Alone Experience Melbourne: This is what it’s really like

A BIZARRE Melbourne experience warns you’ll be “aggressively touched” and “embraced”. They weren’t lying. Check this out.

One of the performers.

THEY warn you before you even arrive.

In an email, organisers of one of the most intense and creepy experiences you can participate in tell you not to bother coming if you’re pregnant, suffer from vertigo, have back or neck problems or are not in good physical shape.

“You’ll be aggressively touched,” they say. It’s not a lie.

This is the Alone Experience, an immersive hour-long event that’s not for the faint-hearted. This is what it’s all about.

SIGN A WAIVER, REMEMBER YOUR SAFE WORD

The email landed in my inbox about 3pm on a Friday afternoon offering a series of directions that ended in “wait under the glowing triangle”.

Once there I entered through a set of double doors into a dimly-lit storage room that reeked of incense and anticipation. I signed a waiver, washed my hands, received my safe word and walked through a cut-out hole in wall.

It’s less than five minutes before a bag is pulled over my head and I’m shoved — aggressively — through a series of plastic sheets and into a room with a stranger staring me in the face.

For the sake of future participants, I won’t detail exactly what happened next, but I will say it shook me out of my comfort zone and delivered on it’s promise to leave me “utterly displaced and alone”.

The experience, created in Los Angeles by duo Devon Paulson and Lawrence Lewis, is what you make it. It challenges you to engage with theatre performers in spaces that belong in the creepiest of Hollywood films. Think Saw and you’re somewhat on the right track.

But unlike the escape-if-you-can scenario made famous by the cult classic based on serial killer Jigsaw, the Alone Experience never puts you in danger.

The creators say it’s designed to push you, but not too far that you have a mental breakdown.

“We basically say we’re an experience,” Lawrence told news.com.au. “It’s something you can’t get in your normal everyday life. This hour gives you an opportunity to explore yourself as a human being and feel different experiences in really intense ways.”

Me, at the end of the night. Yes, there’s a face-paint element.

Devon said the intention of the Alone Experience “is not to make it so challenging that you don’t want to do it”.

“We’ve never had anyone look at the waiver and not come in. The intention is not to unnerve somebody to the point of collapse. There are moments that are about joy, there are moments that are about feeling dislocated. People say to us that they were scared at first but it’s their favourite to thing to do.”

It is challenging in some parts, and does feel like a “haunted house”, even though Devon and Lawrence say that’s not their intention.

Men in dark clothing and hoods stand over you in pitch-black rooms. If you’re claustrophobic you might want to think again too — some sections require you to crawl into the back of a couch and through a tiny, dark tunnel.

It’s supposed to be this way. The creators say it came about as an evolution of other projects they were working on.

“It kind of evolved,” Devon said. “We don’t come from a theatre background — we were actually in bands together. I come from the fine art wold and was doing work that had experiential components to it.

“Lawrence and I starting doing sound installations and it kind of developed from there. I think the various things that we do are just random ideas but the overarching thing that we do is strip away all the norms and the safety nets and security that are part of your normal day-to-day life.

“It essentially puts you in a bit of a bubble you can move through, you see the world with slight perceptual shifts.”

The Alone Experience is designed to pull you out of your comfort zone.

‘IT MADE ME FEEL ALIVE’

Those who’ve taken part say they’d do it all again. Some do come back for more.

“No performance based experience has ever made me feel so alive in my own skin,” one participant said after the Melbourne event.

“Had an immersive experience tonight,” another said. “No phones, no video, just walking through the city guided by strangers. All by choice, never forced into a situation. Found out at the end that no one had the same adventure.”

Another said they were “marked ... on the inside and the outside”.

Lawrence says that’s how you’re supposed to feel.

“There’s a beauty in being unnerved.”

To find out more, visit aloneexperience.com.au. Or get in touch @ro_smith