A blank-looking house on a Brooklyn street is the setting for Then She Fell, a long-running promenade piece that’s been drawing New York audiences for over three years now. Third Rail Projects, led by Zach Morris, Tom Pearson, and Jennine Willet, specialise in immersive work – something that appears to be much less common on this side of the ocean. It’s become so en vogue in the UK that I often begin my journeys with trepidation that the work is merely a gimmick trying to replicate the big hitters like dreamthinkspeak or Punchdrunk. Indeed, my own work with Dante or Die has been similarly approached by audiences and critics. Although how many productions of Hamlet are produced every year without comparison to each other?!

However, a dance-theatre piece in a period house, with cabinets of curiosities to explore galore and up-close and personal interaction… One can’t help but at least acknowledge the similarities. And now I shall move on, because that’s where the comparison can end. Third Rail invite only fifteen audience members per show into Kingsland Ward, a century-old institutional facility. Having had quite a stern but wry briefing about not opening any locked doors, given a set of keys and a shot of some rather bitter tasting booze, we’re separated into smaller groups or lone travellers. One of the joys of the piece is is that we have solitary moments with performers, and are then dumped into a room with three others, before being whisked behind another door to join a different audience member. My brain was frantically trying to work out the stage management and audience routes. Soon enough I gave up and just enjoyed the well-oiled, excellently crafted ride.

My first room set the scene. Our firm guide sits at a long table opposite me. She shoots a silver cup down the table towards me – I catch it. Suddenly she’s sliding across the table towards me and fills both our cups with bubbling cold liquid. We clink and drink. Before I know it she’s swiped the cup and darted to the other side of the table, returning to present a box with a lock. I fumble for my keys but none of them fit. She dangles a tiny, tiny key in front of my face – as I reach towards it she has already made it disappear and has popped it under a cup (there are now three). I finally get my hands on the key and open the box – a letter from Lewis Caroll to Alice Liddell.

Over two hours I meet two versions of Alice, a man embodying the white rabbit, Lewis Carroll himself, The Mad Hatter (brilliant), and nameless orderlies who now and then pop up to open another door for us. The building itself is not that large – we move only between three floors – but Third Rail have concocted a dizzying rabbit hole journey as we are commandingly landed into another space before revisiting spaces through a different door later. It really does feel like a dream that you have no control over; and yet we are made to feel incredibly safe and taken care of. I applaud their audience management and interaction – space is left for us to explore as well as interact with performers yet at the same time we are being brought on a very specific journey.

Highlights included combing Alice’s hair whilst talking about my first love, frantically trying to notate for the Mad Hatter who keeps changing her mind about what she should write, and a magical duet between two versions of Alice, each behind a two-way mirror. Cleverly, I was treated to seeing both angles of that delicate moment. The choreography (created by the original ensemble) is detailed and urgent; and importantly, is entirely specific to the space in which it is performed. Alice and Lewis’s duet on a staircase sees them both ascend and descend on an angle, and sinuously wrap around the banisters. It’s a beautiful moment that crystalises the impossible love story that Then She Fell handsomely shares with us. The overall experience is a nuanced exploration of love, madness and the fragmented self.

Then She Fell is booking to March 2016 and Third Rail Projects’s new show, The Grand Paradise, opens in Brooklyn next month.  

Walid Raad, dressed unremarkably in a black t-shirt and dark blue jeans, speaks to a group of 40 people seated in MoMA’s beautifully open Marron Atrium. Armed with blue headphones, his voice is channeled into our eardrums, drowning out the chatter, laugher and general hubbub that fills one of modern art’s most famous buildings. We sit facing a large white wall with an enormous chart facing us. It is filled with drawings of faces pinging out at us encircled by bright colours, arrows pointing to names of several organisations and lengthy contracts. It’s a busy wall of detailed information.

Raad tells us that he’s not an actor, that he can get nervous, and may need to move around during his performance. That’s the first of many slippery sentences in which our narrator wrong-foots us. In fact, he is a compelling storyteller who magnetically draws us into his world in an instant. His story begins with a woman called November who contacts him to invite him to be part of the Artist Pension Trust – a scheme for artists to invest their own artwork in order to create a pension for themselves. As he begins to investigate the scheme it leads him on an intriguing story of investors who have all served in the Israeli army and he questions his safety as a Lebanese man if he were to invest his art within this worldwide system. This kicks off an hour-long monologue in which five art-works are used as props to investigate the blurred lines between artistry, commerce and war.

We move between five areas within the atrium. Projections of empty art gallery walls create an eerie backdrop for what appears to be a factual account of how the Arab world is building a new empire of art galleries and theatres, built by ‘starchitects’. But who are this new, giant Guggenheim Museum and Louvre Museums in Sharm Al Sheik for exactly? Raad suddenly becomes a normal Arabic man, ten years from now, who walks to the entrance of the newly opened gallery wearing a black T-shirt and dark blue jeans and is almost-violently refused entry. It’s a quietly unnervingly image that lingers uncomfortably in my mind.

The third section utilises his celebrated work The Atlas Group (1989 – 2004), which was inspired by his research into the Lebanese Civil War in which 100,000 people were killed. Having been pestered for years by a curator (could this be true?) he finally agrees to display his work in Lebanon but when he arrives to see it hung, everything has shrunk to 1/100 of its size. It’s a miniature. Someone must be playing a joke on him, or is he having a psychotic episode?

The entire performance has this nightmarish, slippery quality that experiments with narrative – what is true? What should we believe? We are entirely invested in Raad’s narrative until he slides in a quietly dark image, or an unquantifiable ‘fact’ – he tells us with great sincerity that all of the colours framed on the wall have disappeared, yet we can see them. And he keeps us smiling – he’s funny, charming, convincing. As we roam the artworks alone after he’s left we’re faced with our own reflection in four large frames of grey. Who are we within all of these forces: the arts, the economies that celebrate and fund these arts, and the wars taking place with faces that we never see. It’s a powerful performance, whose force sneaks up on you, and lingers in the mind.