Immersive Theatre

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.

Alice Stanley Jr writes about three site-specific and interactive and/or immersive theatrical experiences.

Jacob Richman shares insight into his piece The (unfinished) Ballad of Adam and Elena Emery as a roving performance. 

Technology reflects and changes the ways in which we think.  We need to start telling more stories designed to accommodate our interactivity of the internet to grow with our audiences.

Chris Garza visits The Visit staged in rural Minnesota, and reflects on how immersive theater invites audiences complicity in a play about mob psychology, vengance, and greed.

Bertie Ferdman writes about the use of immersion in Roadskill and La Ruta, and how this trend in storytelling can help us create political theater that creates empathy and action.

W.M. Akers looks at how this immersive musical from Alex Timbers, David Byrne, Annie-B Parson and Fatboy Slim tells Imelda Marcos' story through disco, audience involvement, and theatrical hypnotism.

Jeffrey Mosser seeks the vast possibilities of immersive theatre when an audience is allowed to explore and discover.

Christopher White, of the Mugwumpin ensemble, dissects their process for subverting audience's expectations when entering a theatrical performance.