Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances

Commit Yourself!

Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit, Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429582318
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular, immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space.

Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances.

Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art.

Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy.

Chapter 1

Immersion and spectatorship at the interface of theatre, media tech and daily life

An introduction

Doris Kolesch

Three recent immersive settings in art

A few steps take the visitor from the Norwegian island of Tautra to London. From there, it’s only another few metres to New Delhi. Or Sao Paulo. Or Beijing. This compressed trip around the world takes place in the courtyard of the London Museum Somerset House, where British artist Michael Pinsky has designed five accessible geodetic domes, each of which uses ingenious technology to simulate the air of Tautra, London, New Delhi, Beijing and Sao Paulo with scientific precision. Air in the Tautra dome is clear, clean and fresh, while the stinking, filthy haze of the New Delhi dome makes it hard to see. A few metres away, the aggressive fumes of the Sao Paulo dome make visitors’ eyes water. The installation is called Pollution Pods—and it addresses the problem of worldwide environmental pollution not with facts, not with concentrations of toxicity and its impact on human health. Instead, it transports the visitor directly into the air of Sao Paulo, Beijing and New Delhi, allowing air pollution to be experienced immediately, while also, with the air of the Norwegian island of Tautra, demonstrating the palpable difference between clean and dirty air. The goal of this short-term, aesthetic immersion is completely didactic. The website of the Somerset House states:

It is estimated that the average Londoner, exposed to the current levels of pollution, loses up to 16 months of their life, while for a resident of New Delhi, pollution could cut short the life of a resident by around 4 years.¹

Pollution Pods aim to make the rather intangible, frequently abstract and enduring problem of global pollution concrete by turning it into something you can experience physically and connecting it to an affective reaction. With this, Pinsky’s work raises the question: ‘Can art make real for us that which stays abstract in average values, precise facts and modeled scenarios?’ (Habekuss 2018, p. 36).

Scene change: art project DAU Freiheit (DAU liberty) provokes bitter arguments throughout the summer 2018, well beyond Berlin. Together with film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the Berliner Festspiele wants to host the world premiere, which would involve such renowned artists as Marina Abramović, Tom Tykwer, Romeo Castellucci, Massive Attack and Teodor Currentzis. Further stops are planned for Paris and London. The vision: in the neighbourhood of Mitte, in the once divided city of Berlin, an area will be sealed off with a replica of the historical Berlin Wall. Access to this artistically framed but nevertheless real parallel universe would not occur via ticket sales but through visa application. Cell phones would be handed over at the entrance and visitors would have to submit to an individualised trip consisting of diverse activities and events, from film screenings, concerts and performances to public discussions, one-on-one conversations and much more. The heart of the work as a whole was to be Khrzhanovsky’s film, which almost no one has seen yet and which nonetheless has been glorified in an almost cult-like fashion by cineastes. Between 2009 and 2011, the director filmed material about the physicist, Nobel laureate and propagandist of ‘Free Love’ and new ways of living, Lev Landau, known as Dau. In Landau’s hometown of Charkow in the Ukraine, Khrzhanovsky reconstructed the man’s scientific institute, Landau’s laboratory and Lebensraum, in painstaking detail, complete with historical costumes and props. For more than two years, several hundred people lived, worked, ate and slept on site as part of a secluded community in a quasi-totalitarian, quasi-Stalinist regime. Anyone who wanted to smuggle in a cell phone, anyone who wasn’t punctual or anyone who tried to use social media was severely punished or barred from the community. Filming went on for two and a half years—and not with a script and countless rehearsals. It was rather a kind of documentary of life on set. The DAU Freiheit project in Berlin was pursued with the utmost secrecy, but it ended prematurely because applications for the necessary government permissions were submitted too late and thus denied. The Berliner Festspiele contextualised the planned art action, which was to take place in the historically loaded time window of mid-October to 9 November (the day the Wall fell), as follows: ‘DAU opens a historical echo chamber, which, 29 years after the fall of the Wall, offers the chance to have a socio-political debate about freedom and totalitarianism, surveillance, co-existence and national identity’.² Quite a tall order for art. In comparison to the Pollution Pods, here too immersion in the fictional but nonetheless real existing and accessible parallel world of Dau Freiheit is to have a didactic, even enlightening effect: namely, by instigating a sociopolitical debate on the grand issues of our time. This is to be achieved not through deliberation, not through the exchange of opinions, positions or arguments, but rather via immersion in a totalitarian parallel world—via immediacy rather than distance.

As part of this introduction I would like to sketch one final immersive situation. Das halbe Leid/Half the Suffering, by Danish-Austrian performance ensemble SIGNA, invited theatre visitors as ‘workshop participants’ to attend a course on empathy by spending an entire night, from 7 pm to 7 am, with performers playing homeless people and other social outsiders. With the help of (performers acting as) homeless people acting as mentors, the audience was to learn how to take part in the suffering of an/other. The fictional narrative framing the event was that the course was hosted by a charitable and purportedly humanistically minded organisation called ‘Half the Suffering’, who also maintained the space as a homeless shelter. Throughout this performance, concrete aesthetic and para-aesthetic formats were consistently invoked and brought together in heterogeneous, sometimes contradictory combinations. There was the form of site-specific installation in their use of the disused Heidenreich & Harbeck factory in Barmbeck, Hamburg. There was the form of durational performance, of fake institution and of diverse settings reminiscent of therapeutic treatments such as talking, art or physical therapy. In addition, various institutional frames such as charitable organisation, school or reformatory were invoked and staged. As a whole, the performance did not simply represent social situations, did not just play them out in front of the spectator, but rather allowed for, even provoked, various concrete social situations between visitors and performers, as well as among audience members themselves.

In thinking about spectatorship in immersive performances, there is one characteristic of Das Halbe Leid/Half the Suffering that, to me, seems particularly worthy of consideration. Generally, theatrical representation stands apart from other arts on the basis of a particular distinction, namely in its supposed lack of distinction from the deeds and actions of daily life. While literature acts through the medium of language, while painting makes use of colour and form and while film shows two-dimensional projections of moving images, theatrical representation occurs through the medium and material of human existence—as aesthetic-anthropological reflections have pointed out since the beginning of the twentieth century. In such accounts, the quality differentiating theatre from daily life rests firmly in theatre’s ‘as-if’, that is, in the sense that actions are represented as opposed to being actually carried out. Art and performance forms like the three mentioned at the beginning of this introduction undermine this distinction in particular, and not just on the side of the performers, but also and especially on the side of the spectators who have been activated and mobilised as participants. In these performances and installations, I, the spectator, do not simply observe the performers as they portray certain happenings. Instead, those happenings are simultaneously part of a situation in which real actions are carried out—a situation in which the activities, behaviours, reactions and emotions of the spectators become an integral part of the performance event.

Immersion and immersive performances

Given the increasing prevalence and popularity of immersive performances, I would next like to identify similarities and differences between quotidian and aesthetic experiences of immersion, as well as to analyse established concepts of immersion. Additionally, in the following I enquire into the seismographic significance of immersion for our contemporary society and its attendant and fundamental changes to the spectator’s position, role and activity.

Immersive situations and settings are not limited to aesthetic forms like theatre, performance art, film, videos, computer games and virtual-reality applications. They are an enduring aspect of every imaginable field of society and culture: from military use of immersive scenarios for war preparation and soldier training (Magelssen 2014; Alvarez 2018); to medical applications, various educational contexts like museum pedagogy, or the communication of diverse inventories of knowledge and experience; to economising strategies in the spheres of advertisement, consumerism and work; to the experience and entertainment industries (Bieger 2011). My hypothesis, in light of these diverse applications, is that immersion’s potential and our fascination with it are both rooted in how immersion represents a specific modality of experience, one that implies the fluidification of boundaries and (temporal) spaces. Immersion has to do with how we experience, understand, conceptualise—and sometimes fantasise about the blurring or even annihilation of—the boundaries between subject and media, between observer and surroundings, broadly understood. I would therefore suggest we treat immersion as a consistently relational concept, and thus attend especially to the thresholds, passages and transitions between different surroundings, environments or even worlds.

Immersion derives from the Latin verb immergere, meaning originally the plunging or submersion of a body or object into a liquid, hence the figurative sense of becoming enveloped or engrossed in a certain situation. While in the German-speaking world, the term ‘immersion’ has only recently appeared in common usage, in English it has long been used to describe full absorption in (artificial) worlds or symbolic systems. Classic examples of immersive experiences include, for instance, Christian baptism or models of language acquisition that place a person in a foreign-language environment.

In recent decades, discourses and theories of immersion were particularly virulent in relation to film, video, computer games, virtual reality and other media-technological developments. Of course, I must emphatically emphasise that immersion is by no means a sign of our current moment, and it is certainly not a characteristic unique to advanced media technology. On the contrary, we can be fully immersed in the substantially ‘old’ medium of a book, just as we can lose track of time and surroundings when contemplating a painting.

These last two examples of the book and painting demonstrate the necessity of differentiating various forms and dimensions of immersion, especially because the term has been used to refer to the most diverse media contexts. As Burcu Dogramaci and Fabienne Liptay note,

In the broadest sense, “immersion” describes a sensation that can equally arise while reading a book, watching a film, visiting an exhibition, or playing a computer game, namely, the impression of being placed in or surrounded by the space artificially created by the respective medium. This impression can be summoned by addressing both our perceptual apparatus as well as our imagination – two examples of entirely different modes of aesthetic experience.

(2016, p. 11)

Against this backdrop, experiences of immersion can be fundamentally described as mental-psychological or perceptual-physical situatedness (or both) in artificially and/or media-generated worlds. These two variations of immersion can be distinguished as follows. First, the more mental-cognitive dimension of immersion has always shaped the aesthetic practices of illusion-making and deception. Characteristic of this kind of fictional immersion is that ‘a majority of the recipient’s attention is drawn away from the surroundings and directed entirely toward the artifact’ (Voss 2009, p. 127). Second, we can distinguish perceptual right up to full bodily experiences of immersion, such as those produced in immersive theatre, but also in immersive worlds of employment, consumerism and entertainment. In this variant, the observer, spectator or user represents an active and constitutive element of the environment in which they find themselves. The three examples mentioned initially all belong to this second type.

For a number of years now, performance formats that call for the audience’s involvement, active participation, even partaking have become commonplace. Buzzwords like participation, interactive theatre, but also immersive theatre dominate the debates about this trend and polarise spectators and critics alike. These forms call to their audiences: join in, get involved, become active, you’re responsible for making the most out of your evening at the theatre. The dissolution of the boundary separating art from life, the aesthetic from the quotidian—a trope that has mobilised artistic fantasies and practices since the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century—appears to have finally come to fruition.

Spectators equipped with cell phones, radios or headsets are led through a city or theatre building, following the directions of an unknown voice (as in the walks by LIGNA, Rimini Protokoll or Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller). Or else they can climb into the set to eat and chat together with the performers and other spectators, such as in Showcase Beat Le Mot’s Cooking in Crisis. She She Pop’s Warum tanzt ihr nicht? (Why aren’t you dancing?) calls on visitors to dance with the performers, although they also leave space for the indecisive to stay standing in a corner, watching the others dance—which, of course, does not promise a solution to the dilemma ‘to join or not to join’ if it evokes embarrassing memories from bygone school dances. In other productions, spectators can become a theatre audience, at once ironically distanced and legitimately involved, as they observe the events, rules of play and ways of behaving at a real Daimler-Benz shareholder meeting, such as in Rimini Protokoll’s Die Hauptversammlung (Shareholders’ Meeting). Theatre visitors can, as in the production The Money by Kaleider, either be present as silent witnesses or, as benefactors, help decide what to do with the box-office proceeds, although being a supposedly uninvolved silent witness comes at a higher price. Finally, in the works of artist collective SIGNA, who have been evolving and exploring the immersive potential of performative installations in bold and innovative ways for over a decade, visitors are assigned different roles and positions at the beginning of each production, for instance as a patient in Ventestedet (Waiting Room, 2014) or in Söhne und Söhne (Sons and Sons, 2015) as new employees at a firm of the same name, sent through various departments and graded, as if at an assessment centre.

Immersive theatre forms often activate urban spaces that were not established as places for art, such as empty factories or office buildings. They combine performance models from theatre, installation and performance art with pop cultural elements from film, television and the entertainment industry, but also from the world of employment, the healthcare system, psychological practices, the justice system and bureaucracy, and the sex industry. In densely atmospheric and thoroughly designed spaces, accessible parallel worlds are generated. They are staged so completely as to create a perceptual impression not only visually, but also acoustically, olfactorily, gustatorily and materially, in terms of used objects, materials and textures. Visitors often spend several hours in these worlds, during which they can (and sometimes must) interact with performers and other visitors.

Put succinctly, we could formulate a concept of these diverse forms and characteristics of immersive theatre as follows. Immersive theatre mobilises (in the most encompassing sense) the spectator, and it does away with the stage as a clearly delimited, special place: it totalises the stage. The title of this volume, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!, calls both these aspects to mind.

For the multitude of immersive experiences offered by both art and daily life in the digital age, the role of sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Funding note
• 1 Immersion and spectatorship at the interface of theatre, media tech and daily life: an introduction
• Part I Mobile audiences
• Part II Researching spectatorship
• Part III Questions of power – politics of affect in immersive performances