Unstructured Interviews
“I feel now it’s a little bit like the golden age of Hollywood… where everything is possible and people are only really just starting out…people’s understanding of what we’re doing with these techniques is still in their infancy but actually it’s boomtown time, people are making stuff all over the place and new things are being discovered every day and new innovations are happening all the time.”
– Owen Kingston 2019
Whilst we at Immerse 101 collectively had some knowledge about immersive theatre due to the continuously changing nature of this relatively new industry we decided to conduct interviews to
expand our understanding.
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A lot of the current immersive understanding is undocumented due to immersive theatre being a relatively new sector and innovations are being discovered constantly.
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Unstructured interviews lend themselves to conversation and discussion where appropriate meaning that we were able to ask follow up questions when we required more information.
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Unstructured interviews also meant that we could tailor the questions to different individuals and their practice and expertise rather than using a method such as a survey where everyone’s creative practice would be blanketed under one umbrella.
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As our research was about immersive theatre we only interviewed immersive theatre practitioners and we didn’t restrict who we interviewed by any other parameters.
However everyone who we interviewed and the majority of practitioners whose work we have read about or whose opinions were voiced online are white, mostly male, English and aged between twenty-five and forty-five.
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We would obviously have liked our research to be more inclusive and representative of society as a whole but the reality is that we had to interview who was available and from what we have witnessed we haven’t found that there are many non-white immersive theatre creatives.
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This shouldn’t detract from the validity of these company’s work and we know a lot of the companies we have referenced are working hard to include minority groups and women in their productions.
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These unstructured interviews and discussions between practitioners are subjective and deeply personal to their individual practice so provide data that can’t be applied across all immersive theatre or taken as the final word upon the subject.
Obtaining interviews from a range of theatre practitioners and combining analysis of these with written opinions enabled us to gain a balanced understanding of different immersive theatre practices.
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If we had simply taken these interviews on their own rather than seeking to contextualise them within the overall immersive theatre landscape their insights would not have been as useful to our practice and the development of our business model.
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Whilst some of our interviews were conducted in a more professional way a few were conducted at a bar after a play where the participants were far more relaxed about answering.
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It was also interesting because as we were talking in groups on three or four there was a more conversational aspect to the discussion whereas in the one on one interview we were spoken to rather than engaged with in conversation.
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Both were useful but the more relaxed environment of the bar meant that we could ask more direct questions and no one overthought their answers.
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We recorded these interviews with permission and typed up the transcripts which are available alongside our other industry research.
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