The Marriage of Ivan and Livvy

For our wedding we put on a scripted, custom-scored, multi-media live show, telling our story in a performance hall for our 500-ish guests. It’s our favorite thing we’ve ever made.

Having had an interest in live storytellings, live radio shows, and myself (Ivan) having dabbled in documentary film, as soon as we were engaged we began to think about how we could do something to capture why we love each other so much—how we had been friends for seven years—and how we eventually ended up getting together.

We knew from jump we had a very strong third act, so we dived into exploring story structures, reviewing our old letters, journal entries, photos, and videos to craft the most compelling setup possible.

After months of writing, editing, and revising, we locked in on the script and got to work commissioning a custom score for a string quartet and pianist to play behind key moments.

We also worked at designing motion graphics, photographing the letters, and editing footage to be shown on the screens, and got to practicing.

It was so much fun.

Some last-minute reviewing of the script.

Telling our story in our own words.

Concluding the story with a marriage ceremony.

Mostly lost to history as a result of inscrutable failures in video equipment, we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that with lack of proper documentation the event has passed onto legend. However, in the years after, we felt increasingly sad that we couldn’t share it our new friends—people who would definitely be invited were we to be getting married after we met them—so for our five year anniversary we performed a modest reprise, packing 30 people into our small, Somerville apartment to share the story again.

The audience in our Somerville apartment in 2019.

A still taken from the recording we successfully captured of the reprise.