Category: Immersive Theatre 101

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The Activity Spectrum

As I’ve claimed before, “Rule #2: The audience is active” is the game-changer in the genre. Theatre is good fun, I’m usually laughing or learning in the dark, but immersive theatre sees me. It gives me opportunities to explore myself in new contexts, face new challenges, and come out on the other side a little different for the experience. I did not just witness the story, I built a relationship with it. I lived it.

It’s amazing when a gorgeous set is all around you, and perhaps you can even smell the meat pies, but things don’t get really interesting until you’re invited to make those pies yourself. Or perhaps, when you have to decide if you’ll help Sweeney Todd enact his revenge or not.

As rich as the surroundings no doubt are at the Barrow Street-turned-meat-pie-shop, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney ignore the seated audience, as is tradition. (Credit: Joan Marcus)

That, my friends, requires a new kind of writing, a new kind of performing, and a new kind of audience. It’s theatre that mirrors the imaginative play of childhood, except with way higher production values. This is how theatre can (finally!) meaningfully differentiate itself from Hollywood.

But not all activity is created equal.

A big difference among immersive theatre productions is how the piece engages you, and you often don’t know what you’ll be doing until you’re inside. Sometimes characters will float in and out of awareness that you’re there, some will build relationships with you that reward commitment, while yet others will directly ask you for aid. Sometimes even, you get to be the protagonist, and the actors buoy your story, functioning more like NPCs (non-playing characters). Different structures invite different activities.

For me, I don’t like to call it immersive theatre unless there’s sustained audience engagement. But once a production passes that initial hurdle from passive to active mode, there’s a lot of colorful territory to explore.

the activity spectrum

Because I have a strange fetish for the codification of qualitative stuff, I’ve categorized the range of activities common in immersive theatre into a spectrum.

Note that being on the left side of things does not make the production any less awesome than shows in the red zone. This is not a quality spectrum. Nor does a structure being on the right side guarantee that it will include the other forms of activity to its left. You can have a sandbox where characters never make eye contact with you, for example.

As you move left to right, you can expect to do things more like you do in real life. Presence turns to activity turns to agency. I consider these 3 very distinct stages. The first knows you’re there; it’s the start of a relationship. The second employs you but doesn’t make much distinction between one warm body and the next. The “tasks” tend to be easy, and if you fail at the “task,” there are no consequences. The third means you—yes, you! the particular you—can make a difference.

activity IS NOT AGENCY

To have true agency requires altering the story, whether that’s your story or the central story of the characters. “Challenges” lead to alterations in what you experience and typically present as binary: win/lose, pass/fail, do/do not. It’s up to you. “Choices,” on the other hand, have a deeper impact and influence the headlining story, affecting change that goes beyond “I saw this” or “I unlocked that.” The characters and/or other participants are affected. Choices are not necessarily binary, but can be.

Example: Completing a quest falls under “challenge,” but if completing it then alters the fate of a character, it moves into the zone of “choice.”

Escape rooms and sandboxes usually don’t go beyond the “challenge” stage. There aren’t many examples of “choice” immersives, and I can’t think of any common structures but LARPs (which may or may not be immersive theatre). There’s a lot of territory to explore in the red zone, but it poses many challenges—how do you structure an evening’s experience for multiple participants that allows each to exercise meaningful choice without ruining the show for the others? Perhaps a many-branched one-on-one train? And is that economically feasible?

bragging zone

I’ve identified the warmer area to the right as “the bragging zone.” While you can certainly tell the story of what you saw in a dark ride over drinks, you cannot claim to have earned it. In my first viewing of Then She Fell, I received the Alice letter-quest. While I was thrilled by what happened on that track, I could not brag about it afterwards—what happened to me was pure luck. I was navigated to it. I couldn’t own it.

But I can brag about puzzles that I solved or completing “the Malcolm Marathon” (he has a fondness for the fourth and first floors). Shows that enter “the bragging zone” mean you get to exercise your specialness.

Just don’t brag too much. (The Simpsons)

Some people crave shows in the bragging zone: it engages more of themselves, and they leave with a more satisfying experience.

And yet others may want a little less engagement, a little less challenge, and a little more guarantee. Less choice means you’re free to focus on other things, like connecting with the performer in front of you, exploring where you happen to be, or piecing together the story. You won’t get a bad show because you can’t make poor choices. I get the sense that about 95% of people who visit Sleep No More come out dazed and confused, whereas Then She Fell guarantees every participant a quality experience.

And besides, don’t you sometimes want a break from the existential avalanche of never-ending choice that we call life?

Henri, le Chat Noir, understands. (Click for amusement)

Some days, I really wish I were on rails….

for story’s sake

Choose your activity wisely. The story of Sweet & Lucky would have been disastrous as a sandbox; gamification would do it a disservice. And yet its quiet invitation to do a task or two moved me no doubt more than if I had experienced it as a proscenium show. It’s at home exactly where it is.

In our turn, take the escape room out of The Man From Beyond, and you have to re-conceive pretty much everything about it, to the point that it would be unrecognizable. The player experience is its foundation.

So before you jump on the immersive theatre bandwagon, consider the story you want to tell. What impact will different modes of audience engagement have on your story? Why is the audience there? Why invite them to do anything at all? What happens when audiences act more like friends? Or like players? I don’t want to be doing something just for doing’s sake—you need to go somewhere with it. Invest my activity with meaning. Then we’ll be really going places.

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Rules in Immersive Theatre

In the “anything’s possible” wide-open frontier of immersive theatre, creators are dreaming up all sorts of ways to make the audience active in the story. Unless you like chaos in your shows—I don’t, but I know some designers may like to set folks loose and “see what happens”—every show needs to start the experience stating very clear rules.

Traditional theatre rules

The rules for audiences of traditional theatre are so ingrained that productions don’t feel the need to remind you beforehand. Nevertheless, there are rules…

  1. No talking (or singing along!)
  2. Stay seated
  3. Turn off cellphones (this one’s less instinctual, so we have to be reminded)
  4. Overall: respect the actors on stage

It’s very passive, intuitive, and easy to learn. People seem to agree on what’s acceptable, although I have encountered audience members who, according to their evil glares, categorize my loud and frequent laugh as a violation of Rule #1. I’m not being passive enough.

Please disregard your feet, hands, voice, and personality for the duration of the performance. Thank you.

But when the audience has no seat to pen in their behavior, all hell can break loose.

Immersive Theatre Rules

Since there is not one structure for immersive theatre, the rules will vary based on the show’s unique structural design. The rules dictate our activity and help guide us to the most fulfilling way to experience the show. You’re inviting the audience to do something; we need to be confident in what we’re doing.

The most common rules will focus on speech (when it’s allowed, if at all) and movement (where I can and cannot go). One thing is clear: breaking the rules will essentially break the show.

Punchdrunk needs you to wear your mask, so a free-roaming audience can differentiate at a glance between actors and audience. Third Rail says only to speak when you’re spoken to—thus opening the door to personal connection with actors that doesn’t get too out of hand. These two leading companies have very, very different rules, and I’ll be posting from personal experience about what happens when you break their rules. (See: Breaking the Rules: Sleep No More and Breaking the Rules: Third Rail Projects)

Productions must take the time to make the rules clear at the start of the experience. Ideally they will make a scene out of it (as opposed to playing a video or posting a list for the audience to read)—both to continue the immersion and because it will be more memorable.

Avoid non-intuitive or complicated rules. The audience can learn only so much so quickly. Immersive theatre can’t be like those board games that take 30 minutes to read the rules; no one will know for certain what to do, and that guarantees a bad audience experience. And if there’s something you really, really don’t want participants to do, design the experience to make that behavior impossible, rather than throwing a non-intuitive rule at your audience.

Rather than say “don’t use the tools to disassemble the furniture,” why don’t you create a game that doesn’t give me a screwdriver? (Real Escape Game’s Escape from the Time Travel Lab)
Rules in THE MAN FROM BEYOND (SPOILER LEVEL 1)

As an immersive escape room, we present the rules for the game as rules for the séance. Our rules address the escape room aspects—do not abuse my room, no cellphone use, work together. We do not provide rules for the actor interaction. NONE.

Madame Daphne guides you through Rules Hall

We expected our players would default into the ingrained “polite audience behavior,” perhaps driven by “awe of the actor”—the kind of audience behavior that Sleep No More expects, even through the 1-on-1s. We were so wrong. Without any rules encouraging audience silence, people were treating our characters as people: contributing to conversations, assuaging fears, even making jokes. After all, the primary mode for the experience is game-play, which requires extreme activity, so audiences applied that same approach to our scene work as well.

With a few tweaks to the script, we were able to adjust for more active engagement. We may not incorporate audience responses as much as I’d like (things do have to keep on a schedule), but we made more space for it. For the moments where we needed to drive home the story and have much less back-and-forth, we made sure that the players were sitting down, thus prompting them to more typical “audience mode” behavior.

Important lesson here is to keep the rules consistent. You can’t have rules for one point in the experience, and then expect a completely different kind of behavior at another point. And if you don’t limit the audience’s behavior, expect real interaction at every point.

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Why not “Interactive Theatre”?

If the activity of the audience is key to a true immersive theatre experience, why don’t we call the genre “interactive theatre”? Isn’t that a better description?

Because I wince when I hear “interactive theatre,” and so do you. The phrase conjures up images of campy murder-mystery dinner-theatres, children’s shows, and theatre that entertains the audience by dragging an audience member on stage and picking on them for the amusement of others.

This is not immersive theatre.

Why does interactive theatre suck? When you pluck out an audience member from the safety of their seat and invite them to participate, it makes that person ferociously self-conscious. Once content in their passivity, now they’re suddenly under the spotlight, while the cast is seemingly chanting “Dance, monkey, dance!” It’s embarrassing. Nobody likes that.

Killing self-consciousness

Self-consciousness is the enemy of the actor, and in immersive theatre, self-consciousness also becomes the enemy of the audience. Building a world around the audience as only immersive theatre does makes it possible for the audience to act naturally in a way they never could in a traditional theatre. In sophisticated works of immersive theatre, you never feel like you’re under the spotlight because…

  1. The world is richly detailed, thus making make-believe for an adult less embarrassing.
  2. The world lacks the seat-stage divide (one zone is safe, the other is scary) so you never have that awkward transition from passive to active-mode.
  3. The rest of the audience is well-dispersed, so a bunch of people aren’t there just to watch you.
  4. You’re so busy doing the thing you need to do in the world that there’s no time to feel self-conscious.
    (More on Meisner theory in immersive theatre to come.)

When I speak of The Man From Beyond to someone who hasn’t played yet, I often have to assuage their fears of embarrassment. No one will be watching, judging, and calling you stupid, I promise. Besides, you’ll be too busy doing things to even think of that!

I regret that we cannot reclaim “interactive theatre,” but most people don’t think of “interactivity” in the context of theatre as a good thing. Get them through your doors under any other terms, and then they’ll know that interacting in theatre is FREAKING AMAZING.

 

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What is Immersive Theatre?

You’ve heard of it, maybe even done it, but what does it mean? To flourish, immersive theatre needs a hard definition—what it is and what it isn’t. When my friends says, “I bought tickets to this new immersive theatre piece, want to join me?” I need to be able to imagine the experience I’m signing up for. Imagine buying musical theatre tickets only to discover upon arrival that the production involves no singing because someone in PR was confused about what defines a musical. That’s not okay.

“Immersive” is a buzz word right now in video games and entertainment, and journalists are bandying about “immersive theatre” as if the phrase means a cool set. NO. A favorite twitter account of mine, @isitimmersive does an excellent job of policing the term “immersive theatre,” documenting when it is used appropriately and when it is misunderstood, and I wholly agree with the author.

I propose the following rules to serve as a definition…

1. Immersive theatre surrounds the audience with the world of the story.

This characteristic is what “immersive” primarily denotes. It is as if the audience is drowning in the world. The story-world may be a custom-built set or the streets of a city. Either way, the story exists in a fully-realized world that doesn’t require audience imagination to fill out the edges. We don’t need to believe, because we’re there. And that’s seriously powerful. And often leads to dreaming.

Proper “immersion in the world” also means eliminating the divide between audience and performer. Both exist inside the same world; there should be no “safe spaces” in immersive theatre, where the audience should be and where the performer should be. It’s not so much “breaking the fourth wall” as it is refusing to build the wall in the first place.

I am certain at some point, some audience member has climbed into that bathtub. What I really want to know is if that happens once a week. (Sleep No More)

If there’s a stage where the performance happens, and you’re not invited near it, it’s just an elaborately decorated theatre. Site-specific theatre is not necessarily immersive theatre. And prosceniums are right out.

And don’t get me started if there’s an assigned seat on your ticket.

This is the most basic criterion for immersive theatre, and a lot of people think this is enough to qualify. It’s NOT.

2. The audience is active.

This is where immersive theatre truly gets interesting. The audience is not passive in the traditional sense; they do not just “receive” the story. Instead they become something more kin to a player or participant.

Immersive theatre isn’t something you SEE; it’s something you DO. One of my favorite taglines for Strange Bird Immersive is “Don’t just see what happens. Be what happens.” This difference is what makes a generation who doesn’t see theatre suddenly buy tickets.

Immersive theatre is to traditional theatre what a video game is to movies. Sometimes you’re tired and want to sit passively while a story gets told to you. But if you’re feeling a little more energetic…

There are many ways to make the audience active, and documenting the wide-range of possible structures for activity is what Immersology is all about. Sometimes the audience exists to the performers; they may answer questions and form relationships with the characters. Or the audience can choose what they see. Or the audience may make a choice or perform an activity that alters the story.

The activity does not necessarily have to have an impact. While it’s most rewarding for an audience to see that what they do has ramifications, it’s enough for them to be spinning cogs in the well-oiled machine. In a Third Rail Projects show, the audience will never alter what happens to them, but a proper run of the show cannot take place without their participation.

“Why yes, I do take dictation!” But in all seriousness, what happens if I say no? My best guess is she’ll respond, “Well, learn on the job!” (Then She Fell)

Most shows that get mistakenly classified as immersive theatre fail this rule. I am also supremely frustrated that many critics fail to explain HOW the audience is active in an immersive theatre piece. Sometimes I can’t even tell from a review if a show fulfills this rule or not! It’s not rule #1 that’s shaking things up, guys! It’s the promise of participating in the story, the gamification of theatre, that’s, well, the game-changer.

Companies must write and generate their own work, because the notion of an active audience isn’t something playwrights have worked with in the past. Maybe someday you can license an immersive, but for now, if you’re paying royalties to Samuel French and selling it as “immersive theatre,” please stop.

3. It needs to be theatre: live performers telling a story.

This is perhaps the easiest criterion to meet. But I have participated in work that is truly immersive, yet does not qualify as being theatre, so it doesn’t go without saying!

When I call something “theatre,” that means at least one living, breathing performer was there with me. It also means that that performer devoted herself to a coherent whole, something more than a medley of impressions—a story. The end goal of the piece is to communicate something particular with a beginning, middle, and end.

In so many ways, the reward for your activity is the story you unravel and the intimacy you can earn with a performer.

Where are you taking me? (The Man From Beyond)

And that’s the genre. Immersive theatre is at its core experiential entertainment. You’ll want to wear comfortable shoes, because you’re very likely about to do something extraordinary.