A House Repeated  is a video game stripped down to its framework of commands and voice prompts.  But these are described and narrated by Seith Kriebel and a female performer, who personify a virtual and specific site, revealing a fantastical imagined world based on Battersea Arts Centre itself. The duo divide the audience into two teams who sit opposite each other in a minimally dressed studio. Running two stories in parallel, the audience (who never leave their seats) visualise their tour with the guidance of Kriebel’s concise descriptions. Each performer takes turns to offer their team a description and three options to navigate a journey until they find each other in the same room and are transported into a re-arranged plan. The battling teams then shift to share the narration with Kriebel, playing with the second performer who becomes our protagonist in the hot seat.   As an audience of immersive theatre, indulging in vivid descriptions – from a witch’s hut to a man in a tower with a hundred eyes who never sleeps – becomes quickly over-shadowed as the piece turns into a fast-paced game. The descriptions themselves are rich and inconsequential, forming a diversion from the journey towards a mysterious goal that half the audience seem to already understand.

Moving from description to question to command, there is little time given to establishing the framework and language needed to access this work, which is disorientating at the start. Those in-the-know are those who are familiar with early computer games and for whom choose-your-own-adventure stories mean something. After being instructed to talk to each other before choosing one of the options outlined in a series of multiple choice questions, audiences become divided by ‘gamers’, who in turn divide themselves into subgenres and the rest into non-gamers. Watching this piece with three friends who access the form with surprising determination enlightens my experience. They make a shared community of gamers, analysing others’ responses and placing value on interpretations based on a language that is foreign to me. The rigid framework of options to navigate the imagined space is frustrating for me and liberating for them. Kriebel’s clever and complex responses to our answers draw on extensive preparation and improvisation and overturn notions of audience accessibility by using a language whose meaning shifts depending on how it was engaged with (and by whom).

As a piece of immersive theatre, I missed opportunities to actually walk the space. Over all too quickly, I half expected to be led on the journey we had just created. Instead, afterwards, I wandered the upper level, checking door signs and trying to decipher the journey that was sometimes vividly and sometimes abruptly illustrated. Looking more closely however, A House Repeated does more than simply reconstruct a game into another medium because in doing so, it becomes an embodiment of game, site, and audience agency. All three aspects are released from the video, repackaged within a new medium and a repeated set of boundaries. This allows audiences to experience the concepts of the game and of exploring site in an entirely new way, whilst altering an experience of theatre by conceiving it through the framework of a video game.

Descriptions of rooms rearranging, of promenading into existing spaces and discovering objects, intertwines brick and mortar with fantastical architecture and biography of space. It taps into the extensive rebuilding programme quintessential of BAC’s identity as a centre for play and creativity. After a history of campaigning to save the building and the recent setback of the fire in March 2015, BAC is fully engaged in its rebuild based on a long term research programme that works on their creative concept of Scratch. Rewriting or rebuilding the whole or sections of the centre as part of the creative process for performance work, ushering a new era of collaboration between site and show. Drawing longer term solutions from these interpretations places this architectural concept of ‘Playgrounding’ as creative catalyst for both show and site. A House Repeated parallels this innovative process by deconstructing and reinventing its theme and site together with every prompt, decision, and description in the piece. It takes apart and rebuilds Battersea Arts Centre, adhering to the same concepts of creative play that underpin artistic director David Jubb’s and architect Steve Tompkins’s creative architectural concept of Playgrounding. Stripped bare of production and technology this piece is complex and challenging through its minimalism, firmly establishing itself within BAC’s identity and pushing the boundaries of immersive theatre in alternative directions.

Voodoo, debauched dancing, white-and-black minstrels, abused crucifixes, popcorn, twerking (culturally appropriated and otherwise), wigs, stilettos (knives and shoes), tits, bums, and a superb jazz drummer. Not your average night at the theatre.

What exactly is it? Is it a gig? Is it performance art? Is it immersive theatre? Yes to all of the above. Merging a launch for a new single by Lady Vendredi and her band The Vendettas (What Time Is It? – available on iTunes now!) with performance work exploring the possibilities of self-exploitation, Battle Cry comes charging into the Roundhouse, guns ablazing, taking no prisoners.

Weaving through and around all this is an exploration of dance and ritual from the Vodou (aka Vodon aka Voodoo) tradition. Glueing it together is the exhilarating free-jazz funky music of three live musicians (playing drums, saxophones/other brass and percussion) and a laptop.

Audience members are free to wander, yet gently manipulated by the performers – encouraged with ease into a circle to witness the mesmeric undulations of the  Yanvalou dance that bless the space at the beginning of the evening, or attracted by sound or light over to Pocha Nostra-style ‘stations’ in the corners, on which personal explorations of race, gender, and cultural identity – extreme versions of the self – are enacted.

See here, for example: Mexican performer Ignacio Jarquin, who has transformed himself into a licentious priest or nun, a grotesque transgendered figure in a cassock, lying on his/her back, bare legs akimbo as s/he tries to force her feet into ridiculously high heeled shoes. And there: a devil-girl anointing herself with lipstick, pushing what looks like a Guy Fawkes mannequin around in a trolley; a creature bedecked with a swathe of West African cloth, wearing a Lucha Libre mask; and now Lady Vendredi herself (Nwando Ebizie), pushing the blaxploitation card to the max, shaking her booty in her sequinned bikini, donning her minstrel costume and tap shoes, and inviting audience members to help her white up.

Working well with all the supporting company of three musicians and five performers, with particularly electrically charged duets with Daniel Cunningham – her perfect foil in Eminem-esque backward baseball cap, shades, and white-boy rapper attitude – Lady V brings things to a head with an ecstatic Banda dance, which in the Vodou tradition evokes the disruptive spirits of the dead known as Ghede. The way this manifests is as a wild party dance in which invisible drugs are snorted, smoked and drunk; hilariously over-the-top orgies mimed; and great imaginary feasts gorged upon.

Battle Cry is one stop on a long journey: this particular leg started as a nine-day Secular Ecstatic Art performance laboratory, reported on by Total Theatre here. It is part of an evolving two-year process that will culminate in a show called The Passion of Lady Vendredi at Soho Theatre in spring 2016 (co-produced by MAS Productions and nitroBEAT).

So this is, I suppose we could say, a work-in-progress. There’s a lot of fabulous material on show here – the singing, the music, the vodou dance, many of the performance vignettes – but some things that are puzzling. An over-arching theme of an imaginary neo-feminist cult called M.A.M.A (Mothers Against Male Aggression) goes over my head: that what I’m witnessing tonight is purporting to be set within this cult is something I glean from the programme notes, not the performance itself, although knowing it makes sense in hindsight of some sections of the evening I’m not particularly drawn to, including a rather cringy moment in which men and women who’ve come to the show together are invited to pair up to enact confessions of male abuse. Although there is some take-up, many don’t want to – and same-sex couples and friends, and people who’ve come on their own, stand back bemused.

There are also transitions between musical numbers and performances in which the energy drops – often the times when Nwando takes to the mic to do typical between-song gig chat, which doesn’t work well in this context. It’s one of the few moments where the tug between gig and performance piece produces an uneasy compromise.

But it is early days, with many months to go before the full-length show comes to fruition – and the company and director Jonathan Grieve (formerly of Para Active, this current project in many ways the natural successor to that company’s extraordinary interactive show Zoo-Oids) are to be lauded for their refusal to play safe, constantly trying new material, and growing up in public rather than hiding away in the rehearsal room. This is the sort of work that needs an audience right there, live in the room, to see if things are working.

What I’m sure they’ll take away from this exhilarating and highly succesful showing at the Roundhouse is the knowledge that they have all the core elements in place: a fantastic persona in Lady Vendredi (performed with phenomenal verve and energy by Nwando Ebizie); great music, a truly innovative fusion; a fabulous team of supporting performers and musicians; a way of using the vodou material that works outside of its religious/ritual origins; and the praiseworthy intention of finding interesting, humorous and courageous ways to explore questions of race, gender and cultural identity. Most of all, what’s here is the passion. Everything’s ripe for the taking – go get, Lady Vendredi!

Stacy is greeting us as we come into the Marlborough Theatre’s cosy, pink, womb-like theatre space. She’s wearing a radio mic, but there’s also (80s pop) music playing, so her words are only just audible, which is rather nice – a kind of murmuring undercurrent. Everyone gets a hug or a smile or a wave or a few words. She’s like an excited puppy greeting her family’s homecoming.

So now we’re all seated and she prevaricates before getting up onto the stage, musing on the separation of performer and audience intrinsic to theatre and performance – no matter how interactive or intimate a piece is, she (the performer) is in one role and we (the audience) is in a different role. This is something important to acknowledge, and I like her for it. It’s hard to get up there, to cross the divide.

Cut! The music stops and she introduces herself and the theme for the night. She’s here because she wants us all – together – to learn that we don’t need to play it small. We can be bigger, better, louder, prouder. She tells us that her estranged father mistakenly called her ‘Tracy’ – and then gets us singing along to Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. I’m possibly the only person in the audience who doesn’t know the words, but as we get to sing it five or six times throughout the evening, and as she has a karaoke version on video for us, I get to learn it. We do all learn, together, not to play it small, to give it all you’ve got – and by the time we’re on our last take, the audience is standing and leaping and singing at the top of their voices.

Vesper Time is an odd and interesting mix. Her ‘evening prayer’ is a reflection on ageing, and specifically on doing it and saying it before it’s too late; on male role models and the need for father figures (real or imaginary – gods, heroes, or mere mortals); and on the perils of obsessing on revenge and regret.

She manages, skilfully, with a firm grasp on the dramaturgy, to weave together reflections on Moby Dick, the ultimate exploration of masculinity, peppered with homoerotic desire; stories from her own childhood, marked by the departure of her father and the arrival of her ‘uncle’ Leo; and some deliciously blasphemous fantasies about God the Father. Holding it all together are the constantly recurring threads of the Tracy Chapman sing-a-long, and a stated desire to change her little red slippers into a pair of multi-coloured glittery platforms under her chair. Again and again she tries and stops herself, defeated…

We don’t just get to sing – we also get to greet the person next to us (like you do in church these days) with a great big ‘Aloha – Ai Yai’, and to write down the thing we really need to say to someone before it’s too late – a declaration of love, an apology – these all fed into an American-style mailbox on the side of the stage (Stacy was born in Hawaii but lived her early adulthood in mainland America). Inevitably, we learn of instances in Stacy’s life when she’s left it too late – sometimes just by a whisker, learning of a death just days before of the person she needs to tell ‘ I love you, you were there for me’.

Vesper Time, like previous work by Stacy Makishi, weaves together engaging and warm verbal storytelling informed by her experience in stand-up comedy (with a bit of street preacher thrown in); video clips from TV and movies (Demi Moore! Moby Dick!); and a simple but effective scenography, the white dress complemented by white sheets hung from hooks that reference the sails of a ship. These ‘sails’ are the screen for her film clips. There are choreographic sections that give us  sculptural images of birth and death, the hanging cloths becoming a bundled baby, then a shroud, then – as she dons her black-framed glasses over the shroud – an evocation of The Invisible Man (to my eyes anyway – aware that this is a reference that might mean very little to anyone under 40).

She ends – of course! – by donning the platform shoes and revelling in her decision not to play it small – to go for big, tall, brave, wild. The packed house includes a lot of teenage and young adult students, who are all on their feet cheering and whooping. ‘That’s the best thing I’ve seen – ever’ I hear as they exit, smiling and excited.

Vesper Time describes itself as a ‘secular prayer’ and it does feel like a quasi-religious communion has taken place. You leave feeling that you’ve been nurtured and nourished – that you haven’t just witnessed someone else’s story of the fight for liberation and self-expression, but have been made complicit in the united desire for a better world in which we can all grow to our full potential – no rivalry, no competition, just everyone doing their best and being their best version of themselves. Wow! What more is there?