Immersive Theatre

In this installment, Damon Krometis discusses Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 and the relationship between watching and being watched for theatregoers.

In this installment, Gab Cody discusses her writing process for both iterations of OjO in Pittsburgh and San Diego.

verity healey offers an overview of pop up performances by Belarus Free Theatre’s studio Fortinbras, highlighting the treatment of disabled citizens in Belarus.

In this third installment, Sam Turich discusses the question of identity and its relationship to audiences in Pittsburgh and San Diego.

In the third installment of his series, Damon Krometis explores how much agency to give audiences during an interactive performance.

In this first installment, Artistic Director Jeffrey Carpenter discusses the origins of Bricolage’s OjO: The Next Generation of Travel performance.

A consideration of how to make successful marathon-length theatre based on Sean Graney’s All Our Tragic production of 32 Greek tragedies.

Liane Tomasetti discusses evaluating the impact of her team’s site-specific project and future implications for the community. 

Phil Weaver-Stoesz describes an immersive theatrical experience where the audience took control of the narrative, and asks what rules, if any, we should set for audience members in non-traditional works.

Romanian playwright Peca Ştefan discusses a project to research and engage with residents to tell the stories of towns throughout Romania.

Scholar and theater practitioner Erin Mee, considers how by giving time-space to the sensoria, immersive, and interactive productions are inherently rasic.

In this last installment of her series, Mikhael Tara Garver explores sight, memory, and what happened to her when a literal wall came down on her.

"Audience participation" is a vague term, like much of theatrical terminology; it has come to mean different things to different people... What happens when the audience participates by becoming performers—without volunteering to do so?

Mikhael Tara Garver explores the difference between taste and estimation, and the responsibility an open-frame theatremaker has to an audience who is unsure what to expect.

Based on interviews with local teachers and students about the current educational climate, Forgotten Futures creates space for discussion of the dysfunction plaguing Chicago Public Schools.

Touch has an important place in open-frame work. It is our most powerful resource—but we must craft it with the care we craft each other element. In fact, with more care, because we are stepping into a world where audience members need to grant true permission for it to be impactful. Touch is a sense we may turn off to function in our day-to-day lives. Are you aware of the smooth texture of your keyboard or the hard wood of your seat? Are you processing the feel of your jeans against your skin?

Haley Honeman writes about The Kirkbride Cycle, a site-specific musical performed at Fergus Fall State Hospital, a deinstitutionalized asylum in Minnesota.

Smell can instigate imagination because it sparks multiple visceral possibilities. Our brain takes in a smell, and connects it to a collage of memories logged from the past. And in that collage of memories the audience member’s imagination is set off.

Sound design alone is not immersive performance. Immersive performance is reliant on the audience experiencing related sensory stimulation to the performer and a multi-sensory design. The experience of sound can be the most recognizable and common part of our otherwise foreign immersive experience.

Within the bigger picture of "openframe", I define myself as an immersive storyteller. My text is that of playwrights, space, and senses. I am adamant about crafting the relationship between the audience and the story as specifically as the relationship between two characters. When it is built at its best, the audience’s presence is an imperative for the story to move forward.

Bertie Ferdman writes about her experience at Speakeasy Dollhouse, and the context of the production's creation.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about the 2014 Chicago Home Theater Festival, which places participatory performances inside private homes.

Martha Steketee interviews dramaturg Jill Rafson about the process of developing The Mysteries, described as “48 playwrights and 54 actors retelling the entirety of the Bible in a single night.”

Megan Reilly sheds insight on the gamification of theatre.