Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top

2016 | Book

Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance Read chapter Read first chapter

Reframing Immersive Theatre

The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

Editor: James Frieze

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Login to get access
insite
SEARCH

About this book

This diverse collection of essays and testimonies challenges critical orthodoxies about the twenty-first century boom in immersive theatre and performance. A culturally and institutionally eclectic range of producers and critics comprehensively reconsider the term ‘immersive’ and the practices it has been used to describe. Applying ecological, phenomenological and political ideas to both renowned and lesser-known performances, contributing scholars and artists offers fresh ideas on the ethics and practicalities of participatory performance. These ideas interrogate claims that have frequently been made by producers and by critics that participatory performance extends engagement. These claims are interrogated across nine dimensions of engagement: bodily, technological, spatial, temporal, spiritual, performative, pedagogical, textual, social. Enquiry is focussed along the following seams of analysis: the participant as co-designer; the challenges facing the facilitator of immersive/participatory performance; the challenges facing the critic of immersive/participatory performance; how and why immersion troubles boundaries between the material and the magical.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance
Abstract
In this volume, scholars working in various vocational contexts in countries including UK, US, Brazil, Spain and Belgium challenge key orthodoxies about immersive and participatory performance. It seemed for a while that no performance event in which the audience moved, or in which they were somehow surrounded or emplaced by the performance, failed to capitalise on the value of the term 'immersive'. The cachet of the term reflects a valorisation of cultural forms that offer the chance to do more than ‘just’ observe or study; they offer the chance to interact with, even to become, the object of attention. This offer projects an assumption that there is a cultural problem which the immersive claims to solve. If the problem projected by the immersive is a condition of spiritual and political detachment, the panacea is participatory form that will help us to re-connect, to re-attach with one another and with ourselves. Championing of the immersive as a form of personal and cultural reparation frequently asserts/implies that theatre itself needs to be woken up, to be re-attached to an agenda of embodied, interactive engagement. This assertion is made, for example, in what is—in its generosity of examples and its staking out the territory of the immersive—the closest thing we have to a textbook on the subject: Josephine Machon’s Immersive Theatres. Along lines broadly similar to Lehmann’s opposition of dramatic/post-dramatic theatre, Machon opposes immersive theatre, positioned as adventurous and dynamic, to ‘traditional’ theatre, positioned as stifling: ‘With immersive theatre the audience is removed from the “usual” set of rules and conventions expected from “traditional” theatrical performances’ (2013, 26).
James Frieze

Participant as Co-designer: Critical Reflections

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. On Being Immersed: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding
Abstract
Machon considers the ways in which immersive practice offers experiences of intimacy and immediacy in performance, which has evolved new approaches to audience interaction and appreciation as a result. The chapter begins with an overview of the key terms and defining features of immersive theatres, first introduced in Machon's Immersive Theatres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), to show the way in which such work prioritises embodied interaction in the event itself and in any consequent appreciation of the work. Machon’s (syn)aesthetic analysis of Adrian Howells’s The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding elucidates the practice further and offers critical reflections that address the risks and ultimate pleasures for the audience-immersant and artist-immersant alike.
This chapter is dedicated to the life and work of Adrian Howells (April 1962–March 2014).
Josephine Machon
Chapter 3. In the Body of the Beholder: Insider Dynamics and Extended Audiencing Transform Dance Spectatorship in Sleep No More
Abstract
Drawing on statements from Maxine Doyle, associate artistic director and choreographer of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (SNM) as well as reflections of SNM performers and spectators, Julia M. Ritter considers how dance practices are deployed to affect experiences of immersive performance by engendering and complicating agentive action, engagement, and investment in dance spectatorship. Ritter identifies a confluence of extended postmodern dance practices and insider dynamics (including complicity, porosity, contagion and inclusion) in Doyle’s choreographic strategies that afford possibilities for spectator agency and engagement, transforming audience experiences of dance spectatorship. Ritter proposes the term extended audiencing to describe how spectators continue their experiences of post-performance through reflection in social media postings and the creation of cultural products alongside the theatrical event.
Julia M. Ritter
Chapter 4. Troubling Bodies in Follow the North Star
Abstract
In this essay, Ruth Laurion Bowman recounts and analyses her experience participating in the immersive performance developed by Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, in Indiana, where visitors pay to play the part of nineteenth-century runaway slaves. Bowman draws on body, performance, and critical race theories to argue that the performance deactivates the agency of the fugitive slave while nonetheless implying that the experience is personal and relevant to the consumer. In this way, the park implements and profits from new service economy strategies and serves as a troubling model for how complex issues such as race and slavery are performed.
Ruth Laurion Bowman
Chapter 5. Experiencing Michael Mayhew’s Away in a Manger: Spectatorial Immersion in Durational Performance
Abstract
Half of this chapter comprises an account, written as a spectator in real time, of Michael Mayhew’s durational performance, Away in a Manger, in January 2012. The purpose of this writing as a practice was to induce what Georges Bataille calls ‘inner experience’, whereas the purpose of writing the complementary text was to chart the territory in which such immersiveness was able to occur. In a gallery set to a soundtrack of birdsong over a seven-and-a-half-hour period, Mayhew transforms the white space with oil, straw, his own blood and phrases written on the walls while blind-folded. While drawing attention to globalized ecologies of addiction and complacency, these materials also frame the terms of his engagement with audience members.
Roberta Mock
Chapter 6. Integrating Realities Through Immersive Gaming
Abstract
In this chapter, alternate reality games (ARGs) are examined as an example of immersive and pervasive play, in which game play may escape a proscribed sphere and permeate into ‘ordinary’, non-ludic life. Particular attention is addressed to this genre of games’ dissimulative, ‘this is not a game’ rhetoric, which seemed to early critics to promise (or threaten) a compelling engagement with a deviously simulated reality. Using the 2007 game World Without Oil as a case study, the chapter examines the potential for ARGs to blur the boundaries between in- and out-of-game realities in a practical sense without resorting to the sort of seamless simulation or requiring the naive reception that early criticisms assumed were features of play.
Lindsay Brandon Hunter
Chapter 7. Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Uninvited Guests’ Make Better Please: A Hypertextual Experience
Abstract
This chapter uses Possible Worlds Theory to analyse how the spectator responds to the complex collaborative experience provoked by Uninvited Guests’ production Make Better Please. It proposes that this philosophical framework facilitates a new way of considering the spectator’s creative input and generative response to the participatory performance event. Examining how Possible Worlds Theory is used by digital theorists to elucidate the processes of hypertext fiction, Swift argues that the theory provides tools and a language which also recognise and validate the operations of participation in performance. This new application of Possible Worlds Theory makes an important contribution to the consideration of the immersive and interactive experience of the active spectator.
Elizabeth Swift
Chapter 8. Outdoors: A Rimini Protokoll Theatre-Maze
Abstract
Belvis Pons explores the attributes of the immersive in Rimini Protokoll’s intermedial piece through the thought-provoking approach of the theatre-maze. Focusing on the ethics of co-design, the chapter draws attention to the ethnographic and participatory methods used in the creative process, questioning where the limits lie in working with non-professional performers and the implications of mediatising intimacy through technology. Outdoors not only challenges the theatrical as art by proposing innovative ways of accounting but also interrogates reality by inscribing its creative process in the everyday. ‘Outdoors: a Rimini Protokoll theatre-maze’ reveals how the immersive appears as a method of inquiry that serves to confront realities.
Esther Belvis Pons
Chapter 9. Immersed in Sound: Kursk and the Phenomenology of Aural Experience
Abstract
In this interview extract, George Home-Cook reflects on what it means to be ‘immersed in sound’. Steering clear of the natural tendency to set hearing (distractedness) over and against listening (attentiveness), Home-Cook invites us to reconsider aural immersion in dynamic terms. He urges us to pay closer attention to the dynamics of embodied attending: immersion is ‘dynamic embodied attending in the world’ (Arvidson 2006; emphasis original). Referring to Sound&Fury’s Kursk, the interview considers the particularities of conducting a phenomenology of theatrical listening.
George Home-Cook, Kristian Derek Ball

Facilitating Immersive Performance: Ethics and Practicalities

Frontmatter
Chapter 10. Reflections on Immersion and Interaction
Abstract
non zero one discuss their and others’ approaches and attitudes towards interactive and immersive theatre. The company considers key definitions such as ‘site-specific’ and ‘site-responsive’ and ‘interactive’ and ‘immersive’, proposing the benefits of offering choice and agency to participants in performance. Using examples from their own work at the National Theatre, Bush Theatre, and Edinburgh Fringe, they discuss the ethics of interaction, including control, exploitation, and personal boundaries. Considering notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stimuli for interaction, the company articulate the goal of finding a balance between dramatic, structured narrative, chance, and play.
non zero one
Chapter 11. Caravania!: Intimacy and Immersion for Family Audiences
Abstract
In this artist’s contribution, Ledger discusses The Bone Ensemble’s performance Caravania!, an intimate, participatory performance experience for a family audience. Couched as a visit to a micronation, the piece was conceived as an immersive performance for six spectators at a time in an old caravan and has toured extensively. Ledger explores the reasons for creating the work, especially the desire to address a lack of intimate performance work for children and families. As well as discussing the work’s content and reception, the notion of ‘participant-spectator’ is allied to critical reflection on spectators’ agency in this and other work.
Adam J. Ledger
Chapter 12. A Dramaturgy of Participation: Participatory Rituals, Immersive Environments, and Interactive Gameplay in Hotel Medea
Abstract
Ramos and Maravala argue that, in contrast to most immersive theatre practice in the UK, their overnight piece Hotel Medea does not fully focus on fictional representations, neither does it replace a theatrical narrative for a fully interactive game. Rather, it concentrates on the rituals suggested by the Medea myth. The authors discuss why they won’t allow audiences simply to wander around spaces, hoping for a meaningful sequence of events. Instead, through trial and error—especially through error—Maravala and Ramos have found parallel participatory tools that create experiences akin to those themes in the myth of Medea throughout the night, culminating in a shared breakfast at dawn. By casting audience members in specific roles, giving them permission to participate, and constructing a dramaturgy which is audience-centered, they will both surrender to and actively participate in their own customised and memorable experience.
Jorge Lopes Ramos, Persis Jade Maravala
Chapter 13. She Wants You to Kiss Her: Negotiating Risk in the Immersive Theatre Contract
Abstract
The four performances discussed in this article were presented together as part of the InOnTheAct Festival produced by The Lowry Theatre, Salford, in Autumn 2012. Advertised as ‘intimate’ and ‘risk-taking’, they can be broadly identified as immersive theatre productions. Drawing on interviews with producers and participants and on audience surveys, Talbot argues that, when artists and programmers ‘behind the scenes’ in immersive environments ‘disappear’ in order to facilitate participant agency, participants can feel exposed, stranded, and script-less. They risk losing face and being embarrassed, humiliated, or singled out without consent. The potential pitfalls can be offset by the appeal of creative practices that afford participants an active engagement with the process of performance making and in some cases a more intimate experience of co-presence with others. Indeed, confident participants may take uninvited liberties with performers, objects, and other participants. The article considers the ethical and practical problems facing artists and participants within particular contractual frameworks.
Richard Talbot
Chapter 14. The Fourth Wall and Other Ruins: Immersive Theatre as a Brand
Abstract
A former member of ritual theatre and film company FoolishPeople, Blyth argues that the most radical aspect of immersive theatre is neither its open structure nor its unconventional staging but rather the unique economic context which has fostered its development. Blyth demonstrates that immersive theatre’s success derives primarily from its ability to meet the demands of the modern marketing industry. In tracing the effects of the immersive “brand” upon FoolishPeople, she shows that, whilst the adoption of immersive tropes and language might have postponed the company’s disintegration, in so doing it has radically altered their former anti-theatrical raison d’être.
Rachael Blyth
Chapter 15. Immersive Performance and the Marketplace: The Hit
Abstract
Gow and Owen share their experience as part of a larger team collaborating on The Hit, an immersive theatre production at Hotel Indigo, Tower Hill, London. Exploring the authors’ experience of the intensifying relationship between corporate promotion and immersive theatre, the essay discusses the rich source of creative provocations the project provided, enabling the company to create a piece of theatre with clear goals and for a specific audience. Gow and Owen argue that, ultimately, the creation of any artistic work exists within a framework of constraints and that this should be viewed not as an impediment or compromise but as an inspiration to the creative process.
Sherrill Gow, Merryn Owen

Where Material Meets Magic: Theories, Histories, and Myths of Immersive Participation

Frontmatter
Chapter 16. Spectral Illusions: Ghostly Presence in Phantasmagoria Shows
Abstract
Wynants revisits the ghostly presence effects of phantasmagoria shows as historical precursors of immersive theatre. The fantasmagorie was a travelling show in nineteenth-century Europe in which showmen such as the mysterious German Paul Philidor, English lantern lecturer John Henry Pepper, and the Belgian physicist Étienne-Gaspard Robertson performed spectral illusions with terrifying stage effects. With their innovative use of new technologies such as mobile magic lanterns and mirrors and their emphasis on interaction between performers and public, phantasmagoria are a mid-nineteenth-century form of immersion and intermediality in performance. Wynants offers an imaginative, historical genealogy and contextualisation of contemporary notions of intermedial theatre, such as liveness, presence, and interactivity.
Nele Wynants
Chapter 17. Playing a Punchdrunk Game: Immersive Theatre and Videogaming
Abstract
This essay explores the similarities of immersive theatre and videogames, drawing on virtual reality and computer gaming discourse to examine the player/participant’s experience of immersion in performances such as Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2013). Addressing aspects of perceptual and psychological immersion as articulated by virtual reality and gaming theorists Marie-Laure Ryan and Gordon Calleja, the author argues for an understanding of immersion in Punchdrunk productions as active, playful, and fundamentally ludic. Like a videogame, immersive theatre such as The Drowned Man insists on the audience-performer’s ‘hyper-attention’ (Hayles) and instinctive response to a multi-dimensional performance text.
Rosemary Klich
Chapter 18. Proximity to Violence: War, Games, Glitch
Abstract
Ball traces the uses of immersion—techniques that place a spectator in close proximity to a world, story, or character—to form and reform political subjectivities through a detailed comparison of International WOW Company’s immersive drama of the Iraq War, Surrender; the violent videogame Spec Ops: The Line; and Harun Farocki’s installation of four documentary films, Serious Games. Ball argues for locating the political potential of immersive theatre in the inadequacy of certain simulations to precisely render reality. Brought into proximity with an immersive model, a spectator inevitably encounters a glitch—the ostensible error that disrupts verisimilitude—that can interrupt the efforts of constituted powers to mask the reality of global conflict.
James R Ball III
Chapter 19. The Promise of Experience: Immersive Theatre in the Experience Economy
Abstract
In this essay, Alston addresses what he calls the ‘promise of Experience’ in immersive theatre and elsewhere in the experience economy. He draws on a range of examples, including Punchdrunk’s And Darkness Descended … (2011) and The Crash of the Elysium (2011–2012), Hilary Westlake’s Dining with Alice (1999), and Lucien Bourjeily’s 66 Minutes in Damascus (2012), comparing them with Walt Disney World Resort, horror house culture, and the economisation and marketisation of customer experiences in the experience economy. He argues that those working in the experience economy, including immersive theatre makers, tend to idealise the consumer/audience experience, producing a gap between lived experiences and their ideal forms. He suggests that the experience economy, in true capitalist mode, abstracts from experience its commodity, or ideal, form and that immersive theatre risks doing likewise. For Alston, the turn towards the experiential in immersive theatre and the experience economy may come at the cost of recognising relationships between people.
Adam Alston
Chapter 20. Differences in Degree or Kind? Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost and Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable
Abstract
This essay responds to concerns that ‘immersive theatre’ potentially reflects neo-liberal values, by questioning the assumption that it may not do so. Focusing its argument through a comparison between Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man and Ockham’s Razor’s Not Until We Are Lost, the chapter complicates loosely defined, anti-capitalist political claims by which those engaged in the criticism or practice of ‘experimental’ live performance (or both) assert its fundamental progressiveness. The essay argues that the ability of immersive performance to ‘activate’ spectators, transforming them into ‘witnesses’ via a certain ‘undecidablity’ attributed to Rancière, distorts his thinking by linking undecidability to particular formal strategies guaranteed by ‘ethical criteria’. Tracing the play of repetition and difference in debates around the relationship between aesthetics and politics from Peggy Phelan and Nicolas Bourriaud to Rancière and Claire Bishop via figures such as Adam Alston, Jen Harvie, and Shannon Jackson, Harris asks what is at stake in this discourse and for whom?
Geraldine Harris
Chapter 21. Coriolan/us and the Limits of ‘Immersive’
Abstract
Filmer argues that the labels ‘immersive’ and ‘site-specific’ are unhelpful in describing what it is that works of theatre and performance do. Analysing National Theatre Wales’ 2012 production of Coriolan/us, directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, Filmer suggests that the real and meaningful differences between works variously labelled as ‘immersive’ or ‘site-specific’ exist in the nature of their critical and conceptual address to their location, to existing models of practice, and to differing dramaturgical logics. Filmer suggests that the concepts of location and orientation might help avoid the creation of ever-expanding critical categories and instead focus us on articulating what it is these works generate and disclose and the specific means by which they do this.
Andrew Filmer
Chapter 22. Participation, Ecology, Cosmos
Abstract
In this essay, Carl Lavery turns his attention away from conventional socio-political definitions of participation and focuses on ecology. By doing so, he argues that participation is not a voluntary activity, something that we either assent to or dissent from; on the contrary, it is something that we cannot avoid, implicated as we already are in the dense materiality of the world. In order to theorise what an ecological understanding of participation might look like in contemporary performance practice, Lavery turns, first, to eco-critic Timothy Morton’s notion of the ‘hyperobject’, a massively distributed entity, such as global warming or breathing, that implicates the whole world in its grip. In the second part of the essay, Lavery analyses how the choreographer and conceptual artist Simon Whitehead discloses the presence of the hyberobject in his trilogy of river performances, the Dulais Suite. As Lavery explains, the simplicity of Whitehead’s work produces a dizzying sense of participation in which the spectator is encouraged to respond creatively to the cosmic play of the hyperobject.
Carl Lavery
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Reframing Immersive Theatre
Editor
James Frieze
Copyright Year
2016
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-36604-7
Print ISBN
978-1-137-36603-0
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36604-7