Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk's Theatrical Worlds

Carina E. I. Westling, Scott Palmer, Joslin McKinney, Stephen A. Di Benedetto, Scott Palmer, Joslin McKinney, Stephen A. Di Benedetto

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350101944
• eBook ISBN: 9781350101968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Direction & Production

Longlisted for the PQ Best Publication Award in Performance Design & Scenography 2023

Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk's Theatrical Worlds is a detailed account of the company's award-winning productions and their historical context. Examining Punchdrunk's role as pioneers of immersive theatre in the UK through a range of their productions including Sleep No More and The Drowned Man besides theatrical works such as Faust, The Duchess of Malfi and Kabeiroi, and cross-platform productions like The Moon Slave, The Borough and The Oracles, the book presents an original framework for understanding immersion in theatrical and mixed reality experiences.

Central to the book is a study of how immersive experience is produced in interaction with physical and digital scenography for participatory audiences. Through ethnographies of the company, their designers, actors, producers and audiences, the book interrogates the relationship between the aesthetics of interaction and the experience of immersion in Punchdrunk's work. The theoretical framework that the book introduces affords analyses of material cultures and the influence of technology on interaction design in theatre and beyond, and offers a blueprint for next-generation immersive design and scenography for interactive multimedia environments.

1

Immersion in Punchdrunk’s Theatre

In the opening of Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze frames an otherwise often abstract and challenging philosophical text with a gesture towards a focus of his critique: the occlusion of desire by conflation with reason from the uninterrogated subject position. Implied are the hierarchies that flow from this occlusion, in which the body and its senses take a minor position: ‘The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition’ (Deleuze 2014: 2).

Repetition, as Elizabeth Grosz emphasises, is never possible in the sense of replication (2011: 30), and it refers to the inescapable immanence of practice, which occurs in the emergent present and in response to its conditions of possibility. Repetition is thus always particular; an instantiation of the idea, no matter how much the idea seeks to express the general. Its specificity is essential to liveness, but ordinarily attention to the uniqueness of live experience is focused on the stage, whereas its equally unique experience occurs simultaneously in the auditorium. The citation from Difference and Repetition above positions exchange as a transaction throughout which framed orders can remain stable, whereas repetition implies engagement within a shared or even exploded frame: an immanent encounter. The implementation and maintenance of frames is a complex operation that simultaneously expresses or reinforces hierarchies and affords meaning-making on terms determined by gaze, even though the containment of difference or change within the proscenium arch of theatre or any other frame can only be an illusion.

Immanence precludes the illusion or reality of control of the moment, whether through framing, generalisation or distance, all of which are relevant to the practice and critique of representation and narrative in theatre. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze analyses the work of Antonin Artaud and positions immanence as the subject position from where real or precarious thought flows, dichotomous to the dogmatic image of thought, where the thinker is external to the frame of consequence, and may assume control over the outcomes. In theatre these ideas find concrete form, and Deleuze draws on Artaud’s work to illustrate, and arguably evidence, a concept with far broader application. The shifting frames of media environments spurs change in how we see ourselves in the world (Meyrowitz 1985), and the virtual worlds of games and pervasive technologies present new forms of connection and exposure. Starting at the Drama department at the University of Exeter, where students are encouraged to take radical embodied approaches to theatrical space, Felix Barrett’s vision for Punchdrunk is famously multi-sensory and based in physical design of extreme depth and detail. He and the other senior members of the company – Peter Higgin, Maxine Doyle and Colin Nightingale – supported by a large and growing team of designers and producers, are expanding their storyworlds and the essential audience component into and across virtual worlds. Punchdrunk’s immersive theatrical worlds, which are the object of study in this book, notably incorporate the living, sensate bodies of their audiences as active participants and moving parts within theatre machines, comprising scenography and dramaturgy.¹ Audiences and actors share the frame of the performance, bounded in time and by the perimeter of the performance space. While the experience is intricately structured and designed, its ‘living parts’ will repeat rather than replicate. Participation thus embodies change or difference, and makes concrete the amalgam of potential extension, exposure to uncertainty, exhilaration and precariousness that is central to immanent encounters.

Audiences describe their experiences in Punchdrunk’s theatrical worlds with a powerful desire for more, aware that a return would render them no less hostages to fortune. Uncertainty, as a quality of experience, runs through all audience interviews in this study, enmeshed with awe, frustration and desire. Returning to the quote by Deleuze that opens this chapter, these are also amorous emotions with the object of desire laid bare, as it ultimately is in love, as the potential for difference. By contrast, the remote gaze of exchange affords the illusion of control that underpins instrumentalisation of interaction. Interrogation of the subject position is key to understanding the difference between conditions of possibility that is suggested in the above quote by Deleuze. It is also a point of entry for the application of critiques of representation in theatre and performance to interaction design in other media. Through immanent framing and uncertainty, participation in Punchdrunk confronts the subject with its representation to itself and in relation to the event. Rey Chow describes this as capture (2012), which is relevant to the idea of self-exploitation in performance art (Bishop 2012). The art-work of participation begs comparison with instrumentalised participation on social media and the socio-economic emphasis on ‘the event’ that is discussed in depth by Geert Lovinck (2016) under the rubric of prosumption. In her discussion of self-exploitation in art, Claire Bishop draws attention to the historical moment that participatory and immersive theatres share with network-based production and affective labour (2012: 277), and highlights the importance of possible failure and consequence to embodied participation. This difference is critical, and informs transitions and connections between physical and digital scenographies without abandoning the immanent and precarious thought that is inherent to embodiment. The similarities between physical worlds and virtual worlds on games and social media platforms are seductive; like a Punchdrunk performance, participation in virtual worlds sate and leave you hungry – but while subtle at source, the differences are profound. The possibility and practice of extension has a different meaning if the consequences of failure are embodied, that is, sensed in and through the body. The implications for design and experience become clearer if thought through gravity and its relation to conditions of possibility. The conditions of possibility in physical and digital storyworlds are framed by the presence or absence of gravity, both in the literal and the metaphorical sense of the word. Gravity and consequence thus insinuate themselves as aesthetic dimensions with deeper relevance to design than the initial exhilaration of limitless possibilities suggests – their occlusion from the experience comes at a cost.

The material practice of making theatre in scenography, acting and sense-making as an ambulatory spectator is the focus of this book, but later sections will discuss how the disconnect with time and gravity in digital media might be compensated for in the design process. For the purpose of this analysis, large-scale Punchdrunk performances are thought of as crucibles of sense-making, where masked audiences numbering in their hundreds seek a mixture of sense and aband on in labyrinthine and almost completely dark spaces. Multiple visits, up to a hundred and more by some spectators, fail to exhaust the number of possible recombinations of all the separate scenographic and choreographic elements that comprise Punchdrunk’s ‘theatre machines’. Countless opportunities for interaction and experience are tiny and hidden, like hand-drawn flipbooks in the corner of old books, stacked in bookshelves without any indication, or one-to-one performances that play out in spaces that may be unknown even to some who work on the productions. These opportunities are too many, too layered, and too disparate in space for any one spectator to attend them all, producing an excess of experience potential that feels endless; an illusion with ambiguous edges. Punchdrunk productions are designed with a careful balance of structure and emergence that comes to expression in the sense of potential free-fall within an experience that is precisely designed. Emphasising this precarious balance, each performance ends with a mass scene for the entire audience to which all arrive by their own routes and narratives, often without noticing how they are directed to do so.

The experience is visceral, not only because you are on your feet most of the time, walking or running to follow performers between scenes. Lady Macbeth’s bedroom scene in Sleep No More (2011) serves as a signature Punchdrunk moment: a powerfully dramatic, largely wordless and intensely physical scene that plays with boundaries and proximity, voyeurism and exposure, and where acting merges with athletic dance. I attended one of Tori Sparks’ performances in the role; she played Lady Macbeth in the original casts in both Boston and New York. After leaving the bath where she attempts to wash blood off her hands, Lady Macbeth danced in a large, glassed dressing room in the corner of the bedchamber, and the intensity of the performances gave me, on the safe side of the glass, a similar experience of awe to that you might feel when separated only by a fence from a magnificent animal in a zoo. Afterwards, she moved slowly through the audience, drenched in sweat and blood, at close enough range that I felt the heat radiating from her body. While the vicarious thrill of being there with Lady Macbeth but not being seen is part of the appeal, the tacit voyeurism is countered by the power of the performer, who inhabits the encounter more fully than you do. You are already lost, or rather committed to the theatrical world in which you find yourself, having been separated from the company you arrived with and pushed into the performance without knowing where or when you are in the narrative, and the combination of disorientation and curiosity that holds you in a state of suspended disbelief is enhanced and held by the power of the designed environment. The relation between suspense and trust that sustains you throughout the experience is central, as one company member remarked:

I think you... you never get over your initial Punchdrunk experience, I think. That always stays with you. And so if you’re going to work with the company, you need to understand what it’s like, and what the feeling is. Because I think everyone that works there has had that; that sense of amazement, or being terrified, that then stayed with you.²

Punchdrunk’s live masked productions are structured as giant clockwork puzzles of complex exchanges between actors, audiences and scenography, that require connection, processing and completion by audience participants to make sense of the theatrical worlds that they find themselves in. The physical environments constructed by Punchdrunk for the productions Sleep No More and The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable occupy several floors of large buildings containing 100 and 170 separately designed spaces, respectively. Sleep No More and The Drowned Man were created to accommodate audiences of 400 (Sleep No More) and 600 (The Drowned Man) per night, with each performance including separate one-to-one encounters designed for one audience member at a time. The diffraction and distribution of the narratives across large performance spaces ensures that audiences will have unique personal experiences, which necessarily challenge perceived expectations. There are too many scenes and potential interactions for any single audience participant to exhaust all possibilities, even after many visits. The experience is designed for each audience member to take responsibility for curating their own experience, with no guarantees that they will do so very well.

Sleep No More and The Drowned Man share key aesthetic characteristics; filmic references, chiaroscuro lighting, a dynamic approach to space through scale and labyrinthine passages and series of rooms, intensely physical performances blending largely non-verbal acting with choreographed movement, and richly detailed scenography. The plays and novels on which the productions are based are woven through performance and scenography, with the movements of cast and audience forming a two-part spatial choreography, and much of the text encoded and layered into the set. The two productions are both ambitious in scale but structured differently, particularly with regard to how much of the narrative can be pulled together by one audience member during one visit. Sleep No More is based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth woven through with elements from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Rebecca and pivots around two key areas: the ballroom, where the slow-motion banquet scene with the entire cast takes place, and Lady Macbeth’s bedroom. The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable has a more complex narrative structure. Based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, a text that is already fragmented and unfinished, the performance is woven through with elements from two novels: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locusts and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Mirror stories add complexity; Woyzeck-William is mirrored by Wendy, and Marie-Mary is mirrored by Marshall. The dynamic between them follows the storyline of Büchner’s original play but with reversed male/female characters. Woyzeck is here reimagined for a different time and place, and set in the fictive film studio complex Temple Pictures, which takes the place of the military environment of Büchner’s original play. Temple Pictures and its environment; the trailer park just outside the studio complex, the town of Encino (part of the present-day Los Angeles District), and the nearby Mojave desert landscape are re-created on separate floors of the building and both frame and engulf the smaller stories of love, hope, jealousy, insanity and self-destruction that play out within films produced by the studio and moments glimpsed between the characters. The boundaries between different layers of reality within the narratives collapse into each other as participating audience members perform a ‘shadow choreography’ as they move through and between the nested sets of Temple Pictures within the scenography. The narratives that were woven together for the production were distilled and encoded in space and detail through the devising and design of the sets,³ left as hidden text fragments in books and scripts, scribbled on walls, and played out in notes and letter correspondence that could be pieced together by combining finds from different locations within the sets. The fragmented, embedded and nested storylines form theatrical worlds that can be likened to large interactive systems in which audiences are the moving parts and ‘spatial operators’ that animate and connect the whole, and Chapter 5 discusses how audiences frame this as a positive challenge. Describing Punchdrunk’s productions as interactive systems nods to their ambitions to expand live performance to incorporate other platforms, but even their physical productions lend themselves to comparisons with computer games (Judge 2019). Felix Barrett harbours open ambitions to take the company’s work from immersive theatre to ‘playable shows’:

‘When we were described as a video game I started going back to games to find out more about them, to unpack it, and learn more about game mechanics,’ says Barrett. He realised while Punchdrunk wasn’t ‘ever directly inspired by an open-world game’, open worlds give birth to choice, which creates a new way to tell stories – similar to what he was trying to achieve in theatre. (Judge 2019)

As in virtual worlds, the anonymity conferred on audiences by the obligatory masks worn by Punchdrunk audiences suspends social inhibition, but the function of the mask is more complex. It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Immersion in Punchdrunk’s Theatre
• 2 A Genealogy of the Immersive Aesthetic
• 3 Punchdrunk’s Interactive Systems
• 4 Behind the Interface – Making Punchdrunk’s Storyworlds
• 5 Audience Experience and Participation
• 6 The Shape of Agency in Interactive Storyworlds
• 7 Impure Futures
• Appendix
• References
• Index
• Copyright