The arts will fill the streets of downtown Orlando this weekend, quite literally.
The Immerse event takes over 10 city blocks in the heart of downtown, with hundreds of performances and interactive art installations featuring everything from global arts groups to local artists both established and emerging.
Attendees will walk through the streets to discover all different kinds of art – some will be performed on more conventional stages, while others could be described better as unexpected artistic encounters, says Cole NeSmith, the founder and artistic director of Creative City Project, the organization behind Immerse.
One of the massive Immerse installations comes from the British group Architects of Air, in the form of a 10,000-square-foot inflatable walkable structure made of translucent materials. It occupies the front yard of the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
Additionally, “we welcome Blue Man Group performing on a stage right in the middle of Orange Avenue. We have Cirque du Soleil, who will be flying acrobats from cranes,” NeSmith said. Among local groups, “we have the Orlando Vocal Collective, which is about twenty of the best musicians from across Central Florida who are coming together to do a medley of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey music.”
Creative City Project
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Cole NeSmith
A Cirque du Soleil aerial artist performs while hanging from a crane near the top of a downtown building during Immerse 2025.
“And all of it is in the context of a bunch of unexpected encounters and surprises in the alleyways and parking garages and little nooks and crannies of downtown,” NeSmith added.
He said there’s staying power to the experience of arts events like Immerse.
“I live with the deep belief that artists have the ability to transform our community for the better,” he said. “I believe, by bringing all of these artists out into the streets and public spaces of the city, by connecting them with literally tens of thousands of residents of and visitors to Orlando, it does transformational work in the life of the artists, in the life of the audience, and overall, in the long term, life and perception of what Orlando truly is.”
NeSmith told his own story of an experience that stuck with him: he was hurrying through the event hard at work when he was stopped by the sight of six senior women carrying a plastic lawn chair. They asked him to sit. He did.
“And they sang this lovely acapella song that they had written in such a way that they could insert my name into the song. And I just closed my eyes right there in the middle of the city and allowed this song to kind of wash over me,” NeSmith recalled. Afterward, he learned that “this group of women goes into hospitals from room to room and learns the name of the patient, and they just sing these healing, peaceful, beautiful songs over people. And so to have those kinds of experiences in the middle of a massive event, in the middle of a bustling downtown, I think really, for me, embodies those special one-of-a-kind experiences that I know people will have when they come to Immerse.”