Unquestionably the most remarkable success in the current New York experimental theatre scene is that of the British Company Punchdrunk and their production of Sleep No More, a very remote adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, filtered through the influence of Hitchcock's films and contemporary spatial experimentation in staging practice. The production was originally scheduled to run for five weeks, from March 7 to April 16, 2011, but critical and popular response was so positive and so overwhelming that it was extended again and again. It is still, in the spring of 2015, running to sold-out houses. There is every indication that the production, now entering its fourth year, is nowhere near the end of its run.
This enormous success had a considerable impact on the New York experimental scene, with other so-called "immersive" productions appearing soon after Sleep No More achieved its first success, and others appearing every serion, until now this kind of theatre, although example of it vary a great deal, is an important part of the New York experimental theatre.
In Britain, where Punchdrunk was organized in 2000, the term "immersive" was not heard in connection with performance until their arrival on the scene, although it was beginning to be used at about the same time in connection with the developing internet.[1] Critics at first characterized their work with the much more familiar term "site-specific," a designation in fact applied to almost any performance taking place outside a traditional theatre space. Over the next decade, as the company's reputation grew, so did the usage of the term, until at present "immersive" theatre has become the fashionable designation of almost any work that in some way involves the audience, thus covering almost as broad a range of activity as the term site specific did at the end of the last century.
Clearly the same dynamic is at work in New York. Sleep No More, earlier versions of which were presented by Punchdrunk in London in 2003 and at the American repertory Theatre in Boston in 2009, was in 2011 the first production of this company or of its particular style to be seen in New York, and the term "immersive theatre" was almost totally unknown except to those who followed the current British experimental scene. Thus the British Council, a sponsor of the company, posted an introductory blog on their work between their Boston and New York appearances, identifying them to American audiences as "one of the most prominent UK companies exploring the contemporary practice of site-specific "immersive" to describe their work. As Sleep No More's run was extended again and again, it became the most talked-about experimental theatre piece in New York, and the term "immersive" was seized upon by reviewers and theatre producers alike. By the beginning of the 2011-2012 serion the term cleared appeared to be replacing the now somewhat dated "site-specific," Already we could see "immersive" being employed, as "site-specific" has been in the past, by critics as a descriptive and by producers as a marketing tool, applied with very little consistency to a wide range of unconventional staging approaches. In fact, many of the so-called "immersive theatre" productions mounted in the wake of the success of Sleep No More had very little in common with that production or in a number of cases, with each other.
I must take a moment then to briefly explain what Punchdrunk, with whom this term is most closely associated, means by it. The most distinctive feature of a Punchdrunk production is the unusual interplay of production, space, and audience. Each Punchdrunk production begins with a space, which in turn suggests to the company the sort of work they will develop there. The company has performed in derelict warehouses, shuttered factories, abandoned schools, even the garden of a 16
th century manor house. Their first production, the 2000
Cherry Orchard, was set in a former geological survey building in Exeter, England. "The most difficult space is one that's been lived in recently," says Barrelt, who has served as both director and designer of the company. "Once it's been empty for a while, ghosts and echoes start to infect it. You can almost feel the rot starting to set in, and that's a much more creative starting point.
[2] In these found spaces, generally consisting of dozens of locations, the Punchdrunk company create complete environments: cluttered rooms, graveyards, open fields, forests, crypts, and so on, through which both the audience and the actors may wonder as their inclination takes them. Although most of the Punchdrunk productions have been based on familiar dramatic texts, these texts are so cut, fragmented, and dispersed that only "ghosts and echoes" of the original text remain. How much of the "text" a spectator experiences will clearly vary. After the epedators have passed the ticket barrier they usually come into a kind of neutral assembly room, a hotel bar in
Sleep No More, given masks to wear, encouraged to
-circulate freely but individually and then set free to explore the building at their own pace and at their own whim.
The first post-Punchdrunk "immersive theatre" experiments in New York began to appear as early as August of 2011, less than six months after the opening of Sleep No More, but when the Puchdrunk offering was clearly embarked on an extended and hugely successful New York career. The Amoralists, one of New York's rising young experimental companies, mounted a two-play evening (with Works by Adam Rapp and company co-founder Derek Ahonen) early that month called HotelMotel, which was characterized as "immersive theatre" by both the company and reviewers. It was set in a room of an actual commercial hotel in New York, the Gershwin, with an audience of 20 seated around the room's bed. The first play emphasized the voyeuristic situation, with a couple and a sex therapist and the room representing itself. After an intermission the bedroom was transformed into an imaginary hotel room in Boone, North Carolina, with characters presumably trapped there in a blizzard. The scripts were fairly typical of Amoralist work, but not the setting, the first Amoralist production outside a conventional theatre space. Significantly, the concept of an intimate production even including male nudity, one of the "shocking" elements of HotelMotel was not at all original. Richard Maxwell created his Showcase for an intimate audience in a bedroom of the New York Hilton in 2013, and that production has since toured to more than twenty cities around the world, where it has been usually described as "site-specific," but never, to the best of my knowledge, as "immersive."
Another, related type of staging is what has been called "living-room" performance, where a small group of audience members gather to witness a monologue or larger production in an intimate domestic space. The most famous example of such work was the Living Room Theatre of Pavel Kohout in the 1970s in Prague, which performed plays like Macbeth clandestinely in living rooms to avoid the Soviet censors. Since the l 990s this type of performance has become increasingly common in New York, most notably in the case of Wallace Shawn's Fever (1990), originally written to be performed in private apartments with audiences of ten or twelve. These smaller performances are immersive only in the sense that audiences and performers share a common space; the primary reception experience sought is not really immersive but intimacy.
A more interesting and complex example of this claimed new style opened in New York just two weeks after HotelMotel. This was The Tenant, staged by Woodshed Collective. Unlike The Amoralists, Woodshed, beginning in 2002 with conventional proscenium-style performance, moved beginning in 2006 into what the company generally called "installation theatre" and reviewers site-specific theatre. For these productions, the Collective found locations which could be divided into multiple areas, with audiences free to move about and put together their own collage of experience. The 2009 adaptation of Melville's The Confidence Man acattered acted scenes and YouTube videos throughout the spaces offered by four levels of a decommissioned US Coast Guard ship, through which audiences could wonder as their fancy took them. This and the 2011 The Tenant were close in conception to Sleep No More.
The Tenant was a collection of scenes inspired by a 1964 novella and a Polanski film adaptation of it, presented in a landmark church building converted for this production into five stories of a rundown Paris apartment building, with audiences free to move about (unmasked) and try to piece out or construct a story. A year or two before, such a work would have doubtless been labeled site-specific, but the
New York Times review clearly expressed the new framing by characterizing
The Tenant as "the latest in a proliferating mini-genre of immersive-spookhouse mood pieces."
[3]
"Immersive" productions that demanded a mobile audience were certainly less conventional than those that placed seated audiences in unusual surroundings or untraditional configurations, but these also were not as revolutionary as many of their promoters or devotees have claimed. There is a long theatrical tradition of mobile audiences, going back in Europe at least to the medieval theatre. The late twentieth century saw a new interest in freeing audiences much in the manner of Punchdrunk, though without the specific identifying label of "immersive." In Britain one common term for such work has been "promenade theatre." An early prominent international example of such work was John Krizanc's Tamara, created in Toronto in 1981 and moved to Los Angeles in 1984 and New York in 1987. For each production, ten rooms of the palatial villa of the Italian author Gabriele d'Annunzio, were created in some elegant, pre-existing Victorian building, in New York the Park Avenue Armory. There was not a single line of action, but multiple scenes playing simultaneously, so, although audience members could not move totally freely, they could freely decide which of a number of these scenes they would watch or what character they would follow.
As the New York Times review suggested, however, by the summer of 2011, there was a"proliferating mini-genre" of so-called "immersive" theatre in New York, a proliferation which continued to escalate. I use so-called advisedly however, because in fact almost all that these productions had in common was the term "immersive" and the utilization of unconventional audience arrangements. It is clear that all such productions shared a desire to provide a reception experience different from that ordinarily provided by the theatre, ideally one in which the audience member was not placed in the traditional position of passive spectator seated before a separate display, but was, at least in theory, totally immersed in that display, creating, presumably, a more holistic physical and emotional experience.
In fact the reception dynamics have varied greatly within theatre experiences claimed to be "immersive." Probably the most conventional of these experiences have been productions that simply removed the proscenium arch and placed the seated audience within the same space as the actors as in
HotelMotel. The most intimate of these involved very small audiences, twenty or less, but others simply provided a common space, as we see in the Soho Rep adaptation in June of 2012 of Chekhov's
Uncle Tanya, which was advertised as an "immersive" production.
[4] The performance itself was in fact a quite conventional one, with a conventionally passive audience.
What justified, at least in the minds of the producers, the term "immersive" was the setting. Stage and auditorium were designed as one, a single room under an A-frame roof, with a carpeted floor for the actors surrounded on all four sides by carpeted levels with pillows instead of chairs, where the spectators sat. This, as most theatre-goers will recognize, is not far removed from what used to be called "arena theatre" or "theatre-in-the-round." One might argue that the "theatricalization" of the entire shared space, audience and acting areas, moves such a production into another reception realm, but that also is hardly new. Ever since the 1960s, this audience arrangement has normally been referred to not as "immersive" but as "environmental," a term popularized by Richard Schechner, although he had been preceded in such work by Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Stein, and several early twentieth century Russian directors seeking a more intimate audience/performance relationship. Indeed I would argue that "environmental" is a more accurate term for such an audience arrangement, since in fact audiences are no more actually "immersed" in the fictional world of the play than they would be at a perfectly traditional proscenium-arch presentation.
The fact that many "immersive" productions, especially in Britain, have sought to make these environments especially personal, confining, or uncomfortable does not alter their basic dynamic, and if anything imposes even more on the audience's freedom than sitting in a conventional auditorium seat. A Guardian reviewer fresh from an "immersive" staging of Kafka's The Trial at the Southwark Playhouse in 2009 complained:
When the actors from The Trial blindfolded me and led me through into a disorientingly cold and inhospitable space, instead of feeling a frisson of "What now?" I just thought. "Oh, not blindfolded again." When the actors prodded and poked me in a manner presumably calculated to frighten and create some of the feelings of claustrophobia, hopelessness and confusion experienced by Kalka's Josef K, I just felt irritated. . . . The power relationship between the audience and the cast seemed to have tipped rather completely into the cast's favor. [5]
This question of the power dynamics of immersive theatre, rarely mentioned in writings on the subject, is I think a critical one, to which I will later return. (image 15) An interesting experiment midway between conventional theatre on a proscenium stage and promenade/immersive productions of Punchdrunk and others, which set the audience free to wonder more or less at will through multiple rooms in whole buildings, was the Roman Tragedies performance, created by the Flemish director Ivo van Hove for the Avignon Festival in the summer of 2008. This was a six-hour production (with no intermission) combining Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. It was revived the following year at the London Barbican and in November of 2012 at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The term "immersive theatre" was used as a description of the work in all three locations, but the "immersion" was very different from that of, for example, Sleep No More. Actors and audience shared a common space, within which the audience were expected to move about, but instead of joining the actors in a created non-theatrical space, a former church, hotel, or warehouse, the audience was brought actually onto the stage, into the conventional world of the performers.
The setting, by van Hove's long-time designer Jan Versweyveld, represented a large conference hall, with video screens, sofas, birs, and tables with computers. As one reviewer rioted: "We both watch the play and we are in the play, invited on to the stage to loll on the sofas, check our email on the computers or buy a drink from the on-stage bar. We are the nameless citizens of Rome, we are implicited in the action.”
[6] Strictly speaking, this is not a "promenade" production, even though the audience is free ind indeed is expected to move about durring the action, since actual alternate spaces are not part of the performance. Everything takes place on the large stage area. If a spectator leaves that area, to use the toilets or simply to take a break, they leave the world of the production. Of course they are free to focus on any part of the stage and to view a scene or a character from a different angle, but their "immersion" is much more like that of walking, unnoticed, onto the stage of a conventional production. No reviewer, I think, noted that this experiment was only a slightly more extreme version of Peter Hall's 1984 staging of
Coriolanus with Ian McKellen at the National Theatre, where audience members were invited on stage each evening to represent the Roman crowds. Later McKellen complained of their interference, remembering with particular irritation the evening when one woman, returning from getting a drink at the bar, asking him in the middle of a scene to autograph her program.
[7]
Clearly the van Hove production is much closer in many ways to the "immersive"
Sleep No More than is the Soho
Vanya, but the audience, though they have been "cast" as Roman citizens and have a certain freedom of movement and action within the performance space, in fact in terms of the overall performance have not much more real agency. A version of Shakespeare's
Coriolanus is being performed around then and although they have unusual control of how much of it they witness, should they actually attempt to participate they would be as unwelcome as McKellen's autograph seeker. The
Guardian review attempts to separate the viewer's experience from that in the conventional theatre: "We can also view the drama from multiple perspectives, or indeed curate our own versions of the plays because of where we choose to look. When Coriolanus is banished from Rome, I viewed the entire scene by looking at his wife's despairing face.”
[8]
Actually this process in fact happens all the time in much more conventional theatre, with each audience member "curating" their own version of the play, a dynamic at the center of modern reception theory, but allowing the audience actually to move about to gain different perspectives calls new attention to this general process.
[9] Theatre professionals are well aware of this phenomenon, and must assume at any moment that someone in the audience has chosen to look at them, no matter how far from the center of the scene they are. This is the principle behind Stanislavsky's spokesman Tortsov's admonition to the extra playing a gondolier in
Othello. That minor player is advised to develop a full character and detailed motivation to contribute fully to the experience of the spectator who chooses to look at him at any moment instead of Iago.
[10]
Mobility, however, is not the same thing as agency, a distinction often overlooked in the recent rhetoric surrounding the new freedom given to the spectator in immersive theatre. There is much talk among reception theorists today about the "emancipated spectator," a term not, not entirely coincidently, developed in popular in critical discourse about performance almost simultaneously with that of "immersive theatre”. "The Emancipated Spectator" was the title of a highly influential article published by Jacques Rancière in
Art Forum in 2007 and then subsequently heading a collection of five essays in a book which bore that title in 2009.
[11] Although there are close ties between this work and the author's previous
The Future of the Image (2007) concerning art's inevitable interconnection with politics and the development of a more equitable society, the title, and to some extent the argument of
The Emancipated Spectator looks back to Rancière's 1981
The Ignorant Schoolmaster, concerned with dismantling the authoritarian student/teacher relationship.
The Emancipated Spectator reverses the focus of the earlier work, using the metaphor of theatre instead of the classroom. In order for the theatre to achieve its real essence, says Rancière, the Spectator must be liberated from his traditional role of mere passive observer, submitting to the authority of the performer. Drawing upon Brecht and Artaud, Rancière insists that on the one hand the Spectator must abandon this role and "take on that of the scientist who observes phenomena and seeks their cause." On the other hand, he must no longer remain "still and untouched in front of a distant spectacle," but must be "drawn into the magical power of theatrical action."
[12]
The first, more Brechtian proposal has to do with an attitude rather than a physical process, and in theory, as Brecht articulated it, could operate equally well in a conventional theatre space. The second, closer to Artaud, is also closer to the actual dynamics of immersive theatre, where audience members are necessarily to a greater or lesser extent "drawn into the magicai power of theatrical action." Artaud, and for that matter, Rancière, have however, a much more radical vision than anything generally seen in so-called immersive theatre, including the Punchdrunk productions. (image 16) It is true that in Sleep No More audience members can move with total freedom among the approximately one hundred rooms in the six floors of this former warehouse converted into a hotel. They can read the books in the library, eat sweets in the candy store, sleep in the hospital beds. But their freedom is limited in odd ways. They are required, as in all Punchdrunk productions, to wear white neutral Venetian-style masks, removing much of their individuality and marking them as spectators rather than actual actors. Moreover they are requested to move as individuals and never to speak, restrictions obviously not imposed on the actors. Despite the mobility of audience members, they share the actors' space but they cannot really become equal participants in the theatrical action.
By contrast, a much greater audience involvement has been sought in at least some of the experimental productions of certain continental groups, most notably by Signa, a Copenhagen-based company formed in 2001. Its work is similar in many respects to that of Punchdrunk, but it has not been characterized as "immersive" except by some British reviewers. Signa is not as well known in the Anglo-Saxon world as Punchdrunk, but much better known internationally, having mounted what it calls "performance installations" in Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Argentína. Like Punchdrunk, Signa avoids both traditional theatres and conventional narrative structures, using found locations, often ones with multiple spaces, like abandoned public buildings or warehouses, whose intenor spaces are made into environments in which actors and spectators mingle. Despite its very free adaptations of material, Punchdrunk has remained closer to the dramatic tradition, about half of its productions based on Shakespeare or other standard classic authors. None of Signa's pieces has such a reference, though most draw upon elements of found social or cultural material. (image 19) A number of the pieces are set in clinics or hospitals, with audience members treated as patients, often with mental problems. Both companies generally give spectators choices not only about the space of their experience but also time. Sleep No More, like most Punchdrunk productions, gives audiences total control of how they allot their time within the space, but comes to an end at an allotted time, in this case about three hours. Signa productions are generally much more open-ended, in some cases running continuously for a week or ten days, with audiences free to come and go as they like. It also has encouraged more flexible interaction between performers and spectators. Although Punchdrunk often features what are called "one-on-ones," intimate interactions with individual spectators (always initiated by the actors), Signa has, in some productions at least, allowed spectators a much more active role in improvising scenes and actions on their own or in cooperation with the actors. The amount of freedom Signa allows varies widely from production to production. In The Dorine Chaikin Institute (2007) spectators were given almost no freedom. They were cast as mental patients who had lost their memory and spent several hours "recovering" the memory of a fictitious alter ego. The Ruby Town Oracle created in Cologne, Germany, in 2008 and revived later that year in Berlin, offered a complete village of 22 buildings, presumably a political enclave that required a passport and visa to enter, which ran continuously for a week, and encouraged free interaction with the more than 40 "inhabitants." In other productions, beginning with the three "Tavin Lives" plays which which Signa started, audience members have been encouraged not only to interact actively with the performers,-but to ereate,characters and plot developments on their own, to which the performers adapt. In these latter productions we seem to be close to Rancière's actively participating emancipated spectator. Yet, despite the radical phenomenological shift in the reception process, I would argue that this emancipation is still to a significant extent illusory. In each of these productions the imaginary world, its locale, its properties, its rules, and its back story remain the product of the creators. The spectators enter it as guests with their participation and knowledge always to a certain extent restricted. The closest model is not actual life, as it is for Rancière and Artaud, but rather virtual video games, in which one's character is free to move and make choices, but only within the parameters set forth by the game. One may see this influence clearly in the website of Punchdrunk, based on an interactive digital game. The spectator is in a sense emancipated, but it is in fact what might be called virtual emancipation. The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who anticipated in his mid-twentieth century novels and short stories many of the concerns of the next century observed in 1978.
Fake realities will create fake humans. Or fake humans will generate fake realitiesand then tell them to other humans, turning them, essentially, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride-you can have all of them, but none is true. In this essay Dick makes an ironic suggestion: In Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the part with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when then discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! The park being cunningly transmuted from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. [13] In fact Punchdrunk, literally selling of fake realities, is clearly much closer to Dick's Disneyland than it is to a device for emancipatiog the spectator. The spectator who would attempt to being real birds into Sleep No More, were such a bizarre act to be permitted, would be scarcely less welcome, nor less accepted as part of this artificial and controlled world, than the lady who interrupted Ian McKellan to request his autograph. The rules of the game may have been adjusted, and the spectator may have changed from an observer to a player, but the game, and the rules, still remain some else's.
[1] Immersion and the internet is a fascinating and related field, but one that takes us too far afield to be addressed here. Fortunately a recent book by Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion (New-York: Norton, 2011), provides an excellent introduction to this subject. Another important study relevant to the cultural shifts behind the interest in narrative Immersion is Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields (New York: Knopf, 2010). Shields names as the characteristics a new artistic movement randomness, spontaneity, reader/viewer participation und involvement and "a blurring (to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction und nonfiction: the lure und blur of the real" (page 5). Although Shields is not speaking of immersive theatre, all of these characteristics are central to its operations.
[2] Quoted in Joan Anderson, "Mystery Theater ", The Boston Globe, Arts/Theater, Oct. 4, 2009.
[3] Eric Grode, "Mystery is Set for a Free-Range Audience," The New York Times, August 28, 2011.
[5] Charlotte Higgins, "Immersive theatre - tired and hackneyed already? The Guardian, December 7, 2009.
[6] Lyn Gardner, "Roman Tragedies," The Guardian, Nov. 20, 2009.
[9] See my article, "Psychic Polyphony
[10] Constantin Stanislavsky, Creating a Role, trans. E.R. Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 8.
[11] Rancière, "The Emancipated Spectator," Art Forum (March 2007), The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009).
[12] Rancière, "The Emancipated Spectator," Art Forum March 2007), 272.
[13] Philip K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe, pt. 2," (1978) accessed on http://yin.arts.uci.edu/studio/readings/dick/index2.htmlAugust 22, 2012.
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Marvin Carlson is a Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies. His research and teaching interests include dramatic theory and Western European theatre history and dramatic literature, especially of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He has been awarded the ATHE Career Achievement Award, the George Jean Nathan Prize, the Bernard Hewitt prize, the George Freedley Award, the Edgar Rosenblum Award, the Oscar G. Brockett Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been a Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington, a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University, a Visiting Professor at the Freie Universität of Berlin, and a Fellow of the American Theatre. In 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Athens. His best-known book, Theories of the Theatre (Cornell University Press, 1993), has been translated into seven languages. His 2001 book, The Haunted Stage won the Calloway Prize. His newest book is the Theatres of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia with Khalid Amine (Palgrave 2011).
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