29ROOMS: A WAY TO EXPLORE, CONNECT & UPLEVEL YOUR LIFE

A lot of the approach and DNA of that first year is still true to 29Rooms today, but now that we have this captivated global audience, we think of the possibilities of what 29Rooms can do as an event in a much bigger way.

We can make a measurable impact for causes we believe in like registering our attendees to vote with The New York Mayor’s Office last year or sending out thousands of postcards from our guests to their local representatives in our room with The Women’s March. When we started to tour 29Rooms last year and bring it to new cities, one goal we had was to make space for the creative communities in those markets. For example, we’re working with Trap Bob and Jamea Richmond-Edwards for the Washington DC stop of the Expand Your Reality tour. And of course, because 29Rooms was built to put our audience at its center, we continue to hear from them on what they would love to see, whether it’s more opportunities for introspection, more performance or more group activities.

When is the last time you picked up a paintbrush, repeated an affirmation out loud, really thought about your teenage bedroom or actually connected with a stranger? Those are all experiences guests can have here.

There are rooms local to DC that will give guests a chance to see their city, culture and community celebrated and reimagined into some of our spaces. Come see the work of Jamea Richards and Trap Bob, two young women artists of color from DC and dance with performers and music curated to the DC area. For guests who follow and love Refinery29 online, it may be their first time to see and feel our brand in real life with rooms that are dedicated to R29 initiatives like Unbothered, our platform for black millennial women, and Shatterbox, Refinery29’s ongoing film initiative to support female directors in Hollywood.

For the tour, we’ve pushed a lot of experiences to be exclusively interactive and hands-on so that guests have to engage with themselves and strangers in real-time.

You’ll be challenged to open up in rooms like 29Questions, a led question and answer experience between two strangers or Blind Date With Destiny, an anonymous palm reading room experience. And then there are rooms that invite more introspection, like “Love Letter to Your Inner Child” where guests write a note to their childhood selves or Kali Uchis’ “Dream Doorways” which lets guests step into Kali’s own surreal dreamscapes.

Knowing that people come to 29Rooms wanting to create and capture content and we’re now inviting them to get hands-on with each other or reflect on themselves, Expand Your Reality is also about expanding our audiences and even our own expectations of what 29Rooms is and could be.

But finding time to really feed your creativity when you have no time is something I can definitely empathize with. One of my favorite truths I’ve heard recently was, “Your diet is more than what you eat, it’s what you watch, listen to, read….” from the poet Saul Williams.

There are so many un-inspired decisions we have to tackle in a day and so much routine so rather than trying to carve out time that I might not have, I try to think about how I can be a little more ambitious in the choices, plans, responsibilities I already have in front of me. There are probably cuisines you’ve never tried two blocks from your office. Your standing dinner and a movie with friends could be dinner and a play instead. Those are low-stakes! But I sometimes need to remind myself that creative choices or the decision to do things differently are within reach for me every day and they are for anybody.

We went through a lot of possible cities for the tour but a big factor in deciding is demand and where the R29 digital audience is, knowing that 29Rooms is a chance for our fans in these cities to connect with our brand in person.

And we’ve had an amazing roster of talent including artists like Petra Collins, Signe Pierce, Lizzo, and Shantell Martin who we worked with earlier on in their careers and are now these global talents.

29Rooms is definitely a broadcast moment for younger artists to a live audience AND a massive social audience which is the added magic of 29Rooms. Aside from exposure and press, 29Rooms can open up the possibility of future brand collaborations and other experiential projects for artists.

Uzumaki Cepeda, who we built a reimagined teenage bedroom with for Expand Your Reality, for example, recently collaborated with Facebook and Instagram on installations of her work. And for artists who haven’t brought their work to life three-dimensionally or in a physical space before 29Rooms adds a whole other level of possibility to their medium. We’ve created a womb-like sanctuary with poet Cleo Wade and a guided-meditation experience with poet Rupi Kuar, using their poetry as the audio and guide to a physical built room experience.

We’ve worked with some amazing organizations, from Planned Parenthood, GLAAD, and the ACLU, and we think about their rooms as a chance to not just share their mission but actually ignite action around it.

A great example of that is our 2018 room with The Women’s March called “Hear Our Voice” that I mentioned earlier. The room itself was inspired by a collaboration we’d done with them and 30 emerging artists earlier in the year to create posters women could march with. We used that art as the hero design element of their room and then wanted to think about ways we could mobilize our guests on-site. We printed 20,000 postcards and provided information for local representatives across the country so people could live write a card to their rep in the room and leave it for us to mail. We mailed thousands and thousands of cards out at the end of last year’s tour. I love that the room gave us impact we could track in numbers and then shined a little light for our guests on one way to make contact and be heard politically.

I do yoga at the same studio twice a week with one friend without fail and I have another friend who we commit to seeing one play a month together, as examples. It adds some accountability because I’m showing up for someone else while always keeping those activities, whether its exercise or seeing art, fun for me.

THM: And there you have it – a bit of a backstage pass to 29Rooms from the thought-leader herself, Olivia Fagon.

Be sure to check out the links below providing information on ticket sales, the 29Rooms website and Instagram account. I have also rounded up some popular and well-rated books on creativity for you as well below.

We thank you, Olivia, for your generosity of time and fascinating insight into 29Rooms! And, I especially loved hearing your smart advice on incorporating creativity and healthy habits into our everyday.  From one health-minded individual to another, I wish you the very best in 29Rooms here in DC and elsewhere and with all your healthy living pursuits.

ALL PHOTO CREDITS COURTESY OF REFINERY29

SHOP CREATIVE TOOLS

Check out these top-rated books and other fun tools to spark more creativity in your life: