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On Immersive Theatre

The Senses to Take the Wall Down—Part 6: Memory, Sight, Edgar, and What is Next?

A six-part series on the words, challenges, craft, and zeitgeist of the immersive theatre movement.

There is no question that vision is a key part of making theatre. You must have the vision to see the piece of art you want to make. You must envision given circumstances, obstacles, and a world that exists offstage. You must make something that is visually compelling. You must envision the theatre life you want to live. Your audience most often leads with their visual senses. When the assumption of a fourth wall is down and the frame has open boundaries, we must be even more specific about how, where, and why we use moments of unified vision. Visuals can be a crutch. Yet in open-frame work we have an opportunity to bring relief to our visual functioning by accessing our range of sensory resources.

Three years ago, a wall fell on me in the theatre. Not the metaphorical fourth wall. A wall. It crushed me to the ground. There’s much to be written about the ways this has impacted my creative, personal, and professional life and how we take care of each other in this industry, but now is not the time and this series is not the place. In this forum, I am going to focus on my synesthetic functioning: the ability to process the combination of neural information from one’s senses. We all have it. Amidst a myriad of injuries, my synesthetic functioning was greatly impacted: I had trouble reading, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. My senses could not communicate with the speed or even language they had used before.

I know I have a desire to create metaphor, but I would like to stress that I did not go out looking to make a career in sensory art making. For fifteen years I followed the theatre I wanted to make and the relationship I wanted to have with an audience. A year prior to the wall falling, I wrote my graduate thesis on storytelling through the senses and about how I think it is lazy to assume there is a fourth wall. Yes, I see the irony, or poetry, or something— trust that a sense of humor is not one of the senses that I lost.

I do not think everything happens for a reason. But I think the reason you find in happenings is what makes a life. It’s what we often make theatre about. When I was lost, I found my lifeline in several people, but one was in my visual therapy specialist. He is one of a few doctors who understood what I could not articulate. I have almost always had corrective contacts for my eyesight—this is not about a changed prescription. I could see, but I couldn’t visualize. Prior to this experience, I innately experienced the world through the combination of sensory experience and found my way to open-frame work organically. It was not a fad or an angle for a product launch. This was just how I understood the world. How I discovered telling stories. And then with the wall, suddenly that was gone. No one could really understand the difference I felt inside. Although “seen” information enters the brain, the act of processing the things we see is a complex and detailed event. It is a process that results in vision.

An audience often relies on sight in their day-to-day functioning. And most often the sensory stimulation that leads when they sit in the seat of a dark theatre is visual. So when you change the paradigm of how the audience participates in open-frame work, their multi-sensory awareness is engaged. Let’s imagine for them it’s like a mini-trauma. “Hey there theatregoer, I know you know how this works when you buy your ticket and sit in the darkened theatre. I am changing that. Anything could happen.” Trauma is not to be taken lightly, and we will reach for our crutches, anything that will be a lifeline. However, as practitioners we have an opportunity here. Let’s make good reason out of the change. Let’s take care of more of the audiences’ senses.

Instead we still tend to throw visual stimuli in as a crutch—the audience may see it, but I question whether they emotionally process it. It becomes a beautiful sight, not necessarily a transformative experience. If they are moving or in a different location, their other senses are already heightened. We can face the trauma by linking other sensory events to the seen information. Sight will be their crutch if you let it, but when incorporated into all the other senses with care and layering, it is not just sight: it is vision.

Our vision and its connection to memory is theatremaking. I truly believe that the best theatre, whether it is open-frame or not, links visual storytelling with the notes of a sensory symphony. In the rebuilding of my own system I am more sensitive to the orchestration for an audience. I am acutely aware of the way sight plus taste or sound or touch embeds an experience as a memory. I don’t just intellectually believe this—I live it everyday.

After the accident, it was with my doctor that I understood that this combination, the thing I had relied on most in articulating my worlds, had been damaged. I found myself in visual therapy with injuries similar to veterans or football players, and a doctor who could understand the impact this kind of injury was having on my way of being in the world. And ultimately, on my way of making worlds. All the sensory crutches I used before no longer worked. We rely heavily on what we see and paring out the unimportant information and processing the things we need. So I now live the experience of how I think we should approach sight in open-frame theatre: as a part of a greater whole.

Last year, I was in the hospital for a week to test some of my more extreme sensory episodes. I am pretty private and so was exhausted from the first day of poking, prodding, and questioning. A volunteer walked in with a cart of plants. I was to pick out one and then dig my hands in the dirt and plant it for myself to take home. I told her I have killed a lot of my plants, but she was not swayed. She led me through it. I named my new plant Edgar; he sits on my desk as I write this now. I dug my hands into the dirt and interestingly when I look back on that week, that is the memory that sticks out: the smell of the dirt, the feel on my hands, the light in the room.

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Our vision and its connection to memory is theatremaking. I truly believe that the best theatre, whether it is open-frame or not, links visual storytelling with the notes of a sensory symphony. In the rebuilding of my own system I am more sensitive to the orchestration for an audience. I am acutely aware of the way sight plus taste or sound or touch embeds an experience as a memory. I don’t just intellectually believe this—I live it everyday. I want to stress again. This did not all happen for some sort of reason and anyone who might like to posit that to me will get an earful. But I am a curious person. I think curiosity is at the core of why we all are in the theatre. We were curious at one point about our place in the world and so we figured out how to create story experiences.

I live in Brooklyn. I work in multi-sensory techniques. My doctor nags me weekly to do less and not put stress on my system, but he does so with a smile. We have found an important partnership. He specializes in the science of the art I continue to be obsessed with. We discuss the way our bodies process sound, touch, or taste. We challenge my memory skills and my ability to read for longer portions of time. I will be “graduating” soon and left to take these lessons into managing this into my future.

Seeing is not enough to make memories. A beautiful painting is not theatre. It can be exceptional, but it is not theatre. Theatre is the art of time and space and in that art form we make things happen between our stories and our audience. If we solely rely on sight, we are not stepping towards the craft. I remind you here of what I said in my first part of this series: I love good proscenium plays. They understand how to use the proscenium’s relationship with audience. Two-dimensional processing through sight is too much a part of our current day processing: television, video games, movies, computers—our brains are oversaturated with visual stimulation. But in theatre we have an opportunity. We specialize in the craft of the live. We have the opportunity to make human memories: to mark stories with sound, touch, taste, smell, and sight in concert. We have the opportunity to balance this in open-frame work with the music of our other senses and bring theatre into a growing phase of story experience. But just like any shifting of experience for our audiences, I believe our responsibility is to deepen our craft for multi-sensory design. This is where the next phase of open-frame theatre can have long-lasting vision.

There have been days where the light in the world feels revelatory to me. I literally see clearer on certain days and am reminded of the way that light can illuminate everything. I don't take its glow for granted. It changes and opens me up to more tastes and sounds and smells. I end this series by saying that this has just scratched the surface of what myself and many are investigating in this work. More to come from me and from others as we deepen this investigation, but I will admit that discussing some of my injuries in this kind of public forum is terrifying for a theatre director. But I do so because it now informs the work I make. If I want an audience to trust me, I too take a risk. I know that with all the pressures and questions about theatre’s future context, this opportunity to launch our curiosity about the craft of open-frame feels risky to many traditional theatremakers. But we could reframe it as an opportunity to expand our craft. This series has marked a launching point for multiple conversations about open-frame making, immersive questions, and stepping into what is new for ourselves as artists in order to encourage envisioning an evolving relationship with our audience.

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Thoughts from the curator

A six-part series on the words, challenges, craft, and zeitgeist of the immersive theatre movement.

Immersive Theatre Series

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It really is amazing what can happen to an audience when you start adding in stimuli other than sight... Thank you for this Mikhael! Very interesting read, love from Perth, Australia. xo

I work at a seasonal company, and in the winter months I often seek reminders of why our work is necessary because when I'm surrounded by planning rather than by performance I can lose my vision. Thank you for bringing that vision back to me today.

Mikhael, I had no idea what happened to you!!!! I am in awe of your mind, your brilliance, and what I just read…. wish you the very best, and I know you will overcome all the limitations this terrible accident brought you. With affection, Kati

Hell yes Mikhael! You are a fighter, a maker and one of the most generous people in this industry. You create community and artistry. Keep on keepin on.