ABSTRACT

Recent years have seen an increasing number of scholarly works about the wide genre of Immersive Theatre: debates about why ‘immersion’ might / might not be an appropriate concept to describe experiences like Chemins, analyses of the cognitive and pedagogical implications of different kinds of immersion, and articulations about the ethical conundrums that emerge from the use of a form that often leaves its spectators vulnerable and/or uncomfortable. Most recently Josephine Machon (2013) and Gareth White’s (2013) books on Immersive Theatres and Audience Participation in Theatre, respectively, propose frameworks for the consideration of immersive aesthetics through theoretical analyses and through interviews with artists who use these forms. In addition to these two works that primarily address the experiences of spectators in immersive, theatrical environments, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris’s (2014) Performing Proximity adds to this oeuvre by highlighting the perspectives of creators/performers in such intimate forms. However, while such existing scholarship articulates political, aesthetic, cognitive, and ethical questions that are embedded within immersive forms, my own queries around what Immersive Theatre ‘does’ are driven by the desire for an empirical, comparative study. In the context of existing analyses around Immersive Theatre therefore, and given my own practical explorations of this form, I often ask myself why and how the execution of an Immersive Theatre piece might differently impact spectators and actors in comparison to more ‘conventional’ theatrical performances.