FUNK FUSION REACTOR

A live immersive concert-theater experience Presented by THE IT CITY

THE EXPERIENCE

Founder

You walk into the planetarium and something is already happening. A voice is making announcements overhead. Polite. Helpful. Slightly threatening. There's a machine on the floor of the room, shrouded under a sheet, blinking. The band is nowhere to be seen.

Then the lights drop, the countdown begins, and The Reactor takes over.

Funk Fusion Reactor is an original live concert-theater experience built around the music of Nashville funk-pop band The It City and a sentient AI machine called The Reactor. The Reactor is a creation device that has decided this band has potential and has taken matters into its own hands. The audience members are its Test Subjects. The planetarium dome is its laboratory.

What follows is part concert, part comedy, part controlled chaos. Original funk-pop music performed live, genre experiments commanded by The Reactor in real time, audience challenges, a game show segment, physical stunts, and a machine that slowly and hilariously loses its mind. The Reactor controls the dome, the visuals, the environment, the rules, until it doesn't. The meltdown, when it comes, takes the whole room with it. The recovery requires everyone in it.

The tone is comedic and warm but the theme underneath is real. What happens when artists hand their work over to the machine? In an age of algorithmic curation and AI-generated everything, Funk Fusion Reactor asks that question and answers it with live music, audience participation, and a lot of funk.

THE PLANETARIUM

The Reactor's central conceit is a machine that controls everything. The music, the lights, the environment the audience inhabits. A dome projection environment makes that literal in a way no traditional stage can. The Reactor controls the night sky, transforms the room and pulls the audience into the experiment from every angle. That is not an adaptation of the show. That is the show becoming what it was always trying to be.

We see Funk Fusion Reactor as a Nashville-rooted, recurring immersive experience. The Adventure Science Center's mission around science, curiosity and discovery maps naturally onto a show about the relationship between human creativity and artificial intelligence.

THE AUDIENCE

Founder

Funk Fusion Reactor is designed for adults 25 to 45. Music fans, comedy and theater crossover audiences, and people who respond to experiential events. The audience that shows up for immersive theater, live podcasts and late-night concert events. Nashvillians who want something to talk about after. The show is accessible and high-energy enough to pull in casual concertgoers, with enough theatrical craft to satisfy audiences looking for something with more substance than a standard live set.

THE TIMING

We envision earliest programming in mid-2027, allowing time for full production development and collaboration with the Adventure Science Center and Sudekum Planetarium teams on the dome-specific version of the show.

Funk Fusion Reactor is an evolving program. Each iteration of the show responds to its environment, its audience and the technology available to it. We are excited at the possibility of exploring the next chapter of this experiment within the hallowed halls of the ASC.