ABSTRACT
Appearing to refuse the technical, social, and aesthetic apparatus that took shape toward the turn of the twentieth century, immersive theatre locates its spectator by indirectly emulating the forms of performance enabled by contemporary device culture: it demands, requires, and rewards "interactivity". Rather than presenting a work to spectators, immersive theatre asserts a prosthetic interdependency between performer and immersant, a bivalent reciprocity between the player and the played, the machined human and, well, the machined human. Redefining theatre by refiguring its prosthetic relation to the spectator, immersive theatre urges a distinctive means of entertaining and so of fashioning its human participants, laying claim to a specific vision of theatre as a technology of the human, a vision simultaneously avowing and disavowing the ideological structure of the technological apparatus it invokes, shapes, and deploys.
