Immersive fear is performance in which the audience really finds themselves
within a world in which they are able to navigate one in which they have agency.
The landscape that you find yourself in whether it is a literal landscape for a
more psychic landscape you fall into it as might fall into a body of water
and it it is all around you.
>It's the most powerful and visceral experience
that you can have in the theatre and there are no lines between the actor in
the audience and that everything is blurred and the whole experience is blurred.
I love cinema where you feel Macbeth
mean you see Macbeth on the stage and it's you know you're like oh this is
pretty scary must be scary for the actors on stage but when you're standing
in the space with Macbeth running through the room covered with blood I
mean that's thrilling.
Immersive theater which I think is the most exciting and interesting kind of
theater happening is a complete environment or an attempt at a complete
environment and I believe that the moment you buy your ticket the
experience of going to the theater starts so the process that you took to
get the ticket what the ticket looks like whether you get on a train or a
subway or a bus or a taxi or how you get to the theater what the theater or the
room looks like when you show up how it the entire thing is designed it's all
curated to create a certain kind of response and experience for you.
I have a larger version of what a theatrical experiences is than I think many
people do, I go to a professional wrestling match and I get caught up in
the emotion of the wrestling match that's great theater to me. If I go to a
football game and it's exciting... what's difficult in so much of traditional
theater and it's again speaks to some strange psychological makeup that I have
is that the basic structure the audience sitting in the dark, the performers are
in the light, something happens, a bunch of characters talk about it, they go on
stage they go offstage, at the end the curtain comes down that seems all very-
it strikes me very much the same. Whether the plots happy or sad or the writing
is good or bad it's all within a certain box.
There's a part of me that I think I
start to process it, I start to worry I'm ahead of the plot, I just I just don't
enjoy it in the way where I put into an experience where I don't know any of the
rules and once I don't know any of the rules the least little thing is endowed
with such curiosity and such sort of heightened theatricality you are
entering that world, you're not sitting outside it watching it happen you know
through the fourth wall, you're putting yourself into it and you really feel
like you're a tourist in a strange land. It's so fun to even just figure out the
rules and you're sort of lost and confused like the way you're a tourist
and you you know drop in Paris and you've never been in Paris in your life
and suddenly everything seems so much more interesting that it does in New
York even though it's basically the same also but just by switching the context
you know the little things of life like how the street cleaners dress how the
milk comes in different kind of cartons all these things are just surprising and
make you think about your own life in a different way.
With immersive theater
you're not trying to give them the feeling that would be X Y or Z you're
giving them that feeling. Or the attempting really and truly giving them
that feeling and you use real tools and real materials and real smells and real
things at your disposal to create that. How do we make the audience completely
believe that they're in this experience or having this experience fully?
If they were really cooking the food on the stove or if they were really being
trapped in this room and you started talking about what would that feeling be
what would it look like sound like it smell like and taste like
and so if you want to have an experience where you lock someone in a room there's
the version of it where you push go on a sound cue when you hear a chain lock and
then there's the other version where you actually take out the chain and wrap it
around the bars of the door and you lock it.
We're creating worlds where you can't see the edges of.
The audience really finds themselves within a world, one in which they are not
simply passive observers but that they have the ability to explore
and also opportunities for them to have intimate encounters with performers and may in
fact find themselves interacting with the performer be that having a drink
with a performer or brushing their hair or in some cases having a conversation
in which the audience themselves are participating in the creation of this narrative.
>It's been exciting actually to develop an audience like I feel like
from doing this as many years as I have I'll meet people who have been going to
my shows for you know 15 years just looking for well what's what's a new
relationship we can have to a show to theater.
Then She Fell is is almost a little bit of a Rorschach in that you as an
audience member you come in and you see these characters and you see these
scenes and you participate in all of these different ways and there is a
narrative thread and there is an aesthetic arc that develops and unfolds
but walking out of it I think that every audience member has created their own
narrative that is resonant to them that is about their experience and people ask
me what the story is
or if audience members see the same
story and the answer because of that is no.
There is no central story,
there is no single story if we have had you know some thousand number of
audience members come through there are that number of thousands of stories.
There is something that is fundamentally I think playful about a lot of this work
and certainly a lot of programs work.
you
I perform the doctor role who is one of the first characters that you meet upon
entering Kingsland ward who sort of oversees your visit here throughout the
course of your evening and I also play the Hatter role.
We were drawn to Alice
in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and the relationship
between Lewis Carroll and the real Alice, Alice Little.
Then She Fell has now been
running for almost a year. When we launched this project we had envisioned
a six-week run.
All of our work is really a fusion of forms we call ourselves a
multidisciplinary company because almost every piece is some combination of dance
and theater and music and singing.
It's very interesting casting for immersive
theater because what you're taught often as an actor is how to project an emotion
across the divide of a proscenium theater if you're doing a scene like
this with someone it's a completely different style of acting from doing a
scene where you're you know facing 1,200 people through the proscenium.
There's such completely different techniques involved and you know what seems real on
stage to 1,200 people doesn't feel real when you're one-on-one and then you have
to find people who are actors because they have to be able to speak text and
connect to emotions but they have to be able to drop so much of what they've
learned, the actors themselves have to want to try something different.
All performers they want to touch an audience and there's something when
you're doing an immersive show in you are literally physically able to touch
them I think for some performers that is a little too much. They don't really want
to be that close but for other performers that's their dream.
It's not safe. Guess what we've created, an environment with really things can go
wrong and when you're safely on your own side the audience is here and the
performers there that's one thing but when you're
right on top of each other you know anything can happen and that audience
member who doesn't understand the rules can get too involved in a scene and a
performer can get frustrated if an audience members in their way.
When there are no lines between the actor in the audience and that
everything is blurred and the whole experience is blurred it just makes you
attached to the material and so much more powerful way.
I get to imagine whole world's that really are the shell and the envelope
that the play will take place in. Here are some images of Here Lies Love during
the show it really was not just making the scenery, or making the scenic design,
or the environment of the play, it was creating the entire infrastructure of
the theater from scratch. This is representative of a six-foot person this
is this upper balcony here of where the audience would look down into the world
and then all that black area down there is inhabited by both actors and
audiences you know what the experience of this
person is from up on top looking down as opposed to his or her friend who decided
to let go down and be part of the whole world and it's very very different.
You eventually want to take off these pins and pop the walls of the theater off so
you can get down and look in from all the different angles.
I do a lot of my work through conversations.
I find most often that writers and directors and composers
actually kind of know what they want even if they say that they don't you
sort of if I pull that piano out of the swamp it's like a long and drawn-out
often experience where I ask questions I sort of I liken my job to therapy really
I sit one-on-one with people and ask questions about the feeling and about
the emotional content and the background of why they wrote it or why they they
got to this idea or what they're really kind of trying to unearth at this idea
what they're exploring and then sooner or later they say oh my gosh I know that
it's a living room or I know that it's the room I grew up in or something in
this kind of aha moment and then I kind of just filtered through my own artistic sensibility.
After I have all these conversations or while I'm doing these
conversations I start with a ground plan a sort of top-down view of what the
space will look like because it's all about how people move through space.
Many years ago I did a show a face on Midsummer Night's Dream they had this
really this flash I was like if this were in a nightclub where young people
go and it feels like this dangerous forest in a place where they can be away
from their parents how can I even increase the excitement let's put it in
an actual nightclub let's have the audience
for the show be the other clubgoers. There's a theater you sell tickets
you have a bar maybe you sell some drinks during intermission really it
doesn't have to work like that it could be that you're selling drinks during the
entire experience and I've done you know immersive theater in my living room I've
done immersive theater in a garage I've done like I said immersive theater and
nightclubs and you know old hotels but when we're doing things our own way we
don't have to buy ads because sometimes ads mess up actually the creative of an experience.
Maybe you want it to be part of the experience that it does feel
secret the only aspects of the show that you'll ever learn are what happens to
you when you're actually physically at the show.
This is a friend of mine from
college was like you know Randy you've been doing immersive theater forever I
was like really no like yeah you used to do shows in your like dorm room and you
would do secret shows where you take over a museum and do a performance in
the middle of the night there because it didn't even have a name then I was just
doing things whatever seemed interesting to me to do and somehow I've been able
to cobble together a life which never would have dawned on me when I was a
pre-medical student.
Every single project I do I am afraid of everything because
you're doing something where there's just you don't even really get to
rehearse these projects that I create when they're immersive until there's an
audience so you do this thing and it looks great and then almost an audience
comes in and everything is completely different and it's not like okay you're
doing a show on a stage and audience comes in and things are different
suddenly like a line that didn't seem funny is funny or vice versa it's like
the actors can't move you know everything's just completely thrown off
because the actors are dealing with the audience who are the set so without the
set I mean who knows even what you have so it's really like you're really just
jumping off and just hoping for the best and certainly in some cases I've
expected one thing it's gone completely in a different direction and sometimes
that different direction was much greater than anything I could have ever
imagined. In fact really I can admit mostly that's
the case.
We were creating this type of work before we knew the term immersive
it was sort of a very logical progression in terms of our interests
and so found ourselves making this work and then all of a sudden everyone was
like oh immersive theater is hot and we're like oh is that what it's called? Great.
With another show we built this wooden box that the entire audience sat
in the New York Times reviewer that came and saw it she thought that the theater
that we had worked in had done a big renovation she called the fact-check and
our press agent said no you know that was a set and she was so freaked out
that she was sitting in there and she thought like she couldn't believe it
that she just decided to do a story on us and the immersive theater that we were doing.
I think an immersive theater has really come into its own I thought
I used to call it immersive theaters 15 years ago like why wasn't right you know no one
knew what immersive theater was. >I feel like we all walk around all day long
with these iPhones and iPods and iPads and all these screens and so much of our
life is spent like this walking down the street and looking at these screens that
I think the reason why immersive theater has become so prevalent now is because
the pendulum is swinging during the day you're looking at these screens and
you'll pay any amount of money to have a real and true experience where you're
essentially paying to have a human to human contact and to shut your phone off.
To really detach from that technological world and to really invest in these
really special completely unique totally manufactured yet completely real feeling experiences.
> I really hate my cell phone. I was every day I wish I could just
throw it out because it doesn't feel to me the part of myself where I wish I
could be spending most of my life so I think any opportunity I have to get away
from technology is so exciting.
The ability to experience something for
the first time is extraordinary and I think it's what this this forum affords
and so and so it is important to sort of keep that protected.
We I think as a
society and as a culture are spending so much of our time and so much of our
communication and interaction with other human beings in this very mediated way.
We crave those sensory experiences, we crave tactile experiences, we crave intimacy.
I can't even tell what's real anymore not to get really weird and
matrix-y about this but like I don't know where reality starts but I know the
place that I want to be and it's just exciting to be in a room with someone to
see how they respond when you speak to them to see their gestures to see how
their facial muscle muscles tick I mean all these sort of things are what I
really enjoy the subtleties of real face-to-face human connection.
>Not every piece is made to like make you feel good and incredible, in fact are a lot of
pieces especially with immersive theater that are made to make you feel some
other kind of way uneasy contemplative whatever it is and I think that's kind
of the best theater, stuff that is really pushing you to think and contemplate
your relationship to it but also your relationship to the world.