I receive the email with the secret location the day before.
It’s wintertime 2019.
I've got Google Maps open, and I'm on a train to Welwyn Garden City, heading for an abandoned Shredded Wheat factory.
I find the factory, but can't find the entrance, so I climb over a large wall.
There are other people walking around, and we find the entrance.
I'm led inside and told to sign a waiver, which I don't fully read.
Next, I'm led to a dilapidated tiled changing room and told to get undressed. We're given black shorts and black T-shirts and told to lose our shoes.
One by one, we're taken away into this huge, cavernous, dark factory space. There are loud electronic drone sounds.
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Sean Rogg is an English artist who originally moved to America to work in Hollywood. After a couple of years, he decided that Hollywood wasn't for him and turned his attention to his artwork.
He became successful as a visual artist and was represented by international galleries, but he was looking for something else. He wanted to get away from the idea of the audience simply looking at a piece of work and explore and experiment with different ways of involving people in what he was doing.
That eventually became the Waldorf Project.
It started in 2012 with an immersive dining experience. Over five different chapters, it became increasingly experimental, bringing together food, sound, lighting, movement, costume, architecture and performance.
Rogg became interested in ritual, empathy and consciousness, and in what happens when you start to manipulate the environment around an audience.
He's talked about the idea of creating an ‘empathy engine ', where you put strangers through a shared experience and see whether you can create some kind of emotional connection between them.
Some notable examples were an empathy experiment involving around five thousand people at the Wonderfruit Festival in Thailand.
Another took place on a Lufthansa flight to South by Southwest, at 35,000 feet. An empathy experiment, in the pitch dark, on a transatlantic flight.
This is not theatre in the conventional sense.
To give this kind of theatre some context, we can look to ideas already established in the 1970s by Augusto Boal and his Invisible Theatre, which involved breaking down the relationship between performer and audience.
Actors would stage situations in public places without the people around them knowing they were watching a performance. The audience didn't necessarily know where the acting stopped and real life began.
Rogg takes that idea somewhere else, developing some of those themes.
So, I'm standing in front of a mirror.
I've been taken there by a stern-looking performer dressed completely in black. They've got no expression on their face. They don't speak. They just grunt at me.
I'm lined up next to other people. Some are facing each other. I'm facing a mirror.
Something is put into my mouth. I think there's alcohol in it.
Then mud is rubbed over my face and my back. I'm then beckoned to rub mud onto somebody else's face.
Nobody speaks. It's all done through expression and actions.
Roughly an hour later, I'm crawling around on the factory floor in the dark, with this pounding drone soundtrack.
There's little light. It's a huge cavernous space, and I'm taken to a freezing cold shower.
I'm barefoot. I'm surrounded by strangers. The people dressed in black are pushing me and grunting at me.
I've now been there for hours.
I'm hungry.
I'm freezing.
And then it changes..
I'm taken towards two other people.
Our arms are put around each other.
And we just hold each other.
There's no talking. We're three strangers, standing in the dark, sharing our body warmth.
I think that lasts for ten or fifteen minutes.
Rogg has explained in previous interviews about another Waldorf Project experience called *Futuro*. He noticed that people who had spent hours together without speaking had started crying and comforting each other.
He became interested in whether you could actually create that kind of response deliberately.
Could you put people through a particular set of experiences and somehow get them to connect with each other?
This is what he means by his idea of an ‘empathy engine’.
He took this idea further with *Barzakh*, which is the experience I'm describing in 2019.
Eventually we’re led, individually, into a room full of light and warm air.
I’m then laid down and wrapped up, like a baby in swaddling, next to the other participants in a line. Around 40 people, head to toe.
The lights go out.
A sheet is put over our eyes.
And then, suddenly, we're hit with fifteen or twenty minutes of intense strobes, at different frequencies of luminance, with accompanying euphoric music.
It's disorienting.
Eventually this ends…
Nobody says anything.
People slowly get up.
Some people are laughing.
Some have tears in their eyes.
Some people are hugging.
Everyone is looking around at each other as if we've just been through something but not sure what
We find our way back to the changing room and get our clothes back.
I check the time on my phone. The last train back to London is leaving in about five minutes.
I run.
References:
Baytaş, M.A. and Leeloo (2026) 'Sean Rogg', Design Discipline [Podcast]. 18 February. Available at: https://www.designdisciplin.com/p/sean-rogg (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
FLUX Magazine (2019) 'Empathy at 35,000 feet: staging immersive art onboard a transatlantic flight', FLUX Magazine, 4 April. Available at: https://www.fluxmagazine.com/empathy-at-35000-feet-staging-immersive-art-onboard-a-transatlantic-flight/ (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
IMDb (no date) Sean Rogg: biography. Available at: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0737297/bio/ (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Rogg, S. (no date a) Sean Rogg - exhibitions. Available at: https://www.seanrogg.com/exhibitions.html (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Rogg, S. (no date b) Sean Rogg - media, publications, selected press & collections. Available at: https://www.seanrogg.com/publications_press_collections.html (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Rogg, S. (2026) Engineering empathy [Video]. CreativeMornings/LDN, 24 July. Available at: https://creativemornings.com/talks/sean-rogg (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Rosell, M. (2016) 'Sean Rogg, on the ritualistic passage of The Waldorf Project', CLOT Magazine, 15 December. Available at: https://clotmag.com/body-sculptures/sean-rogg (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Templar Lewis, K. (2016) 'Radical immersive art "The Waldorf Project" redefines the human experience', Vice, 15 November. Available at: https://www.vice.com/en/article/radical-art-redefines-human-experience-waldorf-project/ (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Waldorf Project (no date a) Sean Rogg presents The Waldorf Project. Available at: https://waldorfproject.com/ (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Waldorf Project (no date b) The Waldorf Project | Chapter Five. Available at: https://tickets.waldorfproject.com (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
Waldorf Project [@waldorf_project] (no date) Instagram profile. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/waldorf_project/ (Accessed: 22 September 2026).
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