Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, agency and responsibility in immersive theatre

Abstract

Immersive theatre is an emerging theatre style broadly premised on the production of experiences. As this article looks to establish, experiences are rendered an aesthetic site of equal, if not greater significance than the immersive environments which arouse them. But this premise, I believe, is contingent on privileging a particular kind of participation: one that I term 'entrepreneurial participation'. This is a kind of participation based on self-made opportunity. I will be thinking through this suggestion in what follows, theorising how immersive theatre shares particular values with neoliberalism, such as entrepreneurialism, as well as the valorisation of risk, agency and responsibility. Firstly, I will address how immersive theatre is particularly susceptible to co-optation by a neoliberal market given its compatibility with the growing experience industry; secondly, I will expand on this assertion by looking at how immersive theatre mirrors a neoliberal value set, focusing on the audience's perception of risk. These two discursive strands will form the basis for establishing what values are shared between the immersive theatre style and neoliberalism and articulating how that sharing might impact on theorising participation in an immersive theatre context. A more optimistic, but ultimately sobering evaluation of those values will be offered in conclusion.

Beyond the Zero-Sum Game: Participation and the Optics of Opting

“…Adam Alston and others have productively scrutinised immersive theatre's complicity with an experience economy perceived to be the modus operandi of neoliberalism. 35 As Geraldine Harris points out, an assumption often seems to run through such charges of neoliberalism that cultural domains operate separately from one another, so that theatre can transcend the neoliberal, experience economy to which other domains are subject. 36 Theatre, on the contrary, does not exist in a special cultural space cut off from that occupied by television, nor does it exist separately from the culture of commerce in our high streets and online.…”

Control and Being Controlled

“…Immersive theatre also offers an opportunity for a heightened sensory experience. Alston notes that although sitting in a theatre is a multisensory experience in itself, immersive theatre may purposefully create touch-, audioand smell-based interactions [2].…”

“…As noted by Papaioannou, immersive theatre performances can be described as having a "choose-your-own-adventure" narrative in that audiences can pick which aspects of the performance they watch, engage with, or alter [18]. This approach however, can lead to unclear rules of engagement, with the audience unsure about what is "allowed" in the space and to what extent they are expected to push the apparent boundaries they are given [2].…”

Zombies, time machines and brains

“…Collectively, these diverse encounters have been prominently described as 'experiential' (see Machon, 2013;Alston, 2013;Groot-Nibblelink, 2012). Yet, the range of experiences on offer differs greatly in terms of how they stimulate the audience.…”