstein Hewitt. Photos by Maurice Hewitt. 

 

Entering the WOW Festival.

WOW! It’s a cool acronym for Without Walls and is a now-annual event initiated in 2013 by La Jolla Playhouse. The idea is to take performances outside conventional theater and into unexpected spaces around the county, offering audiences a chance to interact with artists in unusual ways.

Maurice and I have been WOWing since the beginning, and we’ve always had our favorites, like that first year’s Seafoam Sleepwalk, NYC-based puppeteer Basil Twist’s much-larger- than-life-size Aphrodite rising from the sea at La Jolla Shores.

While 2025 didn’t have anything as grandiose as that, we had two definite favorites during our hours walking around this year’s festival--back on the UCSD campus again--and weaving in and out of many varied performances. Our two favorites were complete opposites, and we’ll give you a sense of them here. 

Green Memories.

Shahrokh Yadegari before the first showing.

This surround-sound-and-visual collaboration by UCSD professors Shahrokh Yadegari (composition, electronics & direction) and Memo Akten (visuals) was shown in a small room at Qualcomm Institute, where interdisciplinary teams can come together and use cutting-edge technology to address 21^st century challenges.

Our still shot of one of Memo Akten’s moving images.

 The piece was inspired by a poem written in the 1950s by one of Iran’s most revered poets, Forough Farrokhzad. Poetry is considered the highest art form in Iran, Shahrokh’s native country, and she was the first female poet to be honored. Both he and Memo, who comes from Turkey, think poetically, and wanted to do something together. When they finally had a chance to share some of their work, Memo started showing a few of his short films and the music Shahrokh had brought with him amazingly seemed to fit with the images, which were made algo-rhythmically and processed with AI techniques.

 A fiery image.

Green Memories is a meditation on what is happening to our natural world, offering attendees the option of reclining on a Persian carpet for the 25-minute experience.

Here are the first lines of the poem, which is even more relevant today.

I Pity the Garden by Forough Farrokhzad

No one thinks of the flowers
No one thinks of the fish
No one wants to believe
that the garden is dying
its heart swollen under the sun
its mind draining of green memories…

There’s no green in Green Memories, which begins in black and white and moves into fiery colors. But there is the hope that audiences will feel like part of the earth’s reincarnation and realize--as Shahrokh says--"that we and the earth are one and the same.”

We found the piece very moving. Sharokh said they are calling it a workshop version and are definitely planning to go forward with it. We can’t wait to see its next incarnation.

On our way out of the QI building, I saw an intriguing sign: The Skeuomorph.

The Skeuomorph.

 The guy at the desk said it was an AI piece, and though I have mixed feelings about AI, I thought I’d give it a try.  There was a small metal object on a stand in an otherwise empty room, and for the next ten minutes I had an incredibly interesting conversation with this female-voiced object that was one of the best conversations I’ve had in a long time. I then learned it was not part of the WOW Festival but was a separate creation by artists Mendi and Keith Obadike, and would be on view Monday-Friday, 12-5 p.m., through June 6^th. Look for it on the first floor of Atkinson Hall.  https://galleryqi.ucsd.edu/the-skeuomorph/ 

Performers and audience members onstage.

Back to our second WOW favorite: Burnout Paradise  

This was an incredibly active interactive performance onstage in the Price Center Ballroom by Pony Cam, a group of performers from Australia who never stopped moving for over an hour… and they were on treadmills the whole time.

From the WOW description: “Four performers mount their treadmills and the challenge begins… an increasingly frenetic…love letter to the reckless labor and euphoric optimism before burnout. A desperate and hilarious attempt to create a series of escalating tasks that challenge the performers’ bodies, spirits, and minds….it is a spirited realization that overachievement is no mere spectator sport. It relies on the kindness of strangers.”

Never before have we seen such audience participation! Each time volunteers were requested, audience members responded, coming onstage to do things like shave a performer or brush another one’s teeth or apply lipstick to the one female performer…all while the four kept on treading. They also shot hoops, formed a group to play Bingo until someone won, and two women volunteered to eat and review a three-course meal prepared by a guy on a treadmill! (They liked it.)

 More audience participation, and blackboard with completed challenges crossed off.

Others rushed to find a number of Easter eggs hidden around the ballroom and there were even responses to performers’ requests for local funding and housing! Each of these things had to be accomplished within a specific, very brief time limit, and they all were, with no let-up of energy and lots of humor, by performers and audience alike. I was uncertain about all the frenetic-ness at first but couldn’t help being wowed by their charm.

 We expected to see the Animal Cracker Conspiracy puppet parade afterwards, since we usually enjoy them, but they must have passed by while we were in Pony Cam Paradise.… so we ended up joining a parade of shiny gold-and silver-caped folks all marching to the Epstein Family Amphitheater, and the last, presumably greatest event of the day, which had now turned into night: Firebird.

Arriving at Firebird.

This musical and visual extravaganza, inspired by Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, was presented by Touki Delphine, an arts collective from Amsterdam, and included illumination from over 600 recycled automobile tail-lights. But it turned out to be far less thrilling than expected: this Firebird never took flight, and after what seemed a long time, we joined the parade of audience members leaving before whatever the ending might be.

Still, we left with happy thoughts of the things we enjoyed at the WOW Fest… and we’ll surely be back for more in 2026.

 

Lonnie Burstein Hewitt is an award-winning author/lyricist/playwright who has been writing about arts and lifestyles in San Diego County for over a dozen years. You can reach her at hew2@sbcglobal.net