OBSERVATIONAL RESEARCH
“immersive experiences are constructed environments that use sensory stimulation to ‘feel real” [1]-Chirryl-Lee Ryan, director of experience at Idean, New York
We at Immerse 101 have found this to be entirely true. You can read reviews, opinions and descriptions, look at photographs or watch clips but nothing touches upon what it is to go and experience an immersive theatre show. So in June 2019 we hired Emma Lynch, a theatre designer who has real experience of working on immersive productions and then sent her to see some immersive theatre.
​
​
Below we have compiled a list of the immersive theatre shows Emma has been to or worked on since 2013 and listed her role within each piece, whether there was agency, whether these shows took her to an alternative world and whether there was a sense of narrative.
Our researcher Emma Lynch has compiled a series of slides below sharing her experiences of immersive shows with photos and annotations.
Me at the show watching the rude mechanicals
Audience
member
My sister
Rift - 2019
Alexandra Palace Basements
Actors
The plot was an abridged version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with a smaller number of characters. We started in a bar and were moved through three spaces:
​
1. A TV studio - Where we were a TV audience. Audience participation was used here.
​
2. An equipment room - Unclear who we were. There was some audience interaction.
​
3. The woods. We sat upon upside down buckets which represented trees. We became the woods around the characters which I believe was supposed to create a sense of unease, as though the woods were full of hidden creatures.
Felt dank and disorientating and shadowy. As though we had fallen through a rabbit hole and ended up in a dilapidated and dusty dreamland.
We at Immerse 101 understand the importance of not influencing the environments our researchers are observing but this was impossible during this research as our researcher had to implement agency when appropriate. If they had not they would not have engaged with the immersive show properly and been able to explore Immerse 101’s immersive principles which would have been a wasted opportunity.
Whilst our researcher went in with the company’s research question in mind and this did influence how they observed and participated in the show there was an element of subjectivity to how they experienced these performances. If we had sent a different researcher the findings may have been slightly different. We are however confident in the analytical capabilities of our researcher and therefore are happy with the quality of the data they
have provided for us at Immerse 101.
Immerse 101 is a growing enterprise and we expect our profits to expand dramatically in 2020 but this research was conducted under certain financial and time restrictions. If this research had had a bigger budget we would have liked to have sent several researchers to these shows to gather a range of findings and to further counter the subjectivity of the solitary researcher. Immersive theatre is relatively expensive due the scale of the sets even on smaller productions and to the intimate nature of the shows. However even if we had been able to fund this there is no guarantee that the results would have been more varied and the researchers may have had very similar experiences.
We did discuss the possibility of taking several different ordinary members of the public to immersive shows and having our researchers shadow them and observe their journeys. They may not have acted naturally if we had done this and we may have not been able to stay with them for the whole experience. We could have asked some audience members about their experiences of immersive theatre but after evaluation our team decided that our interviews had addressed this already.
A word from our researcher:
​
In immersive theatre an atmosphere is built to influence an audience. Whilst you can watch this on a digital recording or hear someone describe it to get an idea of a piece this is not the same as being there.
The real-world fills all our five senses and so does an immersive world as it contains its own scent, sounds, taste, touch and visuals, some of which might be similar to the everyday but some that are completely different. These sensual triggers interact differently in an immersive world to create a unique atmosphere that I believe you must be in to truly understand it from an experiencing perspective.
I was also attending the two 2019 shows (The Great Gatsby & A Midsummer Night's Dream) as an audience member. It was useful to go to these two shows with my sister and a friend so that I could see their reactions and hear what non-theatre experts thought and gain an understanding on what worked for them.
I tried when thinking about these past immersive experiences to remember how I felt at the time but to also analyse how they sit when looked at with my research question in mind. This way I can try and look at them critically as a researcher but also use the memories of how I naturally felt to understand the power or weaknesses of these productions.
Having worked on some immersive productions I understand some of the logistical problems of working on them, such as audiences wondering into the wrong spaces at the wrong time. This has also helped me when discussing immersive theatre with practitioners as I had a real understanding of some of the issues they had encountered.
Our researcher engaging in observational research at Rift's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Our researcher also attended a branded immersive theatre event. Read the review here.
[1] Ryan, C [2018] Immersive experience is smart business [Online] Available at: https://www.idean.com/spotlight/immersive-experience-is-smart-business [Accessed 16th September 2019]​