Catching Up With Jesse Gazic: ‘The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly’
Jesse Gazic is a Toronto-based game designer, theatre maker, and Queen’s alum—and this summer, he’s been leading a puzzling adventure to catch an elusive butterfly in High Park.
When I first arrived at Queen’s in 2014, I thought Gazic was the coolest person in the very grown-up-seeming cohort of third-year drama students. Though our paths have seldom crossed since he graduated—he’s somewhat elusive himself—I recently managed to catch Gazic for an interview, where we spoke about formative immersive theatre experiences, Kingston’s first escape room, and his latest project, Lockwood Immersive.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As an undergraduate student at Queen’s, Gazic studied in the Stage and Screen program, taking courses in Drama as well as Film and Media. “I came in with a very traditional understanding of theatre, and a very limited one, just owing to my growing up in a small town.” It was thanks to a fellow student—one of those upper-year cool kids—that Gazic first encountered non-traditional theatre. “In my first year of undergrad, I had a really wonderful TA named Aimee Bouchard. She encouraged all of us to come see the show she was working on with a company called Colliding Scopes, which produced interactive, immersive, site-specific theatre.
“So I went to a school not far from campus and saw their interactive production of Peter Pan, which had audiences running through the halls, making choices about whether to follow the Lost Boys or follow Wendy, [stumbling] into the mermaid grotto… I was really captivated by the idea that theatre could have this whole extra dimension that no one seemed to be talking about in my courses. From that, I was hooked.”
Gazic soon got involved with Colliding Scopes—one of many student theatre troupes that would end up disbanding during the pandemic—where audience interaction and problem-solving became central to his creative work. “I remember we did an adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The audience was split between Big Brother stamping out the Rebellion and [members of] the Rebellion sneaking around the facility. I was putting in puzzles and challenges for the audience to decode. I was sort of trying to morph theatre and games, before I even had the vocabulary to understand what that could mean.”
That vocabulary would appear with the arrival of Improbable Escapes in July 2015. “When they first opened, I had no idea what an escape room was. I loved video games—I’ve loved video games since I was a kid—and saw that they were advertising this sort of interactive game experience. So I took a couple of friends, and that was another lightbulb moment—oh my God, you can actually have a game that’s happening in 3D space around you that has a storyline and a whole adventure baked into it.”
These experiences in Kingston led Gazic to seek out opportunities to work in escape rooms after graduation. Now, after seven years working at one of Toronto’s biggest escape room companies, Gazic and one of his co-workers have decided to branch out and start their own company, Lockwood Immersive. “We’re interested in getting a little weirder, making more niche stuff. If escape rooms have puzzles, we want to go puzzlier. If some of these experiences have actor interaction, we want to push that even further. We want to see what we can do to take things up a notch.”
Lockwood Immersive’s first project is The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly, which runs through the end of September. “It’s sort of an immersive scavenger hunt. You get to explore High Park, you meet this Victorian naturalist character with a pith helmet and a butterfly net, and he sends you on a research expedition to track down this fabled butterfly and see if we can prove that it’s real once and for all. So you’re solving puzzles, interacting with characters—and actually learning a little bit about the history of High Park, which I’m a big fan of—all on your quest to find this last species.”
Jesse Gazic is an immersive designer and writer based in Toronto. He graduated from the Stage and Screen Studies program at Queen’s University, where he directed, wrote, and performed in a variety of experimental theatre. His work spans live events, interactive performance, escape games, and TTRPGs. In 2024, he co-founded Lockwood Immersive with the aim of creating new interdisciplinary work in the world of immersive entertainment.
‘The Hunt for the Brightwing Butterfly’ runs until Sunday, September 22, 2024. Tickets and more information can be found here.
