KAY
ABOUT KAY:
Kay Komizara is a Tiohtià:ke (Montreal)-based theatre creator, designer, improviser, writer, and director. Since 2013, Kay has been producing original performance work, and since 2018 they have been bringing those theatre-based storytelling skills into video game development as a narrative designer. Their work draws on anarchism, Daoism, and cybernetics to build stories that are formally inventive, emotionally effective, and generative, inviting others not only to experience a world, but to imagine creating their own.
THE PROJECT:
Passing Streams is a surreal XR / game-like race in which the participant is asked a series of subtle preference questions before being sent down a stream that seems to promise movement, competition, and reward. As the race unfolds, it becomes clear that the participant is being forced into the wrong stream, while another path contains the things they actually relate to and desire. The experience uses playful mechanics, branching routes, collectables, and a sense of mounting pressure to explore the emotional reality of being pushed into a life-path that does not fit.
The work is about trans experience, belonging, transition, sunk cost, and the difficult passage from childhood into adulthood. It captures the feeling of realizing that the identity or social role assigned to you is not yours, while also revealing the cost, danger, and vulnerability involved in choosing to change course. By turning those feelings into a navigable immersive system, Passing Streams makes visible the tension between conformity, desire, self-recognition, and the courage it takes to move toward a truer path.