John Bechtold and his co-creator Alli Ross created Where I End & You Begin, immersive theater that sends two participants on a tandem journey across MASS MoCA’s galleries and campus in North Adams, Massachusetts.

This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2025. 
Below, John discusses the work.

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Developed in a multi-year artist residency at MASS MoCA, we created a novel work of theater for two wirelessly-connected participants. Our goal was to combine locative audio technology with the tools of immersive theater to bring our participants into poignant connection with one another and the world around them. In a time of routine disconnect and digital distraction, we see Where I End & You Begin as connective tissue for the smallest unit of relation possible – the dynamic between you and one other person.

The technology that enables this connection is a bespoke ECHOES app with the unique ability to tether two devices to one another. This synchronizes the participants’ separate but related soundtracks as they travel the museum buildings and grounds, together and apart, to uncover the interwoven journey for them both.

The result of our years-long exploration of MASS MoCA and its distinctive spaces is an 85-minute tandem promenade through its historic galleries, buildings and grounds, all framed by the conjoining branches of the Hoosic River. The outer landscape, fascinating in its own right, begins to magnify and connect the participants’ inner experiences from their respective journeys. As a whole, Where I End & You Begin is equal parts meditative sound walk, shared theatrical adventure, and cinematic dreamscape.  

The site-responsive soundscore and narrative arc guides participants with mindful direction from a voice in their ears that may or may not be their own thoughts. This mystery is one more part of a rich immersive world that overlays with the touch-real reality of the museum spaces. Participants have described the resulting experience as “first-person cinema” for them and their co-protagonist. The synchronized, theatrical world that links the pair as they weave in and out of one another’s stories gestures towards a sense of relational identity – one that defines us through the connections to the people in our lives and the awe-inspiring world we inhabit.

Note: This article does not need to be read in sequence, or all of the way through. After reading the introduction, readers are encouraged to jump to sections of personal interest as they like.

Origins

Where I End & You Begin was developed through a multi-year residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams, Massachusetts. The core question that Alli, my co-creator, and I were asked to explore was straight-forward enough: How could locative audio be used to transform an attendee’s experience at the museum?

Our response was to make a theatrical work that invited two participants on interwoven audio journeys. The separate journeys separate and reconnect over 85 minutes as they travel through the campus’s 19th century buildings, galleries, and the adjoining Hoosic River. Their synchronization, we realized, could turn two separate experiences into a shared one.

MASS MoCA’s varied spaces and our site-responsive sound score established a dreamlike maze for participants to lose and re-find one another in this walk. Our site explorations prompted much of the material of the show.  Early on, participants take a parallel walk through a gallery from opposite walls, tracking each other as they move. This tandem action was found by the shape and form of the gallery and became a foundational part of the show. 

Having found Josh and the ECHOES team while building a suite of audiowalks called Promenades during the pandemic, I explored how its rules-based parameters could be used to make the spaces responsive to our participants. As the Creative Director of Eggtooth Productions, I commissioned a custom app that could wirelessly tether a pair of phones for the duration of a walk to keep both participant soundtracks synchronized. That way, participants could follow individual storylines while engaging in the work’s synchronous, location-aware soundscape.  

We found that synchronizing two participants in separate experiences created a visceral response for both by reinforcing one another’s worlds. We experimented with encounters that could become gently choreographed, guiding participants in and out of each other’s lives, often in unexpected ways. This brought an intimacy into the work that spoke to themes of isolation and deep connection.  

This dynamic is also what establishes a safe, theatrical world with room for engaging relationships, unexpected reveals – and even a few props. In one moment, a participant initiates a delightful connection by dropping a gift – perfectly synchronized – into the other’s waiting hands from an overhead balcony. Simple as it sounds, the playfulness and surprise of the moment has been a favorite for many and representative of the work as a whole.

Important to the origin of the show was the nature of our collaboration: Alli and I met in 2009 as students in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and, at the same time, as members of Punchdrunk’s American debut of Sleep No More in nearby Brookline, where I worked on the production crew and Alli originated and performed the role of Lady MacDuff.  Our shared design language and friendship allowed us to approach this work with trust in one another’s sensibilities and our capacity to create something difficult and novel. 

Once Sam Perry, another friend and collaborator, came on board as our score composer, we had the capacity we needed to complete the picture. Meanwhile, we found additional support from other core Eggtooth members – Linda Tardif and Marina Goldman frequently came out with us to test show routes in its early phases.  

The final piece of the puzzle was put in place when Eggtooth – led by artistic director Linda McInerney – connected with MASS MoCA to help establish the framework for our artist residency, which Alli and I began in 2023. In addition, I was happy to commission a former student and Tanglewood Fellow, Sasha Yakub, to compose a site-responsive choral work for the finale of the show.  

The project’s budget was secured with the MoCA residency funds and additional support from Eggtooth Productions, who helped purchase much of the show’s hardware and devices as we invest more deeply into this technological format.  

Awe

Aristotle named spectacle as one of the core components of stage drama, understanding that the audience’s visceral experience was a prerequisite for catharsis. In Where I End & You Begin, the participants’ early fascination with their synchronization expands into awe by way of their moving bodies going ever-deeper into the world of the show. This sustained act of theatrical attention allowed room for a slow-evolving state of wonder. Participants often cite an out-of-time feeling that one audience member described as a “focused daze.”

Theater offers a gateway to another world through moments of awe – some of them expansive, others more discrete. In the first minutes, participants conduct a choreographed pinky-swear as they vow to look out for one another. The simple magic, reminiscent of childhood but done in synchrony, invited participants to move into the show world on their terms.

This requires a personal buy-in from each participant – and the mutual trust that the other will do the same. A MASS MoCA curator told us after doing the walk that the work “makes a serious ask of the audience”; we couldn’t agree more. The show’s various rituals gave room for audiences to participate in its magic. This is something children do all of the time and without effort, of course. The rest of us benefit from the creative scaffolding that art can offer.

Dramaturgy

Our interest in theater and relational identity found its form through a rich discussion of works led by I and Thou by Martin Buber and the poems of Jane Hirshfield. Research on the history of the people of this land, particularly its longstanding indigenous population, and the ecology of the adjacent Hoosic River proved essential for placing the show against a larger backdrop. Alli’s background in somatic practice and Laban movement work helped us investigate the ambulatory experience of moving through these spaces. Along with Henri Bergson’s notions of time and durée (more below) and Simone Weil’s interest in attention as an act of love, these languages became the conceptual cornerstones of the work.

The artworks within MASS MoCA’s 23.000 square meters of gallery space inflect the show at a number of moments, including several where a participant engages in a reverie with a discrete artwork, often through a dialogue of mindful, slow attention. Some of our participants have a years-long familiarity with these works; a number of them reported experiencing them in a wholly new lens. The show avoids contextualizing the artworks until the post-show credits so as to keep them nested in the theatrical dreamscape. Afterwards, the credits identify the works audiences spent time with by name, highlighting the artist and some meaningful context about the work that situates it in the Museum’s programming. 

We see the show’s layers as telescopic – they can move participants through its myriad locations while selectively guiding their attention to other layers of time and space.

As immersive theater makers, we understood that re-lensing MASS MoCA meant finding a way to relate to these spaces as fellow subjects in the show.  For us, space is the first and largest character. The introduction of a person into a space is the start of a theatrical relationship.

But for something to ignite enough to call it theater, there must be a live encounter. As a potentially long-term installation in the museum, we had no means to support a long-term cast. That meant the live encounter needed to come from somewhere else.

The smallest unit of theatrical encounter is the dynamic between two people. At that level of intimacy, the roles of audience and performer become slippery. An unspoken dialogue forms through the act of mutual, realtime attention. This ever-shifting dynamic became a fundamental and generative question for us to explore.

Portal

We believe that a work of immersive theater should bring an audience member over a threshold into the world of the show. This crossing-over can take many shapes; however it happens, it must be visceral enough for the body to buy in and leave the everyday world behind.  

After participants are outfitted with the show equipment (a show-issued phone with the app, a shoulder bag, a pair of headphones), their devices sync, cueing the opening music and a narrating voice. An amiable guide invites listeners to stare into the river’s currents as they learn the history surrounding them, suggestive of an audio tour.  It’s only after this preface when the participants are separated that they come to understand that the show is going to be about something deeper.  

With the promise of a ritual to be completed and the mystery of sharing a private experience amidst a sea of unaware museum attendees, participants are engaged in the physical world around them while operating on this other frequency. The guided acts of attention narrowed the audience’s focus to the immediacy of sound and space.  As participants engaged in these acts, they built their own portal into the show.

Soundscape

We built much of the show world by overlaying it with the physical environment. We did this through sound: on-site field recordings, original music, and a thoughtfully-developed script. Our composer, Sam, spent countless days wandering MASS MoCA with us to feel out the sonic palette of the show, space by space. We knew that the piece had a cinematic quality, enhanced by the many frames found amidst its former factory buildings.  We knew the sound needed to help you step into a dream. The soundtrack needed to carry audiences in the show world without emotionally over-manipulating them.  

Brian Eno said in an interview that, at its heart, “music is feeling.”  Because the internal landscape of the show is amplified through the sensory experience of the participants, music was a way for feeling to combine with physical space. The score runs seamlessly through the entire show, with music paired to location and marking movements into new spaces. Sounds varied from spare notes on a piano to layered, ambient soundscapes. One audience member commented on how “perfect” they thought the music was in how they were rarely consciously aware of it.  Instead, they said, the music “just felt like what I was feeling”.

Making music for the ever-varied MoCA spaces was done through lengthy experimentation. Sam, Alli and I explored the psychology of those spaces in tandem with the script. Our approach was to think of the sound as a film score that could guide a participant’s inner experience while shaping it with text and space.

Occasionally, we let the sound surge into the foreground. One example comes when the participants enter a grand, silo-shaped building and listen to a choral work (composed for this work by Sasha Yakub) recorded on-site two years ago. Amidst its rippling acoustic reflections, the sonic experience joined with the space to create a feeling of suspended time.

The quality of the audio, including narration, was an important detail for us.  The final script was recorded by Alli and me with Andrew Oedel as our studio engineer at Ghost Hit Recording.  For the audiophiles out there, we recorded on Soyuz 017 microphones, while binaural field recordings were recorded with the 3dio Freespace microphone on site at MASS MoCA to capture room tones and environmental sound.

Time

In our soundwalk, a gap widens between chronological and experienced time. Henri Bergson called the internal sense of time durée – an inner experience of moving through time that couldn’t be frozen into measurable moments. It had its own flow, its own pace and a sense of direction. It was not a force to be quantified; it was intuition giving form to experience.  

We knew we wanted the work to run at least 40 minutes – long enough that the soundscore could inhabit the body and shift one’s experience of time to the subjective world of the show. The music and walking cadences set a meditative and somatic tone intended to heighten the physical senses. The sensory elevation meant that anything the audience experienced would amplify. We think this is why a common descriptor of the emotional experience of the show is the word “powerful.”

In the show, time operates with a dream logic through its suspensions, leaps, and repetitions. In one instance, an estranged participant lands in a location where both were earlier to experience a surprising moment of isolated déjà vu.  Drones, rhythmic pulses and other musical approaches across the show are used in this and other ways to keep time in a fluid state.  

We  found that guiding participants into present awareness with their environment – and rewarding that with discovery or insight – is an effective way to keep them in a heightened experience of time. One measure of this came from a participant who told us that our 85-minute show was the longest period that they had spent in recent memory where they hadn’t thought once about their phone.

History

Opening up the history of MASS MoCA made the theatrical world more expansive. At the top of the show, the narrator first draws attention to the details of the former factory buildings. The buildings sit at the convergence of the North and South branches of the Hoosic River where the Mohican and Wabanaki tribes resided for 5000 years.  The Hoosic River itself is 18,000 years old. Against that telescoping backdrop used across the show, participants gain a new understanding of how flexibly the present moment can expand into the long history of a place. 

As many attendees come to MASS MoCA from a distance to visit, we felt it was important that our work helped locate them in a broader sense of place and history. The opening of the show begins as a fact-filled tour of the Museum through a historic lens as participants orient themselves to the Hoosic River. The commitment to place honors its history while expanding the theatrical setting.

To learn more about the many stories of this place, we consulted with Andy Schlatter, the director of Buildings and Grounds and MASS MoCA, Judy Grinnell, the founder of Hoosic River Revival, among others. From a local perspective, some of our most enjoyable research came from the stories of current museum attendants who worked for Sprague Electric, the previous occupant of these spaces, fifty years ago, which included details on spacecraft components for the Voyager missions and, startlingly, parts for the first atom bomb.  

On our show history: we’ve been in residency at MASS MoCA since 2023, which has afforded us hundreds of hours on-site, learning about everything from the HVAC systems to the total number of windows around campus (2015!).  We’ve walked with the Hoosic branches to their upstream tributaries and watched them enter the flood chutes that cut through North Adams. We have weirdly specific knowledge of individual trees on campus, the construction history of the Hoosic flood chutes, the changing colors of bricks on the gallery walls, and the remains of structures buried beneath the asphalt. This deep connection to a place we’ve come to love continues to reward and surprise to the present day.

Technology

The show was developed for a bespoke ECHOES-based app called Ampersand, which debuted a new “Time Sync” feature. This feature allowed us to tether two phones over Bluetooth to synchronize their individual soundtracks, even as participants went on separate legs of their shared journey. That also meant developing solutions for keeping participants in sync, despite the logistical challenges for both tracks that included everything from unpredictable elevator timings to anticipating an array of walking paces.   

While the hardware and software innovations belong to the hard work of Josh and the ECHOES team, the method for theatrically interweaving two synchronous but separate soundwalks was our invention. We worked through detailed show maps, intricately-specific rulesets in ECHOES, observations of attendees moving through museum spaces, and many hours of experimentation and revision. We worked at length with the still-evolving technology of iBeacons and a full repertoire of ECHOES parameters to make the work as responsive and accommodating as possible. 

Technology can both improve and restrict access to work. To that end, we purchased a small fleet of iPhone SEs as the exclusive devices used for the show. We purchased high-quality over-ear headphones with noise cancellation features and ample flexibility to accommodate hearing aids. Prioritizing this equipment allowed us to unify the hardware while taking the onus off of participants to provide their own devices. This also meant that equity gaps based on people’s personal devices could effectively be erased, and the anxieties of managing one’s own tech could be lifted.

The first two acts take place indoors in multistory factory buildings, necessitating the extensive use of beacons, while the third act takes participants outdoors with GPS-based echoes.  All three acts contain moments of unexpected intersection for the two participants. Our lengthy experience with this technology has helped us build these moments dramatic into highlights of the piece.

The show design contains a backup system for audience members that might miss a direction and directional language designed to be accessible to as many people as possible. Refinements have continued across two years, based on a volume of audience feedback.

Well-Being

Many of the social structures that had previously made space for meaningful in-person relationships have deteriorated with the proliferation of digital social platforms. We wanted our work to provide a meaningful counterbalance to this.  At its essence, the show is a movement score for two people, using locative audio and some lyrical text. The simplicity of the concept allowed the work to serve as a kind of interrelational scaffolding that provides a space for deep connections with another person.

Several audience members have described the piece as “therapeutic”; other common descriptors we get are “intimate” and “meditative.” This comes from the show context, which explores the connection to others and to space as the essential characteristics of one’s identity.  

In this expansive sense of self, participants can transform. Many have expressed seeing one another in new ways (“How are we supposed to just talk to one another now?!” exclaimed a recent participant afterwards) and feeling an elevated sense of empathy for others around them.

The strongest parts create visible awe and wonder in the participants. Several beats have become moments where attendees are consistently moved. We can often identify our participants from a distance by how they carry their bodies. After the show has concluded, many participants immediately turn and hug one another. 

Accessibility through design is a central feature. From the early development of stair-free routes, built-in rest points, and show-supplied hardware, we’ve worked to devise a piece available to a wide array of people. Dozens of recorded interviews with participants have helped us craft a well-tested directional language from their feedback.  We’ve also tested the work with caregivers and their headphones-connected child traveling alongside them, so that families might more readily access the experience.

Walking¹

Across all cultures, walking has been used as a meditative act. There’s something about being conveyed through space that helps us make sense of moving through our inner lives. From the sacred pilgrimages in the world’s oldest religions to providing inspiration for writers and thinkers across time, walking has been used to help us reflect, connect, and create.  

In Where I End & You Begin, the act of walking is part of a sustained somatic state, enhanced by locative audio. In a traditional stage play, pace is set by line delivery, stage transitions, and scene lengths. In an immersive work like this, show pace is set by a rhythmless, ambient soundscore which guides the pace of the walker into the show’s dreamworld.  
As Where I End & You Begin develops across its three acts, the walking patterns shift from shorter, mazelike wanderings through one building into the expansive spaces of another before culminating in an outdoor procession that guides the participants over the Hoosic River.  In the final scene, audiences are guided into stillness, music, and a now silent narrating voice. Over their 85-minute experience, the stillness that concludes the show becomes space for deep presence, held by the shared attention of the connected participants.

Credits

Where I End & You Begin

@ MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, United States
Created by John Bechtold & Alli Ross
Soundscore by Sam Perry
Choral composition by Sasha Yakub
Software development by ECHOES.xyz
Recorded at Ghost Hit Recording, Andrew Oedel, recording engineerCo-Produced with Eggtooth Productions, Linda McInerney, artistic director

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The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2025 will be announced around the start of 2026.

1. We use the word “walking” in its most expansive form to mean any movement at a pedestrian pace, encompassing those who are ambulating, using mobility aids like canes, walkers or wheelchairs. ↩︎