Open World Theatre
The founding brand and the training hub for the Academy.
About the Institute
An institute for human possibility.
Open World develops and applies practices that help people perceive more possibilities, widen their range, act with greater agency, and take part intelligently in uncertain and changing conditions.
Purpose
Why it exists.
Mission
To expand the range of possibilities people can perceive, inhabit and bring into reality.
Central question
What helps human possibility become actual?
The work sits where human interaction, experiential learning, leadership, theatre, game design, embodiment, real-world questing and research meet.
Its long-term aim is to be an institution in which research, public practice, leadership development and cultural experiment keep informing one another, and which can continue beyond its founder.
Origin
Life was always the subject.
Atlas Talisman founded Open World Theatre in 2014. Despite the name, it was never a theatre company in the usual sense. From the beginning it used theatre as a lens for studying human behaviour, interaction, identity, assumption and reality.
Over the next twelve years it grew as a community practice, in the rehearsal room and out in the world: embodiment, human interaction and collective intelligence indoors, and real-world questing through streets, cities and unfamiliar countries.
The Open World Institute is the professional and public form of that practice: one way Open World Theatre serves the world. The Theatre remains the founding brand and the methodological heart of the work.
About the founder2014
Open World Theatre founded.
2023–24
A training space in the Northern Rivers welcomes more than 100 participants over eight months.
2026
The Open World Institute opens as the public home for four departments.
Structure
Four equal departments.
Social
Practise, play and connect.
Immersive
Enter experiences you help create.
Executive
Develop human capability through change.
Research
Investigate how possibility becomes reality.
The Academy is the training context that runs alongside them. Its curriculum, the Orbits, supports all four departments without sitting above any of them.
Method
The room, then the world.
The context becomes the content.
People live inside roles and scripts shaped by family, work, culture and expectation, and mostly do not see them. A theatrical frame slows those patterns down enough to notice: who assumes authority, who waits for permission, who disappears, who rescues.
Because the frame is temporary, people can try what they would otherwise avoid. The bodies, feelings and relationships inside it are still real. When the sense of an exercise falls away and something sincere enters the room, theatre has become a laboratory for Life.
Then the frame comes off. A quest takes the same attention into the real world, with real strangers, places and consequences, to read what a situation is offering and act on it. Theatre is the training wheels. Questing is where the practice is tested.
Stop acting. Start living.
Ecosystem
The wider Open World.
Several brands and tools extend the work. They are related to the Institute and distinct from its departments.
Peculiarity Engine
A digital field tool for questing and real-world experimentation.
Viicariius
A public questing game in which people online help guide a person acting in the world.
Open World Computer
The technology arm behind the software that grows out of the work: questing tools, dashboards, research and field-record systems, and custom participatory platforms.
Open World Labs
The name under which advanced practice labs are presented: inquiries into territories where meaning, desire, authority and identity are hard to talk about. Programme details are still being set.
Stormborn.tech
Equipment for modern adventure, growing out of the gear used to move through the world, record and livestream. Not yet open.
Rigorous enough to trust. Strange enough to interrupt habit.
The deeper worldview behind the work has its own page, kept separate from anything we would call a finding.