“If it’s going to be site-specific, there needs to be something purposeful about where you’ve chosen to present that story and you’re actively looking for ways to engage with that space … The danger is that immersive theatre becomes a shellac over top of something, and it doesn’t offer as meaningful or deep an experience as I think it has the potential to,” Cushman says. Tepperman hesitates to use it in conversation. He feels the word is often used to get attention. It might as well be replaced with ‘cool,’” says Willis.īartolini agrees. But the range of what that experience is is so vast … it feels so general now. “It’s a great word to sell an experience with. A news release for the Canadian Opera Company’s Hadrian this past fall described it as “immersive,” without demonstrating any of the trappings that mark an immersive production. “The feedback that I receive most is, ‘I want to be scared.’ The feeling of not knowing what’s going on, people really enjoy that part and I’m hearing that more and more,” Bartolini says.īut as we near 10 years of Sleep No More in New York City, Willis, Tepperman, Cushman and Bartolini worry about the buzziness of the word “immersive,” now generously applied to dining, travel and visual art projects, and even some big-budget theatre productions that adhere quite strictly to the status quo. Both Cushman and Bartolini created works featured in The Curious Voyage.
That’s a viewpoint shared by Daniele Bartolini, founder of DLT, which specializes in productions created for extremely small audiences, often single spectators who travel from scene to scene outdoors or in large buildings. Cushman has since incorporated immersive elements into more traditional settings, including Treasure Island at the Stratford Festival and Jerusalem at the Streetcar Crowsnest.Ĭushman recognizes that a major part of the rise of immersive theatre has to do with audiences’ desire to shake up the traditional sequence of: arrive, sit down, watch, clap, leave. Marmalade, a quirky and darkly funny play about a young girl and her adult male imaginary friend that Cushman set in a real-life kindergarten classroom, enhancing the story with the audience’s childhood memories of such a room. He and Outside the March broke onto the Toronto scene in 2011 with Noah Haidle’s Mr. I think that’s what’s really exciting about a lot of immersive work,” says Cushman. “I try to approach work stripping away as many preconceptions of what a theatre experience is as possible. But we discovered that people enjoyed that kind of theatre experience and that we enjoyed creating them,” said Tepperman. We started working in it mostly out of expediency: it was cheap when there was no venue. “I never really thought about it as a genre. At that time, the term “site-specific theatre” commonly described plays that took place outside a traditional theatre, usually meaning the location was directly related to the subject matter. His first immersive production, along with his wife, Convergence co-founder Julie Tepperman, was 2006’s AutoShow, seven short plays in or around a real car. Where you’re sitting, who you are you’re not just sitting back and watching,” he says. “Your body, as an audience member, becomes important. Willis has possibly the simplest definition of what immersive theatre is. “That isn’t to say the old contract of sitting in a chair and watching something isn’t still valid, but there are possibilities to enrich it.”
It cracks open the possibilities,” says director and Convergence co-founder Aaron Willis. “There is something subversive about not doing this in a theatre. Audience members gather at an office building in the west end where they overhear a heated argument between an oil company PR rep and an environmental activist. And last week, the Toronto Fringe’s Next Stage Festival presented its first immersive, site-specific production with Athabasca, created by Toronto’s Convergence Theatre.
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Last year saw the trend literally breaking boundaries: Talk is Free Theatre produced The Curious Voyage, a three-day-long immersive production that sent audience members from Barrie, Ont., to London, England. Since the British company Punchdrunk partnered with American producers Emursive to unveil Sleep No More in March 2011, in which masked audience members packed into the McKittrick Hotel in Chelsea and followed performers at will, “immersive theatre” has become the buzz word for plays that break the traditional theatregoing mould. But it’s clear the biggest trend in the last 10 years has been immersive theatre. We’re barely into the final year of the 2010s, a decade of fundamental change in theatre in North America, from leadership to groundbreaking improvements to representation onstage (hello Hamilton).
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