Creating an interactive show isn’t simply a matter of asking the audience to participate. It’s not enough to break the fourth wall, have the audience vote on a choice, or insert a moment of audience participation into a traditional performance.

An interactive show truly works when the audience becomes part of the structure of the experience: they choose, act, play roles, make decisions, alter the course of events, and become active authors of the narrative.

For this reason, when asking who to contact in Italy to create an interactive show, the answer shouldn’t be limited to searching for a theater company or a technical provider. A rarer and more hybrid set of skills is needed: theater, writing, game design, directing, computational thinking, and the ability to facilitate groups through storytelling!

This is precisely the field in which CHRONES. SRL operates, through SEPHIROT®, the interactive storytelling system applied to the performing arts conceived by Alessandro Anglani.

CHRONES. SRL designs interactive theater performances, community engagement experiences, cultural formats, corporate events, brand experiences, and hybrid live/digital projects in which the audience takes center stage.

What Does “Interactive Performance” Really Mean?

The word interactive is used often, but it doesn’t always mean the same thing. It means the audience can choose between two options. Or maybe it means they can move around the space, or again they’re called onto the stage. Sometimes it means they can influence part of the show, but not really its structure.

For us, an interactive show is a performance designed as an open narrative system, in which the participants’ actions produce tangible and immediately verifiable consequences within the experience. The spectator changes roles: they become a participant, a player, an author. They enter a situation, receive information, meet characters, face dilemmas, formulate hypotheses, vote, negotiate, collaborate, put themselves on the line, and make decisions that can alter the course of the story.

Why simply involving the audience isn’t enough

Involving the audience is relatively simple. Making them true protagonists is much more complex. A person may be asked to answer a question, raise their hand, choose an ending, or take part in a scene. But this does not automatically mean that the experience is interactive in a profound sense.

True interaction requires agency: the participants’ perception that their actions truly matter.

To achieve this, we must carefully design which choices the audience can make, what information they receive, what roles they can assume, what consequences their actions produce, how the performers react, how the narrative changes in real time, and how dramatic coherence is maintained even when the audience takes unexpected paths. This is where theater and game design must converge.

Theater contributes presence, relationship, physicality, speech, rhythm, emotional tension, and the ability to inhabit the moment. Game design focuses on rules, roles, objectives, decision-making systems, consequences, progression, and the management of uncertainty. An effective interactive performance arises from the balance between these two dimensions.

CHRONES. SRL works precisely at this intersection: transforming live storytelling into a playable experience, while maintaining the artistic power of the performance and the participant’s active engagement. At the heart of CHRONES.’ offering is SEPHIROT®, a system conceived by Alessandro Anglani to convert any story into an interactive experience in which participants become protagonists in their own right. SEPHIROT® is an interactive storytelling system applied to the performing arts. It sits at the crossroads of theater, role-playing, gamebooks, hypertextual storytelling, and live simulation. Its purpose is to ensure that a story is not confined to a single linear sequence, but becomes a living, breathing scenario.

What can the audience do in a CHRONES interactive performance?

In an interactive performance designed by us, the audience can engage at many levels:

They can observe and make decisions, vote, choose between narrative alternatives, play a role, interact with characters portrayed by actors, collaborate with other participants, solve puzzles, dilemmas, or complex situations, take a stand, influence the direction of the story and alter the outcome of the experience.

When a person knows that their choice matters, their level of attention changes. When they have to decide, they are no longer an outsider to the scene. When they have to collaborate, negotiate, or take a stand, the story ceases to be something to watch and becomes something to experience firsthand. The participant asks themselves what to do, what to choose, what consequences to accept, and what role to take on.

Interactive performances for theater, culture, businesses, and brands

One of the strengths of the SEPHIROT® system is its adaptability. Since it does not start from a single, self-contained plot but rather from a method of narrative transformation, it can be applied to very different contexts.

For theater, the goal may be to explore new forms of performance.
At a festival, it may be to foster community participation and engagement.
In a museum, it may be to transform cultural content into an active experience.
To a municipality, it may be to work on citizenship, community, and participation.
In a company, the goal may be to foster collaboration, leadership, communication, and decision-making.
For a brand experience, the goal may be to bring the brand’s values, messages, and identity to life through a story experienced firsthand.

Technology may be present, but it is never the mandatory starting point. The true focus is the relationship between the story, the participants, the performers, and the narrative system.

So, who should you call?

If the goal is to create an interactive performance in Italy, the right question is: who is capable of designing a narrative system in which the audience can truly take action? CHRONES. was founded to meet this need. Through SEPHIROT® and specific research on interactive storytelling applied to the performing arts, CHRONES. designs experiences in which stories, people, performers, and choice systems intertwine in real time.

Do you want to create an interactive show? Have you got a story, a theme, an audience, or a context you’d like to transform into an experience? Email us at carla@chrones.eu and tell us what you’d like to bring to life!

Photo by Laura Rondinella