Written for Culture Wars
The word ‘immersive’ makes me think of bathtime. More specifically, it makes me think of the perfect bath. The sort you see in soap commercials. The sort of bath into which smooth-skinned women sink down brilliant-white porcelain, their eyes softly shut, their lips softly smiling. It’s perfectly sculpted bubbles and rising wisps of steam. Immersive, for me, screams spa-style relaxation. (Is ‘whispers’ more fitting? Chants? Calls like whale-song?)
Now, that’s not necessarily the case with immersive theatre, where the word merely describes a perspective. It marks a piece of theatre experienced from within rather than as an outside observer. The work happens around you or to you. You are part of it, rather than looking on fundamentally distinct.
Immersive theatre, then, is not confined to relaxation. It can fright or wrestle just as easily as soothe and stroke, but I think there’s often something comparable at play, particularly with one-on-one situations. Being immersed in a bath involves a consciousness of one’s body. One is aware of being surrounded by water. A massage does likewise. In the same way, the immersive experience involves the sensation (or anticipation) of touch and so, induces an acute awareness of one’s physical edges: the skin is vital.
The conventional relationship in theatre (ie a non-immersed audience) often seeks to make us forget our physical existence, wrapping us up in the onstage action. Where it is keen to remind us of our presence, it engages with us not as physical bodies, but as a conscious presence. It reminds us that we are watching, before it reminds us that we are sitting here watching. The act of perception is more important than the (passive) act of attending.
Immersive theatre makes one’s physical presence inescapable. With no distance between oneself and the work, the edge of one’s body is the beginning of the work’s sphere. An awareness of the work, involves an awareness of one’s body. We perceive it not just through the eyes and ears, but through our whole body, whether by touch or movement, smell or taste. Even when touch is not being involved, we are wary that, at any moment, it could be. Take these factors together and immersive work makes us bristle in a way that traditional theatre, watched from afar, does not. In itself, that sensation is pleasurable. (Why else do we seek physical contact as animals do?)
That very experience of bristling is, I think, central to the enjoyment of immersive work, but it often sneaks by unnoticed. It is the nicotine in the cigarette; barely perceptible, but fiercely seductive. I’ve written before about the inherent flattery of Intimate theatre, suggesting its appeal stems, in part, because it places the individual at its centre rather than the work. What I’m saying here might serve as a similar addendum: that immersive work appeals because it strokes our bodies as much as our egos. In seeking to distinguish between good and bad immersive or intimate work, one must perhaps recognise that the form is innately pleasurable. (Even, I suspect, where it causes painful or unpleasant sensations/emotions. I don’t, however, wish to get into sadomasochistic tendencies. Unlike Kenneth Tynan, by the way, who loved that sort of thing.)
I write this now after visiting the BAC’s One on One Festival, returning after last year’s success. (On the whole, the unruly hairdo that was last year’s festival has been trimmed and tamed. The scheduling has been simplified – understandably, given the algorithms that must have gone into plotting some 10,000 performances – but one might miss the jaunty mania.) While all three of the pieces on my menu – I had opted for Immersive, but might have chosen Technologized, Self-Aware or Intimate amongst others – were greatly enjoyable, I’m not sure any were particularly good. Each is best characterised by a fading smile.
In fact, the more I think about it, the same goes for the majority of such work: pleasurable but of little consequence. Best, in other words, when experienced, but changing very little.
The principal culprit was Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images, a piece I’ve been eager to see for a couple of years after positive (spoiler-free) reports. Again, this is a piece experienced through headphones, through which one hears a sweet, delicate female voice that teases and instructs. It could be a child or it could be a manipulative impersonation of childishness. I’m in a corridor curtain by light, white cloth. The lights go out. A hand finds mine. It’s skin is soft, the contact is almost infinitesimal, but almost electric. It leads me – sometimes slowly, sometimes faster, always uncertainly and imbalanced – in a swirl. When the lights re-emerge, the corridor’s dimensions have changed. Except for me, its empty.
The experience, which repeats with variations and escalates, is both sinister and seductive. When the lights are on, it looks minimally gorgeous. The pleasant submission and the delicate eroticism of the guiding hand combine, in the darkness, with the voice’s discordant edge. I can’t help but conjure flashing images of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. As it continues, three figures appear, dressed in denim ruffs and britches. They lead, I follow; pleasant ghosts, present but not haunting. The whole thing is opaque to the point of cluelessness.
However, the experience itself is a potent one. For fifteen minutes, it delights. I tingle, tipping between calm and trepidation. I tread gingerly and stare intrigued. When I leave, returning to reality, the images remain, but they don’t present a challenge. Their mysteries don’t seem to need solving. At the same time, the sensation dissolves. Its not that one forgets the experience, its just that it leaves no troubling stain behind. The smile fades and the smiler seeks a new thrill.
The same is more or less true of Il Pixel Rosso’s And the Birds Fell From the Sky, a film experienced as first-person role-play. It’s not dissimilar to low-tech virtual reality, only without any element of freedom. One is strapped into headphones and goggles, which house a personal cinema screen that plays a point-of-view film. The game is to follow the instructions in your ears so that your movements fall into sync with the film. Turn your head to the left as the camera pans that way; hold out your hand just as it appears on the screen. At one point, a spray of booze comes your way, co-inciding with a burst of laughter from a drunken clown. Elsewhere, hands place objects in yours or guild you around the space. Again, one becomes very aware of one’s own sphere of sensation.
The film places you in a car with three dishevelled clowns, one of whom seems glumly hangdog, another drunkenly manic. They talk in Spanish with the sort of gravelly voices reserved for Mexican honchos. Driving around a clown-filled downtown on a mischievous rampage, they stop clown prostitutes, scream abuse and shoot passers-by. It’s all a bit Grand Theft Auto, only art-house and warped. Later there’s more serenity: we bob in a lake surrounded by other clowns in brightly coloured rubber-rings or stand on a heath, where another places a bird’s foot in our hand. The whole film is beautifully shot, glazed with the burnt ochre of nostalgia. It’s full of feeling, but barely leaves a residue. Forced to think back now, it’s weird and worrying, but there’s no real compulsion to reconsider the piece. Immediately afterwards, it felt a surreal fairground ride or curious computer game, experienced and discarded soon afterwards. Again, on re-entry to the real world, the smile fades and the smiler moves on.
Several questions spring to mind. First, why is it problematic that such work should leave so little trace? After all, the emphemeral is at the heart of both theatre as event and of experiences. How much of that emphemerality is down to the non-natural quality of sensory experience as opposed to visual image?
Isn’t there an impulse of romanticism beneath experiential work, given that it elevates sensations so categorically? If so, isn’t it enough that it simply makes us feel and that experiencing those feelings (though not necessarily the feelings themselves) is pleasurable. In such terms, experiential work need not really engage with ideas. It can settle into opaqueness or triviality quite happily.
Now, I don’t believe that for a second, but it would explain why I liked The Campinglis Bell-Halls’ Where the Wild Things Sleep so much, despite it’s having next to no consequence whatsoever. It is, essentially, a five-minute distillation of Maurice Sendak’s children’s book, recently expanded for cinema by Spike Jonze. More than that, it’s one of the cutest, most ticklish pieces I’ve had the pleasure of passing through.
We are cast as Max, the boy lying awake as his bedroom creaks and shadows creep. Every now and then a widened eye peers at us through a hole in the wall. Under the bed, we come face to face with the cuddly monster, brilliantly played by Gemma Brockis in a onesie, committed as anything and growling like a stomach’s rumble. The whole thing left me chuckling helplessly, absolutely charmed and wide-eyed.
Afterwards, as I cradled the cocoa handed me on leaving, I was content just to have been delighted for a short period of time. Moreover, the piece is equally content to do just that. It is a brilliant five minutes that seeks to be nothing more.
What makes me so uncomfortable about this is that if such work need only provide a pleasurable experience, its quality is defined exclusively by that pleasure. That might be judged in accordance with its intensity, timbre or duration. Either way, I worry that – given the relative ease (and so cheapness) of it’s achievement, as detailed above – we arrive at a situation where craft is elevated above artistry. The triumph of Where the Wild Things Sleep, for me, is in being well-crafted, as are both Rotating… & And the Birds… However, the latter two purport to an ‘about’ (if I might use such a clumsy turn of phrase), which never really carries. Their shortcomings are failings of artistry as seen in the fading of a smile.
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