The Dream Machine: How Insomniac’s Performers Come to Life
“You’re the next guy I was going to come looking for,” the lady in black says. “Where are your articulated fingers, mister?”
That’s the tough exterior of Jila Alaghamandan , Insomniac’s innovative Entertainment Director, talking. She’s at the eye of the storm for all of Insomniac’s live productions. Right now, she’s busy corralling the fabrication of rabbit gas masks and mechanical Grim Reaper hands.
We’ve walked from her Downtown Los Angeles studio to an adjacent warehouse. Splashed across its outer wall is a giant mural of an elephant headdress, fairies and a red monkey. The clatter and clink of casters and concrete conveyors mix with the overcast sky. Entering a ragged room filled with model airplanes and helicopters, buzz saws and a Metallica insignia, we find David the metalworker ready to show off his claws.
“Talk to me,” she says.
“I’m going to go ahead with this plan,” he answers, gesturing to a metal frame contraption three times the size of his own arm, cords attached at a tapered end to a bendable wrist and digits with PVC pipe fingers. “I’m going to rivet velcro on here so you just go strap, strap. I’m going to trim this so you have thumb control. I have nine more to go.”
We get to be real-life cartoons, fantasy warriors, and childhood toys. It’s like stepping into someone’s dream and making it into reality for them.
He pulls on the cords to show the hand articulating. A handle near the elbow is where performers will manipulate the cords, extending their reach into dancers’ minds at Escape from Wonderland, Insomniac’s spooky Halloween festival.
“You’re doing exactly what he wanted, so keep going,” Jila says of her partner in crime, Creative Director Bunny Eachon, who is famous for his outlandish designs. She shows everyone in the room a photo of the full costume for the hands, which includes a furrowed brow and beak a la European Renaissance masquerades. “So they’re going to be on stilts with the long arms and the plague masks and these big witch hats.”
From light to night, Insomniac’s production team has crafted and refined increasingly wild themes and characters for Electric Daisy Carnival, Nocturnal Wonderland and more, pushing Pasquale Rotella’s vision of a rave new world to Wonka-esque heights. Inhabitants include femme bots, bumble bees, butterflies, lollipop girls, clowns, rainbow cranes, toxic bunnies, dragon knights, billowy dinosaurs, and even a giant stilt puppet of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson.
As Insomniac performer Megan Faxel explains, “When you work for an Insomniac show, it’s not only about just dancing, it’s taking on a role and creating an experience for your audience they’ve never seen before.” A classically trained ballerina, she gets butterflies in her stomach just thinking about getting into character. Her favorite role so far was playing an aerialist Cyber Angel at White Wonderland this past New Year’s Eve, where she came out of the ceiling right when the clock struck midnight.
“Costuming and persona are huge for us,” says Jade Mangiafico-Greensberg, who’s been with Insomniac for seven years as a fire dancer, monkey and clown. “Our troupe has spent years honing these traits. When you finally get to bring that to a live crowd, it’s fantastic. We get to be real-life cartoons, fantasy warriors, and childhood toys. It’s like stepping into someone’s dream and making it into reality for them.”
From dream to reality, Jila is focused entirely on the creative whirl in front of her. Her background as a dancer, fire performer and actress makes her fearless in the face of year round productions. But with dark hair and studded gloves, her punk rock look hides a gentler soul.
“I’m fortunate on every level,” she says, echoing Jade and Megan. “I recognize that more clearly as a performance artist, a producer, a director. As any of those things, you don’t always get to work so closely with a partner or have a sandbox to play in. I definitely don’t lose sight of how amazing the opportunity is and how much it develops into something new every year.”
Back in Jila’s studio, an amp and electric guitar sit by her rest bed. Led Zeppelin’s “Ozone Baby” plays on a stereo. Her main worktable holds a swirl of tapes, markers, glues, zipper kits, a skull mask, and mood boards. Up on shelves behind two royal thrones are mannequin heads with curly neon green, gold and cotton-white wigs. Bin after bin of fabrics, beads, glitters and paints line the walls. A baby doll’s head hides in an old television set behind a convex glass screen. A small toy carousel with lions, polar bears and horses sits on a dresser.
This tempest of materials and ideas, along with concepts developed by other creative teams, comes to life at some of the world’s biggest live events. The Night Owl Experience at EDC Las Vegas 2013 was Insomniac’s most ambitious performance yet. “It was that captive hour,” Jila says of its dream theater. “The Night Owl is there, and he’s presenting all these things throughout, and you get to go on this journey through a little forest until you get to the end and the Owl starts talking. It’s a good adventure.”
With 500 performers moving to a pulsing trip through EDC’s history, with towers of flame and searing visuals flashing overhead, Jila was worried her costumed troupes wouldn’t make enough of an impact on an audience of 80,000 in the kineticFIELD. But they pulled it off, helping to bring a narrative scale to the Night Owl Experience that rivaled even an Olympic ceremony.
“Some of them were pieces I wanted to do for a really long time, like the Butterfly Goddess contortionist. We had her in a bald cap, and she was body-painted in pink and white as a monarch butterfly,” she says. “I felt this year with this show, there’s that moment in time where everything just kind of freezes. You can feel a sense of something bigger than all of us.”
Fueled by a desire to transport audiences to another world, Insomniac’s creative team threads every detail by hand, hammer and welder. All of its costumes and props start with dreams and drawings before they’re made real from scratch or transformed by a radical material remix. It’s a painstaking process that also requires quick thinking and resourcefulness.
“It does smell pretty putrid,” Jila says of the rabbit gas masks that Chico the fabricator has made, just days before Escape From Wonderland. Like David of the articulated fingers, Chico works close to her workshop in the same downtown hacker compound. “I think I have turkey bags, though.”
“Turkey bags?” Chico asks, puzzled by Jila’s Thanksgiving save. “I sprayed it through a sprayer. It’s actually silicon rubber. It’s not paint. That’s why I used it, so it would actually stick and not peel. If I take them back to my studio at home I can sit there and grab a couple more heads.”
“I have heads galore,” she says without a blink.
“That’s beautiful,” he says. “Beautiful.”
It’s like walking a tightrope while being chased by an elephant. We use our emotion to help others release their own.
Funny enough, Jila doesn’t care much for EDM. She likes pretty much everything but EDM, though she admits to getting carried away by it at times. Instead, it’s the culture and people at raves she sees the real beauty in. “Everyone is so nice and loving and accepting,” she remarks. “It’s a place for so many people that feel they don’t fit or belong anywhere else who found something that makes them feel at home.”
Taking that openness and reflecting it back in new and surprising ways is Insomniac’s creative mission. “The look on the audience’s faces—when they see the performers come out in our crazy costumes—is priceless,” Megan says. “I hope that I brighten up their night and especially make them smile.”
Unconfined to the stage, most of Insomniac’s colorful cast parade among the audience. They dance and create the experience with them. “I find the personal interplay with guests creates a much more dynamic show,” Jade says. “They get to be part of the magic and mayhem instead of just observing it.”
When it comes to working in her troupe, Jade also sees a simple connection to childhood. “We represent a pure form of deviant innocence,” she says. “Clowning is all about emotion. It’s like walking a tightrope while being chased by an elephant. We use our emotion to help others release their own.”
Gerardus, Jila’s young assistant, represents the next generation of Insomniac’s creative cast. He’s grown up performing with fire and doing acrobatics, but for right now, he’s catching the rush of production. With time running out, Jila tells him to drive to the Van Nuys Flyaway and deliver Chico’s masks to the production bus. Then he has to swing by Insomniac headquarters and pick up another package.
“Take all this?” he asks.
“Take all this,” she says, holding forth the turkey bags. “Stuff all this in there, too.”
After she gets more cash for David to finish production on nine more articulating hands, we run into another neighbor who builds sets for Disney’s Dog With a Blog TV show. She buys a line of his used set pieces to recast, before noting that she’ll also get first dibs on two circuses selling off all their stuff. The grandeur of Insomniac starts with an idea or castoff and comes to life through sweat and tears, from articulated fingers to Grim Reapers, from sci-fi rabbits to cyber angels, from a feather to an owl.
“All anyone really wants is to be loved,” Jila says later, peeling back to the spirit of Insomniac. “I have such a harsh exterior that it’s totally deceiving. I’m not anything like how I look.”
As we walk back, the hiss of machines and drills punctuate the rumble of the concrete factory next door. She checks for signs of Gerardus. “Unbelievable,” she says. “I’m proud. He’s on his way. He flew like the wind.”
