Reframing Immersive Theatre

The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

James Frieze

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781137366047
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This diverse collection of essays and testimonies challenges critical orthodoxies about the twenty-first century boom in immersive theatre and performance. A culturally and institutionally eclectic range of producers and critics comprehensively reconsider the term 'immersive' and the practices it has been used to describe. Applying ecological, phenomenological and political ideas to both renowned and lesser-known performances, contributing scholars and artists offers fresh ideas on the ethics and practicalities of participatory performance. These ideas interrogate claims that have frequently been made by producers and by critics that participatory performance extends engagement. These claims are interrogated across nine dimensions of engagement: bodily, technological, spatial, temporal, spiritual, performative, pedagogical, textual, social. Enquiry is focussed along the following seams of analysis: the participant as co-designer; the challenges facing the facilitator of immersive/participatory performance; the challenges facing the critic of immersive/participatory performance; how and why immersion troubles boundaries between the material and the magical.

© The Author(s) 2016

James Frieze (ed.)Reframing Immersive Theatre10.1057/978-1-137-36604-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

James Frieze¹

(1)

Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK

End Abstract

The word ‘immersive’ has enjoyed a remarkable life in relation to twenty-first-century performance. It seemed for a while that no performance event in which the audience moved, or in which they were somehow surrounded or emplaced by the performance, failed to capitalise on the value of the term. The currency of work calling itself ‘immersive’ reflects a valorisation of cultural forms that offer the chance to do more than ‘just’ observe or study; they offer the chance to interact with, even to become, the object of attention. This offer projects an assumption that there is a cultural problem which the immersive claims to solve. If the problem projected by the immersive is a condition of spiritual and political detachment, the projected solution is a participatory form that will help us to re-connect, to re-attach with one another and with ourselves. Championing of the immersive as a form of personal and cultural reparation frequently asserts/implies that theatre itself needs to be woken up, to be re-attached to an agenda of embodied, interactive engagement. This assertion is made, for example, in what is—in its generosity of examples and its staking out the territory of the immersive—the closest thing we have to a textbook on the subject: Josephine Machon’s Immersive Theatres. Along lines broadly similar to Lehmann’s opposition of dramatic/post-dramatic theatre, Machon opposes immersive theatre, positioned as adventurous and dynamic, to ‘traditional’ theatre, positioned as stifling: ‘With immersive theatre the audience is removed from the “usual” set of rules and conventions expected from “traditional” theatrical performances’ (2013, 26).

Within both critical and commercial discourse (and I present these as overlapping rather than entirely separate domains), the binary of progressive/traditional has often worked in tandem with other binaries: sensory/rational, haptic/optic, agency/passivity. Together, these oppositions have aligned immersion and interaction with liberation from convention. Broadly speaking, the first term within each of these binaries is equated with participation and is positively valenced; the second terms are equated with obstacles to participation and are negatively valenced. It is no accident that, in framing their work, the most renowned practitioners of immersive theatre, Punchdrunk, frequently inscribe these oppositions. In a video interview for New York-based, networking thinktank FoST (Future of Storytelling) filmed in September 2013, Artistic Director Felix Barrett opposes Punchdrunk’s output, which he lauds as sensory, haptic and agency-endowing in contrast to the ‘traditional theatregoing experience’, which he denigrates as a disembodied, passivity-inducing spectacle ‘that’s utterly formulaic’. What is perhaps more surprising is that a similar opposition is maintained by Lebanese artist and activist, Lucien Bourjeily, as cited by Adam Alston: ‘this play is not going to be a traditional kind of play [but] an immersive experience where the audience will have the opportunity to experience first-hand and to interact […] And the audience will come out of the play as they would come out in real life from a detention centre’. A banner headline on Bourjeily’s website echoes Barrett’s (inter)view: ‘Theatre has so many competitors. You want to be able to touch and smell it too. It’s no longer enough to see and hear a play.’ Bourjeily, in other words, seems to share the sentiment expressed in the title of Barrett’s interview: ‘Burn the Seats’. What this book burns to fire debate about participation are the simplistic distinctions that align immersion and interactivity with agency and reify the traditional as passive. Such divisions, which fail to consider the participatory nature of all theatre and performance, are the real deadwood; they are not a firm foundation upon which to conceptualise immersion or participation.

This book aims to unshackle discourse about participatory performance from these chains of oppositional logic. Whereas Machon’s taxonomic method offers scales of immersivity to bring a scientific clarity to the mess of participatory performance, this book does not offer a paradigm to distinguish productive from non- or counter-productive kinds of participatory performance; neither does it attempt to plot scales of participation or of immersion. Instead, it adopts, as Andrew Filmer puts it, an ‘interrogative and inductive approach rather than one that perpetuates the proliferation of taxonomies’. Though there is an exciting diversity of voices, viewpoints and methodologies amongst the contributions, there is a shared desire to interrogate both the term ‘immersive’ and the claims that have been made about various kinds of performance that the term ‘immersive’ has been and might be used to describe.

In using the term ‘participatory performance’, I do not mean to imply that it is easy to mark a boundary between work that is and work that is not participatory. On the contrary, I want to keep in mind the dynamically tautologous nature of the phrase. Participation is performative and performance is participatory: they are symbiotic. My view, in common with most of the contributions to this book, is that participatory performance should hold participation and indeed genre in question. Although it is often taken to be a set of forms that are participatory enough to distinguish them from other less or non-participatory forms, I think it is more accurate and more productive to see participatory performance as a framework through which to read artistic and critical practice. Participatory performance, as it is invoked in this book, is a field rather than a set of forms or formulae, a field in which form is intensely dynamic—evolving through dialogue about the effects of form, dialogue within which feedback from participants contends with projections and assumptions cast by the makers of the work. As such, participatory performance poses acute, and acutely political, challenges to critical framing. These challenges are a focus of this book. Some of these challenges are more ethical/political in nature and some more pragmatic/methodological; but it is the interplay of, and tension between, ethical/political problems and pragmatic/methodological responses that makes participatory performance such fascinating critical terrain.

Participatory performance often subdues the kind of rational reflection upon which criticism is usually seen to be based. Most conceptions of rationality hold that rational processing needs distance; sensory immersion tends to be equated with a collapsing of distance. As Filmer argues, the ‘encouragement of reflexive awareness sits at odds with immersive theatre that valorises immediacy, sensuality’. Several contributions theorise the immersive in ways that complicate the perceived opposition of rational and sensory capacities. Academic writing, as Carl Lavery puts it, ‘parcels the world and experience into a series of neat, nucleated moments in order to maintain a sense of distance’. Participatory performance does not lend itself to this kind of writing. The gift and the challenge of participatory performance are that it entreats us to appreciate the value of thinking of experiential, expressive, and critical faculties as inseparable, calling on us to experience from first- and third-person, insider and outsider perspectives, often in the same instant. Capturing this oscillation in prose is both necessary and desirable if the critic is going to reflect accurately and evoke the spirit of the work. Reflecting on her approach in Immersive Theatres, Machon revisits the paradoxically ‘epic, intimate encounter’ that is Adrian Howells’ The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding. Observing that the need for the critic to integrate subjective reportage and more objective, critical analysis is particularly acute in such encounters, Machon oscillates between the two in an essay that (like the encounter it considers) is about negotiation between beautifully poetic responses and hard-headed, analytical ones.

The dialogue that such negotiation generates begins as an internal dialogue. This internal dialogue, as Esther Belvis Pons and George Home-Cook both evoke, is often intense in explicitly participatory performance contexts yet is equally often absent in critical framing of such contexts. Roberta Mock’s experimental contribution, informed by her spectatorial experience and critical expertise in live art, makes this internal dialogue provocatively present on the page. Critics’ attempts to both preserve that dialogue in writing and extend it to dialogue with imagined readers can produce a strange intimacy that parallels that experienced in performance itself. Machon’s elegant account of her own coming to terms with the fear of being literally and metaphorically naked in Howells’s hands is emblematic of the strange intimacy of immersive participation metastasising from performance into critical discourse.

Critiquing Engagement Within and Beyond the Immersive Event

As they are usually conceived, immersive experiences depend on the creation of an event bubble that excludes the reality of the wider world. For this event bubble to remain intact, collisions between spectators, and collisions between the world demarcated by the event and the world beyond the event, must be avoided. Barrett states that Punchdrunk’s goal is to ‘keep the lid closed so no light from the real world enters in, figuratively or literally!’ That he equates the event bubble with a collapsing of critical self-awareness is evident in his remark that if ‘ever an audience becomes aware of themselves as audience, then we’ve probably slightly failed’ (Machon 2013, 161).

A very different logic emerges from the contributions in this book, a logic in which collision is the essence of participation. Encased within the deeply problematic contractual bubble into which Follow the North Star enters museum visitors, Ruth Laurion Bowman finds a need to examine the bubbles we are expected to inhabit as both critics and participants of participatory performance. Like so many of the authors in this book, she calls for what I would summarise as ‘resistant immersion’. Resistant immersion acknowledges the dichotomous nature of maintaining the critical distance needed to make sense of a new and disorienting experience whilst surrendering to intimate engagement.

That immersion entails intensification of the experience normally afforded to theatre spectators is fundamental to the construction of the immersive as a genre. Correlatively, it is fundamental to this book’s interrogation of immersion. The many implicit and explicit claims made by and on behalf of the immersive are held in question by all the contributors to this book. Far from being sceptical for the sake of being sceptical, these contributions are motivated by a desire to get to and celebrate the genuine potential of participation to exert and inspire change.

Julia Ritter cites philosopher and anthropologist Michael Taussig’s acerbic observation of contemporary Western culture: ‘If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable?’ Suggesting that ‘it is this perceived immutability of life that draws 21st-century artists and audience participants into immersive practices’ that offer ‘opportunities to self-curate, create, invent, and perform’, Ritter frames these opportunities via a notion of ‘extended audiencing’. ‘Audiencing’ is a term that has been used for decades within cultural, sociological and business studies to frame the labour of audiences in material terms. The ‘verbing’ of the term reflects an interest in users of social media as a new kind of audience whose sharing—including critiques, rumour-spreading hype, and expressions of preference—does marketing work that marketeers themselves cannot do. As Eran Fisher conceives it, ‘[a]udiencing begins when one connects with other audience members, becoming, in fact, their audience. Audiencing on social media, then, is entwined with creating networks among members’. Fisher interprets these networks as systems of labour in which audiences perform work that ‘cannot be performed by “regular” media workers since it involves real, lived-experienced events and interactions’ (52). Ritter, Alston and Lindsay Brandon Hunter insightfully explore the impact on the performance event of audiences becoming audiences for one another, complicating the conventional distinction between makers and participants. They show how the labour of these maker-participants necessitates forms of critical analysis that treat works of participatory performance as not just a designed event but an extended event, of which web-based participation (including blogs, trailers, and fansites) is integral.

Participatory performance might be seen to extend the participatory nature of audiencing in a variety of other respects: bodily, technological, spatial, temporal, spiritual, performative, pedagogical, textual, social. I say ‘might be seen’ to stress that I am separating these nine aspects out as ways of seeing the effects of participatory performance. Far from suggesting that as much apparent extension of engagement along as many of these nine dimensions as possible is what is needed for a performance to be deemed genuinely immersive or participatory, these dimensions serve interrogation of claims made for and assumptions made about participatory performance. In particular, they are tools that help to examine the friction between design and experience which runs throughout the book. I posit this nine-dimension approach as a methodological tool broadly analogous to the compositional method known as Viewpoints—a system of composition, developed for theatre training and production by Anne Bogart, that originates from the work of dance pedagogue Mary Overlie. As in Viewpoints work, the bracketing of a particular aspect or aspects is a methodological tool; also as in Viewpoints work, it is the overlaps and tensions between aspects that emerge from this bracketing that are most revealing.

It is no accident that the first in my list of dimensions is bodily engagement. Rhetoric around the reception of performance consistently reinforces the romantic view that the locus of organic, honest reception is ‘the body’. This ‘body’ is a notional one, existing prior to or outside the effects of mediation. Contemporary participatory performance tends, however, to trouble this romantic view of the honest, unmediated body because it challenges the boundaries of the body via technological means, so that mediation is impossible to deny. As Ruth Laurion Bowman suggests, it is a critical convention to conceive ‘a worthwhile participatory performance [a]s one that activates our desire to extend beyond our familiar body boundaries and engage the physical and discursive contingencies of our own and other bodies, including those of space’. The assumption underlying this convention is that participants have a hitherto unfulfilled ‘desire to extend beyond familiar body boundaries’. This implies a relaxing of the borders of personal space that can enable new forms of connection with oneself, one’s environment, and others sharing that environment. However, as Home-Cook conveys in his discussion with Kristian Derek Ball of aural immersion, and as anyone who attended Ring (another Sound&Fury show, created by Glen Neath and David Rosenberg in 2012) would probably agree, some of the most bodily involving performances are those which activate our desire to protect or contract our body boundaries rather than extend them. In shows such as Ring, Sound&Fury use binaural recording to make us feel as if our body boundaries are being challenged. We do not physically move in Ring; neither does anyone move all the chairs around us or whisper secrets or threats in our ear as we sit there in total darkness. Nonetheless, owing to the highly persuasive orientational effects of binaural recording and the lack of any visual cues to contradict this trickery, things seem for all the world to be happening to and around us.

Although it is not just in aural work that the participant is likely to want to contract or protect their body boundaries, the sense of disorientation that triggers protection/contraction reflexes is common in performances that immerse aurally. Performances like Outdoors (discussed by Belvis Pons), in which visual cues provocatively contend with aural cues, can stimulate thinking about the ways in which one’s sense of geography (physical and psychic) is changed by technology. Although I did not participate in Outdoors, Belvis Pons’s account brings to mind my experience of Slung Low’s 2010 Anthology, in which seven different stories are told to seven sections of an audience following seven overlapping paths, starting and ending together at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. As in Outdoors, the participant’s connection to their physical environment is filtered, in Slung Low events like Anthology, through the stories about space told by guides via headset. As Filmer and Home-Cook argue, the ways in which headsets are being used to re-orient headspace in relation to physical space is under-theorised.

Too many debates about technology in performance have polarised the apparently live and the pre-recorded. This polarisation has continued since the 1990s, when debate frequently cited the writings of Peggy Phelan, who was seen to endorse, and Philip Auslander, who was seen to challenge, the opposition between face-to-face and mechanically or digitally mediated means of performance. Participatory performance provides important opportunities to enrich thinking about how digital machinery affects and effects communication and about how changing notions of liveness inform changing notions of participation. Analysing the effects of technology in participatory performance is inherently challenging, as technology is routinely used to re-orient and disorient, ‘giving birth’, as Belvis Pons puts it, ‘to an expanded corporeality that carries emerging dramaturgical possibilities’. Her reading of Outdoors, like Filmer’s of Coriolan/us, details the ways in which the performance ‘places the body in an interesting in-between position that affords interrogation of the relationship between public and private space’. Filmer’s conception of the ‘sonic envelope’ and Belvis Pons’s idea of ‘techno-ventriloquism’ to articulate the iPod user’s uncanny disconnection from and ‘in-tune-ness’ with their own body as (in Michael Bull’s words) ‘their world becomes one with their “soundtracked” movements’ are both informed by Home-Cook’s reflections on the phenomenology of aural attention.

It is not just ontological boundaries between real and representational that are troubled by innovations like the mp3 player or Google Glass but social boundaries also—the limits of individuality and conditions of community. The porosity of personal and social space is greatly influenced by such innovations. In turn, shifts in the nature of personal and social boundaries change the experience of space in the context of performance. Filmer, Lavery and Home-Cook consider space from a phenomenological standpoint, each suggesting that participatory performance re-configures notions of ‘site’ in ways that demand new conceptions of how space is experienced. Rimini Protokoll’s work complicates the ability to identify ‘actual’ or ‘literal’ encounter in space as something separable from the virtualisation or technological over-writing of physical environment. The psycho-geographical, a key facet of the participatory performance experience, is more, though, than just a product of virtualising or any other kind of technology. The work of Gaston Bachelard, in particular his notion of how each of us brings to each new space our personal history of habitation (‘all our former rooms’), is invoked by Machon, Filmer and Lavery. All apply ecological, sociological and phenomenological perspectives to performances that explore the ways in which personal histories fuel and are fuelled by the social experience of space.

The spatial dimensions of the encounters discussed prove the inadequacy of terms like site-responsive. Although the diversity of performance sites addressed in this book is striking—an aircraft hangar, a river, rooftops, streets, m...