Book Review: Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance

Abstract

[...]what emerges is a spiralling definitional approach that fruitfully gathers observations about intimacy, liveness, multi-sensory stimulation and shared presence to help identify immersive theatre's aesthetic characteristics and modes of body-oriented audience engagement. Three 'central features of immersive theatre practice' are noted, which include 'the involvement of the audience', 'a prioritisation of the sensual world' and 'the significance of space and place' (p. 70), alongside a 'scale of immersivity' - an especially insightful aspect of the book - based on hybridized design features, body-centred audience participation, intention (i.e. framing as an artistic experience) and expertise (i.e. of theatre-makers) (pp. 93-102). [...]this - along with a series of 'perspectives', or theorizations, relaying the ideas of philosophers and theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Doreen Massey - nonetheless grounds immersive theatre in a distinct heritage and theoretical pool that rightly downplays novelty, while opening space to allot and think through distinguishing characteristics.

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Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance . By Josephine Machon . Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , 2013. Pp. xix + 324 + 25 illus. £19.99/$30 Pb; £60/$85 Hb.

This inaugural monograph in the study of immersive theatre assertively responds to a gap in theatre studies scholarship that cried out for attention. Recent articles have informatively questioned the appropriateness of the label 'immersive theatre' and the novelty of the practice (see Gareth White, 'On Immersive Theatre', Theatre Research International, 37, 3 (October 2012), pp. 221-35; W. B. Worthen, '"The Written Troubles of the Brain": Sleep No More and the Space of Character', Theatre Journal, 64, 1 (March 2012), pp. 79-97). But with insightful limits now placed on what immersive theatre is not, the task at hand is to account for what immersive theatre is.

Machon sets a wide scope in choosing to explore 'immersivity' in performance (p. xvi), perhaps necessarily given the multiple uses to which immersion has been put by those embroiled in immersive fever across the creative and cultural industries, especially over the past ten years. 'Immersive theatre', she writes, 'is discernible as that practice which actually allows you to be in "the playing area" with the performers, physically interacting with them . . . This live(d), praesent experience [i.e. that which stands before the senses] is a pivotal element of an immersive experience and a defining feature of immersive theatre' (pp. 67-8). This definition is slowly built, which can be disorienting - particularly given the book's structure, which begins by outlining examples of immersive theatre practice and introducing theoretical terms, before moving into its two core parts: Part One defines and theorizes immersive theatre and Part Two provides a wonderfully rich series of artist and producer interviews. And yet what emerges is a spiralling definitional approach that fruitfully gathers observations about intimacy, liveness, multi-sensory stimulation and shared presence to help identify immersive theatre's aesthetic characteristics and modes of body-oriented audience engagement.

Machon provides an illuminating lexicon for hierarchically categorizing immersive theatre's various forms, based on absorption, transportation and total immersion (pp. 62-3). Three 'central features of immersive theatre practice' are noted, which include 'the involvement of the audience', 'a prioritisation of the sensual world' and 'the significance of space and place' (p. 70), alongside a 'scale of immersivity' - an especially insightful aspect of the book - based on hybridized design features, body-centred audience participation, intention (i.e. framing as an artistic experience) and expertise (i.e. of theatre-makers) (pp. 93-102). The first authoritative history of the term 'immersive theatre' (pp. 63-6) and a widely cast survey of its 'immersive inheritance' (pp. 28-29) are also featured. The latter, including progenitors as diverse as Antonin Artaud and Joan Littlewood, is symptomatically episodic. However, this - along with a series of 'perspectives', or theorizations, relaying the ideas of philosophers and theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Doreen Massey - nonetheless grounds immersive theatre in a distinct heritage and theoretical pool that rightly downplays novelty, while opening space to allot and think through distinguishing characteristics.

I would have liked to read more critical reflection on immersive theatre and audience participation within it, as frequent claims about its 'accessibility' and the 'individual uniqueness' of theatre experiences, for instance, might have been productively balanced against alternative perspectives. But the merits and engaging idiosyncrasies of this volume are manifold, rich and rewarding. Immersive Theatres will make a welcome edition on the bookshelves of students and researchers with an interest not just in immersive theatre, but in audience participation more generally.