Conversation with Ross who works in finance department at Les Enfants Terribles and Cat who is a musical theatre actor. Both have degrees in European Theatre Arts and have experience of working on immersive theatre shows.
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Ross: audience agency is, in my opinion at a bare minimum so basically scratched the surface. You compare that to Alice or Twits completely differently
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Emma: With Alice obviously you are assigned a roll but you’re moved around. It’s beautiful and you feel immersed but in terms of audience agency but there’s not a huge amount.
Ross: See I would argue there’s more agency in that because for an audience to have agency you need to have parameters and I feel with ikea there was something a bit more lucid.
Emma:That’s really interesting what you say about parameters.
Ross: Oh Darling, my specialism is in immersive and stuff. In order to make those possibilities available to audiences you have to. In order to have, as you know with the course we did, collectively, you have an element of agency in yourself. But in order to have that agency in yourself you have to have very clear parameters in order to improvise and the same goes for an audience. If you do not provide them with that structure they will run loose. So I would say for Alice and The Twits you have a very strong structure and within that structure the audience could misbehaver but for Ikea there were dictations and there was an element of choice but it wasn’t to the pinnacle of what I would say Les Terribles can do.
Emma:But then that’s time and the brand implementing stuff upon you. With the whole brand collaboration thing, one thing I found that was quite interesting. The immersive experience didn’t spill out beyond the experience onto social media or into the store. I was just wondering what Les enfants thought about that?
Ross: I’m not able to comment because I’m not a part of the production team.
Emma:What do you think though
Ross: To be honest I don’t have strong thoughts on it outside of what I’ve told the creative director already, which is what I’ve told you.
Emma:On ETA I know you guys look at Brecht and Boal, do you see immersive theatre as an extension of that? Of forum theatre for example.
Ross: I would argue it’s not an extension of Boal, I would say it has an element in Brecht. Cat, what do you think about immersive theatre verses Boal and Brecht?
Cat: That was my original idea. Do you remember
Ross: Vaguely. You did it as your dissertation?
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Cat: No, because it could never f*ck*ng work
Emma:What couldn’t work
Cat: Brecht as immersive theatre, it can’t work
Emma:Why?
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Ross: It’s impossible
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Cat: Because Brecht alone is a concept. Immersive theatre alone is a concept
Emma:But do you think sometimes things move from each other?
Ross: No no no. I think it’s impossible for Brecht because off the back of what Catherine’s saying. I think when you take Brecht he is all about didactic and he is all about epic and you cannot make that immersive because it’s a pre-conceived idea.
Cat: I personally think that you can’t do an immersive production in the Brechtian style but you can do a Brecht play in immersive style. If you were to take that Brechtian play and go “we’ll do it Brecht and immersive” No. You do it one or the other.
Emma:There’s a guy who runs an immersive theatre company called Parabolic. And he says that his work is from his political theatre background in Brecht and he sees his shows as a boxing match between audience and performers because they bounce off each other.
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Cat: How are his shows reviewed?
Emma: Oh, he struggles to get them in.
Cat: exactly
Emma: what do you mean by that
Cat: Well if no one wants to see it, it’s not working
Emma: Oh no no, audiences come. He makes a lot of money from it, it’s all self funded. But reviewers don’t want to come. But then if you ask a lot of reviewers to any fringe show are they going to come.
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Cat: I do a lot of corporate sh*t these days. So I’m not as well versed in it. I tried to do it at uni.
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Emma:what were you doing
Cat: Basically trying to break the fourth wall. But then that is immersive theatre, it’s weird. It can work but there are certain things about Brecht – immersive theatre is all about breaking the fourth wall.
Emma: I think that immersive theatre is about moving through the fourth wall and being in it which is different to shouting through it.
Cat: Like breaking the fourth wall, is me doing a scene behind it. like Fleabag
Emma: yeah or Shakespeare.
Cat: Immersive theatre is really like when you get in the place, that world, you loose yourself. You know immersive threatre as a type of theatre no one has ever branded it. Like when we talk about Stanislavsky theatre, Brecht theatre we know exactly what we’re getting. Immersive theatre unfortunately, that phrase is coined these days to make money. I went to see train spotting live.
Emma:was it good?
Cat: They say immersive theatre show. It’s not. You are a sit down audience. The reason they call it immersive theatre is because sometimes they thrown stuff at the audience.
Emma: audience participation which is different
Cat: but because immersive, the word immersive is making so much money.
Emma: like physical theatre 20 years ago
Cat: exactly, everyone’s coining it. Because no ones actually gone “this is what immersive theatre is” it has no definition. This is what I did my dissertation about . Literally every book I read was “no one knows what this is”
Emma:But do you think, we move on. Some stuff doesn’t get defined until 25 years after it’s sort of started.
Cat: I see what you mean
Emma:Do you think immersive theatre now has more of a definition now or is just as vague
Cat: I think people like Punchdrunk, secret cinema are defining it
Emma:For themselves?
Cat: No I think they’re defining it.
Emma:Oh, like what people will expect
Cat: Because when in 20 years when people ask if you have ever seen an immersive production. You’re not going to go “that, that” you’re going to go “like secret cinema”. Aren’t you. Even though we may now be thinking oh, it could be these things. In 20 years it’ll be the big names. If you think of Brecht now, we think, chalk circle, fourth wall. Immersive theatre now is like “Oo what is it” I bet in 20 years it’s like “secret cinema” “oh Punchdrunk”
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Emma:Yeah, you don’t talk about the little theatre companies that existed.
Cat: It’s all about money. This industry is all about the mulla. Everything is about money. Everything is about money. It’s sad but true.
Emma:It’s true.
PAUSE
Ross: With the concept of envira-mersive theatre. And I created the, apparently it hasn’t been done. The notion of an envira-mersive happening because happenings are not traditionally communicative. Happenings just occur. So I took the notion of a happening and made it into an active in the context of envira-mersive happenings
Emma:Tell me, how did you do that.
Ross: basically you create a series of laws in which you can- like I said when you improvise you need a context you need a structure so we created a physical language, my partner and I where we knew what each other meant when we were communicating but within that we could go off our separate ways and that language influenced the lighting design with influenced the space which influenced the audience which influenced their interaction which breaks the barriers of happening as an entity.
Emma:That’s imposed upon everyone
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Ross: and breaks that completely and says ok, if you take an action and make it responsive to audience, to lighting, to environment and therefore immersive because the audience are involved. That’s how you create an envria-mersive happening.
Emma: Is that like the invisible theatre that Boal talks about
Ross: I don’t think it is because the invisible theatre that Boal talks about is. It’s very subconscious and I’m talking about something that’s much more conscious because you are forced to engage so it’s a little more aggressive that Boal which I have to say is slightly oxymoronic because Boal is f*ck*ng ruthless. He’s ruthless! Like if you don’t bleed by the end of the session you’re doing Boal wrong! I suppose maybe you could define what I’m doing as taking elements of Boal practice and combining them with something a little bit more Germanic, a bit more Polish
Emma:Like Grotowski
Ross: More Grotowski in terms of the Physical score that’s used to communicate but also verging more on Stanievski in terms of the environmental theatre because he’s really hot on what the space has been through, what kind of experience you get from the space.
Emma: What I’m wondering is with immersive theatre, because Cat was saying it’s very separate to these theatre practioners. She said you could take a Brecht play in an immersive setting
Ross: You could but it wouldn’t be Brechtian
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Emma: Why
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Ross: Because Brecht created a very specific form of theatre when he started creating his plays
Emma: But is it that he didn’t push it far enough to end up at immersive.
Ross: No not at all. The context that Brecht was creating work in, the context of turmoil, the context of people who were not really engaging with art because it was very dangerous. And so he created a theatre style where he said “this is what is going to happen at the end of the scene, we are going to do that scene now. And actually we’re going to change on stage so you know that we’re not really the characters, we’re the actors.
Emma:Yeah, making it very apparent what the mechanisms are
Ross: and that as a concept, if you put it into an immersive experience becomes very woolly because the whole notion of an immersive experience is to be immersed, you know. So it’s a very separate.
Emma:So as soon as it becomes immersive you loose all of what Brecht was actually trying to prove.
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Ross: In theory yes because of what he stands for. But you could adapt it but he would just be spinning in his grave
Emma:Why can’t immersive be an extension of Forum theatre?
Ross: that’s a very good question
Emma: One guy I spoke to said that Punchdrunk is an extension of Boal and it’s just that he didn’t push it far enough whereas Punchdrunk takes it and takes the theory and moves it forward another step. Where the audience isn’t just commenting on the narrative and suggesting ideas but they’re up, involved, actively pushing buttons that will change things.
Ross: it sounds interesting because I think Boal’s practice is very personal
Emma: to him?
Ross: No, to everyone who practices it. Because the notion of Boal’s practice. For example if you take his acting mechanisms a lot of it is about relating an individual you’re seeing with someone you know very deeply and creating that emotional connection. And for me from an academic point of view it’s very difficult to take Boal out of his own practitioners context and amplify it. If you’re going to amplify it and create something different, it is something different. I mean Punchdrunk are a very interesting anomaly.
Emma:Oh ok, in that they’re different to everyone else
Ross: Yeah, in so much as in what they do is immersive, is environmental. It’s basically, it’s the start, this sounds really arrogant, it’s the start of what I was doing with my dissertation, environ-mersive happening. The trouble we have with Punchdrunk is that they are in reality a company that is very heavily funded and have the ability to play and not many people have that opportunity and so they play and they get these fabulous buildings
Emma: People I’ve interviewed have said that Punchdrunk do the same stuff now that they always do because it works and they’re not very good at moving beyond what they do and it’s almost like they only do Punchdrunk
Ross:I’ll tell you what darling that’s every theatre company that’s been around for five years. They get their usp, I tell you darling, they get their usp and they think that’s the work we do. And they run with it. Does it work? Time will tell. Punchdrunk because of the name, because of the reputation they get that audience in.
Emma: I think sometimes with Punchdrunk it’s that they got in there first.
Ross: just because you scream the loudest doesn’t mean you got there first. Well it’s like if we turned up for a audition, it’s luck of the draw.