The Seven Singing Statues are among the many New Waves Festival attractions

You’ll never know it from a Soulpepper production, but the Young Centre is cavernous and deep, with brick-lined walls beckoning from both floors. Saturday’s “artistic treasure hunt” known as the New Waves Festival (presented by Luminato), showcases the various spaces of the Young Centre, allowing audiences to interact with the art — or in some cases, make their own.

Twelve resident artists (among them, Waleed Abdulhamid, Weyni Mengesha and Noah Richler) helped to curate a multitude of performances centered in the space — which, on Saturday afternoon, is blossoming with families, old-guard theatergoers and artsy young things. Intimacy (both figurative and literal) is a touchstone here, with the “Artist in a Closet” project pulling audiences of two to eight into the Young Centre’s storage space. In “Espresshow,” festival goers are instructed to “sing for their supper" — as a cabaret-style piano plays a song of their choosing — in the time that it takes to whip up an Americano. And while the “Insta-Choir" spontaneously combines artists and audiences into functioning singing groups, a series of live cellphone plays are performed live around the clock (just dial in to hear them).

I lay down in a cot in a room full of strangers for “Bedtime Stories,” as a group of actors sing grown-up nursery rhymes. The ceiling is illuminated to resemble the night sky, with celestial light patterns mimicking the Milky Way. Another project, “The Invention Room,” led by Walter Haul/Toca Loca musician Gregory Oh, forces us to create impromptu interpretative dance ensembles — easily my biggest fear, until the sheer frivolity of our performance takes hold. (Let’s just say that once you mime rowing to a free-jazz glockenspiel, you start to feel a lot less self-conscious.) Closing my New Wave experience, a choir of actors — known as the Seven Singing Statues — harmonize to haunting jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” in the Young Centre’s grand atrium, wearing the oversized headpieces of national landmarks. It was like the rest of my New Waves experience — idiosyncratic, charming, strange, remarkable. What are you doing next weekend?