Memos from a Theatre Lab

Exploring what immersive theatre 'does'

Nandita Dinesh

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315436036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

What does Immersive Theatre 'do'?

By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme – one an 'immersive' experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production – Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon actors and audiences. An in-depth case study of her work Pinjare (Cages) sets out the 'hows' and 'whys' of her specific aesthetic framework. Memos from a Theatre Lab places Dinesh's practical work within the context of existing analyses of Immersive Theatre, using this investigation to generate an underpinning theory of how Immersive Theatre works for its participants.

1 The framework

Memo #1

My first personal experience with Immersive Theatre was as a performer in a piece entitled Fight or Flight (2010), a piece that was inspired by the Red Cross’ refugee simulation educational kit In Exile for a While (Red Cross, n.d.) and created by two Theatre Arts students at the College that I was teaching at in India at the time. In line with the Red Cross guide, the students’ twelve-hour immersive piece was “meant to create mock feelings of intimidation, confusion, anger, disempowerment and hopelessness in the minds of the participants” through the use of threatening “border guards, rude camp employees, mistreatment of women and children, boring food, realistic props and unpleasant surprises” (Red Cross, n.d.:5). All of these strategies were employed in Fight or Flight to help spectator-participants “gain awareness of what real refugees may be feeling” (Red Cross, n.d.:5).

Fight or Flight was composed of around forty spectator-participants, all students between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, from different parts of the world. Similarly, the cast for the event was composed primarily of students, with a few faculty members (including myself) performing roles as needed by the student directors of the piece. With this composition of actors and audiences, Fight or Flight was structured as follows:¹ spectator-participants met at a central location on the College campus. The facilitators shared the game rules and distributed character profiles. Once the character profiles were distributed and the rules of the game were established, participants were divided into two groups: an Illegal Group (IG) and a Legal Group (LG) of refugees. Each group took a different path, encountering different circumstances en route. Eventually though, both the IG and the LG end up at a refugee camp where they ‘rest’ for the night. If at any point spectator-participants did not cooperate, the actors would call an intimidating rebel/guard to take the uncooperative spectator-participant to an isolation cell that was manned by my character. After a night of restless sleep in the camp, actors woke up the spectators, telling them that the situation has worsened and that everyone had to leave immediately. All the spectators arrive at the last location where they are served tea. The directors return to speak with the audience members and to let them know that the experience has ended. Spectator-participants are invited to come for a debriefing session later the same day.

Fight or Flight was my first experience as an actor in an Immersive Theatre performance, and the most important take-away for me was around stereotyping. In particular, I left with many questions about the way in which the guards/rebel characters in the piece needed to behave – as being authoritative, intimidating, abusive – so as to maintain ‘control’ over a spectator-participant population that outnumbered the actors. For instance, when I was first asked to take on the role of the isolation cell guard, I was told by the directors to be “mean” and to use my own biases and prejudices about immigration officials to shape my character. Directed to dress in dark clothes, smoke cigarettes, and be intimidating, the co-directors of Fight or Flight also asked me to take on this role since the blending of a teacher (who already had a degree of power over student spectator-participants) with the character of an aggressive/powerful guard would more likely ensure the student spectator-participants’ following the rules of the immersive environment. While crafting the characterization of the guard I tried to challenge my own stereotypes of immigration officials – having lived in many different contexts as an immigrant, I do not necessarily view these individuals in the most positive light. And yet, I had to wonder, should I really portray the guard in such a stereotypical way? Could there be other ways to show the guard’s power? Or better still, was there a way to portray a ‘good’ guard who was caught up in the system and who tried, in his/her own way, to be helpful to the refugees s/he watched over? However, would this kind of characterization be possibly deemed as being inauthentic to a majority of refugee experiences in which ‘good’ guards might very well be an anomaly? With these questions in mind, during the first few hours of the performance I played a guard who was aggressive but also had elements of kindness and patience. About two hours into my performance, however, a fellow faculty-participant who had been watching my performance from afar came up to me and said: “You’re just being yourself, Nandita. You need to be more intimidating. More guard-like. Otherwise, you’re going to ruin the show.” Embarrassed at being chastised by a colleague, my guard suddenly became a meaner person. She spat at the refugees. Swore more often. She even took one of the actor-refugees from the group outside the isolation cell (something that was completely improvised) and asked the actor to scream as though the guard was committing a violent act against her…

Being an actor in an Immersive Theatre event pointed me toward questions around the ethics of representation in such works. Is there a place for nuance when placing spectators in the shoes of an Other? Can we move away from stereotyping neither the experience of the ‘victims’ nor of the ‘perpetrators’?

***

My second personal encounter with Immersive Theatre was in a piece entitled Wonderland. Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1993) and Through the Looking Glass (1999), one of my other Theatre Arts students in India decided to create an immersive theatrical experience. Wonderland’s concept was centred on the idea that audience members would embody their own Alice – multiple Alices who would then explore Wonderland as best suited them.

Wonderland was designed to occur early in the morning, at dawn. Audience members were asked to arrive at a central location the night before the performance, and we were requested to spend the night in that space. This location, which was a large multi-purpose hall, was decorated with a number of clocks and mirrors and also included a wall with the projection of an optical illusion playing on a loop. The projection played over the course of the entire night until an actor playing the White Rabbit character from Lewis Carroll’s book woke the spectator-participants at dawn. The White Rabbit then took the audience members (in groups) to Wonderland, where we encountered and interacted with different characters from the books. Wonderland occurred in an outdoor area on the College campus that had been landscaped to look like a maze – like a labyrinth. As the audience members walked around the maze, bleary-eyed from a night of optical illusions and white rabbits, we were invited to a tea party, were the victims of innumerable pranks, and were invited (implicitly) to become Alice. To make her wonderland our own.

I remember going to sleep that night looking at the optical illusion being screened in front of me. I also remember waking up multiple times over the course of that night, bewildered by the twirling lights and images that kept playing on the wall. On one of these midnight wake-ups, I think I saw someone dressed like a mad hatter. Did I, though? Disoriented, I went back to sleep only to wake up again, to see someone dressed like a rabbit waking up people around me. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that. I wasn’t entirely sure what was real and what wasn’t – even though I had been privy to my student’s idea from the get-go, I was disoriented in the way that only sleep deprivation can achieve. Although I was expecting to see characters from Alice in Wonderland, I hadn’t imagined what it might feel like to see them through eyes brimming with sleep … Suddenly, the actor dressed as a White Rabbit woke me up and, discombobulated from a night of tossing and turning on a cold, hard, floor, I experienced Wonderland in a bit of a haze. The director had achieved what she wanted, I think. She had put me in a state of mind that made Wonderland seem more illusion-like; more on the borderline between dream and reality … Walking back home that morning, I couldn’t help but wonder about how different the sensations that Wonderland provoked for me would have been had my student chosen to stage the performance as a proscenium piece.

***

My third personal encounter with Immersive Theatre lay in directing Cages as a collaborative, Immersive Theatre piece that was part of my doctoral work in Kashmir. Working with a theatre group in Srinagar, I designed a three-week workshop process that was structured around the five different senses – toward creating a piece that would both speak to some element of the conflicts in Kashmir, while placing spectators in the shoes of an Other. The theme and structure of Cages emerged through collaborative exercises and discussions during the workshop, and the decision to target Cages toward a specific audience of Kashmiri men – each show could only accommodate two spectators – was also a decision that was taken in collaboration with the artists that I was working with. Finally, through the experience of creating Cages, I was finally able to see Immersive Theatre through yet another perspective, the perspective of the director.

In this experience, I often revisited my experiences as an actor (Fight or Flight) and as a spectator-participant (Wonderland ) to Immersive Theatre. I critically reflected upon the struggles that I had encountered as actor and spectator, and in so doing tried to address a couple of aspects: to carefully address how ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ were portrayed as a result of my experience in Fight or Flight; to negotiate my spectator-participants’ comfort/discomfort as a result of what I had experienced in Wonderland. In making these decisions, Cages answered some of the questions that emerged for me from Fight or Flight and Wonderland. However, the performances of Cages brought up new questions: questions around ethics; questions around the politics of using a form that made people powerless and vulnerable in a context that is already defined by powerlessness and vulnerability. Despite the pre- and post-performance discussions that I had designed to mitigate that vulnerability, spectator-participants to Cages were still powerless. And while the feminist in me was not entirely averse to placing male spectator-participants from a rigorously patriarchal context in an uncomfortable position, the ethics of that decision being made in an active conflict zone bothered me.

As a theatre researcher-practitioner who mostly works in contexts of conflict therefore, the vulnerability that I saw Immersive Theatre evoke for spectator-participants in a context like Kashmir made me go back to the drawing board. If I was going to ask my spectators to make themselves vulnerable to an experience like Cages, should I not be able to tell them why this approach might be more effective than a ‘conventional’ approach? If I want to use the Immersive Theatre aesthetic in times and places of conflict, should I not first attempt to understand the functioning of this aesthetic in contexts that are less volatile? Cages catalyzed me to think more carefully about the ethics of Immersive Theatre in places of war and in having to pay attention to the considerations that emerged, I started to design a comparative study about Immersive Theatre in a less contentious setting. Ultimately, I hoped that such a study would enable me to generate more nuanced insights into the use of Immersive Theatre in places of war.

Cages, Wonderland, and Fight or Flight have played an important role in my coming to the project in this book – an important role in shaping my questions about what Immersive Theatre ‘does’.

Framing the aesthetics

Immersive Theatre is a hard-to-define genre, as Josephine Machon (2013:xvi) has indicated, “because it is not one. However, the use of immersion in performance does expose qualities, features and forms that enable us to know what ‘it’ is when we are experiencing it” (emphasis in original). Etymologically, the term immersive is said to have “developed from computing terminology, [and] describes that which provides information or stimulation for a number of senses, not only sight and sound” (Machon, 2013:21). At the heart of Immersive Theatre is the embodied experience of an event to which we are unlikely to have access in our everyday lives; an event during which, as Alan Kaprow says (in Machon, 2013:31), “the line between art and life” becomes “fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.” It is important to clarify at the outset though that I do not see Immersive Theatre as existing in a binary with a proscenium performance that engages the spectators’ senses of sight and sound: Jacques Rancière (2010) among many others have already suggested that being an audience in a ‘traditional’ setting results in its own forms of immersion. That said, while I do see the term ‘immersion’ as being applicable in some way to all theatrical efforts, there are specific ways in which I use these aesthetics in the experiment described in this book.

First, I use the terms ‘conventional’, ‘traditional’, and ‘proscenium’ theatre to refer to pieces that are performed “by actors of scripted plays” and that take place “in front of audiences who are seated within buildings usually constructed for that purpose” (Pasquier, 2015:223). The audience does not verbally or physically interact with the actors; instead, they engage with the world of the performances only through their senses of sight and sound. On the contrary, what I term as Immersive Theatre places the notion of being ‘participatory’ at its core. In such participatory performances “the audience is able to affect material changes in the work in a way that goes beyond the inherent interactivity in all live performance” (Breel, 2015:369). Through this participation the spectators are offered “a level of agency […] to creatively contribute to the work” and while “audience experience is central to all forms of live performance, it is a crucial aesthetic component of participatory work, as the responses and actions of the participants become part of the fabric of the show” (Breel, 2015:369). The term participatory is inherently broad, however, and includes

interaction (where the work contains clearly defined moments for the audience to contribute within), participation (when the audience’s participation is central to the work and determines the outcome of it), co-creation (when the audience are involved in creating some of the parameters of the artwork), and co-execution (where the audience help execute the work in the way the artist has envisioned).

(Breel, 2015:369–370)

And because of this continuum on which we might place different degrees of participation in the theatre, I use the term ‘immersive’ to further qualify my particular application of a participatory aesthetic.

While it is easier for me to describe what I mean by a ‘traditional’ performance, my approach to an ‘immersive’ participatory aesthetic might be best presented through the presentation and discussion of three examples (see Table 1.1). In attempting to distil the particular characteristics with which I seek to infuse the immersive aesthetic in this project, however, I do not seek to propose a universal definition for all Immersive Theatre. Instead, by focusing on particular aesthetic characteristics of a certain approach to Immersive Theatre, this chapter presents a framework for the performance that will be created as part of this project.

Approaches to Immersive Theatre in works such as Chemins, This Is Camp X-Ray, and Cages resonate with Hans-Thies Lehman’s (in Shaughnessy, 2012:12) concept of the “post dramatic” which encompasses a “shift from representation as the focus of dramatic enquiry to the relations between actor and audience.” Nicola Shaughnessy links Lehman’s thesis to Norman K. Denzin’s (2003:24) call for a “turn to a performance-based approach to culture, politics and pedagogy,” an aesthetic in which the traditional audie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The framework
• 2 The two performances
• 3 The data and the spectators
• 4 The data and the actors
• Conclusions
• Index