Atlas9 brings a surreal interactive world full of neon and time travel to Legends

Courtesy Dimensional Innovations

If you’ve driven through the Legends area over the last several months, you may have noticed a huge, dark building looming over the landscape as you pull off of I-435. There it is, plopped between Great Wolf Lodge and Margaritaville: a mysterious black monolith with a logo the size of a two-story house emblazoned on the side reading “A9.” From the highway, it looks like it could be a Cineplex. Or, maybe, a shadowy government-run containment center for some Stranger Things-style supernatural threat.

As it turns out, it’s both. And also neither.

Art by Jack Allgeyer

Stick with me here.

The building is Atlas9, an interactive narrative art space in the Meow Wolf mold, where guests can explore a 46,000 square foot building featuring immersive art and puzzles, a pizza parlor, a speakeasy and more, all inspired by the magic of cinema. It’s the brainchild of Dimensional Innovations, a Kansas City-based firm that made its name in the 90s creating lobbies for AMC and Cinemark theaters (they’re partly responsible for the iconic swirly confetti/popcorn/film reel carpet patterns of your youth, which also decorate the lobby of the new building).

Since then, the company has moved on to design spaces and exhibits for hospitals, museums and sports stadiums, among other places. Locally you can see Dimensional Innovations’ work at the J. Reiger distillery, the downtown branch of the Kansas City Public Library and the National Museum of Toys and Miniatures.

“We wanted to come up with a story that not only Dimensional Innovations could tell, but that Kansas City would love. That’s why we landed on movies, and the theater itself,” Randall Statler, Dimensional Innovations’ executive creative director and the artistic director of Atlas9, says. “Kansas City has a history in movies and movie theaters. Dimensional Innovations does as well.”

Art by Jacob Burghart

Appropriately, the team at Dimensional Innovations created the story of the new space and built it out with the help of a number of local artists, including a number of familiar faces from Kansas City’s film scene. Local filmmaker Jacob Burghart, who co-wrote and directed the 2023 feature film Head Count alongside his brother Ben, is an associate creative director at Dimensional Innovations and helped develop Atlas9’s narrative, as well as some of the space’s film-specific details.

“We’re trying to hit the breadth of 100 years of movie magic and squeezing in different eras and genres,” Burghart says. “It’s been great, it’s kind of a dream to do what I love in a different way like this.”

The story inside Atlas9

Art by John Arnspiger

When you walk into Atlas9, you enter a nine-screen movie theater that’s currently under “containment” by a government agency called F.A.C.A.D.E. (Field Agency for the Control of Aberrations and Divergent Energies). Before it was encased in a giant cage, the story goes, Atlas9 was a movie theater struggling to stay relevant in the megaplex era. The theater’s projectionist started experimenting with a new, mysterious projector called the Holomax, which exploded on opening night. This caused the films showing at the theater to come alive, taking over the auditoriums, and causing other parts of the theater — concessions, offices, etc. — to experience all kinds of strange anomalies. You’ll encounter transmogrified ICEE cups, screaming trash cans and candy with faces, and that’s just for starters.

Visitors to Atlas9 are deputized by F.A.C.A.D.E. to track down the escaped anomalies by using wristbands to check in at points throughout the building. Visitors can track their progress in each space, gather clues to the whereabouts of the theater’s missing projectionist and manager, and get even more narrative details about any given room they enter.

“We were developing the storyline as we went and influencing it with ideas and what piqued different nostalgic feelings from our childhoods and finding ways to integrate that into the space,” Cory Hinesley, a Kansas City-based set designer who helped create some of Atlas9’s more narrative-heavy spaces, says. “There was a lot of laughing, quoting movies and mood boards. It was an astronomically fun process in my experience.”

The rooms Hinesley designed consist of the backstage spaces within Atlas9 — the projection booth, the manager’s office, storage room and break room — as well as a F.A.C.A.D.E. field station outside the theater. In contrast to the building’s more fantastical creations, these rooms are lived-in spaces that are a little more character-driven by design, prompting visitors to seek out clues as to what exactly happened here.

“I let my love for cinema narrate a lot of my design choices,” Hinesley says. “One of my biggest inspirations for the manager’s office was Twin Peaks.”

The brought-to-life movies at Atlas9 aren’t ones we’re familiar with; they’re made up specifically for the space, each one representative of a particular genre or era of moviemaking. Burghart says creating the story outlines and themes for these in-universe films wasn’t all that different from creating a real movie. In some ways, the conceptualization was his favorite part.

“For some filmmakers, developing the idea, making the storyboards, writing the scripts, all of that is so much fun because the movie is still perfect in your head. Once you start making it you start making compromises and that breaks your heart a little,” Burghart explains. “Here, all that stuff lives in the creative cooking area of thinking it up.”

Courtesy Dimensional Innovations

Each dedicated space gives you just enough information to put together what these movies, if they existed in our world, would be about. Scavengers is a late 90s/early 00s animated family film, represented by a giant two-story space cluttered with old toys and statues of cute animated critters. Starbot is an 80s sci-fi movie with a set that could belong in an Alien sequel. The look of magic-tinged noir The Trance of the Sapphire is inspired in part by Fritz Lang films and Nightmare Alley, with visitors walking through brick backstreets and ornately decorated parlors, complete with a mesmerizing hypnotist.

That hypnotist is one of several performers throughout the building from legendary local dance/performance art troupe Quixotic. Shows happen at varying times throughout the space, including in Atlas9’s art deco-inspired jazz club and 240-seat main auditorium.

“Quixotic added an amazing layer to this,” Statler says. “They’ve created live performances that interpret the films in ways that are visceral and in the moment. Throughout the experience, you might turn a corner and come face to face with a performer that’s uniquely dressed to be part of the room they are inhabiting.”

Courtesy Dimensional Innovations

To infinity and beyond

Atlas9 officially opens its doors Sept. 25, but what attendees encounter on their first visit is only the beginning of what the creative team hopes to do with the space. For one thing, there are more movies Burghart wants to see come to life in the yet-to-be-developed parts of the building.

Art by Jacob Burghart

“I’d love to see something like a Hallmark movie or a rom-com. I also think it’d be great to have a macho action movie, something goofy like The Fast and the Furious,” Burghart says. “When I start thinking about it, there’s lots of stuff I’d like to try.”

Statler says he already has future plans to use the main auditorium for outside events — he’s currently working with the Kansas City Art Institute to host a student animation film festival there.

“The whole venue is a love letter to the movie industry, so the theater we have in here is a unique place to celebrate creation of that kind of content,” he says. “We want it to be an avenue where creators can come in and keep it fresh. I don’t know what that theater will hold in two years, and I’m excited that we don’t know.”

Hinesley, for her part, says Atlas9 has been an opportunity to create evocative spaces attuned to her particular interests as an artist. Visitors to her areas may just find references to some of her favorite real life movies sprinkled in.

“There might be a golden ticket hidden somewhere, a mosquito trapped in amber, all these iconic things of the movies from the 70s, 80s and 90s,” Hinesley says. “There may or may not be a Holy Grail in a cupboard.”

Unlike a lot of Hinesley’s work, which usually gets dismantled after a shoot, what she’s created at Atlas9 will stick around for a while, which is an exciting prospect.

“Giving permanence to the kind of art that usually just lives on a screen has been so much fun,” she says. “It’s been a freakin’ joy.”