Immersive Theatre

Immersive Theatre

Immersive Theatre is a “widely adopted term to designate a trend of performances which use installations and expansive environments … which invite audience participation” (White, 2007).

In Immersive Theatre, there are two differing types of immersion, cognitive and sensory. Although both of these are similar and the difference between the two is often difficult to define, there are subtle variances between the characteristics of each.

Cognitive Immersion

This is where the audience are placed into a fictional world where they’re made to lose track of their physical reality. Much like the immersion seen in traditional theatre, it’s crucial for the audience to enter the world being created in front of them by the performers through imagination.

In Rosemary Klich and Edward Scheers book Multimedia Performance, it discusses the importance of the audience to “forget their immediate physical location and enter another through an active process of imagining” (Klich & Scheer, 2011, p. 129).

Sensory Immersion

Although similar to cognitive immersion, this type of immersion attempts to give the audience an emotional reaction to the performance. The aim of performances featuring sensory immersions is to stimulate the senses of their audience by including them into the piece.

Klich and Scheers book defines sensory immersion as a place that brings the audience into the “immediate, real space of the performance” (Klich & Scheer, 2011, p. 131).

Works Cited

Klich, R. & Scheer, E., 2011. Multimedia Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

White, G., 2007. On Immersive Theatre. [Online] Available at: http://crco.cssd.ac.uk/143/2/TRI_37_3_article_2_white.pdf [Accessed 8 April 2013].

By Danny Roberts