DRHA

Embodiment and intersubjectivity in immersive and experiential performance forms

Immersive technologies are increasingly used in performance and theatre to create experiences for audience that move beyond the traditional seated, separation between stage and audience. These performance forms foreground the audience member’s experience and include immersive, participatory multimedia and game theatre forms (which we will refer to as experiential performance). Such approaches situate the audience’s experience as part of the aesthetics of the work and as such foreground embodiment and intersubjectivity.

Experiential performance is not dependent on the use of immersive technologies, of course, but there is increasing funding and support for the use of such technology to continue developing immersive and interactive cultural forms. This development makes it important to consider the tension created by immersive technology and the physical, intersubjective environment of live performance. Live performance depends on the audience’s engagement with space and others, which are inhibited by some types of immersive technology (such as VR). We propose to examine what the impact of such technology is for the embodied and intersubjective experience of live performance, with a focus on the use of mobile phones and wearable devices (such as the Magic Leap).

Our poster will map out the implications of such immersive technologies on the audience’s experience of the work and will examine the ways in which the use of technology can both enhance and restrain embodiment and intersubjectivity. We will map and analyse these strategies from an interdisciplinary perspective (combining perspectives from performance studies, creative writing, and media studies) to combine our experiences as a writer for immersive technology and performance, an audience researcher and a media scholar. Within this we will draw particularly on examples such as The Walking Dead: Our World (an AR-based mobile game), Adventure 1 by Coney (which uses texts and phone calls through a custom Twilio interface to communicate with participants) and new uses of the Magic Leap AR technology in theatre and games). Our focus is on the types of engagement and experience that is enabled by immersive technology as well as how new work may be able to explore the tension between such technology and embodiment and intersubjectivity in creative ways. This is an interactive poster, to highlight some of the tensions and implications of immersive technology on audience experience.