Unique immersive theatrical guerrilla, choose-your-own-adventure experience premieres.
January 16 – February 2 at Secret Brooklyn Location

Buy tickets HERE.

The Assemble Project will present the World Premiere of ASSEMBLE, a unique immersive theater experience conceived and directed by Talya Chalef. This limited engagement runs January 16 – February 2 at a Secret Brooklyn Location revealed to guests after their ticket purchase. It is presented as part of the Exponential Festival.

ASSEMBLE invites you to join Jane as she considers life at 40. ASSEMBLE is a guerrilla, choose-your-own-adventure performance that transforms the mundane spaces of a store in Brooklyn into a series of worlds, fantasies and meditations. Participants download an app to their phones and are prompted to navigate and interact with the store through a series of choices and tasks. The resulting experience is part immersive theatre, part audio tour and an entirely unique experience for each person.

ASSEMBLE was created by Christopher Ross-Ewart (composer/sound design), Jess Kauffman (theatre-maker/writer), David Blackman (app developer/theatre-maker/writer), Johanna Kasimow (contributing theatre-maker), and Talya Chalef (director/ writer/theatre-maker).

Talya Chalef is a Brooklyn based South African/Australian interdisciplinary theatre-maker. She is the co­artistic director and producer of TPWD Inc with Jess Kaufman, and a member of Mapping Spectral Traces, a global group of artists, scholars and academics concerned with cultural geography. She recently co-produced Beyond The Wall, bi-national puppet festival on the Nogales Sonora/Arizona border. Talya has received artist residencies including ArtsHouse North Melbourne Meat Market, Abbotsford Convent Melbourne, Watermill Centre NY, Space on Ryder Farm, Mount Tremper Arts, and Centre for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. She was an invited guest artist in Maynooth Dublin and an ITI fellow at Theatre De Welt in 2017. She is the recipient of multiple awards including the Columbia Dean's Fellowship, the Elizabeth Murdoch Travel Fellowship, multiple Besen Family Foundation Awards and The Australian Council of the Arts ArtStart Grant. Talya holds a graduate diploma in Animateuring (Theatremaking/Devising) from the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne (2004) & completed an MFA in playwriting at Columbia University (2013). Her last immersive piece in New York, Port Cities NY, was staged on and around a barge in Red Hook; it was called “brave and moving” by Culturebot and “equal parts reflective and dynamic” by New York Theatre Review, while Theater Pizzazz noted that it “leaves the audience with a sense of awe.”

Christopher Ross Ewart is a sound designer, composer, and performer from Vancouver, Canada. Learning the cello at an early age, his musical experience ranges from orchestral and chamber music to experimental electronic composition. Studying theatre at the University of Toronto introduced him to composing and performing music for theatre. After creating original work in Vancouver and Toronto, he completed the MFA program in Sound Design at Yale School of Drama. Now working across the US, Canada, and the world, his experience ranges from performer to composer to designer, in theatre, musical theatre, dance and installation. He is the faculty sound design advisor and part-time lecturer at Western Michigan University’s theatre department.

Jess Kaufman is a theater artist and creative producer making thoughtful, ambitious, playful theater across boundaries and borders. She is the Executive Artistic Director of Más Allá del Muro | Beyond The Wall, a nonprofit arts organization that creates 15 foot tall puppets with youth at the US/Mexico border wall in Nogales AZ/SON. Her D/deaf and hearing accessible play, Mathilda and the Orange Balloon, premiered in London and toured the UK with The DH Ensemble in 2019; a 2020 tour is planned, and a US production is currently in development at New Victory LabWorks. She is co-book writer and dramaturg of Hereville: The Musical, co-creator and dramaturg on Martha & the Event Horizon at Camden People's Theater in the UK, and a founding member of SubSublime, an international performance collective. In her past life as an actor, she appeared Off-Broadway, on national tours and at major regional theaters, and narrated several audiobooks. She studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, the Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) in Russia and the University of Miami. As a queer, Jewish artist she is particularly interested in the intersection of social justice and identity.

David Blackman is a digital artist and software engineer. His work focuses on visual and narrative explorations of technology and intimacy. He also practices generative art made physical, which he explores through laser cut leather fashion accessories. He has led engineering teams at Google, Foursquare and Twitter, where he focused mostly on mapping and place discovery.

Johanna Kasimow is a theater artist living in Philadelphia. She has written and performed original works with Pig Iron Theatre Company, The Eva Steinmetz Project, Antigravity Performance Project, Theatre Horizon, and works by César Alvarez, Talya Chalef, Lily Kind, and Mel Krodman. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College and received her MFA in Devised Performance from The University of the Arts/Pig Iron School.


ASSEMBLE runs January 16 – February 2. Small groups of ticketed patrons meet at a secret location and begin their journey every 15 minutes. Performances are available to be scheduled Mondays and Thursday between 6pm – 7:15pm, Friday – Sunday between 5-7pm. The duration of the performance is approximately 75 minutes. Tickets are $20, available at projectassemble.org. Meeting point and complete instructions will be sent to guests after their ticket purchase.