Beyond Immersive Theatre - Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation

BEYOND
IMMERSIVE
THEATRE
ADAM ALSTON
Beyond Immersive Theatre
Adam Alston
Beyond Immersive
Theatre
Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation
Adam Alston
University of Surrey
Guildford, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-137-48043-9 ISBN 978-1-137-48044-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936675
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: © Susanne Dietz
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
For my family
Marion, Jim and John Alston
for your trust, interest and support
and for Hannah Lane
with love
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been greatly enriched by the generosity, insight, labour
and support of others. Sophie Nield’s mentorship over the course of my
PhD had a significant impact on the way that I think and write. I am end-
lessly grateful for her guidance in those years and beyond, for the finan-
cial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and for the
institutional support of Royal Holloway, University of London, and the
University of Surrey. Hearty thanks to Paula Kennedy, Peter Carey, Jen
McCall and April James from Palgrave Macmillan for backing, supervis-
ing and monitoring the book’s production, and also to the anonymous
reader, whose comments played an important role in the book’s develop-
ment. Hans-Thies Lehmann’s and Jen Harvie’s insightful feedback influ-
enced how I built on my PhD research in writing this monograph, and
Jacqueline Bolton, Rachel Hann, Chris Megson, Louise Owen and Dan
Rebellato offered perceptive commentary on chapter drafts, for which I’m
grateful.
Thank you to all the directors, producers, associates, performers,
administrators, and audiences for sharing their passion and knowledge,
especially: Evan Cobb, Ray Lee, Christer Lundahl, Martina Seitl, David
Jubb, Steph Allen, Katy Balfour, Victoria Eyton, Jennie Hoy, Colin
Nightingale, Mischa Twitchin, Mark Oakley, Jessica Brewster, Roland
Smith, Dan Ball and Joe Iredale. My sincere gratitude to Ray Lee, Emma
Leach, Stephen Dobbie, and Susanne Dietz (www.susannedietz.com)
for permission to publish images. This book has also benefitted from the
collegiality and friendship of others not already mentioned, particularly
Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom, Liam Jarvis, Gareth White, Martin Welton, Daniel
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Oliver, Tassos Stevens, and colleagues in the Department of Drama and

Theatre at Royal Holloway and the School of Arts at the University of
Surrey, who continue to inspire a sense of shared endeavour and pur-
pose, and for that reason I address them as a collective. The Theatre and
Performance Research Association (TaPRA) has also been a wonderfully
supportive organisation that continues to stimulate very memorable dis-
cussions both inside and outside of working groups.
Some of my previously published articles and chapters informed the
selection of case studies and the early development of a few themes and
concepts represented in this book, although these have since been substan-
tially revised and rethought. These include: ‘Reflections on Intimacy and
Narcissism in Ontroerend Goed’s Personal Trilogy’; ‘Politics in the Dark:
Risk Perception, Affect and Emotion in Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in
a Room of Images’; ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk,
Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’; ‘Funding, Product
Placement and Drunkenness in Punchdrunk’s The Black Diamond’; and
‘Damocles and the Plucked: Audience Participation and Risk in Half
Cut’. Beyond Immersive Theatre is also complemented by ‘The Promise
of Experience: Immersive Theatre in the Experience Economy’, which
is forthcoming at the time of writing. Full publication details of each
can be found below, and my thanks to the various editors and review-
ers: Eirini Kartsaki, Rachel Zerihan, Brian Lobel, Nicola Shaughnessy,
Bruce McConachie, Joslin McKinney, Mick Wallis, Kate Dorney, Graham
Saunders, Maria Delgado, James Frieze, and all of the anonymous peer
reviewers.
My gratitude goes out to the Lanes, who not only put a roof over my
head in the early phases of the research represented in this book, but also
raised eyebrows at appropriate junctures; to my parents and brother, Jim,
Marion and John, for always being there and for questions asked and left
unsaid; and to Hannah – for patience, reassurance and belief.
REFERENCES
Alston, A. (2013). Audience participation and neoliberal value: Risk, agency and
responsibility in immersive theatre. Performance Research, 18(2), 128–138.
Alston, A. (2012). Damocles and the plucked: Audience participation and risk in
Half Cut. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(3), 344–354.
Alston, A. (2012). Funding, product placement and drunkenness in Punchdrunk’s
The Black Diamond. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 32(2), 193–208.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
Alston, A. (2013). Politics in the dark: Risk perception, affect and emotion in
Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images. In N. Shaughnessy (Ed.)
Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (pp. 217–
228). London: Methuen.
Alston, A. (forthcoming). The promise of experience: Immersive theatre in the
experience economy. In J. Frieze (Ed.) Reframing Immersive Theatre: The
Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance. London, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Alston, A. (2012). Reflections on intimacy and narcissism in Ontroerend Goed’s
Personal Trilogy. Performing Ethos, 3(2), 107–119.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction: Theatre as Experience Machine 1

Productive Participation 5
Neoliberalism and Immersive Theatre 11
Frustrating Productivity 18
Methods/Numbers/Map 23
References 30
2 Theatre in a Box: Affect and Narcissism in Ray Lee’s

Cold Storage 35
Affect 39
Disinterest 47
Narcissistic Participation 51
Biopolitics and the Culture of Narcissism 58
Conclusion 67
References 69
3 Theatre in the Dark: Spectatorship and Risk in

Lundahl & Seitl’s Pitch-Black Theatre 75
Dark Heritage 77
Watching Darkness 86
Embracing Risk 93
Conclusion 104
References 105
xi
xii CONTENTS
4 Theatre Through the Fireplace: Punchdrunk and

the Neoliberal Ethos 109
Neoliberal Value 113
Brandscapes and Mixed Economic Funding 120
Entrepreneurial Participation 129
Conclusion 140
References 141
5 Frustrating Theatre: Shunt in the Experience Economy 145

Producing Consumers 148
Affective Texts 158
Frustrating Producers 164
Conclusion 178
References 179
6 Theatre in the Marketplace: Immaterial Production in

Theatre Delicatessen’s Theatre Souk 183
Disrupting the Sensible 189
Interstitial Pop-Ups 199
Disrupting Immaterial Production 205
Conclusion 212
References 214
Conclusion: Beyond the Experience Machine 217

References 227
Index 229
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 2.1 Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) 37

Fig. 2.2 Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) 38
Fig. 3.1 Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–) 83
Fig. 4.1 Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) 131
Fig. 4.2 Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) 132
Fig. 5.1 ‘The Machine’ from shunt’s Money (2009–2010) 167
Fig. 5.2 ‘Red Room’ from shunt’s The Architects (2012–2013) 173
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Theatre as Experience

Machine
My interest in immersive theatre was piqued in 2007 after experienc-

ing two performances that were both intoxicating and exhilarating, and
seemed to capture something of an innovative streak in theatre performed
in Britain at the time: Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–
2008) and a piece by members of De La Guarda called Fuerzabruta
(2005–).1 The first was a delirious romp through the haunting, morbid
imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe. Audiences wore masks, a Punchdrunk
trademark, and were free to roam throughout the various rooms, stair-
cases and corridors of London’s Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), rifling their
way through immaculately detailed and thematically cohesive environ-
ments, and encountering performed excerpts plucked from Poe’s oeuvre
along the way. The second, Fuerzabruta, was performed in a large tent at
the Edinburgh Festival Fringe while it was on a world tour. For theatre
critic Lyn Gardner, it was ‘like having a spotlight shone in your eyes while
being hit with a sledgehammer by someone who insists, “We have ways of
making you have fun”’ (Gardner, 2007). A series of spectacles followed on
from one another in the centre and all around a single promenade space:
a man running through cardboard walls atop a giant treadmill; dancers
1
Fuerzabruta was devised by members of the Argentinian group De La Guarda, although
it is not strictly ‘by’ De La Guarda following a split between two core members of the com-
pany: Pichón Baldinu and Diqui James. James worked on Fuerzabruta, but Baldinu did not.
‘Fuerzabruta’ is more accurately both a company name and a production name (split into
two words in the United States – Fuerza Bruta), although the show is commonly referred to
as a De La Guarda production, which also makes for convenient shorthand (Binder, 2011).
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

A. Alston, Beyond Immersive Theatre,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_1
2 A. ALSTON
spinning many metres above the spectators’ heads on a reflective silver

sheet that encircled the audience; a giant transparent swimming pool con-
taining a thin film of water that descended to within touching distance,
soon to become enlivened by the crashing and swirling of performers who
allowed the water to refract kaleidoscopic rainbows of light; and descent
into an all-out, water-drenched party fuelled by pounding techno thuds.
In both cases, audiences enter ‘experience machines’. Experience
machines are enclosed and other-worldly spaces in which all the various
cogs and pulleys of performance – scenography, choreography, drama-
turgy, and so on – coalesce around a central aim: to place audience mem-
bers in a thematically cohesive environment that resources their sensuous,
imaginative and explorative capabilities as productive and involving aspects
of a theatre aesthetic.
The term ‘experience machine’ is not my coinage; it derives from a
thought experiment proposed by the philosopher Robert Nozick, who
describes it as a kind of flotation tank that stimulates the brain to artifi-
cially induce desired experiences (Nozick, 1974, pp. 42–5). He asks: is the
experience machine preferable to the more difficult pursuit of desire in
everyday life, as an autonomous individual? The reference may seem odd
because Nozick is a political philosopher concerned with the role of the
state and not with immersive theatre performances. More specifically, he is
a neoliberal: a defender of the absolute sovereignty of inviolate individu-
als and of ‘a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection
against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on’ (Nozick,
1974, p. ix). For Nozick, the experience machine represents the pursuit of
hedonism and subservience to a system that rewards subjects with desir-
able experiences at the expense of independence – independence at the
phenomenological level of experiencing independence, and at the onto-
logical level of being an independent person. He loathes the idea of sub-
mitting to ‘a world no deeper or more important than that which people
can construct’ (Nozick, 1974, p. 43), and uses the thought experiment to
argue that the sovereignty of inviolate individuals supersedes the immedi-
ate gratification of desire on moral grounds.
The experience machine envisaged by Nozick bears some similar-
ity to the immersive environments that audiences enter in performances
like The Masque of the Red Death and Fuerzabruta, along with crucial
dissimilarities. Both performances offer escapist experiences that take place
in aesthetic environments that fully surround, or ‘immerse’, their audi-
ences, and that encourage audiences to ‘give into’ and become ‘swept up’
INTRODUCTION: THEATRE AS EXPERIENCE MACHINE 3
by the experiential qualities of a performance. However, they also invite

individual audience journeys through these environments, particularly in
Punchdrunk’s masked performances, which are linked to a set of expecta-
tions that include promenading and participating, and a physically active
and explorative pursuit of personal pleasure. In other words, they involve
activities that are precluded in Nozick’s thought experiment, which fig-
ures the plugged-in subject as an indolent and inert dreamer. While these
performances resonate with the experience-centred and all-encompassing
environments that Nozick envisions, they also welcome productive audi-
ences whose industriousness and thirst for feeling ideally supplants tor-
pidity. The Masque of the Red Death and Fuerzabruta therefore muddy
distinctions between submission to an engaging experience and a mode of
encounter that celebrates personal freedoms to act and explore in experi-
entially stimulating environments.
I have subsequently journeyed to countless old warehouses, disused
office blocks, appropriated municipal buildings, abandoned factories,
populated and condemned housing estates and towers, purpose-built and
temporary structures, tents, railway arches, wine cellars, a range of under-
ground storage units and tunnels, shipping containers, mobile and station-
ary vehicles (and occasionally theatres) to experience a raft of immersive
theatre performances, most of which tend to share a set of broadly
defined features. Immersive theatre centres on the production of thrill-
ing, enchanting or challenging experiences, which feature as an impor-
tant part of an immersive theatre ‘artwork’ that audiences co-produce by
doing more than watching, or by augmenting the productivity of watch-
ing as a prospectively participating spectator. Audiences might roam freely
through spaces, interact and/or dialogue with performers and/or other
audience members, or physically engage with a performance environment
that surrounds them completely. They are expected to be alert, engaged,
involved and prepared for invigoration. And they are expected to put their
psychological and physiological capabilities to work, either through some
form of physical exertion, or through an intimate involvement in perfor-
mance that enlivens the affective possibilities of an uncertain future.
Beyond Immersive Theatre identifies and responds to an intensification
of audience productivity in immersive theatre that some of these features
begin to signal, focusing especially on the limits of immersion and the
‘productive participation’ of audiences in a contemporary take on the
experience machine. It recognises productive participation as a feature of
immersive theatre aesthetics that stems from demands that are often made
4 A. ALSTON
of audiences – demands to make more, do more, feel more, and to feel

more intensely – and enquires into the meanings and values of produc-
tive participation. The term ‘productive participation’, then, really names
a romanticism, modification and enhancement of an audience’s inherent
productivity, rather than a discrete category of audience engagement.
Moreover, the book approaches the intensification of audience produc-
tivity from a political perspective, tracing connections between modes of
involvement and empowerment in immersive theatre and the economic
and political contexts – particularly those impacted by neoliberalism – that
embed immersive theatre performances and inform the analysis of immer-
sive theatre aesthetics. Finally, while the book presents a critique of pro-
ductive participation as a feature that recurs in neoliberalism’s political and
economic structures, it also sets out to identify and explore practices that
diversify and evolve immersive theatre aesthetics in ways that might ques-
tion or frustrate the pervasiveness and impact of neoliberal production and
productivity, on however small a scale.
The ‘beyond’ in the book’s title is therefore not intended to announce
the obsolescence of immersive theatre; rather, it refers to that which seems
or is meant to remain outside the physical boundaries of an immersive
environment. More specifically, the term is intended to draw attention
to how the political and economic contexts that couch immersive theatre
performances – including the nature and effects of a government’s neo-
liberal policies and philosophy, and innovations in economic production
and consumption – might enhance understanding of immersive theatre
aesthetics and especially the politics of audience immersion and participa-
tion. What are the relevancies of these contexts for the scholarly analysis
of immersive theatre, particularly with regards to audiences? How might
they develop comprehension of the aesthetics and politics of audience
immersion and participation? How total is the closure of an immersive
environment from these contexts? Is the intensification of an audience’s
productivity laudable? Is it empowering? What kind of politics exists in
immersive theatre performances that claim no political agenda?
The next section sets out and unpacks some common features of
immersive theatre performances, focusing on the positing of theatre audi-
ences as productive participants. The section after that defines and his-
toricises neoliberalism and the emergence of an ‘experience economy’
as contextual elements that inform and steer my critical approach to the
production and consumption of immersive theatre aesthetics. I then posi-
tion the book in a field of immersive theatre scholarship and in relation
to studies of neoliberalism in socially engaged art and performance, and

outline how some immersive theatre makers are upsetting the imaginary
of the experience machine by frustrating productive participation. A final
section introduces the methodology, structure and ambition of the book,
which is ultimately intended as both a critique of the contemporary expe-
rience machine, and as an informed celebration of practices that respond
to a pervasive romanticism of intensified productivity within and beyond
immersive theatre.
PRODUCTIVE PARTICIPATION
Immersive theatre is an ambiguous and generic referent, not least because
there is no consensus over what it is that draws companies and artists
together as makers of immersive theatre. For Josephine Machon, a lead-
ing scholar of immersive theatre aesthetics, the ‘area of study is broad and
contestable’, refers to ‘pluralities of practice’ and ‘is impossible to define
as a genre, with fixed and determinate codes and conventions, because it
is not one’ (Machon, 2013, pp. xv–xvi, original emphasis). The murkiness
of what exactly immersive theatre refers to is exacerbated once a broad
range of companies and artists are taken into account that may not be as
well known as Punchdrunk as makers of immersive theatre, but that none-
theless present an equally valid claim to be immersive theatre makers –
or, in the absence of a direct claim, might still be recognised as such, or
appear as occasional makers of immersive theatre. Such an approach might
then consider: Analogue, ANU Productions, Art of Disappearing, Badac
Theatre, Belt Up, Christopher Green & Ursula Martinez, Commonwealth
Theatre, Coney, De La Guarda, dreamthinkspeak, Extant, FoolishPeople,
Goat and Monkey, Grid Iron, Half Cut, Il Pixel Rosso (along with Silvia
Mercuriali’s work outside of the company), Imagine Nation, Kate Bond
& Morgan Lloyd, Kindle Theatre, La Fura dels Baus, Look Left Look
Right, Lucien Bourjeily, Lundahl & Seitl, Nandita Dinesh, Nimble Fish,
non zero one, Ontroerend Goed, Punchdrunk, Ray Lee, Rift (formerly
Retz), Secret Cinema, shunt (along with work developed independently
by members of the shunt collective), Sound&Fury, Teatro de los Sentidos,
Theatre Delicatessen, Third Rail Projects, Visual Respiration, WildWorks
and ZU-UK (formerly Zecora Ura).
These companies and artists are all (or have been) makers of contem-
porary theatre and performance, with some better known than others and
some that may not have been pigeonholed in the mind of the reader as
6 A. ALSTON
makers of immersive theatre, not least because several have only dabbled in
immersive theatre making, or choose to refer to their work in other terms.
However, what this list excludes is what came before their emergence,
as well as other art contexts that involve audience immersion. It largely
excludes civic performance and pageantry, happenings, environmental
theatre, site-specific art and performance, installation art, and relational
art, all of which bear at least some connection, in one form or another, to
the work of the companies just surveyed.
Immersive theatre is a loose term. It can describe practices that precede
the currency of the immersive moniker, just as understandings of immer-
sive theatre will probably – hopefully – continue to evolve as practitioners
experiment with audience engagement. For that reason, you will not find
a rigid definition of immersive theatre in this book. What you will find
are detailed examinations of common features of performances dubbed
‘immersive’ that focus on modes of productivity that are assigned to audi-
ences in immersive settings, and to which audiences are invited to posit
themselves as productive participants. You will find a narrative that seeks to
identify what produces a sense of immersion, and what might frustrate an
audience’s resourcing in the production of an immersive theatre aesthetic.
Theatre audiences who do not intervene directly in the action of per-
formance are no more docile than pedestrians who are herded or amble
between spaces in immersive theatre. To a certain extent, ‘productive
participation’ is what audiences do in all theatre performances when
they’re not sleeping, daydreaming or procrastinating (although some
performances might still build on these activities). In ‘The Emancipated
Spectator’, Jacques Rancière influentially critiques Bertolt Brecht’s and
Antonin Artaud’s approaches to the engagement of theatre audiences to
make a similar point, allowing his caricatured framing of each to stand in
for twentieth-century theatre practice more generally. Brecht described the
audience’s ‘critical approach’ to theatre as ‘our great productive method’,
and he designed and mobilised dramaturgic and aesthetic strategies to
awaken this kind of audience productivity (Willett, 1964, p. 187). And
Artaud proposed ideas for staging proto-immersive theatre, as these ideas
might be understood today, so as to ‘cruelly’ jolt audiences out of docility;
an important aim was to facilitate the audience’s realisation that fiction
is not what they encounter within the ritual of theatre, but in the socio-
culturally coded world outside of the theatre (Artaud, 1958, pp. 96–7).
For Rancière, what these two paradigmatic conceptions of productiv-
ity overlook is the inherent productivity of reception. Audiences watch,
listen, decode, cogitate, imagine, feel, hope and desire. These are all pro-
ductive things to do in the sense that these actions produce meanings
among a gathered audience of individual spectators, each ‘refashioning’
performance in their own way (Rancière, 2009, p. 13).
However, the prefix is important: refashioning. One of the main dif-
ferences between performances that involve an immersive and/or partici-
patory mode of audience engagement and other kinds of theatre is that
audiences both refashion and co-produce theatre performances. They are
part of the means of aesthetic production. Their role as a co-producer may
at first seem fairly arbitrary or minimal, filling in ‘gaps’, to borrow from
Gareth White, programmed as part of a procedure for audience engage-
ment (White, 2013, p. 30). These gaps certainly exist in many immersive
theatre performances (and all performances, if the ‘gap’ of meaning-
making is included), particularly when hollow invitations to participate
are made to audiences to ‘complete’ an artwork by interacting with per-
formers who guide interaction toward a designated goal. However, I pro-
pose that a more fundamental gap exists in immersive theatre that is filled
through a particular form of audience productivity: the objectification of
experience as art.
There is a difference between aesthetic experience and aestheticised
experience. Most theatre performances present audiences with aesthetic
objects, including the objectified actor, which dynamically produce aes-
thetic experiences among creative interpreters of a theatrical event.
Aesthetic experience does not arise from a fixed and stable meaning
imposed on the spectator, but from an active decoding – or refashioning –
of plural and malleable meanings attached to aesthetic stimuli. Immersive
theatre performances involve much the same, but because of important
formal qualities, because of audience immersion and, where appropriate,
participation, aesthetic experience is prone to objectification as part of
an immersive theatre aesthetic. The audience experience produced by an
audience’s relationships to a set of materials tends to be framed as the pri-
mary, aesthetically meaningful element in immersive theatre, alongside a
series of other meanings attached to materials and bodies in an immersive
space.
Aesthetic experiences in immersive theatre tend to promote introspec-
tion, because in the heady heights of immersion and participation it is not
art objects that take precedence so much as the affective consequences of
an audience’s own engagement in seeking, finding, unearthing, touch-
ing, liaising, communicating, exchanging, stumbling, meandering and so
8 A. ALSTON
on, each geared toward the promotion of peculiarly intense or profound

experiences that arise from the audience’s investment of energy – for
instance, by walking, interacting, dancing and even running – in excess
of that involved in sedentary, end-on theatre scenarios. These audiences
may also feel entitled to proximate and intimate liaisons with performers
or other audience members that are paid for and expected. Keren Zaointz
describes this sense of entitlement as a ‘presumptive intimacy’ that ‘fosters
an explicit lack of generosity that ensures that the spectator maintains her
place at the centre of her own singular journey’ (Zaointz, 2014, p. 410).
Taken together, the exertion and presumptive intimacy experienced by
some audience members and, moreover, elicited from audiences, pro-
motes greater degrees of introspection in comparison with end-on stage-
auditorium configurations. It is introspection that ultimately gives rise to
the aestheticisation of experience, as aesthetically constitutive audience
attention is diverted from a more typical art object – be it a sculpture in an
installation or a performer on a stage – to the experiences that arise from
audience immersion and participation.
For Nicholas Ridout, theatre ‘conceives itself as an apparatus for the
production of affect by means of representation’ (Ridout, 2006, p. 168);
and, for Erin Hurley, ‘doing things with feeling is the primary reason for
theatre’s existence […] It is what makes theatre matter’ (Hurley, 2010,
p. 4; see also Welton, 2011; Fensham, 2009). Arousing memorable,
engaging and sometimes challenging experiences are important effects of
watching good theatre that the apparatuses of world representation usu-
ally seek to promote. Furthermore, such ‘small but profound moments’,
as Jill Dolan observes, have the potential to call the attention of the audi-
ence ‘in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful
feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were
as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersub-
jectively intense’ (Dolan, 2005, p. 5; see also Thompson, 2009). Being
affected by theatre, then, plays an important role in theatre’s aesthetic
makeup, and an important role in the composition of values, meanings
and hopes that might be pinned to or derive from a theatre performance.
However, most theatre performances do not encourage the objecti-
fication of aesthetic experiences or involve co-producing the ‘stuff’ of
reception to any great extent. Audiences may enjoy or not enjoy their phe-
nomenological experience of a theatre event, or their analysis of what takes
place before them, but the theatre aesthetic probably does not rely on an
affective register as something other than a consequence of watching and
attending theatre, even if it might revel in it at times, or rely on audience

immersion and participation. It is more likely that a theatre performance’s
aesthetic relies on text and its (precarious) delivery, or the realisation of
a designer’s vision in scenography, or the bodies of performers and the
audience’s refashioning of performances that accompanies all of these
things, as well as the affects that emerge from this refashioning. While
most immersive theatre performances involve any or all of the above, they
also tend to encourage the objectification of aesthetic experiences as art
objects primarily because of the modes of audience engagement that par-
ticipants or prospective participants are called upon to perform. They are
asked to respond not only to performance, but their role in performance,
which is to be taken up and run with. Audiences in immersive theatre are
often asked to do something more than watch, think and feel so that they
can feel more of the work and feel more intensely: to interact, to roam
freely through a space, or set of spaces, to speak with others, and so on.
As involvement increases in immersive theatre, I contend, so does the
intensification of audience productivity, along with a tendency to become
introspective as attention is turned toward an experience that is produced
within the body and constituted by the audience as art in dynamic relation
to an immersive environment.
There is a crucial difference between theatre that produces pleasurable
or challenging audience experiences – which the majority of memorable
and rewarding performances achieve – and theatre which centres on the
generic audience experience as a (necessarily pluralistic) aesthetic feature
of the work, and which figures the audience as a co-producer and not just
as someone who refashions performance in their own way. I might feel
empathy for Macduff when I watch an actor play the character on a stage
from within an auditorium and this feeling might carry significance for
my understanding of the character, his circumstances and their correspon-
dences (or lack thereof) to my own. I might also empathise with him in an
immersive space shared between actors and audience members. However,
what tends to happen in immersive theatre is that the work, as White puts
it, ends up ‘inside the spectator’ (White, 2012, p. 228). While, for White,
this makes the ‘immersive theatre’ moniker unsatisfying because of how
it can be seen to undo the metaphor of being separated from that which
immerses (I disagree with him on this particular point – one can be sepa-
rated and incorporated in different ways simultaneously), and while all the-
atre can be said to exist within the spectator at conceptual, imaginative and
phenomenological levels, these levels are not aestheticised. The difference
10 A. ALSTON
between aesthetic experience and aestheticised experience relates to an

intensification of productive participation and the introspection produced
by that intensification. While an audience’s affective relationship to a work
arises from engagement with something represented, as it does in all the-
atre, and while this may well carry great and personal significance, as it
might in all theatre, the promotion of productive participation in immer-
sive theatre and the introspection that comes with immersion in a contem-
porary experience machine means that affective experience itself tends to
become utterly absorbing as a centrally significant and memorable feature
of immersive theatre aesthetics.
This line of argument is pursued throughout the book by dwelling
on two forms of productive participation in immersive theatre: what I
call ‘narcissistic participation’ (see also Alston, 2012) and ‘entrepreneurial
participation’ (see also Alston, 2013). Narcissistic participation is both
introspective, because aesthetic attention is turned toward one’s own
experiencing self, and projective, because aesthetic attention is also pro-
jected onto an environment that is responded to not just through reflec-
tion and feeling, but often through participatory endeavour as well. That
which is presented to narcissistic participants as being of aesthetic concern
is therefore partly of their own making and twofold: the audience mem-
ber’s own affective experience – an idiosyncratic and embodied experience
which moves audiences in some way either toward or away from some-
thing or someone, and which seizes attention as a strange and indulgent
curiosity – and their own appearance within an immersive world, elements
of which might be fashioned, as well as read. As Chap. 2 explores in most
detail, the notion of ‘disinterest’ in philosophical aesthetics therefore
loses relevance for the narcissistic participant, whose physiology, psychol-
ogy and explorative capabilities are resourced in the co-constitution of an
immersive theatre aesthetic.
Narcissistic participation might also incentivise what I call ‘entrepre-
neurial participation’. Entrepreneurial participation is more common in
immersive theatre performances in which audiences are able to roam freely
through a range of spaces, discovering the hidden secrets of a performance.
By taking risks, not following the crowd, being savvy, taking responsibility
for one’s own actions, and so on, the entrepreneurial participant is able
to increase their chances of discovering these hidden secrets, which might
include intimate and exclusive encounters with performers that are not
available to every participant, or finding rooms and areas of a theatre envi-
ronment that can help with filling in a clearer picture of the performance
as a whole. The entrepreneurial participant therefore strives to make their

experience of immersive theatre as full and as rich as possible, as Chap. 4
addresses most fully. However, while the achievement of a full and rich
experience of theatre ought by no means to be castigated, the derivation
of such an experience from an intensification of audience productivity as
an entrepreneurial participant invites scrutiny.
The identification of narcissistic and entrepreneurial forms of produc-
tive participation is intended go some way toward elucidating the politics
of immersive theatre aesthetics. While it is rare that immersive theatre
makers announce a political agenda, all immersive theatre is still involved
in politics to the extent that immersive theatre aesthetics – particularly
theatre form – is inherently political. Narcissistic participation is predicated
on the productive potential of an audience member as an experiencing and
potentially acting and interacting subject who renders their corporeal self
as a part of an artwork, in relation to an environment that assigns to audi-
ences such an aesthetically productive role. Audiences are asked to posit
themselves according to a framework for audience engagement that invites
and relies on an audience’s effective productivity, enabling, delimiting and
prescribing degrees of involvement that exceed the refashioning of perfor-
mance as an ‘emancipated spectator’. Entrepreneurial participation is pre-
mised on the ‘freedom’ of being able to roam at one’s own discretion in
immersive theatre, which enables some participants to leave a performance
having enjoyed or endured a greater number of opportunities to encoun-
ter and experience a performance’s secrets, in comparison with those who
are less able or willing to exploit such freedom. Even in the absence of an
announced political agenda, there is still a politics to the aesthetics of pro-
ductive participation that this book looks to theorise and critique.
NEOLIBERALISM AND IMMERSIVE THEATRE

The promotion of productive participation in immersive theatre, which
guides and informs the performance analyses featured throughout this
book, prompts me to consider what Jean Baudrillard calls ‘an unbridled
romanticism of productivity’ (Baudrillard, 1975, p. 17) in political phi-
losophy and practice, identifying and assessing what such romanticism
looks like today within and beyond immersive theatre environments. For
Baudrillard, both capitalism and socialism prize production in ways that
ensure that the underlying principle of capitalism – the productivity of
labouring subjects – remains unchallenged, ultimately preserving capitalist
12 A. ALSTON
hegemony in the absence of more radical alternatives. From this point of

view, public and private ownership of the means of production rely on the
same dominant scheme. ‘Everywhere’, writes Baudrillard,
man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself

according to this scheme of production which is assigned to him as the ulti-
mate dimension of value and meaning. At the level of all political economy
there is something of what Lacan describes in the mirror stage: through
this scheme of production, this mirror of production, the human species
comes to consciousness [la prise de conscience] in the imaginary. Production,
labor, value, everything through which an objective world emerges and
through which man recognizes himself objectively – this is the imaginary.
(Baudrillard, 1975, p. 19, original emphasis)
Even if the revolutionary imagination is not haunted to the same extent

and in the same way as Baudrillard envisaged four decades ago (see Weeks,
2005, p. 117), neoliberalism has nonetheless come to epitomise the figur-
ing of a subject’s abilities within an imaginary that valorises the intense
productivity of individuals according to an economic logic. In particular,
neoliberalism in a post-industrial era valorises immaterial forms of pro-
duction and consumption that are based on the psychological and physi-
ological capabilities of producers and consumers, and a value-set to which
workers and citizens are expected to subscribe as especially productive
subjects.
This section introduces the idea that neoliberal theory and especially its
institutionalisation can illuminate what it means to produce and receive as
a productive participant whose immaterial and enterprising productivity
is valued, celebrated and incorporated as an expectation. Furthermore,
the study of neoliberalism opens up a field of terms and concepts that
help to distinguish what makes immersive theatre novel, while prompting
reflection on the terms and nature of an audience’s productivity and its
attachment to certain kinds of participatory freedom that may not be as
free as they first appear. In other words, it is a well-suited conceptual and
critical touchstone for a political address of immersive theatre aesthetics,
so long as the risks of abstraction that so often accompany its usage are
mitigated, which requires clear articulation of its core characteristics and
evolution.
As a political theory, neoliberalism finds roots in the 1920s and 1930s, in
particular the proto-neoliberal theory of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
von Hayek.2 The emergence of the Chicago School in the 1950s, especially
thinkers like Milton Friedman, is indebted to the work of these two think-
ers and has come to form the most influential arm of neoliberal thought.
All three scholars played a vital role in the post-war inauguration of the
Mont Pelerin Society, an early attempt to group together like-minded
advocates of neoliberal principles. While the Mont Pelerin Society denied
political affiliation to any political party or orthodoxy, its values and beliefs
were unquestionably political. As David Harvey explains, neoliberalism
during this time staunchly opposed ‘communism, socialism, and all forms
of active government intervention beyond that required to secure private
property arrangements, market institutions, and entrepreneurial activity’
(Harvey, 2003, p. 157). Such opposition remains influential in contem-
porary neoliberal guises, which also find important heritage in the eco-
nomic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party in the United
Kingdom and Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party in the United States in
the 1980s. Both governments responded to neoliberal theoretical princi-
ples by supporting privatisation, the removal of barriers to free trade, and
the political sovereignty of individual workers and corporate organisations
over and above the collective powers of workforces and citizens in ways
that resonated throughout subsequent governments.
While numerous governments in countries around the world followed
suit, it was Thatcher’s Conservative Party that perhaps most influen-
tially adopted neoliberal policies following a successful election in 1979,
although the Chilean military dictatorship in the 1970s also informed a
global shift toward neoliberal policies. And while it is important not to
overstate the radicalism of political change wrought through the advent
of neoliberal governance,3 there are, nonetheless, significant junctures in
2
In ‘The Emergence of Neoliberalism’, Nicholas Gane observes that Mises’s books
Socialism (1922) and Liberalism (1927) laid the theoretical groundwork for the develop-
ment of neoliberal theory in the 1930s, particularly in the work of Hayek, contrary to the
more orthodox flagging of the 1940s and the emergence of the Mont Pelerin Society as the
primal period of neoliberal thinking (Gane, 2014, pp. 6–12, 21).
3
David Hesmondhalgh highlights continuity in the cultural industries, for instance, from
the post-war period to the present day (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, pp. 97, 257). Furthermore,
he challenges the extent to which governments dissolve their power in favour of the free
market: ‘In all areas of commercial life governments intervene […] Even those national eco-
nomic systems based most on private enterprise, such as the USA, are built on a huge foun-
dation of laws concerning competition, tax, contracts, the obligations of companies and so
on’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, pp. 107–8). While it seems counterintuitive, under neoliberalism
governments do still intervene in the market, especially via three policy areas: legislation,
14 A. ALSTON
the evolution of neoliberalism’s institutionalisation that impacted on the

acceleration of its influence and embedding in a range of sectors. Perhaps
most significant was the Long Downturn which struck advanced capital-
ist economies in the early 1970s after a long post-war boom. The Long
Downturn was ‘marked by particularly severe recessions in 1974–1995,
1979–1982 and 1991–1995. In the G-7 countries between 1970 and
1990 profits fell significantly across all sectors, but especially manufac-
turing’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 85). While financial booms affected
the consistency of the Long Downturn, such as the Lawson Boom in
the UK that followed a period of tax cuts and low interest rates in the
late-1980s, the financial climate of growing insecurity and dematerialised
working processes that accompanied a more lasting decline in manufactur-
ing among G-7 nations played an important role in the growth of neo-
liberalism. What followed was the evolution of an economy toward more
entrenched and pervasive immaterial production, most notably through
the exponential growth of telecommunications industries toward the end
of the twentieth century, and through an expanded service sector with a
much older heritage – a sector that centres on the intellectual and emo-
tional capabilities of workers as a productive source of capital.
An important consequence of the Long Downturn – especially the
unemployment which followed the closure of many traditional manufac-
turing institutions – was to undermine faith in capitalist enterprise as it
stood in the post-war era, peaking in the 1970s: a time also of profound
economic change on a global level following deep shocks to the Bretton
Woods system. This system, formed in 1944, was most significantly char-
acterised by the formulation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
to help stabilise exchange rates between allied nations. But following
President Richard Nixon’s decision in 1971 to decouple the US dollar
from the gold standard, part of the so-called ‘Nixon Shock’, the IMF’s
capacity to function as a stabilising mechanism metamorphosed as a dema-
terialised money system became liberated from state control (see Harvey,
2003, p. 62). Advanced capitalist states like the UK and the US responded
to the Long Downturn and the Nixon Shock not by doing away with
regulation and subsidy (Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 108). These policy areas directly impact on
the freedoms of businesses to exercise autonomy within markets and therefore limit the free-
doms available to enterprise within a free market. The point is not to deny that deregulation
received governmental favour following the institutionalisation of neoliberal policy in the
1980s; rather, the point is to underscore that such measures were not total.
capitalism, but by radicalising its operation. Labour movements were

attacked, most notoriously culminating in 1984–1985 when Thatcher
took on and overcame dissent from the National Union of Mineworkers.4
This was accompanied by anti-inflation strategies, ‘dismantling or rolling
back the commitments of the welfare state, the privatization of public
enterprises (including social housing), reducing taxes, encouraging entre-
preneurial initiative, and creating a favourable business climate to induce
a strong inflow of foreign investment’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 23; see also
Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 87).
Thatcher’s social and fiscal policy decisions resulted in a rejuvenation
of nineteenth-century economic liberalism that advocated an unregu-
lated free market.5 Although the accuracy of this rejuvenation has been
contested (Harvey, 2005, pp. 29, 69; Chomsky, 1999, pp. 19, 39–40),
a version of its renewed idealism prompted the coinage of neoliberalism
(Hesmondhalgh, 2002, p. 87), coupled with a shift of emphasis away from
market exchange and toward an intensification of market competition
(Lazzarato, 2009, pp. 116–17; Foucault, 2008, p. 118). It should also be
underscored that neoliberalism does not just refer to the policy decisions
of governments; it also refers to the theoretical basis and ideology that
informs those decisions. However, this ideology came to relate closely to
government policy throughout Thatcher’s period in office and beyond,
4
As a contextual aside, it is worth quoting Keith Laybourn at length: ‘In 1950 the white-
collar workers represented about 30 % of the British workforce; by 1979 the proportion had
risen to about 52 %. Over the same period the proportion of manual workers fell from 64.2
% to about 45 %. As a result, the traditional occupational bastions of Labour Party support
have declined. In mining and quarrying, for instance, employment has fallen from 880,000 in
1948 to 629,000 in 1965 and, more recently, to 250,000 in 1984 and less than 30,000 by
the end of the 1990s. The National Union of Mineworkers has, as a result, shrunk dramati-
cally’ (Laybourn, 2000, p. 109). While this was parallelled with a rise in white-collar trade
union membership (Laybourn, 2000, p. 109), Laybourn’s observation nonetheless illus-
trates the declining power and influence of the National Union of Mineworkers that influ-
enced Thatcher’s stranglehold victory.
5
Michel Foucault suggests an earlier point of reference around the middle of the eigh-
teenth century, arguing that from that time the ‘reasoning’ of government shifted to focus
‘on how not to govern too much. The objection is no longer to the abuse of sovereignty but
to excessive government’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 13). Note also that Foucault contests the sug-
gestion that neoliberalism arose as a smooth rejuvenation of ‘old forms of liberal economics
which were formulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, arguing instead for a
more fundamental shift in the relations between the state and the market, with the former
increasingly functioning in subservience to the authority of the latter (Foucault, 2008,
p. 117).
16 A. ALSTON
informing both Tony Blair’s leading of New Labour at the turn of the
twenty-first century, and David Cameron’s premiership at the head of a
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010 until 2015 – contexts
that the book returns to and examines in Chaps. 3 and 4, respectively.
As businesses sought to adapt to an emerging neoliberal paradigm, eco-
nomic production had to contend with a new kind of consumer and a new
kind of producer. Firstly, the neoliberal consumer is increasingly offered
personalised and experiential forms of consumption in an expanding
‘experience economy’. B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore (1999),
who were among the first to identify the experience economy, describe
its emergence as a transition from an economy based on the production
of goods and services, to an economy based on the production of expe-
riences. Immersive theatre is a part of the experience economy. Along
with theme parks, themed restaurants, experiential marketing, and so on,
immersive theatre is preoccupied with the provision of stimulating and
memorable experiences, and an objectification of audience experiences
according to a logic that chimes with the commodification of experience
elsewhere in the experience economy.
Secondly, the neoliberal producer is an entrepreneurial subject whose
own abilities form the basis of a source of capital production that cannot
be separated from the individual who bears them (see Foucault, 2008,
p. 226): a producer who labours in a bodily mode and whose ‘immaterial
labour’ (for instance, the exchange and communication of information
and knowledge, and the ‘affective labour’ associated with in-person ser-
vices that demand some kind of effective emotional display) is co-opted as
a source of capital in place of, or in addition to, manual labour (see Hardt,
1999, pp. 95–8). This is what characterises the productivity of neoliberal
producers as ‘biopolitical’, insofar as the physiological and psychological
capabilities of labouring subjects are not just resourced, but prioritised, in
the movements and accumulation of capital.
Notably, neoliberalism ushers in haziness between modes of consump-
tion and production, pitching producers as subjects whose immaterial
labour is consumed as a productive source of capital, and consumers as
producers or pseudo-producers whose experiential and ‘active’ engage-
ment with a product is appealed to in its design and/or marketing. And
this haziness between modes of production and consumption is of much
relevance to frameworks for audience immersion and participation that
elicit high degrees of productivity among theatre audiences, especially
once the politically rich notion of productivity is allowed to inform the
identification of meanings and values that derive from immersive theatre

aesthetics.
However, immersive theatre often seeks to cut itself off from the world
beyond immersive boundaries, as Machon explores in her book Immersive
Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. She is
particularly drawn to Gordon Calleja’s (2011) literature review of game
theory that addresses player immersion in video games, implicitly pitching
‘total immersion’ – a concept borrowed from computer game theory – as
the foremost level in a hierarchy of immersive experiences. Machon’s writ-
ing on ‘totally immersive’ theatre comes across not just as a category, but a
goal that can help to define immersive theatre performances that strive to
achieve high degrees of audience immersion by: (1) absorbing audiences in
terms of ‘a total engagement in an activity that engrosses’; (2) transporting
audiences to ‘an otherworldly-world that requires navigation according to
its own rules of logic’, a space that is ‘both a conceptual, imaginative space
and an inhabited, physical space’; and (3) by encouraging ‘an uncanny
recognition of the audience’s own praesence [the author’s preferred term
for an enhanced sense of liveness and immanence] within the experience’
(Machon, 2013, pp. 62–3, original emphasis; see also Calleja, 2011,
pp. 23–32; Brown and Cairns, 2004, p. 3). Therefore, given the ambitions
of many immersive theatre performances to pursue their own rules of logic
and to seek segregation from contexts beyond an immersive environment’s
boundaries, is it fair to approach the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics
on the basis of identifying correlations between neoliberalism and modes
of production and systems of value in immersive theatre performances?
While ‘total immersion’ tends to be an important ambition in the
making of immersive theatre, this book addresses a series of connections
between the modes of production and productivity that audiences are
expected to subscribe to in immersive performances, and those that sub-
jects are expected to subscribe to beyond the supposedly ‘total’ boundar-
ies of an other-worldly world – particularly with regards to a neoliberal
scheme of production that has become instituted in systems of gover-
nance, and which risks imposition as an ultimate dimension of value and
meaning for citizens, workers and leisure-seekers who have to deal with
its entrenchment. The argument explored throughout suggests that the
‘totally immersive’ worlds that are offered to audiences in immersive the-
atre performances are not that other-worldly after all, and that this lack
impacts and animates immersive theatre aesthetics and particularly the
politics of immersive theatre aesthetics.
18 A. ALSTON
FRUSTRATING PRODUCTIVITY
While theatre and performance scholarship has recently engaged with
the economic and political conditions of immersive theatre production,
there remains a need to link up these conditions with a substantial and
sustained critique of the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics, particu-
larly with regards to audience engagement. For the most part, immersive
theatre scholarship tends to focus on the aesthetics of audience immer-
sion and the construction and inhabitation of immersive theatre envi-
ronments. Scholars including W. B. Worthen (2012), Jennifer Flaherty
(2014), Sophie Nield (2008) and Gareth White (2009, 2012, 2013) are
primarily concerned with exploring various aesthetic features of immersive
theatre performances, such as the scenographic materialisation and disper-
sal of immersive theatre’s source texts throughout a range of intricately
detailed spaces, the relation of these spaces to a narrative that audiences
tend to encounter through some kind of discovery, the (ethically imbued)
ambiguity of an audience’s role when presented with an invitation to par-
ticipate, and the masking of audiences in work by Punchdrunk, which
emerges as a particularly common area of interest in immersive theatre
scholarship. Machon, not least because of her use of the monograph form
(2009, 2013), engages in a more comprehensive study of immersive the-
atre aesthetics, part of which – the notion of a ‘totally immersive’ theatre –
attracted attention in the previous section. However, Beyond Immersive
Theatre takes a different tack by addressing the enmeshment of aesthet-
ics and politics in immersive theatre, exploring how the political contexts
and economic conditions of immersive theatre production and reception
inform the aesthetics and politics of audience engagement.
Spyros Papaioannou (2014) has explored the agential possibilities of
audience immersion in work by Punchdrunk, but he is not strictly con-
cerned with the contexts of immersive theatre production and reception,
choosing instead to philosophise possibilities for audience agency. Jessica
Santone (2014), Fintan Walsh (2014) and Zaointz (2014), however, have
all politicised the study of audience engagement in settings that either
address, or are relevant to, immersive theatre by opening out their analyses
to economic contexts that inform the production and reception of the-
atre performances. It is consequently with these latter scholars that Beyond
Immersive Theatre and my work on the subject to date finds some meth-
odological and thematic affinity, as the ensuing chapters reveal. However,
allowing the conditions of production and reception to inform politically
engaged analysis of contemporary theatre and performance forms that

involve some kind of audience immersion and/or participation is in large
part indebted to another scholar, Claire Bishop, who writes not from
within the discipline of theatre studies, but contemporary art history.
In an influential series of texts (2004, 2006a, 2012), Bishop takes
issue with curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s eulogising of relational art (espe-
cially work by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick) in his book Relational
Aesthetics (2002). She explores how relational art and its discursive fram-
ing celebrates the ethics of collaborative activity to the detriment of aes-
thetic quality, and considers a critique of this celebration to be ‘particularly
pressing in Britain’, where New Labour, around the same time that rela-
tional art and Relational Aesthetics gained currency, employed a rhetoric
‘almost identical to that of socially engaged art to steer culture toward
policies of social inclusion’ (Bishop, 2006a, p. 180). The Third Way – the
political ideology informing New Labourite policy – took as a point of
departure the global hegemony of neoliberalism, and Bishop considers
policies of social inclusion in Third Way politics, particularly in light of
attempts to improve workforce efficiency, morale and productivity, to be
a distraction from ‘the structural causes of decreased social participation,
which are political and economic (welfare, transport, education, health-
care, etc.)’ (Bishop, 2006b, n.p.).
Bishop’s commentary on the politics of participation in socially engaged
and relational art has largely set the terms of debate in scholarly studies
that address audience participation and immersion in contemporary the-
atre and performance. Shannon Jackson has critiqued ‘Bishop’s relative
disdain for public funding processes and relative tolerance for the foibles
of a private art market’ (Jackson, 2011, p. 55), urging that we do not lose
‘a more complex sense of how art practices contribute to inter-dependent
social imagining’ (Jackson, 2011, p. 14). Jackson questions attempts to
vilify or celebrate ‘the espoused values of any particular generation’ in the
analysis of art-making in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centu-
ries, where ‘very specific ambivalences toward concepts such as institution,
system, or governance’ were developed (Jackson, 2011, p. 23). However,
it is still worth identifying how systems of aesthetic production – spe-
cifically the production of a theatre aesthetic – inform, without necessar-
ily determining, the politics of aesthetic production and reception, and
particularly the audience’s role in the figuration of this politics, which is
important in immersive theatre performances where such politics may not
always be readily apparent. What concerns me most of all in this book is
20 A. ALSTON
how audiences are resourced in immersive theatre, and how salient politi-
cal meanings and values that accompany the assignation of audiences to
a scheme of neoliberal production affect how we might understand the
aesthetics of audience engagement in immersive theatre.
Jen Harvie (2013) has addressed the resourcing of participants in con-
temporary art and performance practice, most notably in her analysis of
delegated labour in socially engaged performance. Harvie offers the most
comprehensive examination of audience participation in contemporary
art, theatre and performance as it occurs in a neoliberalised context for
cultural production, and also offers space to the analysis of immersive the-
atre, specifically. Indeed, Harvie’s work over the past decade (see especially
2006, 2011, 2013) continues to inspire my own. However, her main con-
cern as regards immersive theatre is with addressing how the diminishing
size of the neoliberalised state in the UK has resulted in a reformulation of
arts funding, and how this reformulation has conditioned the production
of immersive theatre. She does not compare meanings and values that are
attributable to a given immersive theatre aesthetic with those of the neo-
liberal ethos, which informs the critical approach proposed in this book,
choosing instead to focus on the politics of theatre and performance pro-
duction and particularly the production of socially engaged performance.
Geraldine Harris, in a forthcoming chapter on immersive theatre, has
challenged my own identification of neoliberal value in immersive theatre
performances in a previously published article (see Alston, 2013). Her
main point is that neoliberal value is not a constitutive aspect of immersive
theatre aesthetics and consequently ought not to be assessed as such. She
asks:
what logic equates pleasure experienced in the theatre with narcissism and
neo-liberal values? Such logic must simultaneously hold that, as bell hooks
argues in relation to film, the realm of fantasy is not necessarily ‘completely
separate from politics’, while disavowing the possibility that ‘our desire for
radical social change is linked to our desire to experience pleasure, erotic
fulfilment and a host of other passions’ in ways that (as her discussion
underlies) embrace sociality rather than narcissism. (Harris, forthcoming,
n.p., original emphasis)6
6
My thanks to James Frieze and Geraldine Harris for permission to read an advanced draft
of Harris’s forthcoming chapter in Reframing immersive theatre: The politics and pragmatics
of participatory performance. The quotations from Harris featured in this book are drawn
from the advanced draft and for that reason page numbers are not featured.
However, I maintain that many immersive theatre performances still

tend to assign audiences to a scheme of production that is neoliberal in
character and that affects the values and meanings that are attributable
to that scheme of production. Because of their tendency to resource the
feeling bodies of audiences while relying on a scheme of production that
thrives on the exhilarating perception of risk, or that invites entrepreneur-
ial participation, many immersive theatre performances put into place a
politically charged imperative to be productive as a condition of effective
audience engagement, even in the absence of a stated political agenda.
Harris rightly identifies a binding of fantasy and politics in work, such
as my own, that assesses modes of production and/or reception in immer-
sive theatre in light of the wider conditions that inform and sometimes
enable these modes to arise; however, her linking of this identification to a
disavowal of the possibility that myriad passions can be connected to social
change is something I do not recognise in my own approach to examin-
ing the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics. Many immersive theatre
performances invite productive participation as a condition of effective
or encouraged audience engagement, and this condition may indicatively
involve narcissistic participation, or entrepreneurial participation; how-
ever, a critique of the kinds of invitations to participate and be immersed
in immersive theatre is not the same thing as critiquing an unknown host
of passions among diverse immersive theatre audiences. Immersive the-
atre may rely on the feeling bodies of these audiences for a particular
aesthetic of audience engagement to be realised, and this reliance can be
critiqued, but the politics of audience submission, assertion and subver-
sion in immersive theatre aesthetics is more complicated as a result of the
interplay between production and consumption/reception; attending to
both this reliance and its complication are important ambitions of this
book, as well as recognising the roles played by immersive theatre makers
who frustrate the mirroring of neoliberal value, production and productiv-
ity in immersive theatre aesthetics.
For example, some immersive theatre companies, such as shunt, Theatre
Delicatessen and Half Cut, recognise and respond to the politics of pro-
ductive participation; they tacitly engage with the politics of immersive
theatre aesthetics without claiming an explicitly stated political agenda,
and challenge the imaginary of neoliberal productivity. The production of
immersive theatre takes place within the experience economy and immer-
sive theatre aesthetics often promote neoliberal values; however, immer-
sive theatre makers are still finding ways to frustrate the romanticism of
22 A. ALSTON
audience productivity in immersive settings, and interrogate the commod-

ification of experience.
Such artists and companies make immersive theatre in reflexive, almost
paranoid ways that undermine impulses and demands for audiences to
be more productive, or impulses and demands to maximise the best and
most intense experience for the sake of it. Theatre Delicatessen, Half Cut
and shunt have all problematised the terms of an audience’s immersion
and participation by encouraging audiences to question why they might
want to participate and seek out intimacy, exhilaration, thrill and the like
in relation to a scheme of production that seemingly promises to satisfy
these desires. What links these companies is attempts to generate a reflex-
ive awareness of and sensitivity toward the conditions of audience immer-
sion and productive participation in immersive environments. For shunt,
especially, this often involves designing immersive theatre spaces that seem
to be ‘conventionally’ immersive, but that frustrate opportunities to par-
ticipate beyond thinking, feeling and limited amounts of pedestrian move-
ment or physical activity. Shunt’s theatre design tends to reflect elements
of the experience economy, such as a cruise ship in The Architects (2012–
2013), or a small and sweaty nightclub in one part of The Boy Who Climbed
Out Of His Face (2014), or key signifiers of economic productivity, such
as a factory, in Money (2009–2010). However, modes of participation and
immersion within such loaded landscapes do not mirror so directly that
of the referents. For instance, the ‘trip of a lifetime’ that audiences are
introduced to in The Architects as they find themselves on board a simu-
lated cruise ship is disrupted by alienating periods of blackout that cut
off spoken narrative mid-flow. Furthermore, the promised involvement of
audience members in the ship’s various attractions are only ever narrated
as deferred possibilities that are never realised. The promise of participa-
tion, immersion and involvement, on the experience economy’s terms, is
not fulfilled. In Chaps. 5 and 6, with reference to shunt (including this
performance), Theatre Delicatessen and Half Cut, I will be analysing and
evaluating the politics of unfulfilled audience productivity, exploring the
frustration of productive participation as a politically engaged feature of
immersive theatre aesthetics that upsets the romanticism and intensifica-
tion of audience productivity in immersive theatre.
Some of the most fruitful questions audiences can ask of any immersive
theatre performance are: why was I not immersed more? Why was I not
able to participate more? However, most immersive theatre performances
ultimately strive to satisfy ever-more intense degrees of immersion and
participation. Consequently, there tends not to be a need to ask these kinds

of questions, unless the performance fails to satisfy a particular desire that
is related to them, in which case attention is likely to be directed toward
the shortcomings of a performance: how immersion may be improved, for
instance, or how a greater number of high-quality participatory exchanges
might be achieved. By setting up and then frustrating productive partici-
pation, though, companies like shunt encourage their audiences to ques-
tion why they may desire total immersion and productive participation in
the first place, which will ideally prompt reflection on the conditions that
give rise to that kind of desire.
In immersive theatre that responds to the inherent politics of immersive
theatre aesthetics, audiences still posit themselves according to a scheme
of production which is assigned to them. However, productive participa-
tion in such performances, while present as a possibility, is subverted as an
ultimate dimension of value and meaning. Audiences ‘come to conscious-
ness’ beyond the imaginary of the experience machine, despite the fact
that this coming to consciousness relies on techniques shared with the
experience machine. Audiences enter into experience machines that falter:
not just in terms of theatrical representation breaking down, as Ridout
(2006) has influentially explored, but productive participation specifically.
Audiences in these performances are encouraged to recognise productive
participation as a subject position, unearthing a vitally significant aspect of
immersive theatre’s politically progressive potential that resists or probes
what it means to demand or unquestionably expect the rewards attached
to productive consumption. That, in my view, is worth celebrating once
attuned to the expedient compromises of neoliberalism.
METHODS/NUMBERS/MAP
Countries throughout Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australasia
have developed fields of immersive theatre production, but it is the UK
and London in particular that pulls focus in this book. Focusing (for the
most part) on work presented in a single city opens up space to engage
in depth with a particular field of cultural production and to present a
detailed political and economic context that has affected this field. While
this comes at the cost of a more comprehensive analysis of immersive the-
atre in other countries and regions, it nonetheless affords insight into an
especially vibrant immersive theatre scene that continues to evolve and
diversify. I have also been most exposed to immersive theatre performances
24 A. ALSTON
in London, which affected the decision to focus on the capital, along-

side a desire to draw on my own experiences of immersion and partici-
pation in work that centralises experiential engagement. Finally, the UK
and London in particular has fostered and staged work by some of the
most internationally influential makers of immersive theatre, including
and especially Punchdrunk – which is why Chap. 4 addresses a range of
Punchdrunk’s performances.
However, it is also important to recognise and engage with work by
immersive theatre makers who do not benefit from international expo-
sure and the important role that they play in evolving immersive theatre
aesthetics. This is why the book also considers immersive theatre perfor-
mances by artists at the outset of their careers. Such work may not have the
international impact of a company like Punchdrunk, but this should not
preclude it from studies of immersive theatre aesthetics; the fact that the
work of lesser-known theatre makers is yet to contribute to the formation
of a common and dominant form of immersive theatre aesthetics is pre-
cisely what makes it interesting and valuable as immersive theatre contin-
ues to diversify. A study of immersive theatre that focuses on work staged
in London risks preoccupation with a narrowly defined and ‘proven’ set of
aesthetic styles and standards championed by world-leading, well-known
and successful theatre companies, but this is a risk that can be mitigated by
taking into account the vibrant contributions of younger theatre makers
looking to forge their own language and approach to immersive theatre
making.
Specific case studies will be drawn on in each chapter that relate to
works I have attended as a participating audience member.7 These include
Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) (Chap. 2); Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in
a Room of Images (2007–) (Chap. 3); Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the
Red Death (2007–2008), the New York run of Sleep No More (2011–),
the opening of Louis Vuitton’s Bond Street store in 2010, The Black
Diamond (2011), and … and darkness descended (2011) (Chap. 4);
shunt’s Money (2009–2010), The Architects (2012–2013) and the Shunt
Lounge (2006–2010) (Chap. 5); Theatre Delicatessen’s Theatre Souks
(2010–) (Chap. 6); and Half Cut’s Half Cut (2010) (Chap. 6). I will be
building a critique of these performances – informed by my own politi-
cal convictions and immersion in performance as a researching audience
7
The only performances considered in any depth that I have not attended are the opening
of Louis Vuitton’s Bond Street store and … and darkness descended, both by Punchdrunk.
participant – by constructing a cross-disciplinary methodology suited to

analysing and evaluating the conditions of immersive theatre production
and reception. The book engages with theatre and performance studies,
aesthetic theory, affect studies, risk research, political philosophy, econom-
ics, consumer and market research and cultural materialism, and draws on
anecdote, interviews, reviews, marketing materials and company websites
to flesh out representations of each performance and their contexts, and
to inform their analysis and evaluation. The methodology echoes Harvie’s
multidisciplinary approach in her book Fair Play: Art, Performance and
Neoliberalism, but with greater emphasis on aesthetics and theorising
the relationships between aesthetics and politics as an engaged audience
researcher. With Harvie, ‘I understand culture as always enmeshed in
social, material and historical conditions; contributing to the production
of ideologies; and therefore important to consider in the construction of
social relations’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 17). Immersive theatre is enmeshed in
conditions of cultural production, as Harvie describes, and contributes to
the production of ideologies. Beyond Immersive Theatre is concerned with
defining the fabric of this enmeshment and the character of ideological
production, but with a particular focus on productivity and especially its
intensification within and beyond immersive theatre environments.
While Rancière has influenced contemporary thinking around the rela-
tionships between aesthetics and politics, I am wary of treating his work as
a point of departure. I am more interested in proposing my own vocabu-
lary and concepts that grapple with the aesthetics and politics of productive
participation before thinking about how these ideas fit within, or against,
an existing and dominant field of thinking. Therefore, I will be deferring
until Chap. 6 a detailed analysis of Rancière’s most challenging writing
on the relationships between politics and aesthetics. Rancière would resist
segregating productive participation in immersive theatre from productive
audience engagement as a de facto requirement of spectatorship. He would
probably look disapprovingly at immersive theatre’s attempts to ‘activate’
the audience, just as he swept aside the work of Brecht and Artaud in ‘The
Emancipated Spectator’, which, for that reason, is a text I do choose to
engage with throughout. However, when I turn to Rancière to elucidate
the consubstantiality of aesthetics and politics in immersive theatre toward
the end of the book, I will be reflecting on a wider sweep of his writing to
inform a theory that has been crafted largely in isolation from it.
As a researching audience member ‘embedded’ in immersive the-
atre performances, I have found myself posited as a part of immersive
26 A. ALSTON
imaginaries and as a part of the means of experience production, which

might be enjoyed, or critiqued. If a given performance is to be adequately
analysed, then the limitations of individuality must be recognised as limita-
tions, but ultimately employed as an advantage. While the qualitative and
quantitative audience research methods pioneered in Holland and Sweden
in the 1980s and early 1990s (see Sauter, 1988; Schoenmakers, 1986,
1992) have enjoyed a renaissance of late, not least in the British Theatre
Consortium’s valuable 2014 project ‘Critical Mass: Theatre Spectatorship
and Value Attribution’ (see Megson and Reinelt, 2015; Reinelt, 2014;
see also Freshwater, 2009; Reason and Sedgman, 2015), and while these
research methods have much to offer to our understanding of audience
engagement in a range of settings, the position of an audience member
who approaches immersive theatre ‘from the inside’ as an opinionated
theorist can still be – and perhaps ought to be – harnessed as a critical posi-
tion, even if it is not an objective position (which would seem a difficult
ambition to achieve).
With this in mind, the ‘I’ of the researcher need not be the scapegoat
of empirical research methods, valuing objectivity over and above alterna-
tive values. As Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink writes of one-on-one theatre:
‘there is only a personal insiders’ perspective to depart from and no oppor-
tunity to fall back on a shared point of reference such as a clear plot or
narrative’ (Groot Nibbelink, 2012, p. 413). Nonetheless, the insider is
able to deploy what Catherine Lord and Mieke Bal call a ‘critical inti-
macy’, approaching performance ‘from a position of engagement’ (see
Groot Nibbelink, 2012, p. 413), or what Deirdre Heddon, Helen Iball
and Rachel Zerihan call ‘Spectator-Participation-as-Research’ (Heddon,
Iball and Zerihan, 2012, p. 122). In favouring approaches to the analysis
of theatre and performance that derive from positions of engagement as
an involved subject, I am not looking to suggest that empirical approaches
are without value; rather, different research methods will draw attention
to different areas of concern and will be able to make different contribu-
tions to the study of theatre audiences. A ‘critically intimate’ and involved
approach to immersive theatre analysis allows for both a communication
of and engagement with an experience of performance, as mediated by a
thinking, feeling subject. If the production of experience is so crucial to
the aesthetics and politics of immersive theatre aesthetics, then first-hand
experience would seem a sensible place to begin a critique. It allows for a
depth of experiential analysis that is unrealistic in empirical studies, where
researchers rely on gathering together many more voices that, for perfectly
pragmatic reasons, tend not to be allowed the same space to unpack their
experiences. A critique of this kind, then, is an approach among many, and
a contributor to a conversation that supplements and is supplemented by
alternative methodologies.
Before setting out a map of the book, it remains for me to offer a
brief aside on counting. Immersive theatre performances may be for large
groups of participants or for one audience member at a time. Immersive
theatre may also integrate ‘one-on-one’ performances within a theatre
event involving many audience members. This matters because the num-
ber of participants affects the kinds of negotiations that can take place
inside an immersive environment, and they define figurations of togeth-
erness or isolation, the common or the private, and so on. Tender and
profound explorations of togetherness and commonality can take place in
one-on-one settings, just as they can in theatre events for larger audiences.
This makes it all the more important to assess the politics of immersive
theatre aesthetics on a case-by-case basis, making particular note of any
shared tendencies.
One-on-one performances pare down the theatre encounter to a sim-
ple configuration. This makes them a good place to start thinking about
immersive theatre aesthetics, where audience immersion and productive
participation is applicable. Consequently, Chap. 2 looks at Ray Lee’s Cold
Storage, which is a one-on-one immersive theatre performance that takes
place in a very small, very cold box. The chapter surveys theories of affect
from a range of disciplines, along with their relevance for theatre aesthetics,
analyses and theorises the aestheticisation of affective experience, and
unpacks the politics of affect production, paying close attention to the role
of autobiography in the production of affect. The chapter examines nar-
cissistic participation as a culturally and politically loaded feature of Cold
Storage, and centres on the cold box as a biopolitical experience machine
that thrives on the affective labour of a participating audience member.
Chapter 3 looks at theatre in the dark – theatre performances which
take place in complete darkness for sustained periods of time – and focuses
on Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images: a theatre in the dark
performance for one audience member at a time. Risk perception is fed
into a theorisation of audience productivity that attends especially to how
spectatorship is affected by the possibility of doing more than watching,
thinking and feeling, even while remaining as an observer for much of the
time. The chapter describes an evolving ‘risk society’, and how neoliberal
governance at the turn of the twenty-first century responded to a newly
28 A. ALSTON
developed and radically pervasive state of unknowingness in a globalised

world. My argument compares the neoliberal valorisation of risk with a
complex politics of audience engagement in Rotating. On the one hand,
the performance promotes an ‘active’ and ‘positive’ embrace of risk that
mirrors the linking of risk and productivity under New Labour; on the
other, audiences are asked to ‘give in’ to and trust in a number of unseen
performers who both isolate and support a spectator immersed in inter-
mittently total darkness. What emerges is a meshing of political values that
remain linked to an intensification of audience productivity, but inflect
that intensification in ways that might, but need not be reduced to neolib-
eral valuations of engagement and involvement.
Chapter 4 looks at immersive theatre performances that take place
with larger groups of audience members, addressing work by Punchdrunk
including Sleep No More and The Masque of the Red Death, as well as three
of their corporate performances: the opening of Louis Vuitton’s Bond
Street store, The Black Diamond and … and darkness descended. The chap-
ter identifies and assesses ‘entrepreneurial participation’ as a key feature
of audience engagement in work by Punchdrunk, and reflects on indi-
vidualism, privacy, personal responsibility, risk-taking and entrepreneur-
ialism as values shared between the neoliberal ethos and Punchdrunk’s
influential brand of immersive theatre aesthetics. Informed especially by
comparative analysis with the Conservative Party’s vision of a ‘Big Society’
and its impact on policy and conceptions of productivity, I explore how
Punchdrunk’s public, foundation, philanthropic and especially corpo-
rate funding initiatives represent clear links with interests and concerns
that might otherwise be excluded from the mythic ambitions of a ‘totally
immersive’ environment; however, and more importantly, the chapter
argues that these links are of secondary significance to the extant pres-
ence of neoliberal value in Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive theatre
performances.
Chapter 5 explores two of shunt’s performances, Money and The
Architects, alongside their curatorial project, the Shunt Lounge. It con-
textualises shunt’s practice by addressing the ‘activation’ of consumers
as ‘producing consumers’ in the experience economy, and considers how
immersive theatre and various exponents of the experience economy, with
a particular focus on the London Dungeon, share certain similarities, not
least appealing to the affective engagement of subjects in experientially
stimulating and holistic environments. I approach affect firstly as a hidden
communicative process, or ‘text’, that provides audiences and consumers
with a ‘sense’ of a cultural or material product, and secondly as a produc-

tive capacity – both as a productive source of profit in the experience
economy, and as a source of aesthetic production in immersive theatre.
However, while immersive theatre performances are a part of the experi-
ence economy and tend to share in its romanticism of consumer produc-
tivity, I argue that shunt frustrate producing consumers, both in terms of a
frustration of productivity, and as a feeling of frustration that musters into
an embodied consciousness the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics.
Chapter 6 considers the curatorial practice of Theatre Delicatessen,
in particular their ‘theatre marketplaces’ that the company call ‘Theatre
Souks’. I explore Theatre Deli’s support of work by a young demographic
who may otherwise struggle to find legitimation and endorsement in
London’s immersive theatre scene, and assess their ‘hustling’ of a com-
mercial property market that enables a pop-up theatre company to exist
despite the company’s failure to receive sustainable financial support from
Arts Council England. The chapter represents and then adapts Rancière’s
thinking around aesthetics and politics, in particular their consubstan-
tiality, before outlining the economic context and ideological decisions
informing the curation of the Souks. I then reflect on a one-on-one per-
formance curated by Theatre Delicatessen in the first of their Souks: Half
Cut’s Half Cut. Drawing on Rancière’s commentary on the enmeshment
of politics and aesthetics, the chapter proposes that Half Cut’s political
potential resides in the performance’s capacity to disrupt the aesthetic
logic of immaterial production and particularly the affective relationships
between a prostituted performer and a productive participant. I argue that
the Souks and performances within them are capable of disrupting fields
of cultural and scholarly production that risk marginalising young and
emerging practitioners, while posing an important set of challenges to the
pervasiveness of immaterial production and neoliberal value.
Modest, prosaic or banal invitations to participate and immerse
oneself – from entering a small, cold box in Cold Storage, to plucking a
single chest hair in Half Cut – may belie their significance as a fulcrum for
cultural concerns, ethical issues and political complexities. It is important
not to forget the minutiae of immersive and participatory experiences.
Gestures, chatter, steps, decisions to explore, refuse, commit and submit,
and how these decisions are primed: all this merits attention in the study of
immersive theatre at least as much as the gigantic environments that tend
to attract scrutiny, for such is the terrain of an audience’s productivity.
Finally, while Beyond Immersive Theatre critiques immersive theatre – the
30 A. ALSTON
contemporary experience machine – it does so because the author finds a

wealth of political potential in immersive theatre aesthetics. This potential
is to be celebrated, but not without pause for thought.
REFERENCES
Alston, A. (2013, June). Audience participation and neoliberal value: Risk, agency
and responsibility in immersive theatre. Performance Research, 18(2),
128–138.
Artaud, A. (1958). The theatre and its double (M. C. Richards, Trans.). New York:
Grove Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1975). The mirror of production (M. Poster, Trans.). St Louis, MO:
Telos Press.
Binder, D. (2011) Skype interview with the author, 11 May.
Bishop, C. (2004, Autumn). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. October, 110,
51–79.
Bishop, C. (2006a, February). The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents.
Artforum. 44, 178–183.
Bishop, C. (2006b, July 25). Socially engaged art, critics and discontents: An
interview with Claire Bishop. Community Arts Network. http://www.commu-
nityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php ,
accessed 29 March 2011
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship.
London: Verso.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics (S. Pleasance & F. Woods, Trans.).
Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel.
Brown, E., & Cairns, P. (2004). A grounded investigation of immersion in games.
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/papers/Immersion.pdf. Accessed
16 May 2015.
Calleja, G. (2011). In-game: From immersion to incorporation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1999). Profit over people: Neoliberalism and global order. New York:
Seven Stories Press.
Dolan, J. (2005). Utopia in performance: Finding hope at the theatre. Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press.
Fensham, R. (2009). To watch theatre: Essays on genre and corporeality. Brussels,
Belgium: P.I.E. Peter Lang.
Flaherty, J. (2014, Spring & Summer). Dreamers and insomniacs: Audiences in
Sleep No More and The Night Circus. Comparative Drama, 48(1), 135–154.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–
1979 (M. Senellart (Ed.), G. Burchell, Trans.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Freshwater, H. (2009). Theatre & audience. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gane, N. (2014). The emergence of neoliberalism: Thinking through and beyond
Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(3),
3–27.
Gardner, L. (2007, August 8). Review of Fuerzabruta. Guardian. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/aug/08/theatre.edinburghfestival20072 .
Accessed 14 Dec 2010.
Groot Nibbelink, L. (2012). Radical intimacy: Ontroerend Goed meets the eman-
cipated spectator. Contemporary Theatre Review, 22(3), 412–420.
Hardt, M. (1999). Affective Labour. Boundary 2, 26(2), 89–100.
Harris, G. (forthcoming). Differences in degree or kind? Ockham’s Razor’s Not
Until We Are Lost and Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, In
J. Frieze (Ed.), Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of
Participatory Performance. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harvey, D. (2003). The new imperialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press.
Harvie, J. (2006). Witnessing Michael Landy’s Break Down: Metonymy, affect,
and politicised performance in an age of global consumer capitalism.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 16(1), 62–72.
Harvie, J. (2011). Democracy and neoliberalism in art’s social turn and Roger
Hiorns’s Seizure. Performance Research, 16(2), 113–123.
Harvie, J. (2013). Fair play: Art, performance and neoliberalism. Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heddon, D., Iball, H., & Zerihan, R. (2012, March). Come closer: Confessions
of intimate spectators in one to one performance. Contemporary Theatre
Review, 22(1), 120–123.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2002). The cultural industries. London: Sage.
Hurley, E. (2010). Theatre & feeling. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jackson, S. (2011). Social works: Performing art, supporting publics. London:
Routledge.
Laybourn, K. (2000). A century of Labour: A history of the Labour Party. Stroud,
UK: Sutton Publishing.
Lazzarato, M. (2009). Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the
reconstitution of the social (C. Venn, Trans.). Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6),
109–133.
Lee, R. (2011). Email correspondence with the author, 28 November.
Machon, J. (2009). (Syn)Aesthetics: Redefining visceral performance. Basingstoke,
32 A. ALSTON
Machon, J. (2013). Immersive theatres: Intimacy and immediacy in contemporary

performance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Megson, C., & Reinelt, J. (2015, June 5). Performance, experience, transforma-
tion: What do spectators value in theatre?, German Society for Contemporary
Theatre and Drama in English: Theatre and Spectatorship, University of
Barcelona.
Nield, S. (2008). The rise of the character named Spectator, ‘Backpages’.
Contemporary Theatre Review, 18(4), 531–544.
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Papaioannou, S. (2014). Immersion, “smooth” spaces and critical voyeurism in
the work of Punchdrunk. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 34(2),
160–174.
Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: Work is theater &
every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Rancière, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator. In The emancipated spectator
(pp. 1–23, G. Elliot, Trans.). London: Verso.
Reason, M., & Sedgman, K. (Eds.). (2015). Themed section on theatre audiences.
Participations, 12(1), 117–387.
Reinelt, J. (2014). What UK spectators know: Understanding how we come to
value theatre. Theatre Journal, 66(3), 337–361.
Ridout, N. (2006). Stage fright, animals, and other theatrical problems. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Santone, J. (2014). The economics of the performative audience. Performance
Research, 19(6), 30–36.
Sauter, W. (Ed.). (1988). New directions in audience research: Advances in recep-
tion and audience research 2. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Instituut voor
Theaterwetenschap.
Schoenmakers, H. (Ed.). (1986). Performance theory: Advances in reception and
audience research 1. Utrecht, The Netherlands: Nederlands Theater Instituut.
Schoenmakers, H. (Ed.). (1992). Performance theory: Reception and audience
research: Advances in reception and audience research 3. Amsterdam: Tijdschrift
voor heaterwetenschap.
Thompson, J. (2009). Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Walsh, F. (2014, Winter). Touching, flirting, whispering: Performing intimacy in
public. TDR, 58(4), 56–67.
Weeks, K. (2005). The refusal of work as demand and perspective. In T. S. Murphy
& A.-K. Mustapha (Eds.), Resistance in practice: The philosophy of Antonio
Negri. London: Pluto Press.
Welton, M. (2011). Feeling theatre. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
White, G. (2009). Odd Anonymized needs: Punchdrunk’s masked spectator. In
A. Oddey & C. White (Eds.), Modes of spectating (pp. 219–229). Bristol, CT:
Intellect.
White, G. (2012, October). On immersive theatre. Theatre Research International,

37(3), 221–235
White, G. (2013). Audience participation in theatre: Aesthetics of the invitation.
Willett, J. (Ed.). (1964 [1957]). Brecht on theatre: The development of an aesthetic
(J. Willett, Trans.). London: Methuen.
Worthen, W. B. (2012). “The written troubles of the brain”: Sleep No More and
the space of character. Theatre Journal, 64, 79–97.
Zaointz, K. (2014). Narcissistic spectatorship in immersive and one-on-one per-
formance. Theatre Journal, 66, 405–425.
CHAPTER 2
Theatre in a Box: Affect and Narcissism

in Ray Lee’s Cold Storage
Immersive theatre audiences are frequently invited to engage with their

own feeling bodies as an aesthetic site, and to receive their own pres-
ence and involvement within an immersive space as important aspects of
a theatre aesthetic. This is why I find it useful to think about this kind
of audience engagement in terms of narcissism, or ‘narcissistic participa-
tion’. Narcissistic participation is an aesthetic theory of audience engage-
ment that addresses audience immersion, participation and productivity.
It enquires into the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics, at the heart of
which are audiences whose productivity is rewarded with the promise of
intense, meaningful and personally valuable experiences that are not just
the result of audience reception, but involvement in aesthetic production.
As I’ve begun to explore elsewhere (Alston, 2012), narcissistic par-
ticipation resources the imagination, feeling and potentially acting bodies
of audiences in the constitution of a theatre aesthetic. Firstly, a narcissis-
tic participant’s experience of an immersive environment is itself ‘staged’,
prompting introspection that attends to a deeply personal, involving,
intrusive and richly experiential product. Secondly, narcissistic participants
project their attention onto an immersive world that surrounds them, but
it is not the appearance of this world as something abstracted from a par-
ticipant’s presence that absorbs attention so much as its relation to an
audience’s perceived or prospective involvement.
While drama in end-on stage-auditorium configurations might absorb
attention and prompt a cathartic purgation of emotions, it tends not to
involve the audience to any great extent beyond the activities of watching,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_2
36 A. ALSTON
cogitating and feeling. However, affective experience takes on aesthetic

significance of a different kind for the narcissistic participant in immersive
theatre. When audiences are met with the possibilities of doing more than
watching in environments that are physically involving – and where that
surplus is sought as that which should be sought – self-absorption tends
to follow once the affective experiences generated by those possibilities,
if generated, take hold. Affect then implicates the audience not just as a
judgemental and potentially empathetic observer of a fictive world and its
inhabitants, but as an essential part and co-producer of that world.
Affective experience takes on an engaging precedence for narcissis-
tic participants, which is the core subject of this chapter. Affect might
refer to a noun (a physiological and psychological state), a verb (to affect
something) or an adjective (describing how something or someone is
influenced by something or someone else). Narcissistic participants focus
attention on their own physiological and psychological state in immersive
theatre, which is affected by an immersive environment that may include
people and objects. Often, they are also able to affect this environment
in some way, projecting participation onto it and altering, or fashioning,
the environment – sometimes minimally and sometimes to a much greater
extent. Narcissistic participation consequently fosters compelling political
tensions between submission or commitment to self-indulgence, and the
positing of audiences as productive participants. This is particularly signifi-
cant once narcissistic participation is approached as a model to which audi-
ences are invited to conform, which is the approach taken in this chapter.
Such tensions are what draw me to the biopolitics of affect in immersive
theatre. Biopolitics refers to the convergence of the biological – which
might include the physiological and psychological state of an affected audi-
ence member – and the political, commonly dwelling on the role of power
and particularly relations of domination and subordination. Moreover, I
am interested in how the role of biopolitics in neoliberal modes of pro-
duction can inform immersive theatre analysis, and hence why this chap-
ter draws on critiques of biopolitics to inform the political meanings and
values that are attributable to affect production in immersive theatre.
However, enquiry into these meanings and values demands, first of all,
interrogation of what affect production involves and how affect features
in immersive theatre settings, which is why much of this chapter pays close
attention to advances in affect theory and its applicability to the analysis of
immersive theatre aesthetics.
THEATRE IN A BOX: AFFECT AND NARCISSISM IN RAY LEE’S COLD STORAGE 37
The chapter focuses on a performance by the sound artist Ray Lee

called Cold Storage, a one-on-one work first performed at the Battersea
Arts Centre’s One-on-One Festival in 2011. Ray Lee is best known for his
‘kinetic sound machine’ installations that respond to the movements of
audiences, or the movements of Lee himself. Cold Storage took a different
tack, immersing audiences in a world enclosed by headphones, retaining
the essential sound element in his work, and within the physical confines
of a very small and very cold box.
I remember being greeted by a smiling nurse at the beginning of the
performance, to recount my own experience, who opened up a body-sized
box against the back wall of a small room (see Fig. 2.1). I climbed inside
and lay down, suppressing an inclination to avoid entrapment, and put
on a pair of headphones which rested on the box’s floor. Once comfort-
able, or as comfortable as possible, the lid was closed. I felt isolated, but
also peaceful. It felt good to be in this box. The only thing visible was
my reflection from the shoulders up in a half-transparent mirror, lit from
Fig. 2.1 Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) (Photography by Ray Lee. Image cour-
tesy of Ray Lee)
38 A. ALSTON
within the box’s interior. A voice recording said that I was to be frozen for
thousands of years. Cold air was pumped inside. At first it felt titillating,
but then I began to tremble, and then to shake. I watched myself quiver-
ing in the mirror and this watching seemed to magnify how cold I felt.
Heartbeat quickened. Several thoughts sprang to mind: is it meant to be
this cold? What if nobody lets me out? Why the hell am I doing this?
The reflection faded to reveal tiny lamps that looked like stars (see
Fig. 2.2). It was as though I was floating through space, but the thing that
grabbed my attention, more than the stars, or the voice recording, was the
feeling of being very cold inside a very small box. This emphasised another
kind of reflection, less literal than that which appeared in the mirror; the
significance of feeling cold and feeling nervous, albeit slightly, emphasised
that a part of me was being reflected back in aesthetic form. I wasn’t just
in the show, but was the show; not just watching, but being performance
as a performing audience. This was a short space odyssey, though, so after
around fifteen minutes the casket was opened, signalling the end of the
work. The nurse who helped me in also let me out, only this time she
Fig. 2.2 Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) (Photography by Ray Lee. Image cour-
tesy of Ray Lee)
wasn’t smiling. I was, though. After a short ride in an experience machine,

I felt elated.
The isolation produced in this work resonated as deeply comforting
once the outside world and any pressures and anxieties consciously asso-
ciated with it in the live moment were distracted with the closing of the
box’s lid. Nonetheless, the performance featured voluntary incarceration
in solitary confinement and unnerving bodily convulsions aroused by a
cold and claustrophobic chamber. The size of the box and the shivering
caused by the steady inflow of cold air undoubtedly placed substantial
restrictions on my ability to exercise autonomous movement. What scope
is there for an audience in this performance to be productive while shut
inside a small, cold box? Do these restrictions limit or enforce audience
productivity? How do they affect thought, feeling and action, and what
is the importance of affect for understanding the aesthetics and politics of
immersion, participation and empowerment?
The next section defines affect and places it in philosophical context,
charting two broad but influential epistemological traditions that continue
to impact on how affect is understood across otherwise diverse fields and
disciplines: the Spinozist and rational actor traditions. Affect will be estab-
lished as a heterogeneous term and a means of thinking politically about
affect will be introduced, reflecting on the influence of autobiography in
affect production. The second section, while inflected by political concerns,
considers the aesthetics of productive participation in Cold Storage, focus-
ing on the aestheticisation of affect. The section after that theorises narcis-
sistic participation, using Cold Storage as a case study, which is followed by
a political examination and assessment of the aesthetics of audience engage-
ment in a small, cold box. This final section reflects on affect’s ‘doubleness’
in immersive theatre as a phenomenon that is at once ‘real’ and ‘art object’,
and considers the significances of cultural and economic contexts for an
assessment of the politics of narcissistic participation. In conclusion, I eval-
uate how the cultural and biopolitical baggage that audiences bring with
them to an immersive theatre event, perhaps unconsciously, affects how
particular and important meanings and values arise at the point of encoun-
ter between an immersive environment and a narcissistic participant.
AFFECT
Affect studies incorporates a host of different disciplines including phi-
losophy, politics, anthropology, behaviourism, psychoanalysis, psychology,
40 A. ALSTON
physiology, biology, the cognitive sciences, cultural geography, pedagogy

and sociology, not to mention the various disciplinary strands that lead
into, out of and between these disciplines. However, despite the diversity
of approaches to affect, the Western philosophical tradition profoundly
influenced how those approaches have been and, in many instances, still
are practised. There are two primary streams in this tradition: the first
finds roots in René Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Immanuel Kant’s
Critique corpus; the second in Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics. This has
given rise to an epistemic quandary, of sorts, insofar as these streams are
oppositional, so long as they are approached dichotomously.
Descartes (1968 [1637]) famously argued that philosophy must dis-
tinguish between mind and body, asserting the act of thinking as the sole
harbinger of truth. The distinction he makes between mind and body
is commonly referred to as dualism and privileges the activity of the
mind above corporeal knowledge. This privileging, although not strictly
Cartesian dualism, later found an influential interlocutor in Kant. Gemma
Corradi Fiumara highlights the importance of Kant’s transcendental ideal-
ism for an emerging theoretical concern with affect toward the end of the
nineteenth century. She selects a particularly telling passage from Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason that flags a latent dualism or rationalism in his
writing, in which he describes the rational mind as an island ‘surrounded
by a wide and stormy ocean, the true home of illusion, where many a fog
bank and ice that soon melts away tempt us to believe in new lands’ (Kant
qtd in Fiumara, 2001, p. 4; see also Kant, 2007 [1781], p. 251). The
pitching of the mind as an entity at risk of being led astray by embodied
knowledge forms the bedrock of a post-Kantian episteme in the West, for
Fiumara, whereby the ‘higher’ sphere of the mind’s rationalism is priori-
tised over earthly interaction with the world.
An important tradition spawned by this episteme has been dubbed the
Rational Actor Paradigm (RAP). This paradigm, typified in Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason, pitches rationality as the guiding principal of individual
actors, and ‘remains a central legacy of Western thought’, from world
views to theories (Jaeger et al., 2001, pp. 22–3). The RAP is relevant
for affect studies, particularly regarding the ethics and politics of affect,
because of its coupling of a reasoning mind with subjectivity. An agentic
subject is posited as being capable of autonomously affecting something
or someone as the product of intention, especially reasonable choice. The
RAP, more explicitly than dualism, inputs morality into affect: responsi-
bility and culpability are figured as being applicable to subjects who are
capable of reasoning and reflection. So in affecting others, the rational

subject directly engages with both politics, by entering into a negotiation
of power, and ethics, by negotiating responsibility, moral or otherwise, for
an affected subject’s welfare.
Late-twentieth-century academic vogue challenged the Cartesian/RAP
world view, while sticking with its focus on cognition. There have been
important and increasingly influential shifts, particularly in the cognitive
sciences since the 1980s, toward the notion of an ‘embodied mind’ that
can be seen to trouble the RAP insofar as mind and body are considered to
be in a symbiotic relationship.1 At the same time, this is more a question of
subtracting intentionality from the RAP and removing its Cartesian lean-
ings than it is of disregarding the Kantian legacy altogether. The Spinozist
tradition, in contrast, presents far more radical epistemological opposition.
Spinoza understands affect as a constant interplay of motions between
people and things, disagreeing with the idea that affect must arise from
thought and reason (and, by extension, embodied cognition) (de Spinoza,
1994 [1677], p. 71). In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centu-
ries, Spinoza’s Ethics, along with the writing of Gilles Deleuze, had a
profound impact on philosophical, sociological, geographical and politi-
cal approaches to affect (Clough & Halley, 2007; Gregg & Seigworth,
2010; Massumi, 2002, p. 15; Thrift, 2008, p. 13). Jane Bennett, for
instance, considers affect as being unspecific to humans and ‘intrinsic to
forms that cannot be imagined (even ideally) as persons’ (Bennett, 2010,
p. xii). Adapting Spinoza’s discussion of affecting and affected bodies, her
approach to affect forms part of an anti-humanist project that attributes
agency to things (see also Massumi, 2002, p. 15). According to Bennett,
all things have the capacity to demonstrate vitality, manifested in their
openness to being changed and potentially changing other things within
a context of heterogeneous subjects mutually impacting on one another
(Bennett, 2010, p. 23).
In its Spinozist articulation, ‘Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness:
in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010,
p. 1, original emphasis). This understanding of affect might be applied to
1
For neurologist Antonio Damasio, in Descartes’ Error, the brain and body are thought of
as indissociable, ‘integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory
circuits (including endocrine, immune, and autonomic neural components)’ (Damasio, 1994,
p. xxvii). This perspective participates in recent theoretical shifts toward the embodied mind
thesis (see Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 37–8; Johnson, 1987, p. xiii; Johnson, 2007, p. 1).
42 A. ALSTON
both humans and non-humans, because affect is defined as a flow of move-

ments and influences. Particularly in Bennett’s Spinozism, agency is not
strictly attributable to any one subject, but belongs instead to a Deleuzian
‘assemblage’ of things and people, all affecting and being affected by one
another (Bennett, 2010, pp. 23–4; see also Deleuze & Guattari, 2004,
p. 4). However, one problem with the Spinozist model of affect is its ten-
dency to conflate the production, transmission and reception of affect with
cause and effect. The Spinozist model tries to impose an impersonal and
generic framing of affect production onto a system that might just as well
be disrupted or subverted by maverick agents, for good or ill. At least as it
has been applied in recent studies of affect, the Spinozist model is unable
to account for the manipulation of affect production, or for the agency and
cooperative endeavour of its subjects, who remain bound to providence.
Dichotomising approaches to affect on grounds of rational action, and
affect’s emergence and role within assemblages of beings and things, risks
detracting from the multilayered constitution of affect. Numerous inputs
contribute to its production that escape the binary logic to which the RAP
and Spinozist models conform. In setting forth my own cross-disciplinary
understanding of affect in what remains of this section, I want to dig
down into this multilayering – not because I want to join the chicken-and-
egg race of asserting affect’s ‘origins’, which is not a particularly helpful
exercise for the current study, but because I have found it instructive to
recognise the limitations of existing models in the study of immersive and
participatory theatre.
Visceral processes (often referred to in the most general terms) are
involved in the affective experience of sentient beings, although they do
not fully encapsulate the human experience of affect. In anatomy, viscera
may refer to a life form’s internal organs, skin, blood vessels and endocrine
secretions (see Damasio, 1994, p. 86). Visceral activity might include, by
way of example, a quickening heartbeat, faster blood-flow, sweating and
piloerection (a wonderfully esoteric term for goose bumps). For Silvan
S. Tomkins, for these individual, visceral, effects to become a given affect,
they must act in a particular synergy (Tomkins, 1962, p. 151). However,
affect is not reducible to the orchestration of visceral processes alone. As
far as humans are concerned, to be affected is to be acted upon in such
a way that both cognition and corporeality are engaged in response to
environments, and people and things within those environments. These
responses may contain intuitive and/or idiosyncratic components that
supplement the physiological workings of a body.
Defining and clarifying what constitutes a ‘visceral’ response to some-

thing is informative, but what can this really tell us about audience immer-
sion and participation? What does it mean for audience participants in
immersive theatre? What does it mean for the politics of immersion and
participation? When someone is affected, they are influenced by some-
one or something. They are made to move, think, feel or act in a way
that may not be fully at the subject’s command. There is consequently a
politics to the biology of affect production – or ‘biopolitics’. In immersive
theatre, this encourages a questioning of who or what it is that is doing
the influencing and what the extent of their, or its, influence might be, in
relation to an audience’s ability to move, think, feel, or act differently. The
biopolitics of affect production in immersive theatre therefore involves
negotiation between being influenced and evading influence, or influenc-
ing other people and things, or having that influence evaded. The key to
understanding the terms of this negotiation lies in what participants bring
to the production of affect. To be affected is not necessarily to be subju-
gated; it might just as well be an active process of negotiating power, and
an important part of this process involves the inputting of autobiography
into affect production.
There is a prosperous tradition of considering both affect and emo-
tion as inherited dispositions, which would seem to be at odds with the
onus on autobiographical influence that I want to explore in setting out a
politically engaged understanding of the production of affect (see Darwin,
2009 [1872]; Ekman, 2003; Tomkins, 1962). However, as the experi-
mental psychologist Alfred Lehmann ponders, why is it that a given stimu-
lus affects some, but not others, or affects us in one time and place, but
not another (Lehmann, A, 1968, p. 37)? While I am not looking to dispel
the claim that there exist affects, such as startle, or ‘primary emotions’,
that are largely the product of disposition (Damasio, 1994, p. 177), I
nonetheless argue that these inherited dispositions only tell part of the
story. Autobiographical, or learned, inputs significantly contribute to the
apprehension of affective or emotional stimuli, and how affects or emo-
tions end up being felt (Damasio, 1999, p. 51; Saville, 2008, pp. 895–6).
The predominant commonality of visceral processes among humans
implies some degree of universality underlying affect production. However,
the assertion that affective responses are fundamentally hardwired is incon-
gruent with the observation of affects in oneself and others in relation to a
potentially shared source, such as a theatre performance. The personal and
the social are inscribed both in what is perceived as an affective stimulus,
44 A. ALSTON
and in how affect is felt to be, at least to some degree (Damasio, 1994,
p. 124; see also Blair, 2008, p. 20; Shaughnessy, 2012, pp. 32–3). What
this means, in other words, is that audiences have a foundational role to
play in the production of whatever affect it is that captivates them.
Rarely is it the case that audiences are simply dominated by an affecting
thing or person. For Jacques Rancière’s ‘emancipated spectator’, audi-
ences bring their own life narratives to acts of spectatorship, observing,
selecting, comparing and interpreting performance ‘by refashioning it in
her own way’ (Rancière, 2009, p. 13). The affected subject – a subject
that Rancière chooses not to consider in ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ –
does something similar. Of course affect influences people, but people
also influence how affect works and when it works. They are involved in
its production.
Rancière encourages his readers to move away from an approach to
spectatorship and participation premised on polarising activity and passiv-
ity; comparably, such a binary is misleading with regards to affect produc-
tion. In the theatre, or outside of it, subjects participate in the production
of affect and this merits political recognition. Affect can take a power-
ful hold over audiences. It can feel incapacitating, but it can also propel
action in ways that are not just about being controlled, or controlling, but
about negotiating a continuum of control and submission. The individual
autobiographies of audience members add uncertain potentialities into the
theatre event and this takes on added significance when audiences directly
participate in that event. These potentialities, at least for those experienc-
ing the work, produce an overarching tainting of the perceived work, and
might also spur actual interventions in performance. Therefore, in the
context of immersive theatre performances, the mechanics of affect pro-
duction suggest that the audience is a co-producer of immersive theatre
aesthetics in a way that is imbued with political significance.
As Deirdre Heddon recognises, ‘Creative practices are always informed
by who we are, as subjects embodied in time and space, with our own
cultures and histories’ (Heddon, 2008, p. 7). I have something similar in
mind when commenting on an audience’s autobiographical contribution
to an immersive theatre performance: the inevitability of a complex and
multifaceted self that lies in an audience member’s acts of production and
reception in the theatre. Audiences bring with them to reception a unique
life story and this life story – or autobiography – impacts not only on
what is identified as a locus of attention, which would occur in any theatre
event, but also on how that locus influences the production and reception
of affect and its consequent impact on thought, feeling and behaviour in

an environment that bears down on an immersed audience, and which
they also affect as a result of their presence and potential participation
within the work.
An example offered in Magda B. Arnold’s cognitive research into ‘affec-
tive memory’ helps to unpack the role played by autobiography in affect
production. She asks her readers to consider a rider once thrown by a
horse. Seeing the horse again may cause ‘immediate apprehension’, which
‘can only be based on the remembered joy or pain’ (Arnold, 1970, p. 174).
Arnold calls this kind of remembering ‘affective memory’, which describes
the potential for affect to be both persistent and lasting, underscoring
the ways in which it is at least partly defined by previous experience. It
stands in subtle distinction from what Josephine Machon calls ‘corporeal
memory’, or an intuitive knowledge arising from the body’s production
and appreciation of its own ‘language’ (Machon, 2009, pp. 5–6). There is
greater emphasis on cognitive acts of remembrance as something relating
to embodiment in Arnold’s account of affective memory, but in a way that
gives more credence to mindfulness, as opposed to the Deleuzian idea of
affect being ‘immediately conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave
or vital emotion’ (Deleuze, 2003, p. 33).2
Acknowledging the role played by affective memory in the subjective
experience of affect production opens up space to think relationally about
affect. In some respects, it encourages thinking about affect in its Spinozist
form, as a state of in-between-ness linking both human and non-human
bodies, even over time, but it also encourages thinking about affect in
terms of the RAP, as something impacting on a human’s capacity to think,
feel and act, without nullifying personal idiosyncrasies. This means of
thinking about affect encourages reflection on the imbrication of particu-
lar participants within an immersive theatre setting. It encourages enquiry
into what an individual brings to affect production and how that ‘bringing
with’ plays into the negotiation and experience of affect in performance.
2
See also Damasio’s notion of the somatic-marker hypothesis. For Damasio, emotion
relates to embodied learning stretching as much into the past as the present. It also relates to
processes of cognition and evaluation that are marked by it (Damasio, 1994, p. 173; see also
pp. 185, 196). This latter is what Damasio dubs the ‘somatic-marker hypothesis’: a technical
term that usefully adds to Arnold’s notion of affective memory. Damasio’s somatic-marker
hypothesis looks at how a feeling body affects cognition (Damasio, 1994, p. 173). Damasio’s
research, then, suggests that emotion impacts on what we think, how we think and conse-
quently how we think of ourselves.
46 A. ALSTON
Affect, then, involves autobiography, but in a way that promotes

‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ from something or someone. It is in this sense
that Sara Ahmed describes her approach to emotion as ‘relational’, and
indeed the ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ that may be felt while emotional
may be thought of as emotion’s affective component – an observation that
I use to justify my occasional appropriation of research into emotion in my
own study of affect (Ahmed, 2004, p. 8). She explores how the produc-
tion and feeling of an emotion ties in with uniquely personal histories ‘in
the sense that the process of recognition (of this feeling, or that feeling) is
bound up with what we already know […] It is not just that we interpret
our pain as a sign of something, but that how pain feels in the first place is
an effect of past impressions, which are often hidden from view’ (Ahmed,
2004, p. 25, original emphasis). For scholars such as Ahmed and Arnold,
despite their different disciplines, recognising an affective or emotional
stimulus is at least partly bound up with past experiences and knowledge
accumulated over a lifetime. Recognition has a personal history that is
impacted by relations with other things and people over time. Recognising
a stimulus as affective entails imagination and what amounts to projection
onto that object, inscribing onto that object a part of oneself. Recognising
a stimulus as affective therefore involves a creative form of perception that
is aesthetic, insofar as it is concerned with perception, and ethical, insofar
as the perceiver casts something or someone in a certain light that may
or may not be favourable. The resulting production of affect is also com-
plexly political, insofar as the subject both submits to an experience of
affect, but also brings something of their own life story to the production
of affect, co-producing an affective experience that they also undergo.
In sum: the production of affect involves being moved to think, feel,
or act by someone or something. Affect production is political, as it estab-
lishes relations of power. More specifically, it is biopolitical because a sub-
ject’s psychological and physiological state is affected by these relations
of power. Furthermore, the condition of being moved by affect involves
both visceral and cognitive activity, integrating the personal within affect
production that is triggered by the perception of external sources. This
positions the participant not just as someone subjected to affect, but as
someone who co-produces affect. The condition of being affected will
also involve an engagement with and negotiation of spaces, things and
people both in the live moment and across time, as the affective memory
thesis suggests, resulting in a Spinozist ‘flow’ of affect between things and
beings – the difference being that subjects further politicise and complicate
the production of affect as a result of autobiographical contributions.

Affect ought not to be reduced to visceral processes, or rational cognition,
or abstract and invisible flows between things and people, which often
characterise affect theory as it appears in theatre and performance stud-
ies, among other disciplines; rather, it traverses physiology, psychology/
autobiography, and social relationality, which is of course missed in less
holistic approaches to affect, and is significant not just for a more fulsome
understanding of the mechanics of affect production, but for understand-
ing the biopolitics of affect as well.
DISINTEREST
The roles played by affect and audience introspection in immersive theatre
give rise to a need to rethink an important cornerstone of philosophical
aesthetics. How is it possible to experience ‘disinterest’ while invested in
the co-production of an art form premised on the artistic codification of
affective experiences? What scope is there for participants to ‘disinterest-
edly’ reflect on theatre while locked inside a very small, very cold box?
Does an experience of a theatre work cease to be aesthetic when claustro-
phobia kicks in?
Disinterest refers to the ‘pure’ contemplation of aesthetic objects,
appreciated for their own sake as ends in themselves and detached from the
preoccupations, or ‘interests’, of the individual(s) apprehending them (see
Sheppard, 1987, p. 68; Hegel, 2004 [1886], p. 64). Disinterest implies
distance between the perceiver and her or his interest in the perceived that
allows for critical contemplation and reflection, especially with regard to
the formal components of an aesthetic object. However, if experience can
itself be aestheticised, as I claim it can, then this distance would appear to
collapse, which has important ramifications for the theorisation of immer-
sive theatre aesthetics.
My interest is not just with the experience produced by something on
a stage, or contained within a picture frame; in both instances, the artistic
experience is not really ‘the art’, but is what ‘the art’ induces. Rather, what
I am proposing is that experience in immersive theatre is objectified as art,
as a part of the artwork that exists alongside the more familiar aesthetic
features of a theatre performance, such as mise en scène and the actor’s
performing body. Something like this perspective has in the past been
vilified, most notably in Michael Fried’s diatribe against the ‘theatrical-
ity’ of Minimalism. For Fried, literalist sculpture – his term for minimalist
48 A. ALSTON
sculpture – ‘establishes the experience itself as something like that of an

object, or rather, objecthood’ (Fried, 1968, p. 135).3 In Fried’s articula-
tion of literalist sculpture and my own understanding of immersive the-
atre, there is a shared emphasis on the establishment of experience itself
as an ‘art object’, but to the point not just of resembling art, but becoming
art. However, while Fried regards this as an inherently, but generically
theatrical phenomenon, I suggest that it is more usually a phenomenon
of immersive and participatory forms of theatre that can be analogically
attributed to other contexts, including minimalist and installation art-
works. What separates theatre aesthetics generally from immersive theatre
aesthetics is the rendering of affective experience as aestheticised experi-
ence as a result of immersing audiences within a world that surrounds
them completely and that asks something of them via an invitation (implicit
or explicit, actual or possible, intended or mistakenly perceived) to explore,
to interact, or to touch. This rendering is not generically theatrical, but
arises through a particular kind of audience engagement that encourages
introspection. It is not so much form, or dramaturgy, or concept, which
are the ‘take home’ aesthetic features of immersive theatre; rather, the
experience is the artwork.
Aesthetic theory, from Kant to Theodor Adorno (2013) and beyond,
has been preoccupied and continues to preoccupy itself with the rela-
tionships between sense-as-perception and sense-as-thought. Friedrich
Schiller, for instance, in an influential series of letters on aesthetics, argues
that ‘no real connoisseur will be likely to deny that [art]works […] are
all the more perfect according as they respect the freedom of the spirit
even in the greatest storm of emotions’ (Schiller, 2004 [1794], p. 106).
Schiller’s respect for the freedom of the spirit presupposes an interre-
lationship between aesthetic object and aesthetic reception. The latter,
for Schiller, is split into free play, or ‘reciprocal action’ (Schiller, 2004
[1794], p. 73), between sensuousness and reason (Schiller, 2004 [1794],
pp. 64–6). Tacitly building on the same philosophical tradition, Machon,
in a reading of contemporary theatre aesthetics that includes immersive
theatre aesthetics, frames comparable relationships between sensuousness
and reason in terms of a ‘(syn)aesthetic fusion’ between sense-as-feeling
3
Fried is here addressing minimalist artist Tony Smith’s recollection of a car journey, in
which Smith describes his aesthetic experience of the world outside his car. The implication
that arises from Fried’s analysis of Smith’s recollection is that the objectification of experience
is also applicable to literalist art.
and sense-as-meaning, albeit in terms that replace reciprocal action with

notions of synergy and intermeshing (Machon, 2009). Relationships
between sense-as-perception/sensuousness and sense-as-thought/mean-
ing in aesthetic theory have therefore persisted as a core concern in ways
that inform recent immersive theatre discourse.
However, immersive theatre is geared toward the production of a great
storm of emotions, as are many artworks; only this great storm is itself
aesthetically meaningful in immersive theatre performances. It draws the
limelight. Where aesthetics, for Kant, Schiller and their philosophical lin-
eage, is primarily concerned with identifying and admiring things like
form, line, shape, colour and beauty in the visual arts, as well as relation-
ships between them, and between them and a perceiver, and where an
emotional ‘storm’ might detract from a purer, disinterested engagement
with these things and their relationships, immersive theatre encourages
the direction of attention toward, not away from, affective experience.
Immersive theatre aesthetics still thrives on play as it exists in the space
between aesthetic environment and audience member, but this is because
the audience engages in aesthetic co-production within an immersive
environment as an affected subject who might also affect that environ-
ment, or perceive such a possibility. A great storm of emotions is what
makes immersive theatre aesthetics meaningful and it is what audiences are
encouraged to contemplate as art.
In Cold Storage, an audience’s aesthetic contemplation of the work is
literally reflected back to them in the mirrored interior of the box. This
box does not simply represent ‘the silent presence of another person’, as
Fried describes literalist sculpture (Fried, 1968, p. 128), but is rather filled
by the silent presence of oneself. The participant’s silence in Cold Storage
does not signal passivity, nor even just attentiveness, but the completion
of the art event. The participant is the art event. Cold Storage relies on
the participant’s being there as well as the participant’s capacity to pro-
duce affective, sensuous experience, such as the titillation or discomfort
that arises from incarceration. It is this experience that becomes integrated
within the aesthetic. The participant is an aesthetic producer, whether they
like it or not, and their own productivity is what makes the meaningful
stuff of reception.
Sensuous experience, as a notion implied in the term ‘aesthetic expe-
rience’, is heightened for participating audiences confronted by the
potentially pleasurable, thrilling or challenging fact of uncertainty that
accompanies participatory activity. But the sensuous consequences of
50 A. ALSTON
affect production are prone to taking receptive precedence over whatever

stimulates such experiences. Feeling thrilled or feeling affected in some
other way might become a participatory goal and an incentive to attend
immersive theatre performances, just as it might with any theatre perfor-
mance. But where a play text or scenography, for instance, might provide
an aesthetic source for thrill – and an aesthetic end in itself – that end is
ripe for reorientation in immersive theatre performances like Cold Storage.
This is not to say that scenography or a play text cannot be profoundly
engaging in immersive theatre; rather, it is to suggest that these means
tend to be geared toward more sensuous artistic ends.
At least since the experimental theory of Max Hermann and others in
the early twentieth century, the production and reception of stable and
lasting material and textual artefacts has been attacked in light of theatre
and performance aesthetics as a necessary prerequisite for an aesthetics of
the work of art (Fischer-Lichte, 2008, p. 162). However, immersive and
participatory forms of theatre and performance, especially, encourage an
extension of thinking beyond the generic eventfulness and ephemerality
of performances. Much as Fried recognised a ‘literalness’ to Minimalism,
there is also a ‘literalness’ to immersive theatre as audiences find them-
selves plotting their own path not just through a mental and phenomenal
forest of things, acts and signs (Rancière, 2009, p. 16), but within the
forest itself – a forest that affects them and that they are able to affect, at
least potentially.
The aesthetic perspective unfolding here might be wrongly associated
with theorists of the aesthetic such as Roger Fry and Clive Bell, writing
over a century ago. For Bell, ‘The starting point for all systems of aesthet-
ics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that
provoke this emotion we call works of art […] This emotion is called the
aesthetic emotion’ (Bell, 2003, p. 107). However, what I am considering
is not necessarily, or just, an aesthetic emotion, understood as an emo-
tion provoked by a work of art; what I am considering is an aestheticised
experience. The audience experience in immersive theatre, I contend, is
itself aestheticised within environments that invite this aestheticisation.
The participant’s body does not just enter into an immersive world; the
immersive world enters into the participant’s body (see also White, 2013,
p. 161; Böhme, 1993, p. 114). Aroused experience ends up forming its
own aesthetic site to be engaged with in immersive theatre that is not just
the phenomenological consequence of observing theatre, but part of the
stage on which an immersive aesthetic is played out.
Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, though not initially intended as objects

for ‘ESTHETIC DELECTATION’ (Duchamp, 1973, p. 141, original
emphasis), demonstrate how encounters with a given object morph once
placed and perceived in an environment that is geared toward aesthetic
recognition. A urinal in an art gallery – Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) – is
subjected to an aesthetic surplus; it gains a special kind of resonance and
demands a special kind of attention. It is made strange. In a similar vein,
affective experience in immersive theatre, by virtue of the space in which
it is experienced, in conjunction with the aesthetically constitutive atten-
tion of an audience attuned to that space, also gains a special kind of reso-
nance that demands a special kind of attention. Immersive theatre draws
aesthetic attention to the experience of affect: firstly, the way in which
the piece is apprehended is creative and constitutive; secondly, immersive
theatre environments, while they might have outstanding aesthetic merit,
function more as vehicles for the production of affective experience, which
becomes the primary focus of the theatre event for immersed audience
participants. Within the world of immersive theatre performances like
Cold Storage, a world entered with an eye predisposed toward aesthetic
expectations and desires, affective experience is aestheticised in a way that
it is not outside of an aesthetic environment.
In sum: affect becomes aestheticised as a consequence of audience
engagement with and in an immersive environment that triggers affect
production, which emerges as a feature of a theatre aesthetic once cast as
such by an audience’s aesthetically constitutive attention. While arising
from a collection of things and people that make up an aesthetic envi-
ronment, an aesthetic product ends up existing within an affected audi-
ence member. The mechanics of aesthetic production in immersive theatre
builds on the creative productivity and individuality of an observing, expe-
riencing and introspecting audience member, in dynamic relation with an
immersive theatre environment and autobiography; the mode of audience
engagement that is asked of audiences in immersive theatre is therefore of
a narcissistic kind, insofar as audiences turn attention to their own affective
engagement with(in) an immersive environment.
NARCISSISTIC PARTICIPATION
Cold Storage promises a special experience for one audience member at a
time. Isolated audience participants climb into a body-sized box, the lid is
closed, and cold air is pumped inside. This produces a sensory experience
52 A. ALSTON
that is the result of directing an audience’s ‘interest’ toward the cold and
the claustrophobic size of the space. However, because the cold and the
size of the space are focused on inducing a peculiarly intense experience
for an entrapped audience, the environment encourages a diversion of
attention away from the material box and toward an affective experience
of the box’s conditions. In Cold Storage, feeling does not just accom-
pany perception, but indulges attention as a part and point of a theatre
performance. Furthermore, bodily expressiveness and activity – shivering,
pressing against the box’s interior, watching one’s own facial expressions
reflected in a mirror – also absorbs attention. While participation of this
kind affects the environment to a minimal extent, the audience’s own
expressiveness, activity and presence within the work are still set up to be
received as a constitutive part of the live theatre event. What emerges is
a double-edged mode of audience engagement: introspectively attending
to affective experience, and projecting onto a participatory environment
something that might subsequently be received as part of a theatre aes-
thetic. Both of these activities signal narcissistic participation.
In Ovid’s account of the myth of Narcissus and Echo, Echo, a nymph,
falls in love with a proud male youth called Narcissus. Along with many
others, Narcissus rudely rejects Echo’s advances, claiming that he would
rather die than yield to her. Narcissus is damned for his pride and haughti-
ness by the goddess of retribution, Nemesis: ‘So may he love – and never
win his love!’ (Ovid, 1986, p. 63, original emphasis). Narcissus ends up
falling in love with his own reflection in the shimmering surface of a pool of
water – a love so strong that his reflection holds him fatally enrapt. Narcissus
dies by the pool, overcome by the grief aroused by an impossible union.
In Ovid’s myth, Narcissus shuns intimacy with others in order to sati-
ate intimacy that is directed inwards, toward his own self, as well as the
image of himself that he observes in the world around him. He becomes
self-absorbed. In psychoanalytic appropriations of Ovid’s myth, the char-
acter of Narcissus is used to describe a character disorder premised on
self-absorption (see Lowen, 1985; Morrison, 1986), particularly in sex-
ual development (Freud, 2006). A sense of self, bound up with either
self-aggrandisement or vulnerability, tends to be framed in this discourse
as conflating with the world, in opposition to inter-subjectivity and com-
munity (Houlcroft, Bore, & Munro, 2012, p. 274).4 Esteem, entitlement
and power are commonly attributed to narcissists as motives that affect an
4
For recent contestations of this formulation, see Gebauer et al. (2012).
engagement with the world and with others (Gebauer et al., 2012). For
psychoanalysts, we are all potential narcissists, so long as the symptoms of
narcissism are apparent.
While narcissistic participants might be rewarded with a sense of esteem,
entitlement and power, and while a sense of self is guided toward confla-
tion with an immersive environment, this is not (necessarily) because the
audience suffers from a character disorder; it is because the audience sub-
scribes to a mode of audience engagement that is assigned to them, albeit
one that might in itself provide a motive for choosing to engage with this
kind of theatre. Narcissistic participation therefore refers to a model to
which audiences are invited to conform. It is a part of the aesthetic make-
up of immersive theatre performances like Cold Storage, and a condition
of a prescribed form of audience engagement.
In my own experience of Cold Storage, I watched myself in a mirror that
was inches away from my face. The limitations of the space meant that I
could do little else, which forced me to acknowledge and attend to those
aspects of the environment that bore a particularly strong relationship to
my own presence within the work: namely, the cold air, the smallness of
the space, and the mirror. Positioned as a participant inside the box, as
a part of the work, I was interested in what affected me and therefore
attended to those aspects of the performance that lent themselves to my
own preoccupations. My selecting of important aesthetic components was
driven by a reading of those components as direct and personal concerns.
Projecting my own interests onto an immersive world impacted on my
translation of that world and my reading of it in aesthetic terms; in turn,
my own experience ended up being of aesthetic interest. I became self-
absorbed as a performing, productive audience.
The immersive environment, then, guided and framed how I engaged
with Cold Storage. Because of the environment’s arousal of affective
experience – because I entered into an experience machine – my attention
was focused less on the machine itself and more on inspecting (inspect: ‘to
look into’) my own feeling body, actions and expressiveness. As a narcis-
sistic participant, I was posited as a productive audience who was meant
to respond to an immersive event by constituting within and around
myself the stuff of reception – experience, expressiveness and activity – in
dynamic relation with an immersive environment. As with Narcissus in
Ovid’s myth, I engaged with the world around me, but the appearance of
myself within this world and the feelings that appearance generated felt as
though they were of greater significance than the world itself.
54 A. ALSTON
What this account of Cold Storage helps to illustrate is that a lack of

overtly physical activity, such as roaming freely and interacting with others,
does not equate to an absence of productivity. In free-roaming immersive
theatre, particularly in the large-scale, multistorey work of Punchdrunk,
audience members may interact with a space by rifling through drawers
and pulling out letters to read, or entering into caravans and exploring
wardrobes, or peering through windows, or being led into a physically
proximate exchange with a performer, and so on, as they do in a perfor-
mance like The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013–2014) – a per-
formance loosely based on Georg Büchner’s 1837 proto-expressionist play
Woyzeck, Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939), the films
of David Lynch and, as with most of their work, film noir. The attention
to detail within aesthetic spaces like The Drowned Man may be stagger-
ing, but the detail is not of much relevance until the participant discovers
the detail for themselves, at which point it takes on personal significance.
A Punchdrunk letter is something I find by opening a drawer that I dis-
cover and choose to open. The link between this letter and the various
sources of a Punchdrunk performance is a link that is there to be found,
but I’m the one who finds it in a forest of things, acts and signs that are
tangible, physical, and at my disposal. In Cold Storage, where physical acts
of discovery are less blatant, the participant is nonetheless also I-oriented
and physically engaged. I am in the box, by myself. I feel cold because
I am the only one in the box and this makes me feel special. The box is
an experience machine designed to generate an experience of immersive
theatre that – at least for the short duration of the performance – is just
for me. More specifically, while triggered by the box that makes up an aes-
thetic environment, an aesthetic product ultimately emerges from my own
bodily engagement with performance. The box facilitates performance,
but it is me that makes the performance come alive and it is me that I
observe in the immersive world as a part of that world that I feel entitled
to experience. I do not have to rifle through drawers, or meander through
a range of spaces, to experience this sense of involvement and productive
engagement with performance; rather, productivity and a ‘closeness’ to
and involvement with immersive theatre can be prompted even when shut
inside a small, cold box.
Keren Zaointz puts an interesting spin on the audience’s narcissistic
self-absorption in immersive theatre in an article that recognises narcissistic
audience engagement in performances that do not confront audiences so
obviously with their own reflected self. Reflecting on her own experience
of The Drowned Man, she identifies what she calls a ‘presumptive intimacy’,
or sense of self-entitlement to intimacy in performance, ‘that ensures that
the spectator maintains her place at the centre of her own singular jour-
ney’ (Zaointz, 2014, p. 410; see also Alston, 2012; Alston, 2013, p. 130).
While I cannot claim to know whether or not other audiences may want or
desire this individualised journey, it is nonetheless possible to identify how
immersive theatre environments like The Drowned Man and Cold Storage
invite self-absorption and presumptive desires for intimacy, resulting in a
theatre aesthetic that allows for audience attention to be directed away
from stimulating environments and toward engaging experiences and the
reception of one’s own feeling, expressiveness and activity as a centrally
significant part of the performance.
The feeling and perceiving ‘I’ and the ‘I’ that strives to feel more reaches
out into an immersive world, but in a way that simultaneously turns atten-
tion toward the experiencing self. Affect is something attended to, but it is
also something which colours perception of and can even physically alter an
immersive environment once audiences are motivated to do so, within the
limits of possibility defined by a theatre maker. Narcissistic participation
underscores a constant negotiation with an immersive world and whatever
(and whomever) is in it. In this sense, because of the ways in which the
narcissistic participant is figured as a productive participant, narcissistic
participation can feel empowering. A forest of things, acts and signs that
are potentially available to anyone who is able and willing to experience a
work end up seeming acutely personal because of a focus on indulging in
experience not just as an effect of audience engagement, but as a site for
audience engagement. In one sense this ensures an emancipated form of
spectatorship, as Rancière might envisage it, as the audience, in personal-
ising what they engage with as an audience member – through selecting
what to engage with as a spectator and the role of autobiography in affect
production – is ‘free’ to craft their own personally meaningful journey
through a performance. However, in immersive theatre performances like
Cold Storage and The Drowned Man, this personal journey is in part predi-
cated on the positing of audience members as productive participants who
must find and/or recognise their own role and place within a world that
is provided for them, physically involves them, and that affects them as
isolated individuals.
I can imagine Rancière recoiling from the prospect of locking isolated
audiences in a small cold box. And yet, he asserts that an audience’s power
‘does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body’,
56 A. ALSTON
but from the recognition that ‘each of them has to translate what she
perceives in her own way’ (Rancière, 2009, p. 16–17). For Rancière, it
is this translation capacity that equitably and radically links theatre audi-
ences as a disparate collective; all spectators have it and this commonality,
for Rancière, forms the condition of their emancipation. In Cold Storage,
audience members are similarly able to construct meaning for themselves
and to stitch together meanings and assign values to things, acts and signs,
spawning a web of associations, as with any audience member. However,
unlike most other forms of audience engagement in theatre, the audience
is involved in the production of a theatre aesthetic that frames productivity
as a necessary condition of a prescribed engagement. Participating audi-
ences engage with a theatre event in an environment that does not offer a
viewing position that is separate from the theatrical world that they both
observe and are immersed within. They are of that world and complete
it. Furthermore, the ‘emancipated’ activity of spectators that Rancière
acknowledges – the individual translation of a perceived theatre aesthetic –
is treated as a productive resource and extended to include physiological
engagement with an environment as a productive activity, which carries
with it political implications that impact on the apparently inherent ‘eman-
cipation’ of the spectator.
The concepts of ‘autopoiesis’, ‘heteropoiesis’ and ‘allopoiesis’ help to
flesh out how narcissistic participants are resourced as productive partici-
pants in immersive theatre performances like Cold Storage. Autopoiesis is a
term that was first introduced in biology in the early 1970s to describe the
capability of cells to regenerate in a self-contained system (see Maturana &
Valera, 1980). Mitosis offers one example of autopoiesis, which refers to
the division of one cell into two smaller cells with identical sets of chro-
mosomes. Since then, the concept of autopoiesis, or production in a self-
contained system, has been applied in systems theory and performance
studies to help explain how a given network of elements and relationships,
such as relationships between an audience, performer and a performance
environment, can recursively produce something new, such as the ‘event-
fulness’ of performance (see Luhmann, 2000, p. 49; Fischer-Lichte, 2008,
p. 150; Carlson, 2008, p. 7; Shaughnessy, 2012, p. 36). Applied to narcis-
sistic participation in Cold Storage, autopoiesis can inform a participant’s
self-absorbed introspection and how the affective experiences triggered by
a very small, very cold box provide both a focus for the audience’s engage-
ment and a driver for bodily expressiveness and activity that can also absorb
attention. Narcissistic participants in Cold Storage attend to themselves in
an immersive theatre event, which provides an important basis for recep-

tion and a stimulus for the production of affect. The experiencing subject
ends up producing within what appears to be a self-contained system that
fundamentally relies on their own productivity.
However, as White suggests, there are also ‘“heteropoietic” aspects [of
performance] when thinking of how performance is designed and produced
from outside itself, when thinking of what performance makers create and
rehearse’ (White, 2013, p. 188). What interests me, though, is what audi-
ences bring ‘from the outside’ to a seemingly closed system of aesthetic
production. I do not just mean this in terms of an audience’s ‘horizon’ of
cultural and ideological expectations that interact with the reception of a
theatre event, as Susan Bennett has explored in her influential survey of
reader-response theory and assessment of its relevance to the analysis of
audience reception in theatre (Bennett, 1997, pp. 98–9; see also White,
2013, pp. 57–9); rather, I am interested in asking how autobiography
and especially affective memory affect not just the reception of immersive
theatre, but the narcissistic production of whatever audience reception
addresses, such as one’s own experiential engagement or participatory
activity in an immersive world. There may also be ‘allopoietic’ elements of
immersive theatre production, where performance creates meanings ‘that
audience members take away with them’ (White, 2013, p. 188), which
affect the meanings and values that end up being attributable to a perfor-
mance. Experiences of immersive theatre may be profoundly memorable
and may affect audiences long after the live event, which might also inform
future experiences of immersive theatre. Heteropoiesis and allopoiesis are
therefore compelling counterpoints to the seemingly autopoietic self-
absorption of narcissistic participants, insofar as they address the connect-
edness of audiences to contexts beyond the seemingly closed system of
aesthetic production in immersive theatre that embed, precede and follow
on from their participation in live performance.
Immersive theatre is not designed with a specific individual in mind –
only the generic audience. However, the application and appropria-
tion of theory drawn from biology and systems theory informs what an
‘emancipated’ capacity for translating an aesthetic world might mean
for immersive theatre participants. What is translated is not just a forest
of things, acts and signs that present themselves to the visual and aural
perception of audiences. What is translated is not just the personal sig-
nificance that these things, acts and signs have for individual audience
members. Rather, these things, acts and signs are presented for an audience
58 A. ALSTON
to perceive, and are also partly of the participant’s making. Things, acts
and signs are shaped and coloured by affect and affective memory. There
is also the possibility that they might be handled, used, used on oneself,
or that they might bear down on the participant either as a use, or even
as a threat. The possibility of participation enlivens things, acts and signs
within an immersive theatre landscape. They may well be invested in by
the narcissistic participant as having some kind of personal and immediate
relevance. However, the appearance of personal significance and its attach-
ment to the audience’s productive engagement as a narcissistic partici-
pant ensures that a peculiarly enhanced productivity remains intact as that
which ought to be adhered to as an immersed audience member.
BIOPOLITICS AND THE CULTURE OF NARCISSISM

Audiences in immersive theatre really feel, as they do in any kind of the-
atre, or situation. However, for narcissistic participants, affect is also
experienced as an art object. It is both ‘real’ and ‘art object’. But what
does this ambiguous doubleness mean for the politics of narcissistic
participation?
While it is possible to offer a convincing performance of emotion with-
out being emotionally affected, as Denis Diderot observed and encour-
aged in his posthumously published text The Paradox of Acting (Diderot,
1883, pp. 16–17, 74; see also Roach, 1985, p. 58),5 there is no such thing
as an unreal affect.6 The real is not something that performance can claim
as its own and mark off from theatre; an aesthetics of audience immersion
and participation derived from affect production opens up access to this
realm, albeit within aesthetic worlds that may well strive toward absolute
separation from contexts that are spatially, temporally and associatively
beyond their aesthetic boundaries.
5
Theatre researchers and neuroscientists have explored how mimicking emotional expres-
sion can produce emotion in the actor, spawning a branch of actor training that uses the
performance of emotion to induce affect (see Bloch, 1993; Rix, 1993). This takes Diderot’s
advice to the actor and turns it on its head, collapsing the distance between emotional display
and feeling an emotion.
6
This is not to be confused with the subject of Colin Radford’s bewilderment in his article,
‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina’. For Radford, being moved to tears
by the fate of a fictional character is incoherent (Radford & Weston, 1975, p. 78). My focus
here, in contrast, is not so much on what might move an audience, but the movement itself:
that is, the state of being affected in the theatre, as a state that becomes aestheticised.
Asserting the realness of affect is not intended to undermine the influ-

ence of social normativity on how emotional displays are rehearsed and
repeated over time, along with the resulting attenuation of how affect and
emotion is felt. Performances of emotions are theatrically constructed,
as Peta Tait acknowledges, ‘which suggests also that a display of emo-
tions can be manipulated within a social context’ (Tait, 2002, p. 3; see
also Harré & Parrott, 1996, pp. 45–6). Rather, the ‘literalness’ of affect
production in immersive theatre, as sensuousness, or as the affective com-
ponent of an emotion, unsettles the sectioning off of a fictional world
from the personal histories, experiences and desires that individual par-
ticipants bring with them to a theatre event. Those histories, experiences
and desires tie in with the manipulation of affect, feeling and emotion in
wider social contexts. In asserting the ‘reality’ of affect, then, I also assert
and underscore the constructedness of that reality, and the porousness of
an immersive environment.
In Cold Storage, an experience of nervousness or peacefulness is not
representational; it is nervousness or peacefulness. It makes no differ-
ence to the subjective reality of affect if perceived to be trivial in relation
to more intense experiences, nor does it matter that the stimulus which
helped to produce that response was looking to represent something. In
fact, that seems to have been Lee’s intention in Cold Storage (Lee, 2011).
The intention was to place the audience in a position where they might
experience by means of imagination and representation a state of sus-
pended animation for many, many years, waking up at some point in the
distant future. However, in my own experience and despite the intentions
of the artist, the performance’s narrative came across as secondary to a
more fundamental, experiential and narcissistic engagement with a theatre
environment that was thrillingly affective.
The ambiguous doubleness of affect in Cold Storage is what prompts
me to consider what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls the ‘irruption of the real’.
Lehmann identifies the irruption of the real as a stylistic trait in ‘postdra-
matic’ theatre performances: performances made from the latter half of
the twentieth century through to the present day that build into a drama
a potential of ‘disintegration, dismantling and deconstruction’ which
threatens the stability of a fictive cosmos (Lehmann, 2006, p. 44). He
explores how directors and companies including Frank Castorf, Jan Fabre,
Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio and Robert Wilson have explored and experi-
mented with aspects of theatre and performance aesthetics that disrupt
dramatic coherence and narrative, such as the layering of several, often
60 A. ALSTON
incongruous, theatrical signs in a single scene, or by focusing on the ‘con-

crete’ production of theatre in a given space, at a given time, and with a
given set of bodies. The irruption of the real may emerge alongside these
other stylistic traits in postdramatic theatre performances, participating
in the disruption of drama by rupturing a separated and framed aesthetic
cosmos that is ‘governed by its own laws and by an internal coherence of
its elements and which is marked off against its environment as a sepa-
rate “made up” reality’ (Lehmann, 2006, p. 100). He uses a moment in
Fabre’s The Power of Theatrical Madness (1984) to illustrate, in which a
group of actors take a break, looking out at the audience, after an exhaust-
ing stretch of highly physical exertion. The break occurs within the time
frame of a theatre performance, but its status as a staged or necessary
episode is, for Lehmann, ambiguous. The break itself serves the pragmatic
and ‘real’ purpose of resting after physical exertion; however, the break is
also a ‘designed’ feature of the performance. It unsettles the coherence of
a fiction as something set apart from the conditions of a fiction’s produc-
tion: namely, the exhausted bodies of theatre performers.
The production and experience of affect among audiences in any the-
atre performance, whether dramatic or postdramatic, inputs an irrupt-
ing reality into theatre spectatorship. The spectator, as Marie-Madeleine
Mervant-Roux maintains, is ‘firmly anchored in social reality’ while
investing in ‘the poetry of the stage’ (Mervant-Roux, 2010, p. 232).
For Mervant-Roux, borrowing from Elie Konigson, this is what makes
the spectator a ‘guardian of reality’ (Mervant-Roux, 2010, p. 231). The
auditorium in which affect is experienced in most theatre performances,
along with the construction of creative associations, is set apart from the
world on the stage; the audience is not a protagonist, but a thinking, feel-
ing observer of a framed and separated aesthetic cosmos that is ‘marked
off’ from the auditorium. However, in immersive theatre the irrupting
real of affect takes on something of the ambiguity described by Lehmann
among theatre audiences, specifically, because of its doubleness as both
‘real’ and ‘art object’. It is ‘paradoxically parallaxical’, to borrow from
Brandon Woolf, foregrounding the extra-aesthetic within theatre aesthet-
ics (Woolf, 2013, p. 41). Guardians of the real in Cold Storage guard an
affective reality that is strangely merged with the apparently closed fic-
tive cosmos of an immersive environment. This is what distinguishes the
production of affect in performances like Cold Storage from other theatre
events where affect itself is not experienced as a ‘paradoxically parallaxical’
phenomenon.
I find this fascinating because affect production is at once a fundamen-

tal aspect of immersive theatre aesthetics that is objectified as art, and
also a link between an immersive world and the world beyond a closed
fictive cosmos. While affect production is intended in immersive theatre
experience machines like the box in Cold Storage, it may not be intended
as an irruption of the real by theatre makers, which is perhaps what dis-
tinguishes the irruption of an affective reality in immersive theatre from
the more self-conscious deployment of an ambiguously real scenario in
postdramatic theatre performances like The Power of Theatrical Madness.
The irruption of the real does not necessarily serve a ‘disintegration’ of
drama in immersive theatre, as Lehmann implies in his notion and study
of ‘postdramatic theatre’ – an implication that has also been questioned in
the kinds of production that Lehmann addresses (Bottoms, 2009, p. 67);
rather, despite its ‘reality’, affect serves an integration of the audience into
the conceit of a fictive situation. Furthermore, the very notion of staging
reality in immersive theatre tends, more often than not, to be avoided by
immersive theatre makers who strive to achieve ever-more total closure of
a fictive cosmos. Nonetheless, while audiences play an important role in
the achievement of total immersion – complete separation from the mate-
rial and ideological contexts of production and reception – they are also
what guarantee its failure. They form an important link between these
contexts and an aesthetic cosmos that is marked off from them.
Immersive theatre aesthetics is produced at the point of encounter
between an immersive environment and an immersed audience member.
So far, this chapter has largely been concerned with nuancing how produc-
tion at this point of encounter works in light of what an audience member
brings with them to a narcissistic mode of productive participation, such as
their own autobiography, affective memories, preoccupations, and so on.
Each of these inputs contributes to the constitution of a theatre event that
derives not just from the productive efforts of theatre makers, but the pro-
ductivity of audiences who both receive and co-produce immersive theatre
aesthetics. However, I now want to consider how this point of encounter
is also informed by cultural and economic contexts that embed and inform
the kinds of values and meanings that are attributable to immersive theatre
aesthetics.
In what remains of this section, I will be addressing how a culture of
narcissism and the biopolitical appropriation of affect in work and lei-
sure impact the heteropoiesis of immersive theatre aesthetics. Both fac-
tors, which have mutual relevance, inform the point of encounter between
62 A. ALSTON
an immersive environment and an immersed audience member by affect-

ing the values and meanings that arise not so much from a given per-
formance’s content, but from the productive audience engagement that
immersive theatre performances like Cold Storage ask of their audiences.
In 1974, Richard Sennett published his influential book The Fall of
Public Man: a monumental study that addresses the steady impoverish-
ment of public life from the eighteenth century through to the time of its
writing. In part, he blames this impoverishment on a (North American/
European) society that encourages individuals to question self-adequacy,
resulting in a societal obsession with the feeling ‘I’ that turns the com-
posite parts of a society away from one another as they become socially
withdrawn and preoccupied with self-worth. What ends up being encour-
aged in such a society, for Sennett, ‘is a projection of the self onto the
world, rather than an engagement in worldly experience beyond one’s
control’ (Sennett, 1974, p. 334). This is inherently disempowering, and
therefore of profound political importance, because a preoccupation with
self-knowledge and the display of personality in even the most abstract
institutions ‘has seduced us from converting our understanding of the
realities of power into guides for our own political behaviour. The result
is that forces of domination or inequality remain unchallenged’ (Sennett,
1974, p. 339).
What Sennett is critiquing, at least in part, is a culture of narcissism:
‘The most common form in which narcissism makes itself known to the
person is by a process of inversion: If only I could feel more, or if only I
could really feel, then I could relate to others or have “real” relations with
them. But at each moment of encounter, I never seem to feel enough’
(Sennett, 1974, p. 9). For Sennett, narcissism involves an incessant search
for gratifying a desire that cannot be satiated. ‘The narcissist is not hungry
for experiences’, he writes: ‘he is hungry for Experience’ (Sennett, 1974,
p. 325). In finding images of the self in the world around him, and fol-
lowing desire for an Experience that eludes fulfilment, Sennett’s narcissist
ends up pursuing self-interest in a society that assigns special importance
to subjectivity over and above inter-subjectivity.
When Sennett was writing The Fall of Public Man in the early 1970s, as
Nikolas Rose suggests, ‘the feverish engagement of the previous decade
with the public world and radical politics’, associated with the New Left
and counterculture, gave way to a ‘growth of interest in therapy and self-
development among the young of America and Europe’ (Rose, 1999,
p. 219). For Rose, who builds on Sennett’s work, what emerged was a
mobilisation of narcissism within society where the self came to be defined

not in terms of what it does, but in terms of how it feels (Rose, 1999,
p. 219). The unfortunate consequence of narcissistic culture, for Rose and
cultural critics of the 1970s like Sennett, is individualism and a weakening
of social bonds.
In Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz historicises this growth of interest in
therapy and self-development by considering the emergence of psychiatry
and what she calls the ‘therapeutic emotional style’ in the first half of the
twentieth century, following the institutionalisation of Freudian psycho-
analysis. What this helped to foster, she claims, was a preoccupation with
emotional life and especially the possibility of managing emotions (Illouz,
2007, pp. 6–7). Not only that, but ‘By making personality and emotions
into new forms of social classification, psychologists not only contributed
to making emotional style a social currency – a capital – but also articu-
lated a new language of selfhood to seize the capital’ (Illouz, 2007, p. 65).
Coupled with the growth of interest in therapy and self-absorbed intro-
spectiveness in the 1970s identified by Sennett and Rose, this body of
work inspires the location of a context for the formation of a culture of
narcissism predicated not just on a language of selfhood, but an attitude
toward the self and its role in society that is bound up with a social valuing
of introspection and self-interest.
‘To live for the moment’ in a culture of narcissism, writes Christopher
Lasch, ‘is the prevailing passion – to live for yourself, not for your pre-
decessors or posterity’ (Lasch, 1979, p. 30). It is not coincidental that
discourse on immersive theatre also emphasises immediacy and a concern
with the live(d) moment. As Machon writes, the ‘presence and participa-
tion in the moment’ invited by immersive theatre thrives on and services
a prevailing passion for immediacy (Machon, 2013, p. 83). And as Nicola
Shaughnessy observes of immersive theatre performances, ‘the here and
now of the work of art’ is sought by audiences as ‘a form of authenticity
which is unreproducible’, and therefore of potentially profound personal
significance, ‘even if we experience it again’ (Shaughnessy, 2012, p. 189).
Immersive theatre, as these scholars observe, is thoroughly and deeply
concerned with a prevailing passion for living for the moment, where you,
the audience, take centre stage – where you are the stage.
Immersive theatre, as a form of cultural production, ties into a culture
of narcissism that has a long heritage. Immersive theatre does not sig-
nal a new cultural turn toward narcissism; it is merely the latest trend in
societies that have been valuing for several decades the feeling ‘I’ and its
64 A. ALSTON
preoccupation with self-worth. As with many performances for an audi-

ence of one that do not feature a connection with someone else to be
negotiated, Cold Storage explores individualism without interrogating
it, while encouraging self-absorption. Audiences end up shut inside an
experience machine so that they can revel in their own experience, to be
enjoyed alone, in a small, cold box. The mode of audience engagement
to which audiences must posit themselves is therefore political insofar as:
social relationships are calibrated away from communal formations and
toward individualism; introspection is promoted instead of social nego-
tiation; and the fulfilment of narcissistic desire predominates instead of
fellow-feeling. Preoccupation with self-knowledge does not therefore con-
vert into an understanding of the realities of power, or the roles of others
within a network of power relationships, which means that the politics of
an aesthetic framework is fetishised within the logic of a theatre aesthetic,
although perhaps not for an audience who manages to disengage from
this logic.
Alongside a long-standing culture of narcissism, the meanings and
values that arise at the point of encounter between an immersive envi-
ronment and an immersed audience member are also informed by the
biopolitical appropriation of affect in work and leisure. A core concern of
Sennett’s is to establish how social withdrawal and the demise of civic life
are connected to the evolution of a secular, capitalist culture. He explores
how private, familial domains and relationships provided both stability and
a standard for social relationships as capitalism’s volatile markets started to
dominate the spheres of work and leisure, all in a context where religion
was losing out to a radical sense of subjectivity in an increasingly mate-
rial culture. The decline of the Victorian era’s division between public
and private life, coupled with the increasing influence of the therapeutic
emotional style, paved the way for a reshuffling of boundaries between
the public and the private spheres, making the entrance of emotional life
into the workplace a distinct possibility (see also Illouz, 2007, pp. 16,
23–4). For Sennett, arousing belief in personal appearance, which includes
a communicable belief in oneself as a feeling subject, came to take on a
new and lasting significance that resonates strongly even today, where the
communication of feeling has been figured as an indicator of both work
competency (Goleman, 1995) and social competency (Abercrombie &
Longhurst, 1998, pp. 95–6).
What one is seen to feel takes on a value all of its own that might very
well be disconnected from what one actually feels, and this value can
convert into capital. In part, this is what prompts Illouz to consider feel-
ing as ‘an essential aspect of economic behaviour’ in which ‘emotional
life – especially that of the middle-classes – follows the logic of economic
relations and exchange’ (Illouz, 2007, p. 5). In other words, feeling, as a
competency, is potentially valuable as something other than a subjectively
experienced feeling. More specifically, for Illouz, it is economically valu-
able as a professional competency. Whether pitched as an integral part of
offering a service, or as something more lasting, feeling, as a recognisable
competency, is prone to co-optation. Arlie Hochschild rightly suggests
that ‘It does not take capitalism to turn feeling into a commodity or to
turn our capacity for managing feeling into an instrument. But capitalism
has found a use for emotion management, and so it has organized it more
efficiently and pushed it further’ (Hochschild, 1983, p. 186). An influen-
tial example offered by Hochschild is of a flight attendant who presents
emotion as part of a service (Hochschild, 1983, p. 5). Part of what they do
as work, part of their labour, is based on emotional competence. And what
results, for Hochschild, is ‘emotional labour’, which refers to the labour
required ‘to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward
countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’, such as a
sense of conviviality and safety (Hochschild, 1983, p. 7).
Clearly the emotional labour demanded of a flight attendant is a long
way from the kinds of labour expected of factory workers, for instance, as
industrial capitalism reshaped the boundaries between public and private
life in the nineteenth century. While it is linked to the social psychology
of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, explored by
Sennett, Rose, Illouz and others, the rendering of emotion as emotional
labour seems to indicate a more explicit attempt to harvest value from the
management of a labouring body’s interior and the manifestation of that
interior in expression. This kind of management is symptomatic of a con-
flation of economic imperatives and the physiological and psychological
engagement of workers. What’s at stake in the emotional labour explored
by Hochschild is the impact of capitalism on feeling; in short, what’s at
stake is biopolitics.
In their influential book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
argue that the creation of wealth in the contemporary global economy
‘tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the pro-
duction of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the
cultural increasingly overlap and invest in one another’ (Hardt & Negri,
2000, p. xiii). ‘Biopower,’ write Hardt and Negri, ‘is a form of power
66 A. ALSTON
that regulates social life from its interior’ – it refers to the production
of productive subjects (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 32–3). In addressing
one iteration of biopower, Hardt and Negri deploy the term ‘affective
labour’, clearly echoing Hochschild, to describe services relying on physi-
cal proximity between people and the accompanying creation and manip-
ulation of affect to accommodate this proximity; it is labour in a bodily
mode (Hardt & Negri, 2000, pp. 292–3; see also Hardt, 1999, pp. 95–6).
Affect is therefore made to produce beyond the production of experience.
In other words, the biopolitical appropriation of affect when a subject
engages in affective labour is predicated on extracting economic value
from immaterial productivity.
The biopolitics of emotional/affective labour signals a shift in capital-
ism toward a neoliberal scheme of production. For Michel Foucault, neo-
liberalism proclaims the arrival of a subject who is ‘his own capital, being
for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings
[… The] wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allo-
cated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch
as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from
the human individual who is its bearer’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 226). Industrial
capitalism is and has always been biopolitical to the extent that it alienates
workers from their bodies; neoliberalism, however, regards abilities and
competencies that have no intrinsic relation to the tools of industrial capi-
talism, such as emotional and social competencies, as sources for the pro-
duction of capital. Academics in the neoliberal university, for instance, are
all too aware of the anxieties that surround publication quotas and annual
appraisals; however, from a neoliberal perspective, the cost of an anxiety-
ridden staff base coerced into productivity, arguably because of anxiety, is
justified so long as the pressures of a competitive market enable productiv-
ity and sustainability (see Gill, 2010). Emotional/affective labour of this
kind ensures that the physiological and psychological make-up of workers
produces economic value in a way that also serves a neoliberal agenda by
entrenching the renewed principles of a competitive market economy in an
institution that might otherwise challenge those principles.
This is in part why I find it helpful to approach the kinds of values
and meanings generated by narcissistic participation in immersive theatre
through the lens of neoliberalism, as there appears to be a similar produc-
tion of productive audiences as ‘ability-machines’ whose productivity can-
not be separated from the audience’s feeling bodies. While the next two
chapters, especially, explore a wider range of neoliberal characteristics and
values in immersive theatre performances, it seems important to under-

score how neoliberal value is mirrored in the aesthetics of immersive the-
atre performances like Cold Storage. The aesthetics of audience immersion
and participation in this performance govern the audience’s feeling body,
even while ensuring that the audience is ‘free’ not only to receive, but to
produce. However, this apparent freedom is mitigated by a form of pro-
ductive participation that figures the feeling ‘I’ as part of the means of
producing an immersive aesthetic.
While all theatre is in some way concerned with making, managing,
and moving feeling that is sold to an audience for a wage, as Erin Hurley
acknowledges (Hurley, 2010, p. 9), not all theatre forms and styles use
audiences in quite the same way as immersive theatre performances. As
Fintan Walsh puts it, commenting on the one-on-one performance work
of the late Adrian Howells, the ‘quality and expectation’ of affective forms
of labour is heightened, which produces ‘an imperative to engage in the
laborious production of affect to keep the show going’, making feeling
‘happen’, or at least seeming to (Walsh, 2014, p. 59). While Walsh is
particularly interested in the sense of being responsible for making a per-
formance ‘work’ (both as a product, and ‘to work well’), not least when
confronted with the labour of another – a performer – I argue that this
imperative is present as a more fundamental facet of immersive theatre
aesthetics, even when no other performers can be observed while shut
inside a small, cold box. Immersive theatre is worked for and usually paid
for by audiences, as Walsh observes (Walsh, 2014, p. 59), which collapses
industry and intimacy into one another – only the kind of intimacy that is
at stake, at least in Cold Storage, is narcissistic in kind, and the thing that
facilitates this intimacy is not by necessity another person, but an environ-
ment that elicits desire for richly affective experiences.
CONCLUSION
The meanings and values that are attributable to the aesthetics and politics
of immersive theatre arise at the point of encounter between an immersive
environment and an immersed audience member, in relation to a num-
ber of contexts – autobiographical, cultural, economic and political – that
inform a web of associations between the seemingly closed fictive cosmos
of an immersive world and contexts beyond this cosmos. Firstly, narcis-
sistic participation enhances the audience’s productivity as one whose
experiences, presence and involvement in an immersive world take on
68 A. ALSTON
aesthetically constitutive roles. The production of affect in an immersive

theatre work like Cold Storage comes from both within the participant,
along with their memories and idiosyncrasies, and an immersive world
which is perceived by the participant, but designed by someone else. This
is in part what makes the aesthetics of narcissistic participation heteropoi-
etic once the deeply personal experiences that occur while immersed in a
work take aesthetic precedence over the materials, things and people that
exist elsewhere in an immersive environment, which also lend themselves
to the perception of a peculiarly personal significance in a context that
centres on the audience’s experience, presence and involvement.
Secondly, narcissistic participation, as an aesthetic feature of immersive
theatre performances like Cold Storage, is the latest trend in a culture of
narcissism. This trend stretches at least as far back as the growth of secu-
larism and industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century, although it was
not to flourish until the 1970s as engagement with the public world and
radical politics in the previous decade gave way to a growing interest in
therapy and self-development.
Thirdly, the politics of narcissistic participation is more accurately
labelled as the biopolitics of narcissistic participation. Much as Baudrillard
describes the predicament of labouring subjects under capitalism, audi-
ences in Cold Storage are invited to posit themselves according to a scheme
of production that is assigned to them. This scheme pitches the immate-
rial productivity of audiences, derived from their psychological and physi-
ological investment in performance as an affectively engaged subject, as an
ultimate dimension of value and meaning that resonates with neoliberal-
ism’s turn toward immaterial production.
The target of Rancière’s concern with activating audiences in the the-
atre is the assumption that they need to be awakened from a state of
passivity – and the awakening of audiences as productive participants in
performances like Cold Storage is arguably prone to his critique of audience
activation. For Rancière, spectators are not passive consumers of Spectacle,
but innovative translators of perceived things, acts and signs. The activa-
tion of audiences as productive participants might therefore be viewed
as a patronising and ultimately disempowering imperative. However, as
White puts it – and this is an important point – ‘It simply isn’t the case that
most practitioners these days […] have a thesis that they wish to trans-
mit’ (White, 2013, p. 22). Cold Storage is not political theatre. Indeed,
many immersive theatre performances are not political theatre. Attempts
are usually made to close off the outside world in immersive settings; there
is usually no implication that the outside world should be reformulated,

which therefore takes some of the bite away from Rancière’s critique of
work that matches the activation of audiences with political inspiration.
Nonetheless, there remains a politics of aesthetic production in Cold
Storage that corresponds to a culture of narcissism and forms of biopoliti-
cal production. This chapter has argued that contexts for production and
reception affect the meanings and values that are attributable to the aes-
thetics and politics of immersive theatre, as well as the necessarily limited
ambitions of a totally immersive theatre, and that the aesthetics of audi-
ence immersion and participation are informed by political concerns at a
fundamental level. Cold Storage posits the audience as a creative subject,
and it builds on an irrupting reality that is theirs to enjoy and that results
from their productive engagement with performance. However, its aes-
thetic logic also derives from an implicit valorisation of productivity, and
it relies on an audience’s investment in performance as an affected and
effective producer whose immaterial productivity is resourced. The per-
formance gives rise to creative freedoms even while locked inside a small,
cold box, but these risk being undercut once assessed in relation to con-
texts that problematise the equation of productivity and empowerment as
an assumed facet of spectatorship, especially once affect is recognised as a
many-layered phenomenon that is simultaneously produced, undergone
and potentially co-opted.
In the next chapter, I further an exploration of the tensions between
empowerment and productivity by focusing on relationships between
productivity, value and risk in light of their recurrence in neoliberal-
ism’s political and economic structures. Furthermore, having begun an
enquiry into immersive theatre by addressing a performance that subtracts
from audiences the ability to move freely, I now turn to the work of a
company – Lundahl & Seitl – that takes away from audiences the ability
to see clearly, asking: What happens to productive participation when it
occurs in complete darkness?
REFERENCES
Abercrombie, N., & Longhurst, B. (1998). Audiences: A sociological theory of per-
formance and imagination. London: Sage.
Adorno, T. (2013). Aesthetic theory. London: Bloomsbury.
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh
University Press.
70 A. ALSTON

and responsibility in immersive theatre. Performance Research, 18(2),
128–138.
Arnold, M. B. (1970). Perennial problems in the field of emotion. In M. B. Arnold
(Ed.), Feelings and emotions: The Loyola symposium (pp. 169–185). New York:
Academic.
Bell, C. (2003). The aesthetic hypothesis. In C. Harrison & P. Wood (Eds.), Art
in theory: 1900–2000: An anthology of changing ideas (pp. 107–110). Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political economy of things. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Bennett, S. (1997). Theatre audiences: A theory of production and reception (2nd
ed.). London: Routledge.
Blair, R. (2008). The actor, image, and action: Acting and cognitive neuroscience.
London: Routledge.
Bloch, S. (1993, September). ALBA EMOTING: A psychophysiological tech-
nique to help actors create and control real emotions. Theatre Topics, 3(2),
121–138.
Böhme, G. (1993, August). Atmosphere as a fundamental concept of a new aesthetics
(D. Roberts, Trans.). Thesis Eleven, 36, 113–126.
Bottoms, S. (2009). Authorizing the audience: The conceptual drama of Tim
Crouch. Performance Research, 14(1), 65–76.
Carlson, M. (2008). Introduction. In E. Fischer-Lichte (Ed.), The transformative
power of performance: A new aesthetics (pp. 1–10, S. I. Jain, Trans.). London:
Routledge.
Clough, P. T., & Halley, J. (2007). The affective turn: Theorizing the social.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain.
London: Vintage Books.
Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making
of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company.
Darwin, C. (2009 [1872]). The expression of the emotions in man and animals.
London: Penguin.
Deleuze, G. (2003). Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (D. W. Smith, Trans.).
London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004 [1987]). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and
schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Descartes, R. (1968 [1637]). Discourse on method and the meditations (F. E.
Sutcliffe, Trans.). London: Penguin.
de Spinoza, B. (1994 [1677]). Ethics (E. Curley, Ed. & Trans.). London: Penguin.
Diderot, D. (1883). The paradox of acting (W. H. Pollock, Trans.). London:

Chatto & Windus.
Duchamp, M. (1973). Apropos of readymades. In M. Sanouillet & E. Peterson
(Eds.), The writings of Marcel Duchamp (pp. 141–142). Marston Gate, UK: Da
Ca Po Press.
Ekman, P. (2003). Emotions revealed: Understanding faces and feelings. London:
Phoenix.
Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008). The transformative power of performance: A new aesthet-
ics, (S. I. Jain, Trans.). London: Routledge.
Fiumara, G. C. (2001). The mind’s affective life: A psychoanalytic and philosophical
inquiry. Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge.
Macmillan.
Fried, M. (1968). Art and objecthood. In G. Battcock (Ed.), Minimal art: A criti-
cal anthology (pp. 116–147). Berkeley, CA: California University Press.
Freud, S. (2006). On the introduction of Narcissism. In A. Phillips (Ed.), The
penguin Freud reader (pp. 358–390). London: Penguin.
Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R.. (2012, November).
Communal narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5),
854–878.
Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia.
In R. Ryan-Flood & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process:
Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ.
London: Bloomsbury.
Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg &
G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. London: Harvard University Press.
Harré, R., & Gerrod Parrott, W. (1996). Embarrassment and the threat to charac-
ter. In R. Harré & W. Gerrod Parrott (Eds.), The emotions: Social, cultural and
biological dimensions (pp. 39–56). London: Sage.
Heddon, D. (2008). Autobiography and performance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hegel, G. W. F. (2004 [1886]). Introductory lectures on aesthetics (B. Bosanquet,
Trans.). London: Penguin.
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feel-
ing (2nd ed.). London: University of California Press.
Houlcroft, L., Bore, M., & Munro, D. (2012). Three faces of Narcissism.
Personality and Individual Differences, 53, 274–278.
72 A. ALSTON

Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Jaeger, C. C., Renn, O., Rosa, E. A., & Webler, T. (2001). Risk, uncertainty, and
rational action. London: Earthscan.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagina-
tion and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kant, I. (2007 [1781]). Critique of pure reason (M. Weigelt, Ed. & Trans.).
London: Penguin.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and
its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism: American life in an age of diminishing
expectations. New York: Warner Books.
Lee, R. (2011). Email correspondence with the author, 28 November.
Lehmann, A. (1968). Theory of affectivity. In M. B. Arnold (Ed.), The nature of
emotion: Selected readings (pp. 37–42). Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Lehmann, H.-T. (2006). Postdramatic theatre (K. Jürs-Munby, Trans.). London:
Routledge.
Lowen, A. (1985). Narcissism: Denial of the true self. New York: Touchstone.
Luhmann, N. (2000). Art as a social system (E. M. Knodt, Trans.). Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Maturana, H. R., & Valera, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization
of the living. London: Reidel.
Mervant-Roux, M.-M. (2010). The Great Resonator: What historical anthropol-
ogy and an ethnographic approach to the auditorium tell us about audiences
(G. Casas & G. McAuley, Trans.). About Performance, 10, 223–239.
Morrison, A. P. (Ed.). (1986). Essential papers on Narcissism. New York: New York
University Press.
Ovid. (1986). Metamorphoses (A. D. Melville, Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Radford, C., & Weston, M. (1975). How can we be moved by the fate of Anna
Karenina. Proceedings of the Artistotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 49,
67–93.
Rancière, J. (2009). The emancipated spectator. In The emancipated spectator
Rix, R. (1993, September). ALBA EMOTING: A preliminary experiment with

emotional effector patterns. Theatre Topics, 3(2), 139–145.
Roach, J. (1985). The player’s passion: Studies in the science of acting. London:
Associated University Press.
Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self (2nd ed.).
London: Free Association Books.
Saville, S. J. (2008). Playing with fear: Parkour and the mobility of emotion. Social
& Cultural Geography, 9(8), 891–914.
Schiller, F. (2004 [1794]). On the aesthetic education of man (R. Snell, Trans.).
Mineola, NY: Dover.
Sennett, R. (1974). The fall of public man: On the social psychology of capitalism.
New York: Vintage Books.
Shaughnessy, N. (2012). Applying performance: Live art, socially engaged theatre
and affective practice. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sheppard, A. (1987). Aesthetics: An introduction to the philosophy of art. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
Tait, P. (2002). Performing emotions: Gender, bodies, spaces in Chekhov’s drama and
Stanislavski’s theatre. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing.
Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London:
Routledge.
Tomkins, S. S. (1962). Affect imagery consciousness: Volume 1: Positive affects.
New York: Springer.
public. TDR, 58(4), 56–67.
Woolf, B. (2013). Towards a paradoxically parallaxical postdramatic politics? In
K. Jürs-Munby, J. Carroll, & S. Giles (Eds.), Postdramatic theatre and the polit-
ical: International perspectives on contemporary performance (pp. 31–46).
London: Bloomsbury.
Zaointz, K. (2014). Narcissistic spectatorship in immersive and one-on-one per-
formance. Theatre Journal, 66, 405–425.
CHAPTER 3
Theatre in the Dark: Spectatorship and Risk

in Lundahl & Seitl’s Pitch-Black Theatre
‘Theatre in the dark’ – theatre performances that use and centralise dark-
ness in the constitution of a theatre aesthetic – thrives on the incessant
productivity of spectators.1 Unlike watching a lit or shadow-cast stage
from a dark theatre auditorium, experiences of panoramic darkness in
immersive theatre tend to draw aesthetic focus because complete darkness
overwhelms a given space and the things and people within that space, and
because experiences of complete darkness take on an unusual quality in
comparison with the more familiar glow or glare of artificial lighting in the
city at night, or the bluish gloom of moonlight in rural areas. Audiences
watch total darkness and their watching is creative. Beyond darkness itself,
there is no forest of things, acts and signs that can be observed by specta-
tors; however, a spectator immersed in total darkness is presented with a
blank canvas on which they can project their own forest, together with
the fears, desires, and anything else that might derive from the specta-
tor’s imaginative and affective engagement with darkness. Total darkness
masks the actual or potential presence of things and people who may very
well ask something of the participant, involving them, willingly or unwill-
ingly, in the unfolding of a performance. Whether or not these things and
people are actually there need not stop an audience from imagining their
proximity and potential influence.
1
Martin Welton uses the term ‘theatre in the dark’ as a subtitle in a chapter on theatre and
darkness (Welton, 2006). ‘Theatre in the Dark’ was also the title of a symposium considering
darkness in theatre and performance organised by me on 12 July 2014 at the University of Surrey.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_3
76 A. ALSTON
The last chapter explored audience productivity within the confines of a

very small, very cold box. This chapter considers spectatorial creativity as a
particular aspect of audience productivity, focusing on how the possibilities
of participation beyond spectatorship affect the productivity of spectator-
ship as a creative practice. I am particularly interested in how depriving
audiences of the ability to see clearly might facilitate an increase in the
productivity of spectatorship in immersive settings. How is spectatorship
affected by the possibility of doing more than watching while immersed
in complete darkness? And what are the political stakes of increasing the
productivity of spectatorship in immersive theatre?
Audience engagement in immersive theatre does not just concern
participation; audiences spend much of their time in immersive theatre
performances watching the world around them as spectators. However,
where doing something more than watching is a prospect, even if unful-
filled, spectatorship is affected. The affective experience of spectating in
the dark is peculiarly strong because the darkness holds a potentially infi-
nite number of unknowns. Complete darkness is risky. Audiences, because
they imaginatively engage with these unknowns as affective possibilities,
muster from the darkness a number of risks that might bear down, how-
ever unlikely, on an audience’s welfare and sense of safety and security.
This plays into the productivity of spectatorship, insofar as the audience’s
imaginative engagement with the possibilities of darkness creates a world
that is projected onto darkness: a world that is the immaterial consequence
of imagination and an affective engagement with the dark.
Alongside an examination of spectatorship as an important part of the
aesthetics of audience engagement in immersive theatre, this chapter also
develops the political critique of immersive theatre aesthetics begun in
Chap. 2 by assessing how important meanings and values that are attrib-
utable to a peculiarly productive mode of spectatorship tie in with socio-
logical and economic contexts beyond the seemingly infinite panorama
of complete darkness. This chapter considers risk and risk-taking as nor-
mative values and activities that are related to a society that has become
preoccupied with risk, and particularly a neoliberalised rendering of risk.
As Chap. 2 explored, neoliberalism links productivity to the psychological
and physiological capabilities of individuals; immersive theatre is compa-
rably biopolitical to the extent that it assigns audiences to a scheme of
production that co-opts an affective engagement with performance as a
resource in the production of an immersive theatre aesthetic. I now want
to take this further by considering how theatre in the dark builds on the
SPECTATORSHIP AND RISK IN LUNDAHL & SEITL’S PITCH-BLACK THEATRE 77
affective experience of risk perception and risk-taking as abilities that audi-

ences are expected to utilise while immersed in complete darkness, and
how these abilities affect the biopolitics of spectatorship as a productive
and creative practice.
In the next section, I briefly survey two related but distinct historical
lineages: the darkening of theatre auditoria and the emergence of theatre
in the dark. I then define risk and risk perception, and consider how risk
perception in a theatre in the dark performance by Lundahl & Seitl called
Rotating in a Room of Images (2007–) affects the productivity of spec-
tatorship in immersive theatre. The section after that explores the emer-
gence of the ‘risk society’ and how Third Way politics, which provided a
basis for New Labour’s political philosophy in the UK, responded to a set
of newly emerging risks in the risk society by promoting and valuing an
‘active’ and ‘positive’ embrace of risk as a key aspect of neoliberal gover-
nance. I am especially interested in the relationships between risk, produc-
tivity and value in Third Way politics, and how these relationships inform
the engagement of audiences immersed in complete darkness. However,
this chapter also complicates the equation of risk with neoliberal value by
exploring how Lundahl & Seitl experiment with the ground between trust
and risk, isolation and intimacy, and responsibility and support, resulting
in a complexly political handling of an immersed spectator.
DARK HERITAGE
Theatre in the dark is a fairly recent phenomenon that centralises darkness
as an aesthetic end in itself. However, in order to mark out its heritage and
relevance to the aesthetics and politics of immersive theatre, it is useful
to define the trajectory that led to the prominent tradition of darkening
theatre auditoria, if only to distinguish this tradition from current experi-
mentation in dark theatre aesthetics.2
As Scott Palmer (2013) recognises, drawing on Leone di Somi’s
Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (1556), theatre
makers in late-Renaissance Italy were among the first to experiment with
dimming and extinguishing candlelight for tragic effect in the sixteenth
2
I am currently working on a new book project with Martin Welton, provisionally titled
Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (London:
Methuen), which will deal more comprehensively with the plural histories of dark theatre
aesthetics.
78 A. ALSTON
century. He also credits di Somi as ‘the first to identify the shift in percep-
tion generated when a spectator is placed in shadow’ (Palmer, 2013, p. 7).
However, as Palmer acknowledges, di Somi was not innovating ex nihilo;
experimentation with differing levels of candlelight in theatre is likely to
have been inspired by the Tenebrae (meaning ‘shadows’), a Christian
Holy Week service dating back to the Middle Ages in which candles are
gradually extinguished over the course of a church service. Di Somi was
certainly a pioneer of endarkened theatre auditoria, but there were already
evocative precursors in the rites of Western Christianity that speak to the
mysteriousness of immersion in total darkness.
While experimentation with dark auditoria persisted throughout the
Baroque and Enlightenment periods (see Koslofsky, 2011, pp. 93–110;
Schivelbusch, 1988, pp. 191–212), their religiosity was not to achieve
its apogee until after the opening of Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in
Bayreuth in 1876, described in a travel letter written by Mark Twain
in 1891 as follows: ‘The interior of the building is simple – severely so;
but there is no occasion for color and decoration, since the people sit
in the dark … All the lights were turned low, so low that the congrega-
tion sat in a deep and solemn gloom’ (Twain, 1881, p. 33). It is not
merely an audience that Twain describes, but a congregation that chimes
as much with that of the Tenebrae service as it does with audiences in
Italian Renaissance theatres. Twain’s word choice alludes to an inherent,
quasi-religious dimension of endarkened spaces in which a gathered public
congregates: a dimension that serves the theatre artwork by focusing the
attention of a gathered audience who nestle, contemplatively, within a
deep and solemn gloom.
Dark auditoria, therefore, do not begin with Wagner’s Festspielhaus,
but rather stem from a history of experimentation with darkness both
inside and outside of theatre contexts. Nonetheless, the practice of darken-
ing theatre auditoria only came to play a significant and pervasive role west
of Rome and Bavaria from the early 1880s, following innovations in gas,
lime and electric carbon-arc lighting. As Nicholas Ridout records, Richard
D’Oyly Carte introduced electric lighting to London’s Savoy Theatre in
1881, following the invention of the incandescent carbon filament electric
lamp in 1879. Paris followed suit after André Antoine’s 1888 produc-
tion of La mort du Duc d’Enghien, which is where a connection might be
drawn between dark auditoria and naturalism (Ridout, 2006, pp. 48–9).
Furthermore, the history of dark theatre auditoria is made even more
complicated once a gap is acknowledged between experimental practice
and tradition. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests, the practice of darken-

ing theatre auditoria only formed as a tradition after the popularisation of
cinema in the early twentieth century (Schivelbusch, 1988, pp. 210–12).
The tradition of darkening theatre auditoria, then, at least as it might be
understood in Europe today, emerges from a range of cultural and tempo-
ral contexts spanning theatre, film and church services.
Theatre in the dark, as an immersive theatre practice, did not emerge
until the end of the twentieth century, although ideas for harnessing
darkness and blackout as aesthetic media had been planned by perfor-
mance makers at least as early as the Futurist Aeropainter Fillìa’s Tactile
Dinner Party, which may or may not have taken place at some point
between 1930 and 1931, depending on whether or not you have faith
in the questionable archival practices of the Futurists (Marinetti, 2014,
p. 170; see also Berghaus, 2001, p. 14). In this party-cum-participatory-
performance, guests put on prepared pyjamas ‘made of or covered with a
different tactile material such as sponge, cork, sandpaper, felt, aluminium
sheeting, bristles, steel wool, cardboard, silk, velvet, etc.’ before enter-
ing a dark room, empty of furniture: ‘without being able to see, each
guest must choose a dinner partner quickly according to his tactile inspira-
tion’. Guests then enter another room where an eccentric banquet takes
place (Marinetti, 2014, p. 170). Playwrights, at least since the 1950s,
have also utilised darkness not just to facilitate audience engagement, but
as an aesthetically constitutive part of a drama, most notably in Harold
Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1957), Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of
a Negro (1964), and Samuel Beckett’s Not I (1972). In each of these
plays, near-total darkness or sustained blackouts take on an aesthetic sig-
nificance that surpasses the now conventional darkening of theatre audi-
toria. Finally – and perhaps the closest progenitor to theatre in the dark
as it exists today – it is important to note Andreas Heinecke’s participa-
tory installation Dialogue in the Dark. Dialogue in the Dark is a travelling
installation (which now has a permanent base in Hamburg) that has been
presenting live simulations of blindness for sighted audiences since 1989.
The installation recreates urban environments for visitors to explore, such
as a subway carriage and a supermarket, but casts those environments in
complete darkness. While the extent to which this offers sighted audi-
ences an understanding of visual impairment is dubious, it nonetheless
immerses audiences in dark environments that they are free to explore as
audience members, and consequently bears a striking aesthetic semblance
to theatre in the dark.
80 A. ALSTON
Dialogue in the Dark was programmed as part of the Avignon Festival’s

1993 ‘Dark/Noir’ season. Dark/Noir brought together work that
addressed relationships between light and darkness in performance, such as
Dana Reitz, Jennifer Tipton and Sara Rudner’s Necessary Weather (1992),
which explored choreographic relationships between movement and light,
and an ‘alchemical’ exploration of visual imagery and the ‘palpability’ of
night in Leszek Mądzik’s Tchnienie (1992). Dialogue in the Dark’s con-
tribution to Dark/Noir included gastronomic experiences in total dark-
ness, echoing Fillìa’s plans for a Tactile Dinner Party. The organisation’s
involvement in the 1993 Avignon Festival also played a foundational role
in the formation of a ‘dining in the dark’ movement, which gave rise to sev-
eral successful pitch-black restaurants in the 1990s, including Blindekuh
(Zurich) and Unsicht-Bar (Cologne) (Saerberg, 2007, n.p.). Dining in
the dark has since morphed into a global franchise following the founding
of the first Dans Le Noir? restaurant in Paris in 2004, alongside the devel-
opment of several permanent Dans Le Noir? restaurants in Europe and
Russia and pop-up dark dining events in cities around the world.
Dark/Noir was one of two important festivals for the emergence of the-
atre in the dark as it exists in Europe today; the other was the Battersea Arts
Centre’s 1998 ‘Playing in the Dark’ festival, which featured an experience
called Dark Dinners by June Bretherton of the Bretherton Consultancy,
in collaboration with Martin Gent of dA dA dumb, alongside work for
dark spaces by Sound&Fury, Théâtre de Complicité and a ‘Shakespeare in
the Dark’ micro festival. Both Bretherton and Gent had worked together
before on Dialogue in the Dark when it came to the Royal Festival Hall
on London’s Southbank in 1995. Dark Dinners followed in the footsteps
of Dialogue in the Dark’s gastronomic performance experimentation with
a menu that was specifically designed for its tactile appeal, again harken-
ing back to the Futurist Tactile Dinner Party. Theatre, performance and
culinary histories are consequently entwined as theatre in the dark found
its feet toward the end of the twentieth century. Theatre in the dark’s heri-
tage therefore exceeds theatre history and depends as much, if not more,
on the culture industry more widely conceived than it does on experimen-
tation with endarkened auditoria since the Italian Renaissance.
This potted history of darkness in theatre now arrives at theatre in the
dark as it exists today: as theatre which builds on the experimentation
of twentieth-century innovators concerned with the aesthetic potential of
darkness in theatre, performance and in the culture industry more broadly.
David Rosenberg and Glen Neath’s theatre in the dark performances, Ring
(2012–2014) and Fiction (2014–), are particularly noteworthy examples

given their playful approach to the theatre in the dark form. Binaural
sound recordings were played through headphones in both performances,
giving the effect of three-dimensional sound, to deceive sedentary audi-
ences into thinking that characters were really whispering into their ears.
The virtual ended up collapsed into the actual in dark performance spaces
where such distinctions could not be visually verified and where uncertain-
ties prevailed. The performance collective shunt have also experimented
and continue to experiment with darkness as an aesthetic end in a number
of shows since their formation in 1998, which is perhaps unsurprising
given Rosenberg’s participation as a member of the shunt collective – and
perhaps also given his experience as a practising anaesthetist, where paral-
lels might be drawn with alternative descents into darkness.
Sound&Fury are, in the UK, the best-known contemporary experi-
menter with dark theatre aesthetics and have been making work for dark
spaces since War Music (1998), which featured in the BAC’s Playing in the
Dark festival following an invitation from former BAC artistic director Tom
Morris. Since then, The Watery Part of the World (2001–2004) has received
critical acclaim for its employment of surround sound and 70 minutes of
total darkness, apart from occasional dim lighting which revealed disem-
bodied heads commenting on the sinking of a whaling ship by a sperm
whale. Kursk (2009–2011) immersed standing audiences in total darkness
for prolonged periods on board a British submarine haunted by the sounds
and echoes of doomed Russian submariners (incidentally, this was not a real
submarine. Most Sound&Fury performances take place in studio theatres
and are not site-specific/-responsive). And Going Dark (2010–2014) used
moments of complete darkness to hint at the sight deprivation endured by
the performance’s protagonist as he slowly went blind.
Theatre in the dark, particularly performances that thematise blind-
ness, risks romanticising visual impairment, making experiences of tem-
porary sight deprivation thrilling in a way that arguably does an injustice
to the daily experiences of visually impaired people. The often very enjoy-
able or exhilarating experience of looking in and at darkness comes with
the promise of unimpaired vision returning after the performance – for
sighted audiences. This is what makes the work of Extant so important.
Extant is a UK-based theatre company composed of partially sighted and
blind actors and creatives who look to challenge cultural assumptions
about and develop awareness of blindness and visual impairment. For
instance, audiences in Extant’s Sheer (2012) were guided to conventional
82 A. ALSTON
auditorium seats in total darkness, led by blind performers. The dark space
was occasionally punctured by shards of light, exposing blind actors paro-
dying sexual expressiveness in burlesque sequences inspired by B-movie
sci-fi films. While rough around the edges in terms of the quality of the
narrative and dramaturgy, what emerged was a critique of the attempts of
sighted audiences to ‘get at’ an experience that was not theirs to know, but
which nonetheless invited engagement with visual impairment through
both the sensory and critical faculties.
Depriving audiences of sight has also been approached by theatre makers
in a number of other ways aside from darkening theatre spaces, introduc-
ing a charged eroticism to the live participatory encounter. This is espe-
cially true of Ontroerend Goed’s The Smile off Your Face (2003–2013). In
this performance, audiences were blindfolded and had their wrists bound,
forced to submit to the control of the performers as they were wheeled
around a series of one-on-one performance experiences in a wheelchair.
Bad Physics’ adaptation of Louis de Bernières’ Sunday Morning at the
Centre of the World (2011) used blindfolds toward less erotic ends, treat-
ing the blindfold as a device to focus the audience’s attention on senses
other than sight as they were handed objects and substances to feel and
smell. Projet In Situ’s Do You See What I Mean? A Blindfolded Journey
Through the City (2005–2011) has toured internationally, offering audi-
ences a guided, blindfolded and sensual journey through cityscapes includ-
ing Marseille, Lyon, Montreal and Geneva. It is also worth mentioning
the use of hoods covering the entire head, particularly those purporting
to ‘kidnap’ or hold audience members hostage, such as Lucien Bourjeily’s
66 Minutes in Damascus (2012) and the second part of Punchdrunk’s
corporate performance for Stella Artois Black, The Black Diamond (2011).
Noteworthy art installations in the dark have also been developed since
the emergence of Dialogue in the Dark. Most famous, perhaps, is Miroslaw
Balka’s installation How It Is (2009): a cavernous, five-sided container in
the Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern gallery, in which promenading
individuals immersed themselves in (near-)total darkness. In 2010, drama-
tist Chris Goode created a performance for Balka’s installation called Who
You Are, as a part of the Tate’s ‘Experiences of the Dark’ series of talks,
performances and workshops. The thematic focus of a narrative relayed
through speakers within the container was on what it means to be in the
dark with strangers, along with what the darkness hides, the deceptiveness
and playfulness enabled by darkness, and what audiences might wish to
leave ‘in the dark’ when privacy is threatened in the digital age.
My focus in this chapter, though, is on the work of Christer Lundahl

and Martina Seitl: a Swedish-born, London-based artist duo known as
Lundahl & Seitl who have contributed much to the development of the-
atre in the dark. In their work, it is typical for audiences to wear ‘white-
out’ goggles that deprive audiences of the opportunity to see their
surroundings, aside from more intense degrees of whiteness when torches
are flashed into the goggles by performers who the artists call ‘guides’ (see
Fig. 3.1). These guides lead sight-deprived audience members through a
space as they listen to a narrative relayed through headphones. They take
audience members by the hand, or encourage the participant to reach out
and find their hand, before walking them through a space, or through
various spaces. The softly spoken and playful audio narratives usually make
reference to perceiving different layers of reality, or perceiving imagined
landscapes behind the world of appearances. In The Memory of W.T. Stead
(2013), performed in London’s Steinway Hall, this meant climbing into
an (imaginary) piano and crawling through its string-creaking inner
recesses, entering into a psycho-musical landscape (in narrative, music
Fig. 3.1 Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–) (Photography
by Andreas Karperyd. Courtesy of Emma Leach)
84 A. ALSTON
and the mind’s eye) inspired by Bach, Ligeti and the parapsychology of
W.T. Stead. In Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–), which I first experi-
enced at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2014, audience mem-
bers were led by their guides ‘through’ the walls of a gallery and through
imaginary doors into an extra-dimensional world where fragments from
curator and art worker interviews melded with a physical and imaginative
journey through the gallery and ‘within’ and ‘behind’ paintings.
In Rotating in a Room of Images, which featured in the same one-
on-one festival as Cold Storage at the BAC, their characteristic white-out
goggles were not used and instead they worked with a pitch-black the-
atre space and intermittent periods of light. Rotating revisited and revised
Recreational Test Site (2007), also performed at the BAC, which itself
shared some stylistic and technological techniques with an even earlier
manifestation, My Voice Shall Now Come from the Other Side of the Room
(2006). These performances chart an important part of Lundahl & Seitl’s
ongoing aesthetic interest in sight deprivation and limitation.
My own notes following an experience of Rotating describe a woman
in blue who stood to my left at the start of the performance, gesturing for
me to sit down. She approached and covered my ears with headphones,
hanging a sling containing an MP3 player across my shoulder. The head-
phones mediated a recorded narrative, which gave instructions to the par-
ticipant and picked up on the artists’ familiar preoccupation with altered
states of perception and consciousness. The headphones also blotted out
audio spill – a common aesthetic feature in theatre in the dark performances
and particularly in work by Lundahl & Seitl – promoting aesthetic cohe-
sion. Consequently, sensory deprivation, or limitation, was used to promote
a narcissistic participation in which aesthetic attention was turned inward
toward an experiencing self that also reached outwards, feelingly. The lights
faded to black. A young female voice in my headphones asked me to stand
up and in doing so I made the first of many stumbles. The lights faded back
up and the orientation of the room had shifted 90° to form a long, white
corridor: a trick made possible by the use of fabric drapes to mark the space’s
boundaries. The lights faded back to black. The voice asked me to reach out
my hand before another hand gently touched mine, taking hold of my palm
so as to guide me through the dark space. Despite its gentleness, the touch
came as a shock. Somehow this person could see (I later found out that
Lundahl & Seitl’s guides use night vision goggles). This was the hand – or
was it several hands? – that would appear from above, below, in front of, and
behind for me to find as the stumbling and fumbling continued.
I soon found myself facing myself; a camera protruded from a fabric

wall in front of me and I was writ-large around it. Retrospectively, the
implicit narcissism seems clear. I looked behind. Nothing. I looked back at
the projection, but this time a man and a woman appeared in shot, walk-
ing toward me: a couple seemingly plucked from a Baroque painting. After
more searching through the dark after a long series of glimpsed images
materialised in moments of light, I found the couple and the woman in
blue performing a ritual of some kind behind a set of open doors. The
voice in my headphones asked me to approach. When I drew near, a per-
former stood in my path. We looked into each other’s eyes. The door was
closed. The performance ended.
The presence of affects and sensations contribute to the perception of
risk in otherwise safe environments, like the one in Rotating. I stumbled,
anticipated and imagined things and people that could have been out
there, somewhere in the darkness. As Martin Welton, who was among
the first to theorise theatre in the dark, suggests: darkness ‘is right there
in front of you, and the pleasures and terrors of the dark surely rest on the
collapse of distance as result. Where light reveals the distance between you
and the objects of your perception, you are together with them in darkness
for good or ill’ (Welton, 2013, p. 5). Darkness, in other words, jeopardises
the perception of proximity beyond arm’s reach.
For Welton, the pleasures and terrors of the dark are linked to the real
or imagined distance between experiencer and the experienced; I agree,
but I also consider this to be first and foremost about risk perception and
the pleasures or terrors that the perception of risk might induce. ‘For in
utter darkness,’ writes Edmund Burke,
it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant

of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some
dangerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take;
and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves;
in such a case strength is no sure protection; wisdom can only act by guess.
(Burke qtd in Sorensen, 2004, p. 468)
There may not be any material risks that pose a significant threat to
safety for the subject immersed in the darkness of Rotating, but this does
not affect the perception of risk so long as threats or obstacles are imag-
ined or feared by the perceiver. If participating audiences in immersive
theatre are asked to move in darkness, the likelihood of striking against
86 A. ALSTON
some dangerous object may seem to increase and this will affect the par-
ticipating audience member, albeit in a way that will be contingent on
a given participant’s disposition toward darkness. In turn, edginess will
make participants more inclined to perceive risk.
As Roy Sorensen points out in a critique of Burke, our emotional state
in darkness ‘is more apt to cross the Burkean threshold from fear to awe’
(Sorensen, 2004, p. 469). However, the broader contention I propose
and explore in the rest of this chapter is that risk perception produces
affective responses in the dark, which might be positive or negative, in
aesthetically constructed situations that thrive on uncertainties. I want to
consider what it is that makes participating audiences especially productive
in the dark. Risk might produce fear, or awe, or excitement, or trepida-
tion, or countless other responses that also contribute to a susceptibility
to perceiving further risks. In each case, darkness works as a canvas against
which audiences project risk, imbuing darkness with one’s own interests.
Artists provide stimuli for risk perception, but audiences produce risk per-
ception in relation to those stimuli. If risk perception comes to play an
important part in the aesthetics of a given theatre in the dark performance,
then the audience produces an important part of that aesthetic. However,
they don’t actually have to do anything at all for this to happen, other than
watch.
WATCHING DARKNESS
In Affective Performance and Cognitive Science (Shaughnessy, 2013),
Josephine Machon and I describe and analyse two contrasting expe-
riences of Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating. For Machon, this was a gentle,
trusting performance because of how the performance ‘guides’ walk ‘vis-
itors’ – Lundahl & Seitl’s terms for performers and audiences, respec-
tively – through an experience of the work. I agree, to an extent, but the
agreement is reached via a different path. The guides in all Lundahl &
Seitl performances that I have experienced are sensitive to how tactility
can shock audiences if unexpected. The guides need to be sensitive to
this observation because, for participants, there is an element of risk at
stake. I used my own contribution to Affective Performance and Cognitive
Science to begin reflecting on the relationships between affect and risk in
theatre in the dark. My recollection of Rotating described in that chapter
focuses on my own sense of anxiety, as well as thrill, manifested in the
shock accompanying the first gentle touch of an unseen hand in the dark.
If the visitor is new to Lundahl & Seitl’s work, then uncertainties are high
and so is a corresponding level of risk. If they have experienced Lundahl &
Seitl’s work before, then uncertainty is reduced and so is the level of risk.
Risk is present in both cases, not least because an anticipated action – such
as the touch of an unseen hand – cannot always be accurately tied to a
time in which the action takes place, unless the audio narrative prepares an
audience member for the action; even then the tactile relationship with an
unseen other produces a frisson of excitement.
I want to elaborate and revise some of the ideas set out in that chap-
ter, only without recourse to cognitive science, as I now feel that adopt-
ing definitions and theorisations of risk from the social sciences, read in
conjunction with theatre and performance scholarship, can tell us more
about the relationships between risk and audience engagement in dark
theatre performances. I also want to dig more deeply into the relationships
between aesthetics and politics in Rotating, and tease out some of the
meanings and values that are attributable to a peculiarly productive mode
of spectatorship once audiences are confronted with the manifold possibil-
ities of darkness. Audiences piece together a string of meanings and values
when they watch any theatre performance, and allow for their perception
and understanding of theatre to be influenced by a body of knowledge
and experience acquired over a lifetime, much as Rancière acknowledges
in ‘The Emancipated Spectator’. But what happens when this inherent
capacity that all spectators possess is harnessed as an important source of
aesthetic production? I do not mean this in the sense of activating audi-
ences into a lasting empowerment that exceeds the duration of a theatre
performance, which bears the brunt of Rancière’s critique of twentieth-
century, politically engaged theatre practice; rather, I want to ask what
happens when audience productivity is absorbed into a scheme of aesthetic
production that utilises and relies upon an ‘emancipated’ mode of percep-
tion that permits not just the interpretative reading and piecing together
of things, acts and signs in the theatre, but the creation of those things,
acts and signs in the imagination – not just a translation of something
watched, but the imaginative production of performance.
Varying etymological roots have been foregrounded in sociological
studies of risk, each of which inflects the notions of risk and risk-taking
with different qualities. Peter Bernstein derives risk ‘from the early Italian
risicare, which means “to dare”’ (Bernstein, 1996, p. 8), whereas Gerda
Reith looks toward the seventeenth-century Anglo-French risqué to
underscore how time and uncertainty are entwined in the notion of risk
88 A. ALSTON
(Reith, 2008, p. 64). In the contemporary British context, the word risqué
has persisted, although it has accumulated semiotic baggage and tends to
be used to describe something or someone as edgy, controversial, erotic,
potentially dangerous or morally questionable, but nonetheless hedonisti-
cally inviting. For Reith, risk ‘is defined by and through temporality: the
notion of “risk” expresses not something that has happened or is hap-
pening, but something that might happen’ (Reith, 2008, p. 59, original
emphasis). In other words, risk necessitates engagement with something
that is unknown, or with an unknown outcome.
This is an appealingly broad definition of risk. However, the twentieth-
century economist Frank Knight, an influential voice in risk research, was
at pains to distinguish uncertainty from risk. For Knight, where uncertainty
signals something which cannot be measured, risk can be measured. What
Knight’s economistic view of risk defends is that risk can be objectively
identified from any subject position. For Knight, the distinction between
risk and uncertainty provides the basis upon which profits might be made
in the broader context of a market of actors (Knight, 2006, pp. 19–20).
But once risk is extended outside of a purely economic context, without
forgetting that context, the place of uncertainty in risk seems integral and
becomes its defining attribute (see Luhmann, 1993, p. 28; Jaeger et al.,
2001, p. 17). As theatre scholar Louise Owen rightly points out, uncer-
tainty is not something that can be evacuated from the notion of risk
without fundamentally altering what it represents; it introduces dynamism
to the concept of risk, as well as ‘the possibility for disruption and the
potential for gain or loss’ (Owen, 2009, p. 39). It is for this reason that I
find Knight’s economistic definition of risk to be too narrow; to engage
with risk is to engage with an uncertain future in the present. Uncertainty
is its most important attribute, no matter how honed the techniques to
quantify and measure risk.
Various affiliations are likely to affect the perception of risk and produce
some similar risk perceptions among those within particular social and cul-
tural groups (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982, pp. 6–9); however, the sheer
number of contemporary affiliations that a given individual possesses, along
with their individual life experiences, will promote a complex set of ‘multi-
dimensional’ inputs (heuristic, cognitive, affective, social, political, and
cultural) that all contribute to an individual’s perception of risk (Renn &
Rohrmann, 2000, pp. 221–2). Risk perception results from a complex
mingling of autobiography and sociality, binding the risk-perceiving sub-
ject to an idiosyncratic web of associations that elude standardisation,
indicatively spanning family relationships, friendship groups, exposure to

the mass media, government policy, hearsay, childhood fears, and so on.
As Stuart Grant recognises in a philosophical study of risk and perfor-
mance, all performance – including the unfolding moments of a live the-
atre event – contains within it an improvisational quality that is linked to
a singular, he suggests, and ‘more or less unpredictable situation’ (Grant,
2014, p. 127). For Grant, ‘risk defines performance’ because of its rela-
tion to uncertainty and chance (Grant, 2014, p. 128), and provides an
antithesis, within a commonly supposed binary adhered to by the author,
to the more stabilising aspects of theatre – such as rehearsal, script, per-
former training and the like. However, while performance necessarily con-
tains within it some degree of uncertainty, in many instances this degree
is fairly slim for those, including audiences, who may be familiar with the
codes, conventions and nature of a given performance – such as a theatre
performance.
In addition to the latent prospect of a chance occurrence in what may
well be a well-rehearsed theatre performance, such as something going
wrong, audiences who attend immersive and participatory performances
must also contend with a work that asks something of them, or threat-
ens to ask something of them. The manifold possibilities that could be
attached to this additional element by an affected audience member, how-
ever absurd, therefore add much clearer and more explicit layers of uncer-
tainty to the audience experience of theatre that significantly enhance the
inherently uncertain possibilities of a theatre performance’s unfolding
eventfulness. The ‘significant enhancement’ in question is the result of
risk perception’s idiosyncrasy, which makes uncertainty considerably more
palpable for immersed theatre audiences who must deal with the affective
consequences of actual or prospective participation.
At its most benign, risk perception in immersive theatre can be expe-
rienced with complacency, particularly if theatregoers have been overex-
posed to risk perception in theatre in the past. At its worst, immersive
theatre places audiences in situations that leave them vulnerable for the
sake of making them vulnerable, without putting mechanisms in place to
support vulnerable participants, or without directing vulnerability toward
the realisation of something worthwhile or interesting, such as the eth-
ics of a participatory exchange between a performer and a performing
audience. At its most challenging, immersive theatre places audiences
in situations of vulnerability, but the vulnerability serves an illuminat-
ing purpose. At its most rewarding, vulnerability in immersive theatre is
90 A. ALSTON
negotiated by performers and audiences in ways that foster trust, support

and understanding.
In Rotating in a Room of Images, audiences are placed in a situation
pervaded by uncertainties that are maximised by hampering a sense that
may well be important to sighted audiences. They invite audiences to
engage with risk perception by immersing them in complete darkness.
Audience members are supported, most of the time, by guides, although
they are also exposed to vulnerability in total darkness and even more so
once they accept an invitation to move in the dark, which is sometimes
rewarded with the hand of a performer who guides participants through
darkness, and sometimes not. The performance therefore places audiences
in a vulnerable position that is negotiated between guides and audiences;
what emerges is a complex balancing of risk as an imposed condition of
audience engagement, and the security of a guide whose gentle touch
both leads and reassures.
Gareth White is right to point out that the reluctance experienced by
many people to perform in public
is based in an understanding of a real risk. To expose unconsidered thoughts

or emotions in a semi-public space is risky, just as it is to display incompe-
tence, inappropriate enthusiasm, neediness, distress or loss of poise. The risk
in all these cases is that we undermine the careful (though not often entirely
conscious) performance of a consistent and functional persona: a public self.
(White, 2013, p. 76)
However, a theatre in the dark performance like Rotating demonstrates

that the riskiness of audience participation is not just about the potential
undermining of a public self, as important a risk as this is; darkness can
help to protect participants from feeling exposed. In Lundahl & Seitl’s
work, the risk is not so much that participants lose face, as the face is
understood to be masked by the dark so long as the night vision goggles
worn by invisible guides are not acknowledged; rather, the risk is that par-
ticipants lose their feet, or their orientation. Participants must find their
footing in the dark when asked to move. They must navigate the dark
when asked to do something, such as seeking out a hand somewhere in
front of them. There is a risk of failure, however unlikely or ambiguous,
but no matter how unlikely the risk of failure the fact that risk tends not
to be a measurable uncertainty in a live performance suggests that high
levels of risk can still be perceived. It is not that audiences are mistaken
in perceiving risk; instead, the parameters of risk perception are broad

enough to make risks feel real for participating audiences. Engaging with
uncertain futures in performance, however guided those futures might
turn out to be, does not detract from the meaning and feeling of risks for
individual participants.
Drawing on reader-response theory in audience research and literary
theory, White refers to the collective inputs which make up a participant’s
risk perception as their ‘horizon of risk’. This horizon ‘is given structure
by the negative impulses of the audience participant, and the positive exer-
tions of the procedural author who tries to anticipate, elicit, ameliorate
and/or overcome these perceptions’ (White, 2013, p. 83). For White,
the way in which a horizon of risk is structured by participants and antici-
pated, or ameliorated, by theatre makers (the ‘authors’ of procedures for
participation) is ultimately an ethical concern. There is either an ethically
justifiable case to be made for challenging participants with risky situations
that affect audiences by leaving them vulnerable, or there is not. However,
I want to politicise the notion of a ‘horizon of risk’ as an issue that arises
from the aesthetics of invitations to engage in and with immersive theatre.
Lundahl & Seitl ask audiences to produce within aesthetic space in a way
that exceeds watching; they ask participants to move and to act. There is an
ethics of the invitation that concerns itself with how the individual should
act and how Lundahl & Seitl should handle the participant. However,
the politics of audience engagement in a work like Rotating is concerned
with risk perception as an underlying condition that affects an individual’s
capacity to act, in relation to their being acted upon. Perceiving and act-
ing upon risk, projecting onto a panoramic, pitch-black landscape one’s
own fears and desires, posits the audience member as a producer of an
imagined environment that adds to occasional interaction with the hands
of unseen others who guide audiences. The audience’s own abilities – not
least the ability to imagine possible futures – are resourced as a productive
element in an aesthetic of audience immersion that affects audiences and
allows for affect to intensify an especially creative form of perception.
The riskiness of audience engagement in complete darkness is linked
not just to actual movement and participation in the dark, but prospective
participation. The possibility of moving, or of being involved in the per-
formance beyond watching, was enough to make me feel tentative about
what might happen next. In my own experience of Rotating, small, tenta-
tive movements were characterised by trepidation and mild exhilaration.
Affect was produced and an experience of affect seized attention; it felt
92 A. ALSTON
important and meaningful. Imagined and real barriers were assumed to be

proximate, because it seemed safer to assume proximity and not walk into
anything than to assume distance and trip over or walk into something. I
did end up moving, but not before feeling the affective effects of move-
ment’s possibilities.
The kind of productivity that arises from such an engagement with
darkness was not simply about decoding an aesthetic, but making for
myself something to be decoded as the product of an especially creative
spectatorship affected by the possibility of participation, or of participat-
ing more forthrightly. As Erin Hurley points out, the blackout – and by
extension theatre in the dark – ‘allows for subjunctive thinking’ (Hurley,
2004, p. 201). What if something really is out there, somewhere in the
dark? Could this thing, or person, be a threat? These kinds of questions
affected how spectatorship worked in the dark, not just by focusing spec-
tatorship onto a particular object or person, but by imagining things and
people as possibilities that could be there and that might affect me, for
better or worse.
As Welton recognises, theatre in the dark reduces (visual) perception
to the very barest level of appearance, but it also enables the theatrical
creation of a world to assert itself through a spectator who feels the pos-
sibilities of darkness (Welton, 2013, p. 16). Affected audiences desire, fan-
tasise and worry, projecting out into a space a number of possibilities of
what could be lurking somewhere in the unseen. Their desiring, fantasis-
ing and worrying are creative. This creativity is triggered by an invitation
to participate, assumed or direct, within an aesthetic environment con-
structed by artists and, in Rotating, in occasional relation to the fingertips
of unseen guides. However, audiences add to a dark environment not just
by doing something, usually ‘activating’ preset possibilities in a participa-
tory scenario, but by practising creative spectatorship. Spectatorship is ‘a
practice that can be as intuitive, cumulative and crafted as that of making
performances’ (Skantze, 2013, p. 7), as P.A. Skantze puts it; however,
spectatorship is also an embodied and creative practice, and theatre in the
dark performances like Rotating allow this practice to flourish.
An imagined scenario of threatening things emerging from the dark-
ness, or of walking into a wall, as risks which could result in some kind of
embarrassment, or injury, just as much as they could in pleasure (or the
pleasure of embarrassment), find their counterparts in the reality of affected
behavioural states induced by such imagining: states which might prompt
action. In addition, expecting, anticipating and imagining, as productive
acts, amplify the affects produced in the moment of performance, either
by heightening the pleasure felt when the risk turns out to be positive, or
by heightening the degree of discomfort. Therefore risk perception, as
an encounter with an uncertain future, functions not just as a productive
source of affect, but as a productive source of performance.
In theatre in the dark, risk has an ambient quality that permeates
darkness as a consequence of what the audience imaginatively and nar-
cissistically projects onto darkness. While imagining will be guided and
influenced by a recorded audio narrative in Rotating, darkness is moulded,
shaped, and coloured by imagining, risk-perceiving, and affected audi-
ences. The possibility that audiences might be asked to do something
more than watch affects the productivity of watching and what it means to
watch. The risk of doing something that one might not wish to do, or of
feeling something that one might not wish to feel, or of exposing oneself
to uncertainty – all of this affects how audiences receive and produce while
immersed in total darkness in ways that are not present, at least not in the
same way, in theatre scenarios that ask less of audiences.
Watching darkness as an actually or prospectively participating audience
in Rotating demands an engagement with risk that is significantly more pal-
pable and affectively resonant than the intrinsically uncertain eventfulness
of a theatre performance. The performance sets up a scheme of aesthetic
production that is premised, in part, on an affected individual’s ability to
produce through a creative form of risk perception. The immersed specta-
tor who watches darkness is a producer of a theatre aesthetic to the extent
that they imagine things and people who could possibly be concealed by the
dark and who could possibly ask something of the audience. This is what
binds audience productivity to the physiological and psychological capa-
bilities of an immersed spectator. Risk ends up functioning as a conduit for
the production of an immersive theatre aesthetic because of its intimate
entwinement with affect production and a form of creative perception that
derives from a racing embodied mind. Risk, then, is valorised in Rotating via
a hyperactively creative engagement of immersed spectators. It is a key aes-
thetic and biopolitical principle around which an experience of the perfor-
mance is geared, and which spurs a mode of aesthetic productivity premised
on imagining more, or something other, than what the darkness hides.
EMBRACING RISK
In this section, I want to unpack the relationships between risk, productiv-
ity and value in Rotating, considering how sociological and political con-
texts beyond an immersive environment inform the imposition of risk as a
94 A. ALSTON
productive condition that is assigned to audiences. I will be addressing the

role of risk in neoliberal governance as a comparative context for the analy-
sis of value and meaning in immersive theatre performances, reflecting on
the role and significance of risk as both a key neoliberal value in Third Way
politics, and a key political value in an aesthetics of audience engagement
that Lundahl & Seitl invite. This is not meant to suggest that the kinds of
risk that audiences encounter in Rotating are definitively neoliberal; there is
a more complex politics at stake that seems to explore ambiguously defined
boundaries between trust and risk, isolation and intimacy, responsibility
and support. Also, I do not mean to imply that the presence of risk in this
performance, or any immersive performance, is necessarily an effect of a
neoliberal agenda; rather, in critiquing the politics of audience productivity,
I want to consider how risk functions as a facilitator of intensified produc-
tivity, recognising, with Owen, that ‘we should at the very least be wary’ of
invoking risk as a positive value given the role it has played in the ideology
of neoliberal governance (Owen, 2009, p. 329). How might other contexts
where risk functions in a comparable way, which includes the effects of
promoting an active and positive embrace of risk in neoliberal governance,
inform the politics of risk perception among immersive theatre audiences?
A growing number of sociologists are subscribing to the view, most
famously promulgated by Ulrich Beck (1992), that risk has been playing
an increasingly significant role in the lives of people in countries around the
world (see, for instance, Bernstein, 1996; Furedi, 1997; Gardner, 2008;
Hacker, 2008; Lash, 2000; Luhmann, 1993; Taleb, 2007). In his seminal
1986 publication on risk, Risk Society, Beck argues that advances in knowl-
edge and power ‘from techno-economic “progress” [are] being increas-
ingly overshadowed by the production of risks’ (Beck, 1992, p. 13). The
creation or development of fertilisers, power sources (especially nuclear
power), fuels and the like have the capacity to produce both calculable
‘risks’ (in Knight’s sense of the word), and unanticipated consequences,
often as the result of technological advances. This is what led Beck to
earmark the late twentieth century as a ‘risk society’: or, in Scott Lash’s
terms, a more disordered ‘risk culture’ or set of ‘risk cultures’ (Lash, 2000,
p. 47). Although Beck’s concern was mainly ecological, his thesis can be
extended to account for a much broader range of risks. Examples include
terrorist threats, paedophilia, gun and knife crime, malnutrition, obe-
sity, AIDS, Ebola, hurricanes, recessions, and the precariousness of post-
industrial labour, alongside increasing ease of access to reports on each in
a range of media.
The risk society provides important context for the radical transforma-
tion of the UK Labour Party in the 1990s under the leadership of Tony
Blair as it revised Clause IV of the Labour Party constitution. The histori-
cal fourth clause adopted by the Labour Party in 1918 assured ‘common
ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange’; how-
ever, New Labour ushered in a different set of values ‘where the rights
we enjoy reflect the duties we owe’ in ‘a dynamic economy, serving the
public interest, in which the enterprise of the market and the rigour of
competition are joined with the forces of partnership and co-operation to
produce the wealth the nation needs and the opportunity for all to work
and prosper’ (Labourcounts, n.d.). The revised constitution emphasises a
mixed economy, national security and environmental protection, respond-
ing to an increasingly globalised world that brought with it the potential
for extreme market fluctuations and unknown risks associated with the
environment and innovations in science and technology.
The theoretical underpinning of New Labour, which came into power
in 1997, is largely indebted to a sociologist and its principal architect,
Anthony Giddens – another key theorist of the risk society – who describes
its philosophy as a ‘Third Way’: ‘a framework of thinking and policy-
making that seeks to adapt social democracy to a world which has changed
fundamentally over the past two or three decades. It is a third way in the
sense that it is an attempt to transcend both old-style social democracy and
neoliberalism’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 26). However, what emerged through
New Labour was more of a merger of social democracy and neoliberalism,
rather than a transcendence of both, treating not just a riskily globalised
world, but a neoliberalised global economy, as a point of departure for
politics in a race to the political centre ground at the end of the twentieth
century.3
A crucial part of Giddens’s Third Way was the positive valuing and
embrace of risk in an evolving risk society: ‘Active risk taking is recognized
3
Third Way politics has its roots in New Democrat initiatives in the US. The New
Democrats emerged as a Democrat faction disheartened by the success of Ronald Reagan’s
neoliberal republicanism in the 1980s. The successful 1992 presidential election campaign of
the New Democrat Bill Clinton ushered in the first wave of Third Way politics at the level of
government, followed later by New Labour in 1997 in the UK. For both parties, neoliberal-
ism was taken as a hegemonic given in a globalised world that was responded to not by
expanding the political spectrum in opposition to neoliberalism, but by contracting that
spectrum toward the political centre in an effort to work with, not against, neoliberal
ideology.
96 A. ALSTON
as inherent in entrepreneurial activity, but the same applies to the labour

force. Deciding to go to work and give up benefits, or taking a job in a
particular industry, are risk-infused activities – but such risk taking is often
beneficial both to the individual and to the wider society’ (Giddens, 1998,
p. 116). An effect of institutionalising risk in governmental philosophy –
and policy – is to interpolate subjects either as risk-taking or risk-bearing
subjectivities (see Owen, 2009, p. 323). On the one hand, risk-taking is
valorised under neoliberal governance through the promotion of oppor-
tunism and entrepreneurialism. On the other hand, risk-bearing subjects,
particularly in the rhetoric of Third Way politics – ‘where the rights we
enjoy reflect the duties we owe’ – are defined as an excluded or margin-
alised public that need to be redeemed through a more active embrace of
risk.
Such ‘duties’ were typified in New Labour’s Welfare to Work pro-
gramme, intended to widen social inclusion on condition of being an eco-
nomically productive citizen, as Keith Laybourn explains:
The market-led nature of New Labour’s approach […] was of course bla-
tantly obvious in [Gordon] Brown’s 1997 Budget [as Chancellor of the
Exchequer], particularly in the explicitly titled programme of ‘Welfare to
Work’ […] The philosophy behind New Labour seems to have been to
reduce social need through an alliance between the state and the private sec-
tor. This was outlined, in some detail, by Tony Blair on 18 March 1999 […]
Blair suggested that a modern welfare state should be ‘active, not passive,
genuinely providing people with a hand-up, not a hand-out.’ (Laybourn,
2000, pp. 160–1)
In the run-up to the 1997 election, New Labour foregrounded paid work
as a central principle in their approach to welfare. ‘The focus on paid-
work-as-welfare,’ as economists Mike Brewer, Tom Clark and Matthew
Wakefield note, which was also bound up with the introduction of a min-
imum wage to the UK in 1998 and the Working Families Tax Credit
in 1999, ‘reflected concerns about traditional progressive social security
policy, especially in a context where containing public expenditure (and
so ultimately taxation) was seen as central by the Government’ – a move
that was partly rationalised by a ‘new ethic of rights and responsibilities’
(Brewer, Clark, and Wakefield, 2002, pp. 4–5). Brown elaborated this
ethic in a speech to the East London Partnership on 29 February 2000:
‘to the unemployed who can work: we will meet our responsibility to
ensure that there are job opportunities and the chance to learn new skills.
You must now meet your responsibility – to earn a wage’ (qtd in Brewer
et al., 2002, p. 5). In other words, New Labour framed entry into a labour
market as a condition for the receipt of state benefits for working-age and
work-capable citizens, with stricter work capability testing for Incapacity
Benefit seekers.4
An important component of New Labour’s neoliberalised social
democracy involved the valorisation of risk and risk-taking as a condi-
tion of good citizenship and the effective productivity of citizens. For
Giddens – and for New Labour – embracing risk in the risk society arose
as a suitable response to globalisation and rapid advances in technological,
ecological and scientific change, which were figured as potentially incul-
cating a disempowering culture of dependency on political structures and
the decision-making abilities of experts in a range of industries and fields
(Giddens, 1998, p. 59). The supremacy of economics, it seems, was the
answer, and particularly an acceptance of neoliberal hegemony as a form
of pragmatism in the face of perceived necessity. In a situation where past
experience struggled to provide a yardstick for effective risk management,
as manifold new risks accompanied the unpredictable processes of glo-
balisation, ecological uncertainties, and rapid technological and scientific
innovation, it befell individuals, claimed Giddens and adherents to the
Third Way, to accept greater responsibility for managing risk. For Giddens
and for the newly reformed Labour Party, providing citizens with social
security via the welfare state was tempered by the promotion of an active
and positive engagement with risk as ‘a necessary component of social and
economic mobilization’ (Giddens, 1998, pp. 62–3). In other words, the
Third Way advocated an embrace of risk as a value and allowed this value
4
While the rhetorical and ideological onus on the centrality of work in the restructuring of
social security remained in place, New Labour was also committed to poverty reduction by
expanding means-tested social security (see Brewer et al., 2002, p. 10). The welfare state in
the UK has since endured more substantial and damaging welfare reform under the
Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which shared power after neither party achieved a
majority in the 2010 UK General Election. Cuts to the welfare budget under the coalition
between 2011 and 2014 were linked to a decrease in the overall value of benefits, as well as
reform of housing benefits and council tax support. As Katie Allen reports, ‘300,000 house-
holds have experienced a cut in housing benefit, 920,000 a reduction in council tax support
and 480,000 a cut in both’ (Allen, 2014, n.p.). The attempted attenuation of social needi-
ness by instituting new welfare programmes and reforms that purportedly aim to foster tran-
sitions into worker productivity, which have targeted benefit claimants, have expanded the
number of citizens who risk poverty in a mode of governance that continues to embrace risk
as a facilitator of upward social and economic mobility.
98 A. ALSTON
to inform its politics and attitude toward governance. Furthermore, as

New Labour’s social security reform illustrates, by actively and positively
embracing risk as a value, New Labour also sought to foster increases in
the productivity of individual citizens that was steered toward a binding of
worker productivity and empowerment.
The outcomes that arise from being responsible for something, such as
seeking work as an autonomous, socially and economically mobile individ-
ual, might turn out either well or badly. It puts into play a ‘risk scenario’,
which refers to any occurrence involving risk-taking and/or risk-bearing
subjectivities in a scenario that invites or imposes risk-taking and/or risk-
bearing. The valuing of risk as being either good or bad does not detract
from risk remaining as a guiding principle that determines engagement
with a risk scenario. In the logic of neoliberalism, the valuing of risk as a
guiding principle links up with productivity. Whether pitched as a jour-
ney out of benefits and into work, or as a transfer of responsibility onto
the shoulders of socially and economically mobile citizens, being produc-
tive or handling a situation productively are instituted at a governmental
level as an expectation tied into conceptualisations of good citizenship
and empowerment. A condition for living is consequently assigned to citi-
zens within a neoliberal aspect of governance that demands that they posit
themselves according to a scheme of production that valorises risk and
work in a new ethic of rights and responsibilities, as well as freedoms.
Claire Bishop has usefully explored how the Third Way ushered in a sus-
tained embedding of risk-taking as a principle of good citizenship, address-
ing how the production of socially engaged art and performance under
New Labour tied into a political and cultural agenda that was indexed to
these principles (see Bishop, 2012, p. 14; see also Owen, 2009, pp. 258–
60). She responds to the influence of a report by François Matarasso on
the cultural policy of New Labour (Bishop, 2012, p. 14), which examines
the social impact of participation in the arts on the promotion of social
cohesion, community development and self-determination, among other
things. An important conclusion in the report is that the arts can be uti-
lised as a tool to foster active, engaged citizens who want to be involved
in a society, provided the arts receive sufficient support (Matarasso, 1997,
pp. 76–7). Bishop’s critique explores how this conclusion plays into the
hands of public bodies who may well wish to transform their image: ‘social
participation is viewed positively because it creates submissive citizens
who respect authority and accept the “risk” and responsibility of looking
after themselves in the face of diminished public services’ (Bishop, 2012,
p. 14). The structural sources of such a risk, though, which are linked to
the encroachment of neoliberalism into modes of governance in a range
of political colours, remain preserved. ‘The social inclusion agenda,’ she
writes, in which the arts and especially socially engaged art and perfor-
mance played an important role under New Labour, ‘is therefore less
about repairing the social bond than a mission to enable all members of
society to be self-administering, fully functioning consumers who do not
rely on the welfare state and who can cope with a deregulated, priva-
tised world. As such, the neoliberal idea of community doesn’t seek to
build social relations, but rather to erode them’ (Bishop, 2012, p. 14).
She therefore ponders whether the socially ameliorative goals of socially
engaged art and performance, in light of Third Way cultural policy, func-
tion more as palliatives for a systemic erosion of social(ist) values than they
do as champions of those values.
Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating clearly does not play into this agenda in the
same way that socially engaged art can be seen to have done; the aesthetics
and politics of audience engagement at stake in immersive theatre per-
formances like Rotating are of a different sort and appeal to an audience
that may very well seek to escape participation in a social milieu, preferring
instead an opportunity to be immersed within an environment that strives
to set itself apart from social bonds that might otherwise be encountered
within society. However, while performances like Rotating are not part
of or an effect of a social inclusion agenda, even though its developmen-
tal heritage stretches back to early experimentation in 2006 and 2007,
toward the end of Tony Blair’s premiership, the politics of aesthetics pro-
moted in the performance nonetheless reflects some core neoliberal values
and principles that were adopted in the Third Way, which inform what
kind of politics emerges from an aesthetics of audience immersion and par-
ticipation in the performance. Foremost among these is the valorisation
and embedding of risk as a facilitator of intensified productivity.
Engagement with Rotating as an audience member immersed in com-
plete darkness involves practising risk, whether or not a risk scenario is
identified as such and especially if a particular performance is being experi-
enced by an audience for the first time. This does not mean that audiences
are put at threat of physical harm; rather, it means that audiences are asked
to participate in something in which the end points of the performance,
or means of achieving those end points, are fundamentally uncertain for
the participating audience member. In other words, the aesthetic terms
of audience participation, given their relation to uncertainty, relate to an
100 A. ALSTON
encounter with risk. Risk is integrated within the performance’s aesthet-

ics, no matter what the threat might be, as an assigned mode of audience
engagement and in a significantly more enhanced form in comparison with
the inherent uncertainty that might otherwise be seen to define and con-
dition performance. This enhancement relates to the positing of audiences
according to a scheme of production that resources their imaginative and
risk-perceiving abilities not just as that which complements a theatre aes-
thetic by translating something perceived according to their unique life-
narrative, but as a creative potential that musters something from nothing.
I am not suggesting that an individual consciously evaluates the risks
of participation or darkness mid-performance (although they might), nor
am I suggesting that an individual treats risk as a measurable uncertainty;
rather, whether they like it or not, immersed audiences in Rotating are
forced to encounter uncertainty whenever they are confronted with the
ambiguous and affective possibilities of darkness, especially if the per-
formance is being experienced for the first time. The audience is likely
to be confronted by a situation in which they are asked to participate,
but of which they know little. They must respond to circumstances that,
abstractly, forms the basis of Giddens’s thinking about risk, and to which
they must ‘actively’ apply themselves as embracers of a risk scenario.
Openness to participatory possibilities is risky, particularly the perception
of various possibilities that might arise once confronted with the prospect
of participation, of acting in darkness and being acted upon, despite the
capacity for efficacious action that may in fact be handed over to audi-
ences, which may be fairly inconsequential.
As this section has so far sought to address, neoliberal governance in
the UK has, in recent political history, encouraged risk-bearing and risk-
taking subjectivities to actively embrace risk, binding productivity and the
capabilities of a human individual in a scenario that values risk and makes
engagement with risk a condition for an idealised and prescribed form
of productivity, and a condition for subjects to adopt. What is being tar-
geted in my comparative analysis of risk in theatre and neoliberal aspects
of recent governance is something of an ideal audience who is imagined in
advance of their arrival, and who resembles something of the Third Way’s
ideal citizen – both models to which their respective subjects are invited
to conform if they are to participate effectively in performance or soci-
ety, respectively. Therefore, it is not so much the activity of participation
that illuminates the biopolitics of audience engagement in Rotating as the
affectively resonant prospect of such activity for an immersed spectator in a
context that establishes this prospect as a risk to be actively and positively

embraced, from a subject position that they ought to inhabit. It is this
subject position that is under scrutiny – approached from a position of
engagement, of course, but one that nonetheless affords insight into a
politics of audience engagement premised on a critique of a model audi-
ence as it is made to appear to a prospective participant, and to which
they are invited to conform. What is under consideration, then, is the
imaginary of audience productivity in immersive theatre, and the extent to
which the imaginary of neoliberal productivity and its promotion in gov-
ernance informs the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics. Encountering
the affectively resonant and risky prospect of participation, I argue, is what
figures audiences as productive participants in Rotating – a performance
in which an imaginative engagement with darkness fosters the creation of
core elements of a theatre aesthetic. It is a performance that links together
risk, productivity and value, and which grounds productivity in the physi-
ological and psychological capabilities of audiences – in their immaterial
labour – and which therefore carries something of neoliberalism’s biopo-
litical character in its aesthetic make-up.
However, risk, once valorised, is not an intrinsically neoliberal value,
and the politics of Rotating’s immersive theatre aesthetics is more compli-
cated than my reading of the performance has so far suggested. Stephen
Lyng uses the term ‘edgework’, borrowing from Hunter S. Thompson,
to refer to the different ways in which risk might be actively embraced,
proposing two frameworks that aid an address of alternative valuations of
risk. The first regards edgework as a ‘means of freeing oneself from social
conditions that deaden or deform the human spirit through overwhelm-
ing social regulation and control’ (Lyng, 2005, p. 10; see also Simon,
2002). Base jumping, rock climbing and BDSM serve as examples of
edgework practices that, for some, might be viewed as a response to sani-
tisation, bureaucracy, routine, banality, or anything else that might be seen
to restrict the gratification of desire and autonomy. The second framework
refers back even more explicitly to the risk society in which risk-taking ‘is
itself a key structural principle extending throughout the social system in
institutional patterns of economic, political, cultural and leisure activity’
(Lyng, 2005, p. 8). This second framework appeals to those who are scep-
tical about the possibilities for edgework practices to operate subversively.
According to this framework, edgework practices prompt a desire for risk,
regarding that desire not as a radical intervention against a regulatory sys-
tem, but as an exponent of it. It also regards outlets for edgework practices
102 A. ALSTON
as being imbricated, at least potentially, within a much wider and more

pervasive network of risk taking, more often than not allied with a sani-
tisation of risk, or a capitalisation on the desire for risk taking. Examples
include adventure companies that promise an experience of risk in the
wild, such as white water rafting, where the most risky part of such an
experience among expert professionals is the car journey there (Holyfield,
Jonas, and Zajicek, 2005, p. 177).
Either of Lyng’s two edgework frameworks – aiming to free oneself
from the risk of society’s regulatory conditions, on the one hand, and
regarding risk as a structural principle of the risk society, on the other –
might usefully aid an address of the politics of audience engagement in a
performance like Rotating. So far I have focused on the pervasion of risk
as a structural and regulatory principle in the risk society, which includes
the incorporation of risk within neoliberal governance. However, the first
framework proposed by Lyng suggests that an active and positive embrace
of risk might subvert its co-optation. While the subversive potential of risk
is attenuated by the productive role of risk perception in Rotating, and
while the meanings and values that are attributable to the correlation of
risk, audience productivity and value in the performance are informed by
the valorisation of risk in neoliberal governance, it is nonetheless worth
digging a little deeper into the complexity of risk’s valorisation as a modest
form of edgework.
The guides in work by Lundahl & Seitl know the ropes and they expect
you to follow them; these are performers who can see in the dark with the
benefit of night vision goggles; these are performers who probably know
more than the audience about what is going to happen, who are always
one step ahead, and on whom the audience are dependent if they are to
successfully follow a path through a performance which has been tightly
choreographed and designed. In such a framework, one wonders what
scope there is for a subversive mode of edgework to occur. However, the
politics of aesthetics in Rotating puts into place a compelling compromise.
There are freedoms for participants to enjoy if they accept that unbridled
freedom is not to be tolerated. The degree to which participants open up
to others is limited to a relationship with guides, but the relationship is
there and it is a relationship that relies on trust and a sharing of respon-
sibility for the production of a performance which seems to be at odds
with the individualisation of responsibility in neoliberal figurations of risk.
There are aesthetic rewards to be found if participants offer themselves
up to a bond of trust. The darkness therefore encourages audiences to
recognise ‘the sense of potential in others’, which, as Welton notes, ‘is

the most nascent aspect of any politics worth the name’ (Welton, 2013,
p. 16) – but this potential is also linked to a creative engagement with an
endarkened world that is in part the product of imaginative audience pro-
ductivity, and in part the result of an affective engagement with the tips of
another’s fingers as they lead audiences, intermittently, through darkness.
Lundahl emphasises the clear commitment to trust that the work
demands of its audiences: ‘Trust is essential in our work, to trust oneself
and others. And being able to let go of control and not to see that as a
passive action but an active one. Letting go of the part of the self that takes
action in order to give room for another part of the self that is experienc-
ing the self and [his or her] surrounding[s]’ (Lundahl, 2011–2012). What
Lundahl appears to be underlining is the potential for submission to an
experience to procure rewards for audiences and that this edgy submis-
sion, despite the autonomy it can be seen to sacrifice, is itself a freeing
gesture. While the language he uses may seem to chime, superficially, with
the active and positive embrace of risk advocated in Giddens’s Third Way,
it is important to recognise how Lundahl marries an embrace of risk with
a commitment to sociality, the form of which is necessarily uncertain at
the time of the commitment. To this extent, Lundahl asks his audiences
to commit as much to the possibilities of trust and/in sociality as he does
to the productive potential of risk perception. Where the Third Way views
notions of trust and reliance on experts with suspicion, Lundahl regards
both as fundamentally important parts of an invitation to engage with
Rotating as an immersed audience member.
In sum: Rotating draws on the productivity of immersed audiences as
watchers of darkness who are affected by an uncertain encounter with the
manifold possibilities of darkness and prospective participation. The dark-
ness asks something of audiences; more accurately, the audience is placed
in a position in which they may well be asked to participate in some way,
or in which they imagine possibilities that may never occur. Both of these
conditions affect how darkness is watched as an immersed spectator. More
so than the actual activity of doing something more than watching, the
possibilities of darkness posit the audience as a productive subject whose
affective encounter with the dark results in incessant creativity as desires,
fears and imagined people and things are mustered from the darkness. In
other words, the audience’s physiological and psychological capabilities
are harnessed as a productive source of a theatre in the dark performance,
which carries with it biopolitical implications for the immersed audience
104 A. ALSTON
member. These implications are informed by the figuring of risk in neolib-

eral governance as something to be actively and positively embraced, but
the political values at stake are not definitively neoliberal; rather, they are
compellingly complicated by a balancing of risk and trust, isolation and
intimacy, and responsibility and support.
CONCLUSION
The prospect of doing something more than watching affects spectator-
ship; it increases the productivity of spectatorship as imagined possibili-
ties are played out. These possibilities are especially clear in theatre in the
dark, where the darkness hides actual and imagined things and people
that may ask something of audiences, or bear down on them in some way.
Nonetheless, audiences in Rotating are not alone. They watch and are
watched by performers. Once plunged into darkness, audience members
are still not alone, as unseen hands reach out to lead them through the
space. While the participant may end up experiencing isolation when left
by the guide(s), there may well be numerous other subjects, both pres-
ent and absent, who contribute to that state being reached, from theatre
designers and stage managers who take care to remove sharp and protrud-
ing objects, to the performance’s guides who lurk in the darkness and
watch an audience through night vision goggles. So the experience of
isolation in darkness relies, strangely, on the contributions of a disparate
group.
My attitude toward the politics of risk and trust in Rotating is ambiva-
lent. On the one hand, I support the ways in which it opens audiences out
to relationships with the guides, while placing limits on unbridled auton-
omy. On the other, I am wary of how the performance links together
risk, productivity and value. While these links are informed by comparable
relationships in the Third Way, which embraces the risks of the risk society
and assigns the subjects of neoliberal governance to a scheme of produc-
tion that valorises an active and positive embrace of risk, the meanings
and values that arise from these relationships are more knotty. Audiences
immersed in the darkness of Rotating are positioned as prospective par-
ticipants who imagine much of the performance and feel the consequences
of an affective engagement with the risks that they perceive, but they also
enter into a bond of trust with unseen others. Their role as productive par-
ticipants is therefore complicated by a binding of risk and trust that opens
out as much toward neoliberal value as it does toward alternative, more
socially minded values; however, the condition that enables this complex
politics to thrive is the productive participation of an audience immersed
in darkness. While nuanced, productive participation remains as a resource
in the production of an immersive theatre aesthetic.
The next chapter continues to explore the values and meanings that
are attributable to the productive participation of audiences in light of
neoliberal theory and practice, but it does so by addressing immersive
performances that feature many audience members, instead of an iso-
lated audience in work for an audience of one. In a critique of work
by Punchdrunk, I will be reflecting on performances that neither con-
fine audiences to a single space (Chap. 2), nor inhibit a particular sense
(Chap. 3), but rather encourage audiences to exploit a freedom to revel in
multisensory experiences on offer in a large number of thematically cohe-
sive spaces, paying special attention to the opening up and foreclosure of
agential possibilities.
REFERENCES
Allen, K. (2014, April 22). Welfare cuts drive UK’s poorest families deeper into
poverty, says Oxfam. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/
apr/22/welfare-cuts-drive-uk-poorest-poverty-oxfam. Accessed 3 Apr 2015.
Alston, A. (2013). Politics in the dark: Risk perception, affect and emotion in
Lundahl and Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images. In N. Shaughnessy (Ed.),
Affective performance and cognitive science: Body, brain and being (pp. 217–
Alston, A., & Welton, M. (Eds.). (forthcoming). Theatre in the dark: Shadow,
gloom and blackout in contemporary theatre. London: Methuen.
Beck, U. (1992 [1986]). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.).
Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Berghaus, G. (2001, February). The futurist banquet: Nouvelle cuisine or perfor-
mance art? New Theatre Quarterly, 17(1), 3–17.
Bernstein, P. L. (1996). Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk. New York:
Wiley.
London: Verso.
Brewer, M., Clark, T., & Wakefield, M. (2002). Social security under new labour:
What did the Third Way mean for welfare reform?, 5 June. http://www.ifs.org.
uk/conferences/socsec/clark.pdf. Accessed 14 Apr 2015.
Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. (1982). Risk and culture: An essay on the selection of
technological and environmental dangers. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
106 A. ALSTON
Furedi, F. (1997). Culture of fear: Risk-taking and the morality of low expectation.
London: Cassell.
Gardner, D. (2008). Risk: The science and politics of fear. London: Virgin Books.
Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The renewal of social democracy. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Grant, S. (2014). What if? Performance is risk. About Performance, 12, 127–144.
Hacker, J. S. (2008). The great risk shift: The new economic insecurity and the decline
of the American Dream (Rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holyfield, L., Jonas, L., & Zajicek, A. (2005). Adventure without risk is like
Disneyland. In S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 173–
186). London: Routledge.
Hurley, E. (2004, Summer). Blackout: Utopian technologies in Adrienne
Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Modern Drama, 47(2), 200–218.
Jaeger, C. C., Renn, O., Rosa, E. A., & Webler, T. (2001). Risk, uncertainty, and
rational action. London: Earthscan.
Knight, F. H. (2006). Risk, uncertainty and profit. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Koslofsky, C. (2011). Evening’s empire: A history of the night in early modern
Europe. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Labourcounts. (n.d.). http://www.labourcounts.com/oldclausefour.htm.
Accessed 8 Apr 2015.
Lash, S. (2000). Risk culture. In B. Adam, U. Beck, & J. Van Loon (Eds.), The risk
society and beyond: Critical issues for social theory (pp. 47–62). London: Sage.
Laybourn, K. (2000). A century of Labour: A history of the Labour Party. Stroud,
UK: Sutton Publishing.
Luhmann, N. (1993). Risk: A sociological theory (R. Barrett, Trans.). Berlin,
Germany: Walter de Gruyter.
Lundahl, C. (2011–2012). Email correspondence with the author, 30 March – 6 July.
Lyng, S. (2005). Edgework and the risk taking experience. In S. Lyng (Ed.),
Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking (pp. 3–14). London: Routledge.
Machon, J. (2013). (Syn)aesthetics and immersive theatre: Embodied beholding
in Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images. In N. Shaughnessy (Ed.),
Affective performance and cognitive science: Body, brain and being (pp. 199–
Marinetti, F. T. (2014 [1932]). The futurist cookbook (S. Brill, Trans., Ed.,
L. Chamberlain). London: Penguin.
Matarasso, F. (1997). Use or ornament? The social impact of participation in the
arts. London: Comedia.
Owen, L. (2009). Performing “risk”: Neoliberalization and contemporary perfor-
mance. PhD, Queen Mary, University of London.
Palmer, S. (2013). Light. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Reith, G. (2008). Living with risk: Chance, luck and the creation of meaning in
uncertainty. In J. Welchman (Ed.), The aesthetics of risk: Volume 3 of the SoCCAS
symposia (pp. 57–78). Zurich, Switzerland: JRP Ringier.
Renn, O., & Rohrmann, B. (2000). Cross-cultural risk perception: State and chal-
lenges. In O. Renn & B. Rohrmann (Eds.), Cross-cultural risk perception: A
survey of empirical studies (pp. 211–233). London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Saerberg, S. (2007, Summer). The dining in the dark phenomenon. Disability
Studies Quarterly, 27(3), n.p.
Schivelbusch, W. (1988). Disenchanted night: The industrialisation of light in the
nineteenth century (A. Davies, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Shaughnessy, N. (2013). Affective performance and cognitive science: Body, brain
and being. London: Methuen.
Simon, J. (2002). Taking risks: Extreme sports and the embrace of risk in advanced
liberal societies. In T. Baker & J. Simon (Eds.), Embracing risk: The changing
culture of insurance and responsibility (pp. 177–208). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Skantze, P. A. (2013). Itinerant spectator/itinerant spectacle. New York: Punctum.
Sorensen, R. (2004). We see in the dark. Noûs, 38(3), 456–480.
Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable. London:
Penguin.
Twain, M. (1881, December 6). Mark Twain at Bayreuth. Chicago Daily Tribune,
p. 33.
Welton, M. (2006). Seeing nothing: Now hear this…. In A. Lepecki & S. Banes
(Eds.), The senses in performance (pp. 146–155). London: Routledge.
Welton, M. (2013, March). The possibility of darkness: Blackout and shadow in
Chris Goode’s Who You Are. Theatre Research International, 38(1), 4–19.
CHAPTER 4
Theatre Through the Fireplace:

Punchdrunk and the Neoliberal Ethos
Free-roaming, where applicable, is an implicitly political feature of immer-

sive theatre aesthetics. Free-roaming performances encourage audiences
to plot their own ambulatory paths through an aesthetic space, or a series
of spaces, which may or may not contain performers. While the notions of
choice and freedom implied in free-roaming clearly give it a political edge,
the politics of free-roaming in immersive theatre is not usually announced
or explored in an agenda that is attached to a given performance by politi-
cally motivated theatre makers. However, once audiences are expected to
exploit the necessarily unequal opportunities that ‘free-roaming’ offers up,
there is at least a tacit politics to the aesthetics of free-roaming that invites
critical scrutiny. Just how free is the free-roamer?
The British theatre company Punchdrunk are the leading exponents of
free-roaming immersive theatre. The company formed off the back of a
degree course at the University of Exeter, UK, in 2000 and have created
site-sympathetic immersive theatre ever since, attending to the architec-
tural and environmental givens of a particular building or location, without
delving into the socio-historical specificity of that location. They tend not
to perform in theatre buildings and instead create work in appropriated
sites, which have included an empty Victorian school for the first UK run
of Sleep No More (2003); a defunct Sharwood’s Pickle factory in London’s
Oval for The Firebird Ball (2005); London’s Wapping Lane Tobacco Dock
for Faust (2006–2007); the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), a former town
hall, for The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008), thus providing an
exception to the non-theatre venue rule; railway arches beneath Waterloo

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_4
110 A. ALSTON
Station for Tunnel 228 (2009); the redundant Manchester offices of the
National Probation Service for It Felt Like a Kiss (2009); London’s Great
Eastern Quay for The Duchess of Malfi (2010); and a disused postal sorting
office near Paddington Station for The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable
(2013–2014). Punchdrunk consequently work within loaded spaces:
converted municipal buildings and the outmoded vestiges of industrial
capitalism.
For Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, ‘A central feature
of the work’ that they make ‘is the empowerment of the audience’:
It’s a fight against audience apathy and the inertia that sets in when you’re
stagnating in an auditorium. When you’re sat in an auditorium, the primary
thing that is accessed is your mind and you respond cerebrally. Punchdrunk
resists that by allowing the body to become empowered because the audi-
ence have to make physical decisions and choices, and in doing that they
make some sort of pact with the piece. They’re physically involved with the
piece and therefore it becomes visceral (qtd in Machon, 2009, p. 89).
This kind of terminology, while not assigned to a political agenda, nonethe-

less echoes the political manifestos of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who led
the avant-garde Italian Futurist movement in the early twentieth century.
Marinetti, alongside fellow Futurists Emilio Settimelli and Bruno Corra,
wanted a Futurist theatre to ‘excite its audience, that is, make it forget the
monotony of daily life, by sweeping it through a labyrinth of sensations’, stir-
ring up the audience’s ‘LAZIEST LAYERS’ and allowing for stage action to
‘INVADE’ the auditorium so as to abolish ‘the indignant attitude of a circle
of bystanders who swallow their anguish and pity’ (Marinetti, Settimelli, &
Corra, 1995 [1915], pp. 19–21, original emphasis). Punchdrunk share
with the Futurists both a similar distaste for an audience’s presumed listless-
ness, and an aesthetic concern with a viscerally engaging theatre. Moreover,
their work has arguably exceeded the expectations of the Futurists by allow-
ing audiences to roam freely through a labyrinth of sensations, collapsing
the space between stage and auditorium so as to ‘empower’ an audience.
What, though, are the terms of this empowerment? Are all audience
members in a Punchdrunk performance empowered, or empowered
equally? If not, then what does this mean for the politics of participation
and immersion in a Punchdrunk performance? This book has periodically
touched on Jacques Rancière’s essay ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, which
presents a critique of the attempts of theatre makers in the twentieth
PUNCHDRUNK AND THE NEOLIBERAL ETHOS 111
century to activate audiences out of a state of assumed passivity; such

attempts tend not to recognise the inherent activity that is involved in
watching theatre as a spectator who weaves together meanings and values,
and mediates something watched through the lens of their own unique
life narrative. In other words, Rancière has informatively questioned the
assumption that audiences are in some way inert when they watch theatre,
and consequently the basis on which a politically motivated activation of
audiences is founded. However, while Punchdrunk would seem suscepti-
ble to his critique given the links to politically engaged avant-garde theatre
just outlined, the fact that their work is not intended as part of a political
project means that the activation of audiences takes on a different quality.
As Jessica Santone recognises, many recent performances that explore
varying kinds of audience involvement no longer promote the ‘coalitional
identity politics, activist sensibilities or […] liberation from authoritative
narratives’ (Santone, 2014, p. 30) that characterised much participatory
performance practice in the twentieth century and especially the 1960s
and 1970s – from the Living Theatre, to Jean-Jacques Lebel and Carolee
Schneemann. She adds that in twenty-first-century theatre and perfor-
mance practices that deploy some kind of participation, a politics of col-
lectivity risks displacement by a normative involvement in an event – one
that does not oppose, but rather elides with capitalist objectives (Santone,
2014, pp. 30–1; see also Basbaum, 2011). However, far from draining
these works of political significance, this chapter sets out to uncover an
implicit politics within particular examples by focusing on frameworks for
audience immersion and participation that Punchdrunk offer to audiences
in their immersive theatre performances.
‘The Emancipated Spectator’ only grapples with work that is grounded
in manifestos of some kind or other; it does not address performances
that claim commitment to empowering audiences in environments that
seek separation from a world that might otherwise be framed as change-
able, perhaps by inspiring a change in the outlook and beliefs of theatre
audiences. This chapter responds by exploring how work by Punchdrunk
seeks this kind of separation by engaging audiences in ‘totally immersive’
environments, identifying and analysing modes of audience empowerment
that they build into apparently self-contained frameworks for audience
productivity and engagement; however, it also questions the extent of this
separation by comparing the valuing and intensification of audience pro-
ductivity and its equation with empowerment with the neoliberal valuing
of entrepreneurship.
112 A. ALSTON
Critically approaching immersive theatre by drawing comparisons

with neoliberal figurations of production and productivity informs the
implicit politics of free-roaming aesthetics by illuminating the correlation
between ‘freedom’ and ‘roaming’. It encourages critique of the mean-
ings of freedom and empowerment in free-roaming immersive theatre,
just as it encourages critique of the figuring of roamers in a politically
imbued aesthetic framework. Furthermore, the analogy draws attention
to the contexts that embed immersive theatre production. Free-roaming
immersive theatre performances often seek to offer their audiences what
Josephine Machon identifies (by way of game theory) as ‘total immer-
sion’, which involves ‘a total engagement in an activity that engrosses […]
the participant in its very form’, a ‘transportation’ of the audience to an
‘otherworldly-world that requires navigation according to its own rules
of logic’, and an acute sense of presence and liveness (Machon, 2013,
pp. 62–3; see also Calleja, 2011, pp. 23–32; Brown & Cairns, 2004,
p. 3). However, I argue that the navigation required of audiences in such
otherworldly-worlds derives from systems of production, productivity and
value that are not wholly particular or unique to the fictive cosmos of a
given immersive environment. What, then, are the political resonances of
these systems of production, productivity and value? How might these
resonances inform the politics of free-roaming aesthetics and the produc-
tive participation of theatre audiences?
The next section outlines how a system of neoliberal value has persisted
in successive government agendas from the 1980s through to the present
moment, focusing especially on an erosion of the public sphere and an
embrace of individualism, private enterprise, risk-taking, personal respon-
sibility and entrepreneurship. This value system has affected the material
conditions of immersive theatre production, most noticeably through arts
funding policy; however, a key argument of the chapter is that neoliberal
value is also reflected in the frameworks for immersion and productive par-
ticipation that Punchdrunk assign to audiences and designate as a basis for
effective audience engagement in their free-roaming immersive theatre per-
formances. In tracing the heritage and persistence of neoliberal value in the
political agendas and philosophies of successive British governments, then,
I look to clarify how it impacts on notions of empowerment, productivity
and their administration as a context for the political analysis of neoliberal
value in work by Punchdrunk. An important aim is to be as clear as pos-
sible about what constitutes neoliberal value – which is a notion that risks
cloudiness without the contextual colouring that has so far characterised
the approach taken in this book, and which this chapter looks to enhance –
so as to be in a better position to explore the presence of neoliberal value
in Punchdrunk’s influential style of immersive theatre.
A second section addresses Punchdrunk’s merger of public, founda-
tion, philanthropic and corporate funding initiatives, with special emphasis
on corporate partnerships with companies including Louis Vuitton, Stella
Artois Black and Sony. First, this section examines how Punchdrunk’s
mixed economic funding model complements the material networks of
a neoliberalised economy in the UK; second, the section prepares space
to reflect in more depth on the latent presence of neoliberal value in
Punchdrunk’s brand of free-roaming immersive theatre aesthetics. A final
section attends to this latent presence by analysing The Masque of the Red
Death and Sleep No More, establishing how these performances prioritise
a particular kind of audience participation that I call ‘entrepreneurial par-
ticipation’ (see also Alston, 2013). I argue that entrepreneurial partici-
pation is a key feature of Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive theatre
performances, and evaluate the presence and effects of neoliberal value on
a theatre aesthetic that calls on the entrepreneurial initiative of productive
participants.
NEOLIBERAL VALUE
In a famous interview with Douglas Keay for Woman’s Own magazine, the
late Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher condemned the cast-
ing of social problems as a responsibility of government: ‘There is no such
thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people
and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend
upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves
and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those
who are unfortunate’ (Thatcher, 1987). In this same interview, she also
remarked on her promotion of an ‘enterprise allowance’ that was meant
to help young people start their own business who had spent time on the
unemployment register. The allowance guaranteed entrepreneurial young
people an income of £40 a week provided they were able to raise £1,000 as
a start-up budget (this was therefore not an initiative that would help those
already in poverty). Taken together, her comments evidence a valuing of
personal responsibility, enterprise and entrepreneurship, and an influen-
tially ideological figuring of opportunity – particularly the individualistic
opportunities offered by free markets, as opposed to those offered by the
114 A. ALSTON
welfare state. In short, the interview is symptomatic of Thatcher’s adher-

ence to core neoliberal values. While these values were integrated with
a Conservative embrace of traditionalism and nationalism that bear no
intrinsic relationship to neoliberalism, the importance of neoliberal value
in the policies and worldview of Thatcher’s government nonetheless signal
a turning point that still haunts the present moment; neoliberal value has
persisted in British politics.
As the previous chapter explored, the political left eventually responded
to Thatcher’s entrenchment of neoliberalism not by opposing neoliberal
value, but by embracing it, not least by promoting an active and positive
embrace of risk. In 1997, a new and long-awaited era of Labour gover-
nance arose following the election of Tony Blair’s New Labourite reimag-
ining of the Labour Party, which further instituted neoliberalism as a value
system after the party constitution was reformed around a political ‘Third
Way’ that claimed to transcend social democracy and neoliberalism, but
actually integrated the two. For Third Way theorist Anthony Giddens,
such ‘transcendence’ needed to respond to what several social and cul-
tural commentators identified as a ‘new individualism’ associated with ‘the
retreat of tradition and custom from our lives, a phenomenon involved
with the impact of globalization widely conceived’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 36;
see also Beck, 1992), and with ‘how effectively one participates in the
economic system’ (Hewitt, 2011, pp. 21–2). The new individualism was
consequently approached as inheritance that needed to be harnessed given
its relationship with the monolith of globalisation, and adapted to suit a
society of risk-bearing and risk-taking individuals.
Third Way politics under New Labour accepted the new individual-
ism as a given, but in trying to stoke social cohesion it responded not by
backing communal values, as might otherwise have been associated with
the traditional political left, but by attributing values – values that might,
potentially, be shared – to the new individualism. Personal responsibility,
accountability, risk-taking and risk-bearing emerged as the tools to pro-
mote social cohesion. Furthermore, the competitive spirit of neoliberalism
and the celebration of wealth generation were also merged with govern-
ment investment ‘in the human resources and infrastructure needed to
develop an entrepreneurial culture’ (Giddens, 1998, p. 99), rejuvenat-
ing an important aspect of nineteenth-century liberal doctrine taken up
by Thatcher that celebrated the entrepreneur as a thrifty and sharp indi-
vidual who capitalises on the profitable opportunities afforded by enter-
prise. However, as Louise Owen suggests, neoliberal governmentality
recalibrated the definitional boundaries of entrepreneurialism ‘as a prac-

tice in which all citizens should engage’ (Owen, 2009, p. 258), recruiting
civil society to serve a neoliberal transformation of the social (Lazzarato,
2009, p. 111; see also Foucault, 2008). Accordingly, what might previ-
ously have been identified as the responsibility of the state for the welfare
of its citizens ended up being attributed in the Third Way to a new ethic
of rights and responsibilities predicated on active citizenship and entrepre-
neurial initiative.
The New Labourite Third Way therefore enshrined a clear value set,
the persistence of which pulls focus in this section: a defence of individual-
ism coupled with a public sector that promotes it; personal responsibility
matched with personal accountability and active citizenship; risk-taking
and risk-bearing as values to be actively and positively embraced; and
the institutional backing of entrepreneurial initiative and opportunism.
However, despite constitutional and social security reform, New Labour
still remained committed to certain kinds of substantial public spending –
for instance, through the expansion of means-tested, work-centric benefit
distribution, and through an average annual increase of 4.4 % on public
services in real terms throughout its period in government, primarily due
to increases in spending on the National Health Service, as well as educa-
tion and transport (see Chote, Crawford, & Tetlow, 2010, p. 1). In con-
trast, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that came into power
in 2010, led by prime minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat
deputy Nick Clegg, instituted much deeper political and economic reform.
The coalition’s policy measures, and the Conservatives’ political outlook,
in particular, further affected the dissemination of neoliberal values in
society in ways that enable a deeper understanding of the relationships
between neoliberal values and modes of production – relationships that
draw focus in this chapter as a comparative context that might usefully aid
the political analysis of immersive theatre aesthetics.
The coalition formed a government after the most damaging reces-
sion since the war, following the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008,
which devastated economies around the world, including the UK. It
promised to reduce a growing budget deficit as tax revenues failed to
keep pace with government spending, which had forced the post-crash
Labour government to increase public sector net debt as a percentage of
GDP and pay interest on the increase in borrowed money (see Pettinger,
2013). In acting on this promise, the coalition aimed for an ideologically
led diminishment in the size of the state, which had been a priority in
116 A. ALSTON
Cameron’s administration while in opposition, pursuing the hope of a

‘post-bureaucratic age’, in the words of the neoliberal Conservative politi-
cian Oliver Letwin (qtd in Johnston, 2014). Decreases in departmental
and welfare spending played a (politically motivated) role in halving the
budget deficit relative to GDP (Office for Budget Responsibility, 2014,
p. 6). As Polly Toynbee and David Walker argue, this meant that Cameron
could ‘pursue his longstanding ambition to diminish the public realm.
Margaret Thatcher privatised state-run industries; Cameron’s ambition
was no less than to abolish the postwar welfare state itself’:
The argument in 2010 was not about the principle of getting public finances
in order: it was about the timetable and at whose expense. A cabal of bank-
ers, economic commentators and corporate influencers demanded that net
public debt as a proportion of GDP be lowered to 30 %, the lowest ratio
for 300 years. The figure was plucked out of US neoliberal texts. Empirical
evidence does not suggest that there is a set point at which national debt
has a detrimental impact on growth; economies with higher average debt-
to-GDP ratios have not lost out on long-term growth. (Toynbee & Walker,
2015)
In other words, coupled with public spending reform (see also Elliott,
2014), Cameron’s coalition politicised the reduction of the budget deficit
by reducing the size of the state, adopting an attitude toward it inherited
from the annals of Thatcherism.
While the term itself failed to gain much currency after the coalition
formed a government, Cameron’s vision for a ‘Big Society’ nonetheless
reflected certain aspects of Thatcher’s neoliberalism, albeit couched in
somewhat cosier turns of phrase. The Conservative Party’s 2010 policy
paper, Building a Big Society, describes the ambition of forming ‘a soci-
ety with much higher levels of personal, professional, civic and corporate
responsibility; a society where people come together to solve problems
and improve life for themselves and their communities; a society where
the leading force for progress is social responsibility, not state control’
(Cabinet Office, 2010, p. 1). The ideas in the policy paper echo Thatcher’s
comments in her interview with Keay insofar as both push for a redistribu-
tion of power from the state to those who the state might otherwise serve,
while extending entrepreneurship as an ideal to social sectors that might
otherwise have escaped the reach of economic reason in ways that recalled
New Labour’s calibration of social amelioration in line with neoliberal
values and principles.
For Claire Bishop, while the Big Society vision claims to foster ‘a new
culture of voluntarism, philanthropy and social action’, what it really
denotes is ‘a laissez-faire model of government […] It’s a thinly opportu-
nistic mask: asking wageless volunteers to pick up where the government
cuts back, all the while privatising those services that ensure equality of
access to education, welfare and culture’ (Bishop, 2012, p. 14). While the
notion of a ‘Big Society’ has certainly lost currency, Building a Big Society
set out the government’s ideological approach to public sector reform
in ways that have lasted. Its hopes for voluntary groups to take the place
of beleaguered public services never really took off, but Conservative
policy during their successful 2015 UK General Election campaign still
announced a ‘paid volunteer scheme’ which would apply to companies
that employ 250 people or more, as well as all public sector workers,
in an effort to ‘create a better, more motivated workforce’, as Cameron
put it (Gage, 2015). As this indicative example suggests, the influence
of the Big Society remained in place for Conservative Party stakehold-
ers, to some extent, even if the rhetoric was dropped – an influence that
strove to link the social enterprise of individuals with the productivity of
worker-citizens.
The lasting ambition of the Big Society connects up with New Labour’s
attempts to inaugurate a more ‘active’ citizenship and Thatcher’s prosely-
tising of entrepreneurialism. Building a Big Society promised to foster a
generation of ‘social entrepreneurs’ and a range of ‘social enterprises’ by
offering strategic capital and start-up finance (Cabinet Office, 2010, p. 4).
To be enterprising and entrepreneurial were at the heart of the Big Society
vision. The Big Society therefore sought to valorise personal responsibility,
social enterprise and productivity in a context that in large part tried to
impose these ‘empowering’ values on people at a time when social secu-
rity and welfare was under threat. In other words, what the façade of
the Big Society tried to brush over with its emphases on volunteering,
philanthropy, and so on, was a scheme of production assigned to citizens
and to which they ought to posit themselves that positioned an enter-
prising and entrepreneurial form of empowerment and productivity – in
both work and leisure, blurring the line between the two – as an ultimate
dimension of value and meaning. Even though labour productivity has
consistently struggled in the UK since the financial crash (Barnett et al.,
2014), the Conservatives nonetheless sought to foster a more enterprising
and entrepreneurial culture that valorised the productivity and initiative of
conscientious individuals.
118 A. ALSTON
Neoliberalism, then, has circled around a system of value with some

degree of continuity since the 1980s, even if the governments that have
responded to and advocated neoliberalism have done so via different
rhetoric and different attitudes toward the public sector. A ‘new indi-
vidualism’, privacy, personal responsibility, an embrace of risk, and the
promotion of entrepreneurship have all featured in the policies and phi-
losophies of Thatcherism, New Labour and the Big Society. Furthermore,
these values have also impacted on cultural production in profound ways,
not least recently. For instance, the coalition decreased treasury funding
for arts councils, per person, between 2009/2010 and 2013/2014 by
35 % (NCA, 2015, p. 15). While this decrease was nuanced by significant
increases in the comparatively smaller pot of National Lottery funding
for the arts per person, not least as a result of the belated impact of the
London 2012 Olympic Games – as the National Campaign for the Arts
records – funding for the arts still fell ‘further and faster than ever before
in this country’ (NCA, 2015, pp. 5, 19). Moreover, this new reliance on
Lottery funding is itself an enterprising initiative predicated on risk (gam-
bling) and the sourcing of funds from individuals who are offered a choice
as to whether or not they participate in the initiative, as opposed to sourc-
ing funds through the state by means of taxation.
As Jen Harvie observes, cuts to Arts Council funding were also meant
to be attenuated by an encouragement of philanthropy in a mixed eco-
nomic funding strategy that married up public and private funding
initiatives (Harvie, 2013, pp. 157–91). However, while the notion of phi-
lanthropy implies humanistic value and selfless generosity, the co-optation
of the notion of philanthropy in Cameron’s vision of a Big Society ‘risks
reinforcing social imbalances rather than challenging them’ by: patronis-
ing (in its negative connotation) those in receipt of philanthropic ‘gifts’;
allowing those with wealth to accrue social capital as a consequence of
giving; allowing a funding system to support the private whims of philan-
thropists, instead of a democratic allocation of funding; and ‘legitimat-
ing government withdrawal from arts funding’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 157).
For Harvie, such a funding climate helps to foster an emphasis on artists
as ‘artrepreneurs’ who model a creative entrepreneurialism ‘marked by
independence and the ability to take initiative, take risks, self-start, think
laterally, problem-solve, innovate ideas and practices, be productive, effect
impact and realize or at least stimulate financial profits’ (Harvie, 2013,
p. 62; see also Brink, 2011). While creative entrepreneurship is not in itself
harmful, Harvie nonetheless flags ‘the potentially detrimental effects of
hegemonic expectations imposed on artists to model entrepreneurialism

in ways that both indulge and inherently celebrate neoliberal capitalism’,
in effect modelling neoliberalism by privileging the liberty of individuals
to do and trade as they please (Harvie, 2013, pp. 62–3).
There are a number of ways in which Punchdrunk’s production practices
connect up with the Big Society in light of its adherence to a neoliberal
system of value, such as their reliance on volunteers who give up their time
to build sets for Punchdrunk performances. Punchdrunk’s ‘Enrichment
Director’, Peter Higgin, suggests that the company’s volunteer schemes
derive from ‘an engagement ethos’ that has ‘always existed in the com-
pany … it creates community, it enthuses people in the ambition of the
work, the idea of transforming space’ (qtd in Machon, 2015, p. 266).
Punchdrunk Enrichment relates to an arm of Punchdrunk’s work led by
Higgin that creates relatively small-scale work for communities that might
not otherwise be exposed to a Punchdrunk performance, indicatively
including theatre for young and very young audiences (commissioned by
schools, for instance). In the Big Society vision, though, volunteers are
ideally engaged not just in the vision of the work, but in the ambition of
work and particularly a kind of work that helps to facilitate and arguably
risks justifying reductions in public subsidy. Furthermore, Punchdrunk’s
volunteer schemes, while pragmatic and useful to the company in helping
realise the ambitions of a project, figure volunteers as productive subjects
who labour either in their own leisure time or unpaid work time – often
with the incentive of developing a portfolio of unpaid work experience,
and consequently enhancing the productivity of the labour market and
those looking to enter the labour market, even if their chances of align-
ing commitment to a particular kind of unpaid labour fail to match the
likelihood of securing a comparable kind of paid work at some point in
the future.
However, while the material contexts that form the crux of Harvie’s
critique of neoliberalism and the Big Society inform the politics of
Punchdrunk’s production practices – which I explore in more detail in the
next section – it is also worth reflecting on the politics of immersive the-
atre aesthetics, specifically; it is worth unpacking the terms of ‘an engage-
ment ethos’ that does not just affect volunteers and other workers who
help to put together an immersive environment, but audiences who are
immersed in that environment and who participate in the production of a
more holistically defined immersive theatre aesthetic. The aims of the rest
of this chapter are therefore twofold: first, to address how Punchdrunk
120 A. ALSTON
have responded to the expectations of conforming to creative entrepre-

neurialism in ways that ‘indulge’ and ‘celebrate’ neoliberal capitalism, as
Harvie puts it; and second, to address how Punchdrunk’s ‘engagement
ethos’ extends to theatre audiences and revolves around a set of values
that have been identified in this section as neoliberal values, including
individualism, privacy, personal responsibility, risk and entrepreneurship.
BRANDSCAPES AND MIXED ECONOMIC FUNDING

Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre production strategy commits to a mixed
economic funding model that merges public, foundation, philanthropic
and corporate funding streams; this section deals with each in turn, begin-
ning with their pursuit and receipt of public funding, and culminating in a
focused critique of their corporate partnerships.
The UK’s primary public funding body for the arts, Arts Council
England (ACE), set out a plan to respond to the coalition’s cuts to public
funding of the arts by encouraging individuals and organisations to help
one another in a context where ‘Big Government’ – the antithesis of the
Big Society – was under threat. This plan was set out in their 2010 flagship
policy document, Achieving Great Art for Everyone, which aims to stretch
a reduced public funding pot by integrating public money with private
funding streams. In his statement in Achieving Great Art for Everyone as (a
now former) Chief Executive of ACE, Alan Davey describes how he wants
‘to try and deliver more from the private sector, by improving fundraising
skills and the overall culture of giving to the arts’ (ACE, 2010, p. 7). For
Davey, then, important aims of ACE’s strategic framework for arts fund-
ing are to help artists to become more enterprising – or ‘artrepreneur-
ial’ – and to encourage financial support from the private sector, both of
which feature as goals in this framework that are couched in the rhetoric
of sustainability and enterprise (ACE, 2010, p. 18).
As Harvie addresses, artrepreneurs (are forced to) approach arts fund-
ing not so much as a public financial support mechanism, but as a tool for
investing in the arts in ‘sustainable’ ways, where sustainability is premised
on the part-privatisation of arts funding and the enterprise and initiative
of (at least partly) self-sustaining artists (see Harvie, 2013, pp. 62–6).
Furthermore, as touched on in the previous section, the Arts Council’s
encouragement of philanthropy in a context of diminished public funding
brings with it a number of risks, including the reinforcement of social
imbalances, the potential transfer of a philanthropist’s social capital into
other forms of capital, the inhibition of democratically allocated funding,

and a legitimation of government withdrawal from arts funding (Harvie,
2013, p. 157). In championing a mixed economy, then, the neoliberal
principles and values of Cameron’s Big Society – minimal government
twinned with enterprise and entrepreneurship – also feeds into the admin-
istration and allocation of public funding for the arts. Theatre companies
like Punchdrunk need to be attuned to policy documents like Achieving
Great Art for Everyone if they are to stand a chance of securing public
funding; they will need to demonstrate and evidence a commitment to its
values and ambitions, which are ultimately values and ambitions that con-
nect up with the Big Society’s idealisation of individual and artrepreneurial
empowerment, and a form of cultural productivity that has to deal with
diminishment in the size of the state.
However, in April 2012 Punchdrunk were awarded with National
Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status, solidifying their regular ACE fund-
ing from 2009 with a public funding rise of 141 % in real terms, despite
significant cuts in public funding to former regularly funded organisations
(ACE, 2011). Colin Nightingale, Punchdrunk’s senior producer, suggests
that the company’s popularity enables them to be picky about which pri-
vate funders they choose to work with, while exercising greater authorial
independence. He suggests that Punchdrunk are free to manoeuvre within
a funding field comprising a range of different funding sources, achieving
greater bargaining status through systems of exchange, with potentially
mutual benefits, in a competitive market for both businesses and artists
(Nightingale, 2011; see also Toffler, 1964, p. 107). He is also very clear
about how Punchdrunk’s mixed funding model helped with their success-
ful bid for ACE funding, adding that reliance on public funding is too
risky (Nightingale, 2011). A mixed funding model at least offers security
to continue making work should one or other of the public or private
funding strands fall through.
An example of a private funding strand that forms the second com-
ponent of Punchdrunk’s mixed economic funding model includes their
foundation funding, which has featured contributions from the indepen-
dent Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. Punchdrunk Enrichment has also ben-
efitted from support from both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. While certainly not peculiar to Punchdrunk
as a funding practice, the company is nonetheless able to demonstrate
the ‘sustainability’ and ‘enterprise’ that is sought after in Achieving Great
Art for Everyone insofar as they are able to demonstrably diversify their
122 A. ALSTON
funding sources in a funding context that targets and supports such diver-
sification. However, Nightingale suggests that Punchdrunk has needed to
be entrepreneurial in sourcing funds for their large-scale work for some
time prior to the coalition’s public spending reform, pointing out that
money is always an issue at the forefront of production, particularly a lack
of it to meet the financial requirements of a given show (Nightingale,
2011). As such, while Punchdrunk’s reward of a rise in public funding at
a time of funding crisis suggests alignment with ACE’s funding strategy,
they had already been practising what was to become ACE mantra post-
2010. Punchdrunk, then, have become increasingly imbricated with a
public funding ideology that nudges ever closer to privatisation, but their
own funding initiatives were already demonstrating artrepreneurialism.
Other examples of a pre-existing embrace of mixed economic fund-
ing in ways that have been sustained in the company’s funding strategy
include their philanthropic funding initiatives and corporate partner-
ships – the third and fourth components of their mixed economic funding
model, alongside public and foundation funding. Regarding the former,
Punchdrunk developed a ‘friendship scheme’ that might otherwise form
a more familiar feature of contemporary theatre and performance fund-
ing, both in the UK and abroad. However, Punchdrunk’s innovation on
the friendship scheme, modelled around ‘Keyholders’, ‘embodies exciting
opportunities to support the company as it continues to innovate and
push the boundaries of theatrical experiment. There are six levels at which
you can support the company, each with a different key unlocking access
to exclusive information and experiences’ (Punchdrunk, 2011). These
six levels – which were eventually reduced to four – begin with the £30
annual Valet Key membership, which ‘Unlocks limited access to the com-
pany’s plans with priority booking for some Punchdrunk productions and
an occasional letter’ (Punchdrunk, 2011). In what must have been early
2013 (the date has proved difficult to establish), the fifth and sixth keys
were dropped from the Key Holder scheme, at least from its public face
on the website. The specified range of prices used to be topped with a
£25,000 biennial Skeleton Key membership, which, in addition to the
priority booking and unveiling of some of the secrecy which surrounds the
company, as the £250 Bow Key bestows, unlocked ‘a bespoke opportu-
nity of the most exclusive and exhilarating nature, a once in a lifetime trip
with Punchdrunk Travel Company’ (Punchdrunk, 2011) – an initiative
which promised a highly exclusive holiday experience involving arrival at
an airport, a journey to an unknown destination, and a theatre experience
disseminated throughout that destination. The sixth key was an access-

all-areas Master Key for unspecified larger donations. The current most
expensive option is a £5,000 Abloy Key, allowing key holders access to a
‘personalised service from the Punchdrunk team as they develop and nur-
ture a close relationship with the company’ (Punchdrunk, 2014).
Elsewhere, I have described Punchdrunk’s Key Holder scheme as an
innovation on a long-standing philanthropic tradition in which philanthropy
‘is less like a gesture of giving than it is a purchase of reward’ (Alston, 2012,
p. 202). This reward has for some time been figured in philanthropic culture
as social capital, but the Key Holder scheme refigures this as cultural capital
via gradually unfolding secrecy that surrounds the company, among other
graded perks. Harvie has also criticised the Key Holder scheme for being
elitist and ultimately mirroring ‘the pay-offs Punchdrunk most celebrates in
its shows – individual attention and individuated experiences’ (Harvie, 2013,
p. 181). For both Harvie and me, this ultimately ‘reinforces neoliberal ideol-
ogy’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 181), not least in its resonances with a Big Society
that seeks to reward adherence to neoliberal value and social enterprise.
The fourth and final component of Punchdrunk’s mixed economic
funding is their corporate partnerships. Representatives of Punchdrunk
have been creating work for corporate business for over a decade. In the
early stages of this activity, the corporate face of Punchdrunk went by
the name of Gideon Reeling: Punchdrunk’s sibling company initially
co-directed by Barrett and Kate Hargreaves, a long-standing performer-
collaborator with Punchdrunk. Barrett no longer co-directs Gideon
Reeling since they became an independent company. In early life, though,
as Punchdrunk’s corporate face, Gideon Reeling helped with sourc-
ing funds for Punchdrunk performances through corporate channels.1
More recently, corporate businesses have outsourced creative labour to
Punchdrunk without recourse to Gideon Reeling, although these ven-
tures are not always clearly attributed to Punchdrunk. It tends to be the
corporate publicity that foregrounds the Punchdrunk brand, not that
of the theatre company, although information does now appear on the
‘Partnerships’ pages of Punchdrunk’s website following redevelopment of
the site (Punchdrunk, 2014).
1
For instance, in sourcing funds for Faust, Gideon Reeling provided the creative and pro-
ductive impetus behind Southern Comfort’s Fat Tuesday club nights and the funds raised
through this corporate venture helped to make Faust a realisable project for Punchdrunk
(Gardner, 2006).
124 A. ALSTON
Punchdrunk has since been approached by corporate businesses and

commercial brands including Virgin Media, W Hotels, Louis Vuitton,
Alexander McQueen, Stella Artois Black, Bacardi, Absolut, Xbox and
Sony. For the opening of Louis Vuitton’s Bond Street store in 2010, for
instance, a celebrity-studded audience was driven from the store to a secret
location: an old postal sorting office in Soho, comparable to The Drowned
Man’s disused sorting office in Paddington. They were free to explore an
immersive environment that drew on (now) familiar Punchdrunk motifs
and locales: dim corridors providing entry into an immersive environment,
a train carriage, a pine forest, rooms covered in strips of paper, postcards
and bric-a-brac, a mime performing with a trunk (this was a Louis Vuitton
store launch after all), female performers dancing seductively to gramo-
phone music, ticking clocks, palm reading and, inevitably, opportunities
to consume liquor. All of these elements have appeared in one form or
another in Punchdrunk’s larger-scale free-roaming performances, includ-
ing The Masque of the Red Death, Sleep No More, and The Drowned Man.
The idea for the launch ‘grew from a trip to the museum attached to
Vuitton’s workshop in the Paris suburb of Asnières-sur-Seine’ (Garratt,
2010, n.p.). In particular, for Maxine Doyle – associate director and cho-
reographer of Punchdrunk – the company ‘were inspired by the worlds
that exist within the cases they had there. Trunks in which a writing desk
would appear, a full camp bed, a mosquito net’ (qtd in Garratt, 2010,
n.p.). The trunk and its secrets, Parisian suburbs and the je ne sais quoi of
French chic: these themes, evoked by the Louis Vuitton brand, were spa-
tialised and materialised in a ‘thematically resonant environment’, which
forms an important basis of immersive theatre scenography identified by
W.B. Worthen (2012, p. 86). For Yves Carcelle and Sue Whiteley, the CEO
of Louis Vuitton and its UK boss, respectively, the vision informing the
launch was to ‘create a legacy, something more than just a retail space. […
Carcelle and Whiteley] say they want to immerse themselves in London’s
artistic culture, to give something back’ (Chamberlain, 2010, n.p.). But
this works the other way around as well; Punchdrunk give something to
the brand – Punchdrunk chic. They substantiate, nuance, disperse and
extend the Vuitton brand through space, objects and embodiment.
The Night Chauffeur (2010) and The Black Diamond (2011) were
collaborations with the advertising agency, Mother: the entrepreneurial
and edgy marketing giants behind the Pot Noodle musical at the 2008
Edinburgh Festival, and Acer’s interactive dolphin aquariums pitched in
shopping centres around Europe in 2012 (the interactive dolphins were
virtual, thankfully). Both performances were funded and marketed by

Stella Artois Black. The Black Diamond was rapidly booked to capacity and
played to an audience of 3,000 non-paying audience members over the
course of 6 weeks, 2,200 more than The Night Chauffeur (Punchdrunk,
2011). The Black Diamond was split into seven scenes, with scene one
taking place on a different day to the remaining six. The first scene was
where Stella’s presence was most prominent. Audiences entered a build-
ing playing host to an engagement party for two characters called Jacques
and Cecile on East London’s Blackall Street. The music of Juliette Greco
floated through the cosy complex’s various rooms, furnished with 1960s
décor and very much in keeping with Stella’s brand aesthetic. On enter-
ing the space, audience members were handed beer tokens which could
be exchanged for pints of Stella Artois Black in branded glasses in the bar
upstairs – an exchange that, due to the volume of glasses that trickled
throughout the building, provided a branded backdrop for the frolicking
performers. The bulk of scene one involved, quite simply, being in such a
cool, convivial space, although the scene culminated in the stealing of the
Black Diamond in the street outside – a ring which Jacques intended to use
as an engagement ring for his prospective fiancée (see Alston, 2012). In
the latter scenes of this performance, performed at a later date, there was
much more of an onus on narrative development as considerably smaller
groups of only a few audience members and individuals were led or driven
through the streets of East London as the story of the Black Diamond and
its whereabouts unfolded.
As a third and final example, … and darkness descended (2011) was a
collaboration with Sony to launch the PlayStation game Resistance 3. The
performance took place in tunnels beneath Waterloo Station (comparable
to Tunnel 228) and positioned the audience as torch-bearing survivors in
a Live Action Role Play, post-apocalyptic, alien-fleeing adventure. Again,
there were some familiar Punchdrunk motifs: dark corridors, object-
cluttered and heavily scented environments, evocative soundtracks and
the like. The audience, though, unlike with some of Punchdrunk’s larger-
scale work, were put into groups and had to work together in completing
tasks so as to escape oblivion.2 ‘The idea’, from the perspective of Sony’s
head of sponsorship for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Carl
2
A similar model was used in Punchdrunk’s The Crash of the Elysium (2011–12) and
Against Captain’s Orders: a Journey into the Uncharted (2015), which were both perfor-
mances designed for young audiences.
126 A. ALSTON
Christopher-Ansari, was to ‘recreate the “emotions” of the game in the

production’ (Arnott, 2011, n.p.). … and darkness descended was intended
to put the gamer in a live situation, transferring the virtual into a physical
environment, where the horrors of that environment could appear all the
more urgent and terrifying.
Punchdrunk’s corporate partnerships, as Machon suggests, ‘allow ideas
to be piloted and offer opportunities to budding artists, producers and
managers from within the company. They expose the company to new
audiences, while generating an income that directly feeds into Punchdrunk
Enrichment projects, securing buildings and subsidizing ticket prices’
(Machon, 2015, p. 268). Diverting funds received from corporate busi-
nesses into these kinds of initiatives enables Punchdrunk to support proj-
ects that might not otherwise benefit from more lucrative commercial
appeal. Also, while Harvie is critical of Punchdrunk’s creative entrepre-
neurship, she nonetheless acknowledges that the company is ‘impressively
innovative in generating new sources of income in an age of public arts
funding austerity’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 182). Punchdrunk’s corporate part-
nerships enable free ticketing for prospective audiences and they help to
keep Punchdrunk’s actors in paid work, especially in the potentially long
interim periods between large-scale productions. Finally, Punchdrunk’s
brand partnerships director, Connie Harrison, claims that the company
professes no profit motive – ‘every single penny goes back into the com-
pany’ – which Machon contextualises by commenting on the pragmatism
of running Punchdrunk as a business, facilitating the financial viability of
Punchdrunk initiatives (qtd in Machon, 2015, p. 268).
Nonetheless, Punchdrunk’s corporate partnerships also impact on the
politics and aesthetics of immersive theatre scenography and the engage-
ment of audiences in immersive environments; this is what sets these
partnerships apart most clearly from their public, foundation and philan-
thropic funding initiatives, which are more familiar forms of theatre fund-
ing. Anna Klingmann uses the term ‘brandscape’ to describe the physical
manifestations of a brand identity that demarcates ‘culturally independent
sites where corporate value systems materialize into physical territories’
(Klingmann, 2007, p. 83; see also Riewoldt, 2002; Wickstrom, 2006,
pp. 14–21). Punchdrunk create brandscapes for Louis Vuitton, Stella
Artois Black, Sony and others via an aesthetic that grows out of a brand’s
key themes. These brandscapes ‘spatialise’ brand identities according to
the same logic that defines the spatialisation of source narratives ‘in a the-
matically resonant’ immersive theatre environment. Product placement,
for instance, via a sea of branded glasses in The Black Diamond, seam-
lessly slips into these environments because the environments are designed
around a collection of images and resonances that a brand creates or col-
lects and assigns to itself, providing Punchdrunk with centrally significant
aesthetic source material.
Elizabeth Sakellaridou comments on ‘the physicality and interactive
possibilities of a real “peopled” theatre’ in works by Punchdrunk that
‘enchant audiences back from the alluring pleasures of virtual spectacle’
(Sakellaridou, 2014, p. 28). However, their corporate partnerships com-
plicate the separation of a ‘real “peopled” theatre’ and ‘the alluring plea-
sures of virtual spectacle’, as each performance tends to be based on the
alluring pleasures of Spectacle in the promotion of a product. The ‘physi-
cality and interactive possibilities’ that Punchdrunk offer to audiences are
what makes them so attractive to companies like Sony, which may well
seek not so much the appealing presence of their product in an immersive
environment as a brandscape that can be designed around their product
and that can offer something that it cannot easily achieve without the sup-
port of a company like Punchdrunk.
As Harvie points out, Punchdrunk’s corporate collaborations risk
‘compromising the principles of engagement and participation that form
crucial parts of its identity, pleasure and practices’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 184).
In my view, this is partly because of the audience’s immersion in brand-
scapes, but it is also because of their figuring as subjects who facilitate
the productivity of marketing campaigns. Audiences, particularly if they
enjoy the free performance that is offered to them in a corporate perfor-
mance, end up positioned, at least potentially, as what Max Lenderman
calls ‘brand evangelists’: the bringer of glad tidings and ‘progenitors to
the new consumer’ (Lenderman, 2006, p. 167). Brand evangelists, writes
Lenderman, ‘love the brand because it provides them with an experience
no other brand can deliver. That experience will be translated by word-
of-mouth to peers and family on their own terms’ (Lenderman, 2006,
p. 168). Audiences risk becoming synonymous with brand evangelists for
Louis Vuitton, Stella and Sony once they discuss the event with friends,
or on online blogs. They may not have to buy a ticket, but they buy into
an advertising campaign simply by attending and are depended upon to
make that campaign efficacious. By inviting audiences to participate in a
marketing campaign with the attractive offer of free tickets, audiences end
up marketing a brand. The performance and the audience along with it
are co-opted by corporate enterprise that has become ever more alert to
128 A. ALSTON
the marketing potential of cultural cachet and the buzz affiliated with a
hot ticket.
Significant channels that feed into Punchdrunk’s mixed economic
funding model therefore include corporate, public, foundation and phil-
anthropic funding. In particular, their corporate partnerships allow ideas
to be piloted; keep members of the company in paid work; offer oppor-
tunities to collaborators that might not otherwise be there; (potentially)
bring a new audience to Punchdrunk, provided enough distance is placed
between their core fan base and the corporate partnership; and allow for a
pragmatic approach to funding a range of projects in the midst of auster-
ity. ‘However,’ as Harvie acknowledges, ‘Punchdrunk’s mixed economies
also risk monetizing social relationships and intimacies, reinforcing elitist
hierarchies and reifying the understanding of the supremacy of the indi-
vidual over the group that is so crucial to neoliberal ideology’ (Harvie,
2013, p. 177). Furthermore, their corporate partnerships allow businesses
to utilise audiences by immersing them in brandscapes as prospective
brand evangelists, meaning that audiences end up co-producing the eco-
nomic value of a marketing campaign. In other words, immersive environ-
ments and the audiences that inhabit them are ultimately co-opted within
marketing campaigns as productive participants. While these campaigns
might benefit an arts organisation willing to work with the image worlds
and identity of a particular brand, spatialising and materialising a brand,
audiences end up as unpaid marketers of a product whose productivity as
marketers is utilised. Perhaps their payment is the chance to experience a
Punchdrunk performance for free; however, this payment also comes at
the cost of subscription to a marketing campaign that co-opts the immate-
rially productive capabilities of participants who may very well evangelise a
given product by way of an affectively voluminous experience. As a result,
affective experience ends up resourced as a productive source of capital.
In the next section, I want to develop an analysis of neoliberal value
in work by Punchdrunk by addressing performances that do not feature
as a part of their corporate partnership programme. A peculiarly produc-
tive and neoliberal figuring of the audience is employed in their corporate
partnerships and adds value to marketing campaigns, but it is not pecu-
liar to those partnerships. While Punchdrunk’s corporate partnerships
offer very clear links to a neoliberal context, and while these links inform
the politics of immersive theatre production, I argue that the politics of
Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre aesthetics is predicated on neoliberal val-
ues and principles at a more fundamental level.
ENTREPRENEURIAL PARTICIPATION
In a study of the representation of neoliberalism in nonfiction stage
plays, Shannon Steen questions a rhetoric of threat that might otherwise
accompany and dominate an address of neoliberalism and performance.
‘Performance enacts the rhetorical seductions of neoliberalism in two
important ways,’ she writes: ‘as a metaphor that entices its addressee to
accept otherwise untenable conditions; and as the pleasurable iteration
of the performative imperative, in which the metaphor of performance
reshapes the call to entrepreneurial action as a project of personal and
political liberation’ (Steen, 2014, p. 3, original emphasis; see also Zaointz,
2014). However, in this section I want to take a different approach to
Steen’s in addressing the ‘seductions of neoliberalism’ and their relevance
to contemporary performance forms, which is primarily because of a very
different framework for audience engagement that immersive theatre
offers to audiences in comparison with nonfiction stage plays. This sec-
tion explores what might be meant by a ‘call to entrepreneurial action’
within an immersive theatre aesthetic as a ‘seductive’ part of a framework
for audience immersion and participation. In doing so, it considers how
neoliberalism applies to the immersion and participation of audiences who
are encouraged to commit to an entrepreneurial form of productivity as an
ultimate dimension of value and meaning.
I will be reflecting on my own experiences of Punchdrunk’s The Masque
of the Red Death and the New York run of Sleep No More. In both perfor-
mances, characters, themes and atmospheres evoked in texts – the short
stories of Edgar Allan Poe in The Masque, and William Shakespeare’s
Macbeth and the films of Alfred Hitchcock in Sleep No More – are dispersed
throughout immersive environments that are spread over several floors.
However, despite scenographic cohesiveness among these various envi-
ronments, it is still up to free-roaming audiences to secure for themselves
the best possible Punchdrunk experience. Whether or not an audience
member chooses or is able to exploit the possibilities of free-roaming does
not detract from its ‘call to entrepreneurial action’, and it is this call and its
relation to the ‘neoliberal ethos’ that grounds my critique of the politics of
Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre aesthetics in what remains of this chapter.
‘Ethos’ refers to the characteristic spirit of something. When I refer
to the neoliberal ethos, I mean the characteristic spirit of neoliberalism
which is to be understood as a system of values. In my survey of the values
and policies that have emerged in neoliberal modes of governance over
130 A. ALSTON
the past few decades earlier in the chapter, I dwelt on a set of recurring
themes: individualism, privacy, personal responsibility, risk and especially
entrepreneurialism. None of these values is solely the preserve of neo-
liberalism, but as a value system they comprise the neoliberal ethos. The
neoliberal ethos pushes for a particular form of enterprising and entre-
preneurial involvement in work and leisure. The ideal citizen-participant
according to this ethos is the entrepreneur: the self-starter, the indepen-
dent, autonomous, motivated subject who is capable, self-reliant and con-
scientious. These qualities can be found in ‘artrepreneurial’ theatre makers
and companies, but they can also be found in a figure that I call the ‘entre-
preneurial participant’. The entrepreneurial participant is immersive the-
atre’s free-roaming rendering of Blair’s active citizen and the Big Society’s
enterprising and entrepreneurial go-getter. It is the entrepreneur who is
the most prized asset of neoliberal societies and it is the entrepreneurial
participant who is welcomed into the spaces of free-roaming immersive
theatre performances.
Punchdrunk incentivise entrepreneurial participation through the pro-
duction of affective experiences that are meant to be sought. Free-roamers
are asked by ushers when they enter into a Punchdrunk performance
to carve their own exploratory paths across several floors and countless
rooms within large buildings. Free-roaming is a skill to be honed and
some will be more disposed to this honing than others, or predisposed.
Some will find more, see more, hear more and feel more than others; some
will leave with a more complete or rewarding experience; and some will
just be luckier than others in discovering a performance’s hidden depths
and nuances. But as the entrepreneur knows all too well, luck can be made
and risk can be mitigated.
As with many Punchdrunk performances, The Masque of the Red Death
is loosely based on a canonical literary text: in this case, the short stories
of Edgar Allan Poe. At the beginning of The Masque, the audience is asked
to wear a white, beaked mask and given an instruction to find a purveyor
of cloaks within the performance world (see Fig. 4.1). Adorned with both
cloak and mask, the audience chooses their own individual route through
the surprisingly vast number of rooms inside London’s Battersea Arts
Centre (BAC), each one decadently detailed appropriate to the haunt-
ing worlds of Poe’s short stories. At various intervals throughout the
performance, the cast walk solemnly up the BAC’s main stairway in the
foyer in a communal, trance-like exodus which offers a cue to help syn-
ergise the various performances within this performance that take place
Fig. 4.1 Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) (Photography
by Stephen Dobbie. Courtesy of Stephen Dobbie)
on a looped basis. Audiences might witness an increasingly manic eve-

ning meal with characters plucked from Poe’s The System of Doctor Tarr
and Professor Fether. The Black Cat from another of Poe’s tales prowls the
space. Audiences might also find themselves in grim catacombs reminis-
cent of The Cask of Amontillado, or in a claustrophobic bedroom for the
disturbing murder of the old man from The Tell-Tale Heart. These are all
performances within the performance. Macabre murders are repeatable
in the performance loops over the course of an evening, resurrecting not
only murdered characters, but performance itself.
The participatory element of The Masque primarily comes through
the audience’s ability to roam through the various spaces of the perfor-
mance. Not once do they step outside of an immersive landscape until
the moment they leave the building. This sense of coherence is especially
prominent at the Palais Royale: a cabaret bar hosted by Roderick Usher
from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, although he appears more remi-
niscent of the Kit-Kat Club host from the film Cabaret (1972). In the
132 A. ALSTON
Palais Royale, audience members are permitted to remove their masks and
enjoy a drink while watching vaudeville acts, and are also able to venture
backstage as the vaudeville performers prepare for their next show (see
Fig. 4.2). By opening up the backstage area of this performance space
within a performance space, the rest of the immersive landscape is granted
even more of a coherent reality. Even the productive processes of mak-
ing a performance within a performance are theatricalised. The Masque
ends in homage to the Poe tale from which the production takes its title,
with Prince Prospero’s ball taking place in a hall accommodating every
audience member. An energetic dance begins which features a number of
duets performed in unison. The Red Death, a mysterious, cloaked figure,
eventually appears before miraculously disappearing in a feat of magical
trickery that still baffles me.
Audiences are encouraged to be forthright in The Masque. If they
have an outgoing disposition, or spurred to be outgoing by wearing the
mask and cloak, they might venture through a fireplace in an effort to
find more of the performance in a labyrinthine world, a venturing that
Fig. 4.2 Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) (Photography
by Stephen Dobbie. Courtesy of Stephen Dobbie)
typifies how audiences are called upon to engage with an environment

that holds secrets. Through the fireplace, in dark spaces where desperate
and engrossing images of plague and sickness are physicalised in choreo-
graphed sequences, audiences discover more of the performance, only to
emerge the other side into new rooms, with new stories. If participants risk
stepping into the unknown, they are rewarded with more to experience. It
is their productivity – their productivity as entrepreneurial participants –
that is rewarded. It is the entrepreneurial participant who follows her nose
and reaps the rewards of discovery and adventure; it is the entrepreneurial
participant who takes risks and goes it alone; and it is the entrepreneurial
participant who embraces an individual journey. Entrepreneurial partici-
pants are not presented with an audio-visual stimulus that is shared in time
and space among a gathered audience for the duration of a performance,
as they are in more conventional stage-auditorium configurations; rather,
they experience scenes at different times and in a different order, or experi-
ence some aspects of a performance but not others, or miss out, or gain,
or experience alone. Entrepreneurial participation is also the participatory
mode expected of audiences, for without exercising at least a degree of
entrepreneurialism, the participant is likely to reduce, probably inadver-
tently, the number of opportunities that are available to them. Theatre
through the fireplace is for those who want to invest in a performance
by taking risks and accepting some degree of personal responsibility for a
fulfilling experience of individual discovery, testing the limits of what can
and cannot be entered, opened, touched, or eaten.
Entrepreneurial participation is therefore predicated on entrepre-
neurialism, personal responsibility, and risk-taking, valorising each as
productive features within a framework for audience immersion and
opportunistic participation. However, privacy and individualism are also
valued within this framework, which is more noticeably apparent in the
masks that each audience member is expected to wear while immersed in
the space – a technology that also helps to foster the audience’s adoption
of an entrepreneurial attitude. As Machon writes, Punchdrunk’s masks ‘at
once allow for anonymity and a sense of (role)play within the performance
itself. As an audience member, the mask allows you to take risks, to step
outside of yourself and enter into the adventure of the event’ (Machon,
2007, n.p.). For Barrett, the mask is there to remove the audience’s sense
of trepidation: ‘whatever baggage you’re bringing in, it’s neutralized by
the mask. So you can be a timid person, but crazy in the show world’ (qtd
in Machon, 2009, p. 90). What the mask helps to provide is confidence.
134 A. ALSTON
As Gareth White puts it, ‘identification with the crowd’ is disrupted, which
facilitates a more individualistic experience and fewer displays of ‘reluc-
tance or ironic detachment’ (White, 2009, pp. 224–5). Literally cloaked
from view, audiences are freed from the glare of a potentially judgemental
public that may otherwise deter participants from engaging in voyeurism,
or performing some kind of act that might feel embarrassing.
The cloak and mask close off audiences from one another, with the
exception of anonymous eyes glaring out from behind the mask. Affective
facial expressions are concealed within a private space behind the mask,
known only to the audience member and those performers who tempo-
rarily remove the mask for a one-on-one performance within the perfor-
mance. These one-on-ones are much sought after in Punchdrunk’s work.
They segregate audience members, often behind closed doors, and further
highlight the importance of individualism and privacy in the Punchdrunk
aesthetic. The one-on-ones usually involve some kind of intimate encoun-
ter, such as a whispered monologue concluded with a kiss on the cheek,
or an invitation to engage in some kind of task – such as eating the eyes
(made from olives) of a cat crafted from a napkin.3 As Machon puts it,
‘The potency of the one-on-ones […] remains the Punchdrunk ideal audi-
ence experience […] The importance of placing the audience at the centre
of the experience’ forms ‘the fundamental criterion of the company’s pol-
icy’ (Machon, 2015, p. 261). However, as an ideal and as an exclusive and
private experience that can nonetheless be hunted out, it is also important
to recognise that the one-on-ones present themselves as an enviable thing
and the locus of participatory one-upmanship and cultural cachet. They
are premised on privacy and individualism, and are the reward of entrepre-
neurial participation and an active and positive embrace of risk.
The pursuit of one-on-ones played an important role in my own experi-
ence of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More in New York, which continues to be
the company’s longest-running success. Sleep No More, co-produced with
the US production company Emursive, is Punchdrunk’s first international
commercial venture, reviving a 2003 London premiere and a revisited
2009–2010 run in Boston. The performance is housed in a vast former
warehouse and nightclub that has come to be known as the McKittrick
Hotel since the Punchdrunk-Emursive occupation. The McKittrick has
five floors, though some bloggers lay claim to an elusive sixth floor that,
3
For this particular one-on-one, I make reference not to my own experience, but that of
Chloe Veltman (2008).
for me, remained blocked by a masked usher (see Bonk, 2015). Inside the
McKittrick, masked audiences might stumble across a taxidermist’s blood-
ied bathtubs, a cemetery, a maze and a number of other atmospheric and
detailed environments that make either overt or tangential reference to the
ambience and character psyches of Macbeth and the oeuvre of Hitchcock,
particularly Rebecca (1940).
I remember feeling dejected when another audience member was
selected from a group of three to pass through a locked door for a one-
on-one. The fact that there were only three of us there was itself the
consequence of heading the other way to a much larger group of par-
ticipants once we clocked and followed a solitary female character wan-
dering between rooms. Outside of the locked door, she stared at each
of us in turn, finally selecting the person next to me. This moment was
thrilling, knowing that selection was a possibility as the product of an
opportunity, albeit a failed one, that was self-made. While I was singled
out for a one-on-one later in the performance, these experiences remain
exclusive as a potential source of pride for the haves and envy for the
have-nots. It also constitutes a risk for audiences to move in the opposite
direction to crowds of spectators who may have communally followed
a character on a loop. Taking this risk (which includes the risk of losing
out) may increase the chances of securing a more intimate experience.
Such an opportunity is less likely to arise if the decision is not made and
the risk not taken to ignore the hurried pacing of the crowd on the tail
of another performer.
The distribution of opportunities to experience one-on-ones is nec-
essarily uneven. Free-roamers are presumed to enter into this distribu-
tive framework on supposedly level pegging. However, these pegs can be
shunted up a couple of notches by individuals if they are either disposed
or predisposed to capitalising on particular skills and insights. In free-
roaming immersive theatre, this might include familiarity with immersive
theatre participation – of mastering participatory protocol, for instance,
through experience of comparable performances; familiarity with the per-
formance, especially through attending the performance several times
(either by having the money to afford to do so, or by volunteering as an
usher and receiving free tickets in return); being of an outgoing disposi-
tion, or aspiring to be so once the mask is worn; and a rehearsed awareness
of how to go about securing the best possible experience prior to entering
the performance. In each case, it is the individual that must bear responsi-
bility for maximising self-made opportunity.
136 A. ALSTON
So-called ‘superfans’ of Sleep No More – also known as ‘Sleepalos’,

‘Insomniacs’ and ‘The Sleepless’ (Flaherty, 2014, p. 136) – attend inces-
santly, sometimes twice a night thanks to an additional late night slot
on Friday and Saturday evenings. One such superfan is Evan Cobb, aka
Scorched the Snake and author of the blog They Have Scorched the Snake …
but not killed it, bitches.4 As of 29 November 2012, when I was in email
contact with him and just prior to my New York visit, Cobb had attended
the performance 41 times … and counting: a performance, incidentally,
that at the time cost between $75 and $105.
Cobb has acquired participatory expertise through repeat attendance.
Superfans like Cobb invest time, energy and money into a theatre event
that encourages the cultivation of participatory skills. Participatory capaci-
ties are nurtured by attending to participatory dispositions. It is not
unusual for a fan to celebrate the merits of a given performance online,
nor is it unusual for a spectator to cultivate an understanding of a particu-
lar play or playwright, for instance; what is unusual, though, is the emer-
gence of fora that offer strategies for productive participation in theatre
(see also Anon, 2015; Knapp, 2011).
On his blog, Cobb shares participatory expertise by responding to
questions asked by visitors to the site, although he usually avoids offer-
ing specific instructions on securing one-on-ones. The blog is used to
exchange trivia about the performance and this exchange is accompanied
by personal reflections on what it was like to participate on a given eve-
ning. But Cobb goes one step further: he offers cryptic advice on how
to participate. This advice includes mappings of the performance space
to help with accessing parts of the performance that might otherwise
be difficult to find, as well as tips on discovering notable prop items,
such as an Ouija board or Hecate’s engagement ring (a Holy Grail for
superfans of the production).5 The offering of participatory tips under-
lies an assumption that there are right and wrong ways to set about
participating in Sleep No More, or at least that there are more effective
and productive modes of participation to be exploited. This indicates a
kind of meritocracy premised on privileging particular ideals and values,
4
The blog’s title is drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘We have scotcht the snake, not
kill’d it’ (Shakespeare, 1996, III.ii, 870). In Sleep No More, the line is delivered by Banquo,
not Macbeth, in a one-on-one performance within the performance (Cobb, 2012).
5
See Silvestre (2012). Cobb also specifies the search for Hecate’s ring as a particularly
fanatical pursuit of superfans (Cobb, 2012).
including the cultivation of participatory skills and the valorisation of

entrepreneurialism.
What all this amounts to is a clear shift of responsibility for maximising
the best possible experience of Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive the-
atre from theatre makers to theatre receivers. This is not to downplay the
painstaking work that goes into the creation of myriad immersive environ-
ments, not to mention the energy invested by performers in maintaining
vivacious physicality night after night. Rather, my point is to stress that
savviness enables a more effective response to the performance’s call to
entrepreneurial action: it is up to the audience to foster self-made oppor-
tunity and this fostering can be honed in the weeks, months and even years
leading up to a performance; audiences can find out how to become a
better entrepreneurial participant online; and they can also work out how
to roam more freely and to make the most of free-roaming by attending
the same performance several times to put them in a better position to
glean as much as possible from the performance, increasing their chances
of securing the best possible experience on a given evening. All of these
endeavours are entrepreneurial.
For Spyros Papaioannou, to be immersed in a Punchdrunk performance
‘is to let one’s subjectivity be destabilized, and by extension transformed
into a new agential possibility that is produced from de-rationalizing one’s
role as spectator or performer’ (Papaioannou, 2014, p. 163). I agree with
Papaioannou to the extent that a new agential possibility is produced and
that this possibility is premised on doing away with a rationalisation of
oneself as ‘spectator’. However, the agential possibility that is valorised
in The Masque and Sleep No More is of an entrepreneurial kind. It is not
found through losing oneself; rather, the freedoms that the participant-
agent is able to enjoy are bound to their disposition or predisposition
toward entrepreneurialism. Equality is consequently pitched not as a right
without obligation, but as something to be attained by exercising initia-
tive comparable to that asked of the active and entrepreneurial citizen.
The acceptance of personal responsibility, premised on exercising entre-
preneurial initiative, ends up enshrined as a value.
Commenting on the cultural and social risks of cultivating entrepre-
neurial artists, Harvie describes how ‘individual self-interest is emphasized
in ways that damage social relations and principles of social equality. This is
a risk in any political economy that prioritizes the rights of the individual,
so it is a risk in any neoliberal economy. I suggest it becomes an especially
acute problem when artists are conscripted to its priorities’ (Harvie, 2013,
138 A. ALSTON
p. 77). Something similar is at stake in The Masque and Sleep No More, only
the risks apply to audiences who pursue self-interest within a context that
prioritises individual enterprise, ultimately conscripting the audience to
the priorities of the neoliberal ethos. Keren Zaointz also argues that indi-
vidualised audience engagement in work by Punchdrunk ‘points to the
neoliberalizing of audiences, who are rarely called on to question the con-
ditions of the performance or the potential disparity between spectators’
experiences’ (Zaointz, 2014, p. 413). I agree, although the core political
issue is that audiences are not called on to question the conditions of their
own productivity, specifically, once they commit to a scheme of produc-
tion that is assigned to them, and to which they must posit themselves as
entrepreneurial participants if they are to participate conscientiously and
effectively on the terms set out by Punchdrunk.
By idealising entrepreneurship and extending it as a value across an
entire citizenship, the institution of entrepreneurialism as a value in the
Big Society and the Third Way valorised risk. Something similar is at stake
in Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive theatre. Through a comparable
extension of entrepreneurial participation to all participants, as a value
to be aspired to, risk-taking, by implication, ends up valorised as well. In
raising entrepreneurial participation and risk-taking to the status of values,
as an implicit consequence of the kinds of participation favoured through
their approach to space and the audience’s free-roaming within spaces,
Punchdrunk end up producing exclusionary forms of participation as a
consequence of the grounds on which inclusion is premised. More specifi-
cally, entrepreneurial participation and opportunistic risk-taking are these
exclusionary forms that also serve, strangely, as the basis for involvement
in performance as an individualised and entrepreneurial participant.
The likelihood of encountering risk is something that may well decrease
over the course of a live event, or with repeat attendance. Indeed, after a
few hours of wandering around the various spaces of The Masque and Sleep
No More, I soon became familiarised, or at least better acquainted, with
the layout of the spaces and where the looped performances were likely
to be taking place at particular times. The risk of missing out might con-
sequently be seen to decrease, helped also by attendance at other immer-
sive theatre events and the consequent bettering of knowledge regarding
participatory protocol. Not only that, but a developing awareness of that
participatory protocol over the course of one performance (and over the
course of several years before attending Sleep No More) also seemed to
decrease my own experience of risk perception. Nonetheless, risky choices
were still made: do I follow the crowd, or do I go it alone? Do I take the
hand of this performer, or do I decline? Do I remain in one space and hope

that the action comes to me, or do I wander? While they may seem trivial,
especially with regards to a neoliberal economy where the consequences
of risk-taking are potentially and obviously much more severe, these are
still risks to be negotiated in performance: not by choice, but by necessity.
Comparable to Giddens’s championing of active citizenship and
Cameron’s Thatcherite celebration of entrepreneurialism, then, is the
valuing of entrepreneurialism, individualism, privacy, personal responsibil-
ity, and an active and positive embrace of risk in The Masque and Sleep No
More. The equation of empowerment and free-roaming transfers at least
partial responsibility for the production of an individually encountered
and discovered performance journey onto the shoulders of individuals.
These performances are democratic in the Third Way sense; once pitched
as a group of individuals investing in the shared value of individualism, set
against a seemingly accessible backdrop of looped performances in per-
formance spaces that audiences are free to discover, a kind of democracy
and empowerment emerges that depends on realising this shared value.
However, participants must seek out the ‘right’ to the experiences that
they have paid for. Autonomy ends up being elicited from audiences,
which poses its own restrictions on participation for those without the
disposition or capacity to participate opportunistically.
There is an implicit politics to Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive
theatre aesthetics that may not deliberately deploy participation in the ser-
vice of politics, or democracy, but a lack of deliberate employment does
not stop Punchdrunk’s frameworks for immersion and participation from
accruing political significance. While their attempts to create a totally
immersive theatre may aspire toward the formation of otherworldly worlds,
worlds that strive to put into place their own rules of logic, these rules are
not necessarily peculiar or unique to those worlds. Punchdrunk audiences,
in going their own way, on their own unique intellectual adventure as they
roam freely through corridors and rooms, can be seen to put into motion
the condition of emancipated spectatorship identified by Rancière as an
enacted condition; however, empowerment is also assigned to audiences
through an entrepreneurial call to action that undercuts democratic ideal-
ism in support of a form of individuation that chimes with the neoliberal
ethos. In The Masque and Sleep No More, the shared power to translate
something perceived is attached to free-roaming as a condition for effec-
tive audience engagement as a productive participant – a condition that
benefits those of an outgoing disposition, but disadvantages those who are
less inclined to participate on the terms set out by Punchdrunk.
140 A. ALSTON
CONCLUSION
The implicit politics of free-roaming aesthetics in Punchdrunk’s large-scale
immersive theatre is informed by an analogous relationship to the neolib-
eral ethos. Taken together – and coalescing around the entrepreneurial
participant – individualism, privacy, personal responsibility, risk-taking,
and entrepreneurialism form and fuel the neoliberal ethos as it manifests
both within and beyond the ‘totally immersive’ worlds of a Punchdrunk
performance. Even though the company does not claim a political agenda,
free-roaming invites political examination, as does Barrett’s suggestion
that a central feature of Punchdrunk’s work ‘is the empowerment of the
audience’. Some free-roamers are freer than others and this freedom ulti-
mately rests on the degrees of productive participation that they are able to
exploit. This is because some audiences are either disposed or predisposed
to entrepreneurial participation, which affects the number of opportuni-
ties available to audiences in thematically resonant environments that hold
secrets. Entrepreneurial participation is therefore practised by produc-
tive participants who potentially reap the rewards of their entrepreneurial
endeavour, but it is also something invited by the Punchdrunk aesthetic.
These rewards will be revealed to the entrepreneurial participant, or the
lucky participant; however, luck, or risk, can be mitigated through entre-
preneurialism, and especially a savvy awareness of how best to engage with
a scheme of production and productivity.
Punchdrunk’s corporate work should be placed in a long lineage of
corporate funding initiatives on which countless major theatres around
the world depend, along with many well-established theatre companies.
Limiting focus to London, for the purposes of illustration, prominent
examples of corporate relationships include the National Theatre and
Travelex, the Donmar Warehouse and Barclays, and corporate partnerships
run through the Royal Court and the Barbican. Also, a growing number
of theatre companies creating participatory and immersive work are turn-
ing to product placement, more often than not promoting liquor of some
kind. Hendrick’s Gin and Courvoisier Cognac are particularly noteworthy
placers of consumable products in participatory and immersive theatre.
Examples include Ursula Martinez and Christopher Green’s Office Party
(2011) at the Pleasance in Islington, Hilary Westlake’s Dining with Alice
(2011) at Elsing Hall in Norfolk, and Debut’s Coming Up Festival (2011)
in vaults beneath London Bridge. However, what sets Punchdrunk’s work
apart from these other examples, though to a lesser extent in the sec-
ond string of examples just mentioned, is the direct correlation between
neoliberal systems of production and neoliberal value as manifested in a

framework for immersion and productive participation.
Analysis of corporate partnerships and examination of the changing
faces of neoliberalism in government policy illuminate the impact of neo-
liberalism on the production of immersive theatre performances, but neo-
liberal value in the Punchdrunk aesthetic does not originate in corporate
funding streams, or in a politicised funding climate. Rather, this chapter
has argued that neoliberal value is implicit in frameworks for immersion
and productive participation that are set up by Punchdrunk both inside
and outside of their corporate partnerships, and that precede the com-
pany’s recognition as model artrepreneurs. While the material networks
of neoliberalism usefully inform immersive theatre production, analysis of
neoliberal value as it emerges in the philosophy and policy decisions of
governments can also serve an address of immersive theatre aesthetics,
specifically, by enabling clarity about what constitutes neoliberal value and
how it appears in performances that might otherwise seem quite separate
from the enclosed confines of an immersive theatre environment.
Participation and immersion in Punchdrunk performances call forth
an exclusionary politics that is all the more thrilling because of exclu-
sion. Exclusion and exclusivity are tied into entrepreneurial values that
are both asked and expected of participating audiences. In evaluating
the thrill and sense of amazement or excitement that might come with,
for example, being selected for a one-on-one, or being one step ahead
of the crowd in discovering something within a performance, or find-
ing out where and when the next sought-after corporate performance
is happening, it is also worth reflecting on the political implications of
valuing the enterprising activity of theatre audiences. Furthermore, it is
worth questioning this valuing, considering how immersive theatre per-
formances might handle audiences differently. This is a task that the next
chapter takes up by exploring the frustration of productive participation
in immersive theatre.
REFERENCES
ACE. (2010). Achieving great art for everyone: A strategic framework for the arts.
London: Arts Council England.
ACE. (2011). http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/. Accessed 29 Nov 2011.
Alston, A. (2012, June). Funding, product placement and drunkenness in
Punchdrunk’s The Black Diamond. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 32(2),
193–208.
142 A. ALSTON
and responsibility in immersive theatre. Performance Research, 18(2), 128–138.
Anon. (2015). McKittrick hotel unofficial guide. http://mckittrickhotel.wiki-
foundry.com/. Accessed 10 Apr 2015.
Arnott, J. (2011, September 2). Punchdrunk? Try petrified – Gaming gets the
immersive theatre treatment, Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/stage/
theatreblog/2011/sep/02/punchdrunk-try-terrified. Accessed 8 Aug 2014.
Barnett, A., Batten, S., Chiu, A., Franklin, J., & Sebastia-Barriel, M. (2014).
Quarterly bulletin 2014 Q2 (pp. 114–128). London: Bank of England.
Basbaum, R. (2011, Autumn/Winter). Post-participatory participation. Afterall,
28, 90–101.
Beck, U. (1992 [1986]). Risk society: Towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.).
Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
London: Verso.
Bonk. (2015). The sixth floor, SOME QUESTIONS can only be answered by wear-
ing a white mask. http://neuralhandshake.tumblr.com/. Accessed 10 Apr 2015.
Brink, E. (2011). The Artrepreneur: Financial success for artistic souls. London:
Papy Publishing.
Brown, E., & Cairns, P. (2004). A grounded investigation of immersion in games.
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/papers/Immersion.pdf. Accessed
16 May 2015.
Cabinet Office. (2010). Building a big society, 18 May.
Calleja, G. (2011). In-game: From immersion to incorporation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Chamberlain, V. (2010, May 26). Oh! What a night: Louis Vuitton’s lavish bash.
London Evening Standard. http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/oh-what-a-
night-louis-vuittons-lavish-bash-6473839.html. Accessed 21 Aug 2014.
Chote, R., Crawford, R., Emmerson, C., & Tetlow, G. (2010). Public spending
under labour, 2010 Election Briefing Note No. 5 (IFS BN92).
Cobb, E. M. (2012). Email correspondence with the author, 29 November.
Elliott, L. (2014, February 14). Public sector jobs are set to be cut by 40 %
throughout Britain. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/
feb/14/public-sector-jobs-cuts-britain. Accessed 9 Apr 2015.
Flaherty, J. (2014, Spring & Summer). Dreamers and insomniacs: Audiences in
Sleep No More and The Night Circus. Comparative Drama, 48(1), 135–154.
Macmillan.
Gage, C. (2015, April 9). Cameron to announce paid volunteer scheme for 15
million people. Politics Home. https://www.politicshome.com/communities-
and-regions/articles/story/cameron-announce-paid-volunteer-scheme-15-
million-people. Accessed 10 Apr 2015.
Gardner, L. (2006, June 20). An offer they can’t refuse. Guardian. http://www.
guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/jun/20/theatre2. Accessed 7 July 2011.
Garratt, S. (2010, June 24). Punchdrunk theatre company opens Louis Vuitton’s
new Bond Street store’. Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/
theatre/7843548/Punchdrunk-theatre-company-opens-Louis-Vuittons-new-
Bond-Street-store.html. Accessed 21 Aug 2014.
Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The renewal of social democracy. Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Hewitt, A. (2011). Privatizing the public: Three rhetorics of art’s public good in
“Third Way” cultural policy. Art & the Public Sphere, 1(1), 19–36.
Johnston, P. (2014, December 9). The Coalition flunked its great opportunity to
rethink the state. Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/
liberaldemocrats/11280703/The-Coalition-flunked-its-great-opportunity-to-
rethink-the-state.html. Accessed 9 Apr 2015.
Klingmann, A. (2007). Brandscapes: Architecture in the experience economy.
London: MIT Press.
Knapp, Z. (2011, July 1). The spoiler-free user-friendly guide to enjoying sleep no
more, A Work Unfinishing. http://aworkunfinishing.blogspot.co.uk/2011/
07/spoiler-free-user-friendly-guide-to.html. Accessed 10 Apr 2015.
Lazzarato, M. (2009). Neoliberalism in action: inequality, insecurity and the reconsti-
tution of the social (C. Venn, Trans.). Theory, Culture & Society, 26(6), 109–133.
Lenderman, M. (2006). Experience the message: How experiential marketing is
changing the brand world. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers.
Machon, J. (2007, December). Space and the senses: The (syn)aesthetics of
Punchdrunk’s site-sympathetic work. Body, Space & Technology, 7(1), n.p.
Machon, J. (2015). Punchdrunk. In L. Tomlin (Ed.), British theatre companies
1995–2014 (pp. 255–282). London: Bloomsbury.
Marinetti, F. T., Settimelli, E., & Corra, B. (1995 [1915]). From the futurist syn-
thetic theatre. In R. Drain (Ed.), Twentieth century theatre: A sourcebook
(pp. 19–22). London: Routledge.
NCA. (2015). Arts Index 2015. http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1426519638916/
NCA-Arts-Index-07-14-%28web%29.pdf. Accessed 20 May 2015.
Nightingale, C. (2011). Interview with the author, 54 Holywell Lane, London,
18 October.
Office for Budget Responsibility. (2014). Economic and fiscal outlook, December.
Owen, L. (2009). Performing “risk”: Neoliberalization and contemporary perfor-
mance. PhD, Queen Mary, University of London.
144 A. ALSTON
Papaioannou, S. (2014). Immersion, “smooth” spaces and critical voyeurism in the

work of punchdrunk. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 34(2), 160–174.
Pettinger, T. (2013, June 13). Government debt under labour 1997–2010.
Economics Help. http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7568/debt/
government-debt-under-labour-1997-2010/. Accessed 13 Apr 2015.
Punchdrunk. (2011). www.punchdrunk.org.uk. Accessed 31 Oct 2011.
Punchdrunk. (2014). www.punchdrunk.com. Accessed 28 Nov 2014.
Riewoldt, O. (2002). Brandscaping: Worlds of experience in retail design. Basel,
Switzerland: Momenta.
Sakellaridou, E. (2014, Spring/Summer). “Oh My God, Audience Participation!”:
Some early twenty-first-century reflections. Comparative Drama, 48(1 & 2),
13–38.
Santone, J. (2014). The economics of the performative audience. Performance
Research, 19(6), 30–36.
Shakespeare, W. (1996). Macbeth. In The complete works of William Shakespeare.
Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions.
Silvestre, A. (2012, November 14). Punchdrunk and the politics of spectatorship.
Culturebot. http://www.culturebot.net/2012/11/14997/punchdrunk-and-
the-politics-of-spectatorship/. Accessed 16 Nov 2012.
Steen, S. (2014, March). Neoliberal Scandals: Foxcon, Mike Daisey and the turn
toward non-fiction drama. Theatre Journal, 66(1), 1–18.
Thatcher, M. (1987, September 23). Interview for Woman’s Own, Woman’s Own.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. Accessed 9 Apr 2015.
Toffler, A. (1964). The culture consumers: A study of art and affluence in America.
New York: Random House.
Toynbee, P., & Walker, D. (2015, January 28). Cameron’s five-year legacy: Has he
finished what Thatcher started?. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/
politics/2015/jan/28/-sp-david-camerons-five-year-legacy-has-he-finished-
what-margaret-thatcher-started. Accessed 9 Apr 2015.
Veltman, C. (2008, March 25). The Masque of the Red Death. Chloe Veltman:
Writer and Broadcaster. http://blog.chloeveltman.com/2008/03/masque-
of-red-death.html. Accessed 6 February 2013.
White, G. (2009). Odd Anonymized needs: Punchdrunk’s masked spectator. In
A. Oddey & C. White (Eds.), Modes of spectating (pp. 219–229). Bristol, CT:
Intellect.
Wickstrom, M. (2006). Performing consumers: Global capital and its theatrical
seductions. New York: Routledge.
Worthen, W. B. (2012). “The written troubles of the brain”: Sleep No More and
the space of character. Theatre Journal, 64, 79–97.
Zaointz, K. (2014). Narcissistic spectatorship in immersive and one-on-one
performance. Theatre Journal, 66, 405–425.
CHAPTER 5
Frustrating Theatre: Shunt in

the Experience Economy
So far in this book, I have critiqued how the feeling bodies, imagina-
tions and entrepreneurial activity of audiences are harnessed within frame-
works for immersion and participation in immersive theatre performances.
For the most part, my analysis has been based on drawing connections
between neoliberalism and systems of value and modes of production and
reception in immersive theatre, focusing especially on the resourcing of
theatre audiences as ‘productive participants’. However, this chapter and
the next address immersive theatre performances that impede productive
participation; furthermore, they assess how the hindrance of audience
involvement in the production of an immersive aesthetic affects a roman-
ticism of productivity within and beyond the fictive world of an immersive
theatre environment.
The performances addressed in the previous three chapters all seek
to enhance the inherently ‘active’ engagement of audiences by allowing
an affective engagement with performance to participate in the develop-
ment and completion of a cohesive immersive aesthetic, or by encouraging
audiences to embrace risk, individualism, privacy, personal responsibil-
ity and/or entrepreneurial activity as positive values. Audiences in these
performances produce or discover elements of a theatre aesthetic that
rewards productivity with memorable experiences that can be deepened
and intensified in tandem with a personal investment and involvement in
an immersive world. These performances muddy the water between pro-
duction and reception; they appear to promote empowerment, while also
assigning an ‘activated’ form of empowerment as a condition of effective

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_5
146 A. ALSTON
audience engagement; and they centralise the audience experience as a

meaningful and emotive feature of a theatre aesthetic. All of these features
occur in aesthetic spaces that seek segregation from the world beyond an
immersive environment, a world that includes the economic and politi-
cal frameworks that support and inform immersive theatre production
and reception. However, I have explored how audience engagement in
immersive theatre relates in various ways to these frameworks, especially
neoliberalism – particularly the affective labour of productive subjects in
a neoliberal economy, and the steady entrenchment of neoliberal govern-
mentality in the UK from the 1980s through to the present day – and
allowed these relations to inform a political critique of immersive theatre
aesthetics.
In continuing a critical assessment of audience productivity in immer-
sive theatre, this chapter shifts the comparative focus from productive
workers and their championing in neoliberal governance to produc-
tive consumers in the ‘experience economy’. B. Joseph Pine and James
H. Gilmore describe and celebrate the experience economy in their influ-
ential, co-authored book, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater &
Every Business a Stage.1 In this book, the authors identify the production
of engaging, rewarding and memorable experiences as a relatively new
‘genre’ of economic production, after commodities, goods and services
(Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 2). In the experience economy, consumers
pay for experiences that are commodified in commercially staged events;
incorporated as an experiential feature of a product; or integrated as a part
of their purchasing experience, or appealed to in a marketing campaign.
Common examples include Disneyland and the Rainforest Café, the user-
friendly and ergonomic design of products, such as iPods and iPhones,
and a more pervasive incorporation of experience production in experi-
ential advertising, such as the recent appropriation of flashmobs2 to help
market a range of products. A core feature of the experience economy is
the ‘activation’ of consumers as producing consumers, either in terms of
an affective engagement with a product or a brand that serves as a source
of profit, or in terms of consumer participation in the production of a
product.
1
Pine and Gilmore’s book stems from an earlier co-authored essay, ‘Welcome to the
Experience Economy’ (1998).
2
T-Mobile’s flashmob campaign in London’s Liverpool Street Station is one high-profile
example in the UK.
FRUSTRATING THEATRE: SHUNT IN THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY 147
More so than any other kind of theatre, immersive theatre typifies this
‘genre’ of economic production by targeting audience experiences as a
centrally significant feature of a cultural product, especially by stimulating
a range of senses in staged events; designing a cultural product around
the involvement of an audience; and allowing audiences to shape their
own experience of a cultural product. However, that is not to say that all
immersive theatre performances conform to the promotion of consumer
productivity in the experience economy.
My focus in this chapter is on work by the London-based collective
shunt. Shunt formed as a group of ten theatre and performance makers,
designers and performers in 1998 and until 2004 were based in railway
arches in Bethnal Green, London, where they performed The Ballad of
Bobby François (2000) and Dance Bear Dance (2003). They then moved to
the London Bridge Vaults, London: an enormous former wine warehouse
accessed through an unmarked door in London Bridge Station. As well as
the Shunt Lounge, which functioned as a curatorial project in this loca-
tion between 2006 and 2010, the Shunt Vaults, as they came to be called,
provided a venue for both Tropicana (2005–2006) and Amato Saltone
(2005–2006). After a brief stint at an old tobacco warehouse on nearby
Bermondsey Street for Money (2009–2010), shunt took over the Biscuit
Factory for The Architects (2012–2013) – a defunct industrial space which
dominates what is now the V22 artists’ studios complex in Bermondsey.
Most recently, the collective appropriated a disused coaling jetty that juts
out from London’s Greenwich Peninsula into the River Thames for The
Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face (2014).
In contrast to the large-scale work of Punchdrunk explored in the
previous chapter, in which audiences roam around a range of spaces on
individual journeys, audiences in shunt’s performances tend to have their
movements guided and also tend to remain as a group. As one member
of the shunt collective, David Rosenberg, suggests: if too much respon-
sibility is handed over, ‘then an audience can choose not to enter some
of the difficulties of that performance; an audience can choose not to see
the thing that is going to upset them or confuse them, or surprise them,
or revolt them’ (qtd in Machon, 2009, p. 106). I am particularly inter-
ested in notions of difficulty and confusion and how these notions might
play into the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics. While retention of
responsibility might imply retention of power, inhibiting a form of audi-
ence ‘activation’, this chapter explores how shunt deploy a more com-
plexly political mode of audience engagement. This mode does not derive
148 A. ALSTON
from an equation of physical productivity and liberty; rather, it derives

from a radical frustration of productivity that draws attention to a genre of
economic production that might otherwise be assigned to audiences, and
to which they might otherwise be expected to posit themselves as produc-
ing consumers in the experience economy.
I will be focusing on three projects by the shunt collective: the Shunt
Lounge, Money and The Architects. In Money and The Architects, particu-
larly, shunt frustrates the audience’s productive participation in an immer-
sive performance and in doing so they promote a critical relationship to
the economic and political contexts that embed and inform the produc-
tion and reception of a work. Shunt make immersive theatre in the experi-
ence economy, as do all immersive theatre makers, but they also suggest
alternatives to the experience economy’s commodification of experience
and reliance on a superficially empowering and ‘active’ engagement of
consumers as productive participants.
In the next section, I explore the experience economy as a genre of
economic output that romanticises consumer productivity and fetishises
the experiential engagement of consumers with a product or brand. The
section after that conducts a comparative analysis of the Shunt Lounge
and the London Dungeon as cultural forms within the experience econ-
omy that explore the hidden communicative potential of affective texts in
subterranean immersive environments. A final section considers the frus-
tration of productive participation in Money and The Architects and its rela-
tion to producing consumerism in the experience economy; it focuses on
the arousal of feelings of frustration among audiences in immersive worlds
that seem to invite forthright participation and involvement, but actually
impede participation and involvement as facets of consumer productivity.
The chapter argues that shunt’s large-scale performances bring into an
embodied consciousness a troubling framework for audience participation
and immersion that calls into question the experience economy’s roman-
ticism of productivity and profitable co-optation of seductive consumer
experiences.
PRODUCING CONSUMERS
Economic production tends to be divided into three sectors: the first of
these involves the extraction of commodities and includes the mining
and agricultural industries (the primary sector); the second concerns the
industrial transformation of these commodities into manufactured goods,
an example being the automobile industry (the secondary sector); the

third refers to distributive, communicative, social and personal services
that either mediate consumption and demand in the primary and second-
ary sectors, or produce in new ‘immaterial’ markets, such as the informa-
tion technology and telecommunications industries (the tertiary sector).
Michael Hardt describes the advent of these different sectors as paradigms
and suggests that the paradigm shift from extractive to industrial produc-
tion constituted a period of modernisation, and that the paradigm shift
from manufacturing to service provision, most notably from the 1970s,
heralded postmodernisation (Hardt, 1999, pp. 90–1). This latter shift,
to some extent, remains dependent on outsourcing a significant part of
the manufacturing industries overseas (Castells, 2000, p. 220); however,
Hardt insists that manufacturing is not so much removed from service
economies, as transformed, blurring divisions between manufacturing
and services: ‘Just as through the process of modernization all production
became industrialised, so too through the process of postmodernization
all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming
informationalized’ (Hardt, 1999, p. 92).
In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore identify a fourth para-
digm, or what they call a ‘genre’, of economic production:
Experiences are a fourth economic offering [after commodities, goods and

services], as distinct from services as services are from goods, but one that
has until now gone largely unrecognised […] When a person buys a service,
he purchases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf. But when
he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable
events that a company stages – as in a theatrical play – to engage him in a
personal way. (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, p. 2)
Pine and Gilmore locate the origins of the experience economy in the
entrepreneurial initiatives of Walt Disney, who opened Disneyland
California in 1955 (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, p. 2). Disney revolution-
ised amusement parks by synergising everything within them around a
coherent theme derived from Disney’s films. However, despite Pine and
Gilmore’s valuing of Disneyland as a pioneering model for the experience
economy, it is also ripe to be challenged as its origin. For instance, the
rising popularity of pleasure gardens from the English Restoration until
the mid- to late-nineteenth century provides much earlier examples of
leisure parks that are compounded with a thematically cohesive identity.
150 A. ALSTON
These gardens – for instance, the Vauxhall Gardens in London – enabled

promenading audiences to engage with a range of cultural and commercial
activities, such as listening to music, observing fireworks displays, circus
acts and battle re-enactments, and attending costumed balls, all within
picturesquely constructed landscapes.
Nonetheless, Disneyland innovated the synergising of otherwise diverse
features in a thematically coherent environment by allowing the identity
of a brand to guide the synergising process. Disney’s films are treated as
source texts around which a thematically cohesive and holistically immer-
sive environment is constructed, materialising and spatialising Disney’s
brand identity in a ‘totally’ immersive world. There are therefore links
to be made between Disneyland as a model for the experience economy
and a model for the immersive theatre performances that have so far been
scrutinised in this book.
While other art practices also ‘dovetail’ with the experience econ-
omy, including relational art (Bishop, 2004, p. 52), many immersive
performances – not least those of Punchdrunk explored in the previous
chapter – provide ‘an almost-textbook example’ of the businesses advo-
cated by Pine and Gilmore (Harvie, 2013, p. 178). Work by Punchdrunk
provides audiences with choreographed sequences that are brought
together in a thematically cohesive and holistic environment, much like
Disneyland. For Anna Klingmann, Disneyland is a ‘completely constructed
environment, one that is based not on traditional principles of [architec-
tural] composition but rather on the choreography of scripted sequences
that are compounded with the identity of a brand’ (Klingmann, 2007,
p. 69). Disneyland’s success, for Klingmann, partly resides in the integra-
tion of such sequences, making up a ‘holistic environment’ (Klingmann,
2007, p. 75). In both cases, themed environments are populated with
role-playing performers who interact with audiences; furthermore, audi-
ences are able to physically explore the environment that immerses them.
Both Disneyland and Punchdrunk strive for each constituent element of
an environment to cohere with a clearly defined aesthetic logic, and both
are concerned with closing off the world outside an immersive environ-
ment to ensure the effective construction of a fictional world that absorbs
and transports audiences who are involved in processes of discovery.
Taking Disneyland as a model for businesses in the experience econ-
omy, Pine and Gilmore look at a number of different industry sectors that
intermingle in their embrace of experience production, broadly revolv-
ing around staged experiences, product design and marketing. In what
remains of this section, I will explore each of these areas and assess their
mutual relevance for the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics. I am par-
ticularly interested in addressing a changing relationship between produc-
ers and consumers in the experience economy, and how this changing
relationship informs the aesthetics and politics of productive participation
in immersive theatre.
In her book Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical
Seductions, Maurya Wickstrom records and reflects on her own criti-
cal immersion in North American stores that blend the retail of prod-
ucts and the staging of experiences, including the New York branches of
the multinational Niketown and Ralph Lauren stores, the Disney Store
chain, and American Girl Place outlets in Chicago and New York. Each
of these stores chimes with Pine and Gilmore’s interest in businesses that
replace a more conventional purchase of goods and services with a holistic,
engaging, entertaining and memorable buying experience, mirroring the
Disneyland model through an immersive strategy of consumer engage-
ment (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 3). For instance, Niketown installs tread-
mills so that shoppers can test running shoes, allowing physical exertion
to participate in a consumer’s buying experience, while the Ralph Lauren
store resembles a luxurious and richly detailed household. In both cases,
as Wickstrom explores, consumers do not just pay for a product, but for a
sensual and experiential engagement with a brand.
Despite their very different identities, both Niketown and Ralph Lauren
disseminate their respective clothing brands throughout ‘brandscapes’.
Brandscapes were explored in the previous chapter as the physical mani-
festations of a brand identity that materialise corporate value in sensually
engaging environments that fully surround consumers. Wickstrom consid-
ers how brandscapes, such as those of Niketown and Ralph Lauren, rely on
the ‘productive capacity’ of consumers that ‘allows the designers of these
environments to release the self from its boundaries, and to give us [shop-
pers] the sensation that our identity is escaping foreclosure’ (Wickstrom,
2006, p. 20). For Wickstrom, the prospect that a brand’s identity might
develop or enhance personal identity is essential to the logic of the brand-
scape as it seeks ways to distinguish itself from the standardised offerings
of consumerism – hence why she comments on a ‘release’ of the self from
its boundaries, a release that is in large part predicated on ‘the continual,
restless movement of capital’ (Wickstrom, 2006, p. 20). The enhancement
of personal identity in brandscapes is achieved by engaging a consumer’s
‘productive capacity’, which includes both a physiological engagement in
152 A. ALSTON
and with a sensual and immersive environment, and the potential enhance-
ment of personal identity. In both cases, consumption and production are
intermingled in ways that serve ‘the continual, restless movement of capi-
tal’, and affect the physiology and psychology of ‘producing consumers’.
I want to inflect the term ‘producing consumers’ with two meanings:
first, producing consumers are consumers whose productive involvement
with a purchasable product is appealed to in a competitive market that
looks to develop, or reframe, the producer-consumer relationship; second,
a competitive market can itself be seen to produce a particular kind of con-
sumer – thus producing consumers – catering for a desire that results from
the fashioned seductions of neoliberalism. In the first instance, consumers
position themselves in relation to a mode of consumption that appeals to
the productive capacities of consumers; in the second, a subject position is
produced by the movements of capital.
The term ‘prosumer’ has been rejuvenated in recent theatre and perfor-
mance scholarship, explored by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave (Toffler,
1980), to describe the activity of audiences who resemble producing con-
sumers. As Jen Harvie explains: ‘Prosumers are combined producers and
consumers who do for themselves what would formerly have been done
for them by others (more specifically other workers) and who fulfil their
own needs by producing what they want to consume, whether that be a
commodity or service’ (Harvie, 2013, p. 50). However, I prefer not to
use Toffler’s contraction as it risks detracting from the notions of ‘produc-
tion’ and ‘productivity’, collapsing both into a positive newspeak pitched
against consumerism – a collapse which Harvie challenges by surveying
its negative impact on the conditions of work and leisure in participatory
performance. Prosumerism implies favour (pro-market), as well as activity
(pro-active). The thing that is favoured is not a boundless range of alter-
natives, but a range of alternatives that are contained within the schema
of the neoliberal ethos. The ‘activity’ in question is a form of activity that
is prescribed by the market and more specifically whatever consumable
product defines the terms and limits of a consumer’s role as a producer. In
choosing not to use the term ‘prosumer’, favouring instead the term ‘pro-
ducing consumer’, I therefore wish to foreground the terms and limits of
a consumer’s productivity according to an assigned scheme of production.
The experience economy appeals to producing consumers, but it also
moulds producing consumers as a subject position, not least in immersive
brandscapes that foster the seductions of neoliberalism as seductions. The
notion of ‘seduction’, as Shannon Steen observes, resists a deterministic
account of neoliberalism as a threat that leaves those governed by it with

no other choice but to comply with its structures of governance (Steen,
2014, p. 3). The moulding of a subject position, then, is to be distin-
guished from an enforced compliance with these structures, as a num-
ber of subversive engagements with brandscapes illustrate. For instance,
Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, a New York-based ‘radical
performance community’, have led protests inside brandscapes through-
out the twenty-first century, examples of which include flashmobs in the
New York City Disney Store in August 2009 (Reverend Billy, 2015).
Susan Bennett and Marlis Schweitzer have also documented their ‘adven-
tures in brandscaping’ at the Downtown Disney Store in Orlando, Florida,
‘to see what kind of affective, embodied theatrical labourers we might
become’ (Bennett & Schweitzer, 2014, p. 25). Bennett and Schweitzer
describe an astutely critical engagement with the seductions of Disney and
with how the brand rewards the willingness of children and their parents
‘to play according to the Disney script’ (Bennett & Schweitzer, 2014,
p. 27). The protests of Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, and
Bennett and Schweitzer’s adventures in brandscaping, are not predicated
on compliance with the stores’ ‘structures of governance’, but defiance
and criticality. Nonetheless, both examples acknowledge an extant script
for consumer engagement in Disney Stores and suggest that this script is
ripe for critique – a script that coaxes a consumer’s self toward fulfilment
in the seductions of neoliberalism.
The staging of experiences in brandscapes appeals to the physiological
and psychological possibilities of consumerism by arousing an affective
engagement with brands. However, the experience economy does not just
include brandscapes like the Disney Store and Niketown; it also pervades
contemporary product design and marketing initiatives, reaching much
deeper into a paradigmatic, experience-led phase of economic produc-
tion. While the framing of how goods are sold is an important element
of the experience economy, it is also the nature of goods that is changing.
Examples include the comparative success of the iPod and iPad over rival
MP3 players and tablets, as well as ‘Design Your MINI’ – an online feature
offered by MINI that allows consumers to design the look and feel of their
car’s interior and exterior by selecting from a fairly wide range of options.
Products are now designed around the consumer’s ergonomic experience
and taste preferences, above and beyond more standardised offerings and
functionality.
154 A. ALSTON
Comparably, cultural production in immersive theatre performances is

also designed with audience-users in mind, whose experiential involve-
ment in and with a cultural product forms a crucial part of scenographic
design and dramaturgy. Productive participation in immersive theatre –
which might build on the narcissistic participation (Chap. 2), imaginative
risk perception (Chap. 3), or entrepreneurial participation (Chap. 4) of
audiences, for instance – all derive from frameworks for audience engage-
ment that are designed around the productive involvement of an audi-
ence. While responsiveness to consumer experience in product design and
audience productivity in immersive theatre may only involve a ‘cosmetic’
kind of participation on the parts of consumers or audiences, as Pine and
Gilmore acknowledge with regards to product design in the experience
economy (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 90), that is enough for the idea of a
more active, more engaging, and more productive relationship to a prod-
uct, cultural or otherwise, to be romanticised. Cosmetic participation is
still predicated on a valuing of consumer productivity, even if the form
of productivity does not result in a kind of participation that changes the
status of a product.
Experience has therefore come to pervade the economy in a paradigm
that affects a range of sectors, including experientially minded product
design and the staging of sensuously engaging experiences in holistic
environments. And it has also come to affect the marketing of a signif-
icantly broader range of products in an ‘experiential marketing’ trend.
Punchdrunk’s corporate performances explored in the previous chapter
provide an emblematic example of this trend. In Punchdrunk’s case, the
company engages in corporate partnerships that fund the production of
live performance brandscapes in which an immersive theatre environ-
ment is moulded around a brand identity. Their collaborations with Louis
Vuitton, Stella Artois Black, Sony, and other companies have all immersed
audiences within environments that are cohesively synergised around
a brand’s identity, deriving the value of a marketing initiative from the
‘buzz’ and cultural capital that emerges from these partnerships. However,
Punchdrunk are by no means the only immersive theatre company who
have collaborated with corporate partners in designing and facilitating
experiential marketing initiatives.
Civilised Mess, Pd3, ProKreate, and Reuben Feels all specialise in craft-
ing immersive theatre experiences for corporate partners. As an exam-
ple, Pd3 is a creative agency that provides live and digital experiences
for brands ‘at the intersection between advertising and entertainment’,
including Belvedere, O2 and Sony (Pd3, 2015). The company is led by

Cat Botibol, who is also an executive producer on a popular immersive
theatre production of Grimm Tales (2014–), directed by Philip Wilson
and first performed at Shoreditch Town Hall in London. For Botibol,
who is commenting on work by Pd3: ‘we have made our audience market-
ers because 20 % of the crowd will come and be absorbed by the perfor-
mance and tweet what they see, which means word of mouth becomes the
best way to market ourselves. For brands to create transformative experi-
ences, the audience will become their marketers, their advocates, which
is what every brand wants’ (Botibol, 2015). As Botibol acknowledges,
brands can utilise immersive theatre and, moreover, the prospective ‘brand
evangelism’ of immersive theatre audiences who act as ‘progenitors to the
new consumer’ (Lenderman, 2006, p. 167). In an experiential market-
ing campaign that draws together immersive theatre makers and brands
in corporate partnerships, the labour of audiences is not remunerated,
aside from the benefit of a free ticket – if indeed a free ticket is offered at
all. It may be recognised by producers like Botibol, but the value of the
campaign stems from their unpaid contributions to a marketing initiative.
The physiological and psychological engagement of consumers is central
to experience-driven marketing techniques, as well as the ability to exploit
the unpaid labour of brand evangelists, co-opting consumers in a scheme
of production that resources their personal and affective investment in a
marketing initiative and their potential evangelising of a branded product.
Recognising the importance of how a particular product looks and
feels, such as the cosmetically customisable design of a MINI, has also
been a driving force behind experiential marketing initiatives that do not
occur in live settings. Bernd Schmitt, in particular, has championed the
effectiveness of experiential marketing for products that may not involve
a live staged experience, but that nonetheless appeal to the private experi-
ences of consumers who use the product. He writes in much the same
vein as Pine and Gilmore about the rising commodification of experiences,
but from the more focused perspective of utilising experience in market-
ing strategies. He identifies four ‘Strategic Experiential Modules’ (SEMs):
SENSE marketing, which derives value from sensory appeal (Schmitt,
1999, p. 111); FEEL marketing, which looks to attach affect to a com-
pany or brand (Schmitt, 1999, p. 118); THINK marketing, which aims to
engage the creative faculty of potential customers via intrigue or provoca-
tion (Schmitt, 1999, p. 153); ACT marketing, which relies on promoting
customer interaction and transformation in lifestyle preferences (Schmitt,
156 A. ALSTON
1999, p. 154); and RELATE marketing, which looks to relate the discrete
self of a customer to the wider socio-cultural context reflected in a brand
(Schmitt, 1999, p. 171). ‘Holistic experiences’ are referred to by Schmitt
as a merger of these SEMs and a goal for experiential marketers (Schmitt,
1999, p. 193).
One of the most fascinating aspects of the literature on experiential
marketing, particularly Schmitt’s writing on SEMs, is the choice of ter-
minology and the identification of modes of consumer engagement:
relationality, the promotion of interaction, appealing to the creative and
imaginative faculties, affective engagement, multi-sensory provocation…
This kind of terminology and the modes of engagement it names are
remarkably applicable to frameworks for immersion and participation in
immersive theatre. Pine and Gilmore go further in The Experience Economy
when they describe four different dimensions of experience that businesses
should acknowledge when producing experiences for potential consum-
ers. They provide two axes forming two different spectrums of experi-
ence. The first axis positions passive participation in opposition to active
participation, while the second axis, which intersects the first, positions
absorption in opposition to immersion (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 30).
So-called passive participants are aligned with sedentary, or static, specta-
tors, while so-called active participants are aligned with customers who
‘personally affect the performance or event that yields the experience’
(Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 30). The other axis refers to
the kind of connection, or environmental relationship, that unites customers

with the event or performance. At one end of this spectrum lies absorption –
occupying a person’s attention by bringing the experience into the mind – at
the other end immersion – becoming physically (or virtually) a part of the
experience itself. (Pine & Gilmore, 1999, p. 31, original emphasis)
These two axes, particularly their intersection, define Pine and Gilmore’s
four ‘realms’ of experience: entertainment, educational, aesthetic and
escapist. These axes and realms provide a taxonomy for identifying partic-
ular kinds of experience that are sold by experience-mongering businesses,
but they might just as well provide a taxonomy for identifying particular
kinds of experience in immersive theatre.
The themes and features of the experience economy identified in this
section clearly reflect the targets of this book’s critique of immersive the-
atre aesthetics, which has so far: called upon audience immersion as a
trope in staged theatre experiences; considered the experiential engage-

ment of audiences as a feature of immersive theatre aesthetics; reflected
on entertainment, aesthetic and escapist experiences in immersive theatre
performances; addressed attempts to ‘activate’ audiences in immersive
theatre, critiquing an assumed ‘empowerment’ that finds itself attached
to the productive participation of audiences; and critiqued frameworks for
audience engagement that participate in a pervasive romanticism of pro-
ductivity in politics and the economy. Because of a shared interest in the
experiential qualities of audience engagement, particularly as those quali-
ties relate to a merger of production and reception – which mirrors the
figuring of producing consumers in the experience economy – immersive
theatre and other exponents of the experience economy share priorities.
These priorities link up with the handling of audiences and producing
consumers, whose bodies, thoughts and desires are utilised in schemes of
production and consumption that romanticise productivity and particu-
larly some kind of involvement in the production of an event, or object,
that is also consumed.
Immersive theatre performances – and the branding of experiences in
brandscapes, product design and experiential marketing – posit the human
body as a possibility for consumption. For this reason, immersive theatre
chimes with the experience economy to an even greater extent than the-
atre and performance that places less emphasis on this possibility for con-
sumption. Commodity culture today is no longer resisted so easily by the
supposed ‘non-reproducibility’ of performance, because the experience
economy has absorbed memorable experiences (always fleeting) as the
ultimate commodity. To some extent, theatre has always been predicated
on the productivity of an audience’s consumption, as Nicholas Ridout,
Miranda Joseph and others have argued, just as consumption presents a
site for the performative production of individual and collective subjec-
tivities (Joseph, 2002; Ridout, 2013, p. 55). However, the experience
economy and immersive theatre’s positioning within the experience econ-
omy look toward modes of productive consumption that are capitalised
on more easily as seductions, encouraging affective investment and often
a physical involvement in productivity. Customisation and the personal
involvement of producing consumers in the experience economy is often-
times only cosmetic, but that is enough for productivity to be idealised
and for the purportedly non-reproducible to circulate in commodity form.
Immersive theatre companies that create brandscapes for corporate
partnerships clearly tie in with the experience economy; however, these
158 A. ALSTON
links are identifiable outside of corporate partnerships as well, which

impact on the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics once the figuring
of audiences as productive participants – or producing consumers – is rec-
ognised as complicit with an experience paradigm and a romanticism of
productivity that extends throughout the experience economy. While a
given immersive theatre performance may not directly participate in the
movements of capital as the economy continues to evolve into a new para-
digm, immersive theatre nonetheless risks serving neoliberal capitalism by
fetishising the co-opted feeling body and celebrating a potentially profit-
able, individualistic and apparently personal form of consumer productiv-
ity. However, there is still plenty of scope for immersive practice to resist
complicity with the experience economy’s valuing of productivity, as the
remainder of this chapter illustrates by addressing the work of the shunt
collective – but not before demonstrating how such work is still embedded
in and informed by the experience economy’s material conditions of pro-
duction and reception. To this end, the chapter now turns to an address
of the Shunt Lounge and its former neighbour, the London Dungeon.
AFFECTIVE TEXTS
The Shunt Lounge was based in the Shunt Vaults: a vast complex of vaulted
arches beneath London Bridge Station. It was founded in September
2006 and ran for four years, with a brief period of inactivity toward the
end of 2009 before the closure of the Vaults in 2010, which was due to a
large-scale and long-term redevelopment of the station that was scheduled
to start the following year. As a curatorial project, the Lounge presented
a diverse set of performance practices ranging from cello sonatas and DJ
sets, to circus acts, acrobatic displays, live art, monologues and dance the-
atre. In addition to the 1500 artists and arts organisations that presented
work there, the Lounge also provided a platform for the ten members of
the shunt collective and associated artists to continue presenting work to
a public when larger shunt performances were not in production (Shunt,
2010, p. 1). As Alex Mermikides points out, ‘the Lounge can be seen as a
forum for generating and developing material that may eventually inform
the next group-created “big show” and, as such, can be seen as a devising
process, albeit a rather meandering one’ (Mermikides, 2010, p. 149). The
Lounge was therefore not just a space for artists outside of the shunt col-
lective to present work, but part of a protracted devising process feeding
into larger-scale, collectively created shunt performances.
However, there was also a third function of the Shunt Lounge: it pro-
vided a forum for social interaction. The experience of attending a curated
event that took place behind an unmarked door in London Bridge Station
was a particular appeal of the Shunt Lounge: to be in on the secret that
lay behind the door. The bar was open between and during performance
events that would take place over the course of an evening and there were
plenty of tables and chairs creating social bunkers to encourage chatting
with friends and new acquaintances. The Shunt Lounge was a conviv-
ial, relational space. These bunkers were not so much a refuge from the
festival-like art programming as they were an integral part of a social
experience. This is how the company described the Lounge on their web-
site in 2008: ‘A members’ bar deep in the tunnels under London Bridge
Station… Each week will be curated by a different shunt artist. Some will
fill the space with non-stop entertainment, some will do next to nothing.
Fortunately the bar staff are more reliable’ (qtd in Mermikides, 2010,
p. 152). The Lounge was also listed by the Independent newspaper’s Katy
Guest as #25 of 101 ‘star bars’ in 2007.3 The Shunt Lounge, then, offered
a cool social experience not too dissimilar to the kind you might find in
bars and clubs that have popped up elsewhere in the massive complex of
vaults beneath London Bridge and the surrounding area.
Shunt has avoided theatre buildings since their inception, instead seek-
ing out found locations that the theatre collective can manipulate, particu-
larly through lighting design, and treat as their own residence. For Mischa
Twitchin, a founding member of the shunt collective:
there’s a relation to a space that has atmosphere [in work by shunt], but
which is, in a sense, neutral in theatrical terms – such as a railway arch. It
can be more or less atmospheric, which already gives you something, but
we’re not making a show about railway arches. We’ve not made a show at
the Vaults about the construction of the railway in London. We’ve made fic-
tional worlds for an audience that nevertheless are, of course, informed by,
and produced in relation to, the space that we are in. (Twitchin, 2009, n.p.)
The Shunt Lounge, in particular, seemed at home in the grimy, Victorian-

era vaulted arches, without treating those arches as a thematic point of
3
While some of the ‘Star Bar’ entries are still searchable online, the original article that
featured the Shunt Lounge appears to have been removed. However, the entry has been
noted by Alex Mermikides, who also offers a brief critique of this aspect of the Shunt Lounge
(Mermikides, 2010, p. 151).
160 A. ALSTON
departure for making performance. Performances at the Lounge were not

‘specific’ to the site; rather, the arches provided shunt and those artists
who worked in the Shunt Lounge with an atmosphere that could be har-
nessed, or that could even overpower a performance. For instance, I am
a creative associate with the theatre company Curious Directive. When
we took our first show, Return to the Silence (2008–2011), to the Shunt
Vaults in 2009, we had to deal with the hustle and bustle of a bar that was
situated within the same set of vaulted arches as our performance. Also,
there was no escaping the evocatively dank and grimy fact of the vaults,
together with the rats that could occasionally be seen scuttling across the
space during brief rehearsal periods that were tightly scheduled in a busy
venue. The atmosphere provided by the vaults, together with the bar –
while wonderfully evocative – was nonetheless evocative in a way that
jarred with our show: a devised and highly physical performance explor-
ing neurology. At the same time, the Lounge provided an opportunity to
perform to a diverse, but primarily young, audience that might otherwise
have never attended our work. There was something appealing and edgy
about the Shunt Vaults that was reflected in the 3000 audience members
who were drawn to its unmarked door each week (Shunt, 2010, p. 1). The
fact that the atmosphere jarred with our show was trumped by the pres-
ence of a crowd who flocked to a subterranean venue that already offered
something engaging to an audience, and who made participation in the
Lounge as a theatre company or artist a rewarding opportunity.
The ‘something’ that the vaulted railway arches offers is an affective
potential that emerges from space and is there to be manipulated by the-
atre makers, but is ultimately activated by an experiencing audience; they
stimulate what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls a ‘joint text’ that is co-produced
by performers and audiences in a live theatre event: ‘a “text” even if there
is no dialogue onstage or between actors and audience’ (Lehmann, 2006,
p. 17). Lehmann draws attention to the ‘hidden communicative processes’
that feed into the production and reception of a ‘theatre situation’, which
may relate to the linguistic and material aspects of a theatre performance,
or may just as well relate to ‘the visual, audible, gestic and architectonic
theatrical signs’ that emerge within a theatre situation – especially in radi-
cal staging practice that experiments with these signs (Lehmann, 2006,
p. 17). The ‘something’ that the vaulted arches offers to the ‘situation’
of an evening at the Shunt Lounge, though, derives from what I want to
call an ‘affective text’: a text that, like the joint text, is produced through
an encounter with the various elements of a theatre situation, including
space, performers who inhabit that space, and audience members who are
immersed in a space and who may well engage in some way with perform-
ers and/or other audience members.
The production and experience of an affective text may be linked to
pleasures and desires that facilitate sociality and community in a range
of forms, but they are also prone to the encouragement of a sense of
personal importance and self-entitlement in the experience economy,
and they have the potential to make marketable experiences potentially
lucrative for entrepreneurs. For instance, immersive theatre performances
might promote a narcissistic form of participation premised on an intro-
spective engagement with one’s own experiencing self, where the experi-
ence of affect accrues meaning and significance as an important part of
a live theatre situation. Something similar occurs in brandscapes, where
an affective engagement with a brand is used as a hidden communicative
process that facilitates a personal relationship to a brand’s identity that
also promises an extension of the self that finds fulfilment in the seduc-
tions of neoliberalism. While immersive theatre is capable of subverting an
experience paradigm, as the next section explores, the existence of hidden
communicative processes that also serve as an important part of aesthetic
production risks fetishising the experience of an affective text, masking the
means of experience production in ways that chime with the figuring of
producing consumers in the experience economy.
In what remains of this section, I will be fleshing out the role of affec-
tive texts in immersive theatre and elsewhere in the experience economy
by comparing the Shunt Lounge’s usage of an experientially loaded site
with a business nestled at the heart of the experience economy in London:
the London Dungeon. The Shunt Lounge and the London Dungeon
used to share the same subterranean locale beneath the London Bridge
Station area until both companies were forced out of their venues follow-
ing the start of the station’s redevelopment. Before the station redevelop-
ment project, both the London Dungeon and the Shunt Lounge made
use of the atmospheric potential of underground arches as a resource
capable of immersing and affecting audiences in richly sensuous environ-
ments. Where shunt used these arches as an evocative space that could
house a range of projects, the London Dungeon installed a tourist attrac-
tion within them that playfully shocked and thrilled its customers. The
descriptions of the Dungeon that follow are based on my own observa-
tions from a trip to its former residence in 2012; I will also be using the
past tense to distinguish the London Dungeon in London Bridge from its
new residence on London’s South Bank, close to Waterloo Station, which
features an updated array of attractions.
162 A. ALSTON
The London Dungeon opened its doors to the public in 1975. It was
the brain child of Annabel Geddes, who is an entrepreneur and, accord-
ing to journalist Ian Cobain, a disquietingly outspoken member of the
far-right British National Party (amazingly, given the fact that she ran a
leading tourist attraction and was once a director of the London Tourist
Board) (Cobain, 2006). She wanted to develop the London Dungeon
because of what she regarded as a lack of information and insight offered
by Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors and the absence of atmosphere
she felt at the Tower of London.4 In the Dungeon, promenading audi-
ences were led through a series of themed installations that depicted a
number of episodes from the city’s gory and disturbing history, both real
and mythic: from the Great Plague to Sweeney Todd. These installations
housed still and animatronic models, as well as actors, usually one actor for
each installation, costumed appropriate to the period being represented
and complete with enthusiastically rendered, but wavering, cockney-
inflected accents. The integration of actors within the Dungeon grew fol-
lowing the installation of their Jack the Ripper feature in 1992, to the
point where nearly every attraction within the Dungeon was actor-led.
Technically led experiences were also offered at stations en route
throughout the Dungeon experience. Audiences might have ended up
with water, masquerading as the contents of a chamber pot, chucked at
them from an automated catapult that was hidden in the window of a
London townhouse. The Dungeon also installed the Extremis Drop Ride,
which was meant to simulate an execution by hanging, raising audiences
on a roller coaster-like set of seats before letting them plummet back down
again. There was also a 5-D cinema experience representing a séance at 50
Berkeley Square, reputed to be London’s most haunted house. In addi-
tion to 3-D visuals, audiences had water vapour puffed at them (4-D)
while spinning on a revolving platform shooting various ghouls and mon-
sters with laser guns (5-D).
An aspect of the Dungeon’s spaces worthy of particular note were the
smells, not just as a consequence of deliberate infusion within the spaces,
but also rising from the damp vaults and evoking putrescence.5 The vaults
in both the Shunt Lounge and the Dungeon, while still resident in London
4
I am grateful for the useful information offered by Mark Oakley (2012). At the time of
writing, Oakley is PR representative for the London Dungeon.
5
For more on smell in London’s subterranean vaults, see Michael McKinnie’s reflections
on the power of smell in Beth Steel’s Ditch (McKinnie, 2012, pp. 25–6).
Bridge, were separated by metres, not miles. A smell pervaded both which
enveloped audiences, and both spaces also shared a complete absence of
natural light, rendering the potential for crafting atmosphere particularly
strong, either through use of darkness, or through guiding the audience’s
attention via stage lighting. Perhaps this is a reason why so many immer-
sive theatre companies and venues have set up camp in vaulted spaces and
arches, including Punchdrunk’s Tunnel 228, Debut Theatre’s Coming Up
Festival (2011), Goat and Monkey’s Reverence: A Tale of Abelard and
Heloise (2007), Beth Steel’s Ditch (2010), and an annual VAULT Festival
in the arches beneath London’s Waterloo Station. What these vaults offer
are ready-made affective texts that are ripe for appropriation.
There was a bar in one of the many alcoves in the Shunt Vaults where
the screams from those in the Dungeon, most probably on the Extremis
Drop Ride, could be heard through the walls. For those arriving early
enough, those screams seemed uncannily appropriate, especially if the
association with the Dungeon next door was not made. It was all part
of ‘the experience’. What came to the fore was not only a shared space, a
space shared by an immersive theatre company and a much more explicit
component of the experience economy, but also of how these two bled
into one another. In the Shunt Vaults, those screams contributed to an
aesthetic of the uncanny, the mysterious and the ghostly.
Both the London Dungeon and the Shunt Lounge explicitly drew on
the productive and experiential engagement of audiences. In the Dungeon,
audiences SENSED, FELT, THOUGHT, ACTED and RELATED, with
particular emphasis on sensing and feeling intensely in environments that
completely surrounded audiences. Unlike many museums – excluding
those, like London’s Science Museum, that are responsive to experimental
museum curation and advances in the experience economy, while retain-
ing pedagogic rigour – and despite Geddes’s professed intentions, the
Dungeon-as-pseudo-museum contained very little information, written,
narrated, or communicated by other means, about the ‘exhibits’ beyond
the production of an affective text predicated largely on comedic shock.
In place of glass boxes, audiences were presented with stages and char-
acters that appealed to bravado-inflected inclinations to feel something
approximating fear in an otherwise convivial environment. Information
was sidelined in favour of melodramatised affective events. Comparably,
the written and spoken word, while often present in an evening of per-
formance at the Shunt Lounge, nonetheless seemed subservient to a
more pervasive and generalised affective text offered up by the vaults that
164 A. ALSTON
synergised disparate performances and social exchanges over the course of

an evening, not least because of their affective power and evocativeness. It
was the richness of an affective text provided by the vaults that coloured
how audiences SENSED, FELT, THOUGHT, ACTED and RELATED,
and that framed, supported or dominated the work performed each night.
While the Shunt Lounge facilitated radical performance experimenta-
tion, and the London Dungeon offered a commercial enterprise to con-
sumers that stuck to a tried and tested formula, both the Lounge and the
Dungeon capitalised on extant affective texts that could be harnessed or
manipulated as a tool to aid the production of immersive experiences.
In both the Lounge and the Dungeon, engaging experiences that arose
from affective texts were centralised and privileged over and above the
meaningfulness of other stimuli (scenography, performers, spoken word,
and so on). This is not to discredit the aesthetic intentions of the various
artists appearing in the Lounge, including members of the shunt collec-
tive, or the quality of the work produced; rather, my point is to underscore
how both the Lounge and the Dungeon sought to ‘activate’ a subject’s
feeling body as a centrally significant part and point of their cultural offer-
ings. While stimulated by a material site and within a site, the immate-
rial production of affect was what took aesthetic precedence. However, as
the next section explores, shunt’s large-scale performances – which, since
2006, find important heritage in the collective’s experimental presentation
of ideas and work-in-progress in the Shunt Lounge – problematise the
activation of a subject’s feeling body, as a productive capacity, in ways that
either challenge, or pastiche, their framing as seductions of the experience
economy.
FRUSTRATING PRODUCERS
In each of the immersive theatre performances explored so far in this
book, frameworks for audience immersion and participation have been
shown to resource audiences as co-constitutors of an immersive theatre
situation predicated on an audience’s productive participation. Productive
participation need not necessarily result in a kind of activity that alters or
changes an immersive environment. For instance, productive participation
can occur while shut inside a very small, very cold box, such as the box
that immerses audiences in Cold Storage (Chap. 2); while watching total
darkness as a prospective participant in Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a
Room of Images (Chap. 3); or in free-roaming immersive performances,
such as Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death and Sleep No More
(Chap. 4). The ‘productivity’ of participation in each case is linked, first
and foremost, to an embodied experience of a fictive world that surrounds
audiences and excites their thinking and feeling in an immersive situa-
tion that asks something of them, either through an actual demand, or
an imagined future once faced with the manifold possibilities, however
unlikely, of participatory involvement.
Frameworks for audience immersion and participation in all of these
performances marry up, in various ways, with political and economic con-
texts that embed and inform the production and reception of immersive
worlds, not least because of the assignment of audiences to a scheme of
production that requires productive participation as a favoured form of
audience engagement. These contexts include immaterial labour, neolib-
eral value and the experience economy, and especially the figuring of pro-
ductivity in each of these contexts. Each context informs the politics of
immersive theatre aesthetics, and challenges the basis of total immersion
by linking modes of production and systems of value within and beyond
an immersive theatre environment in excess of the material connections
that one might otherwise expect and assume will affect cultural produc-
tion. In centralising affective experience as a site of aesthetic engagement
and a goal of participatory endeavour, immersive performances tend to
steer attention away from the politically imbued means of experience pro-
duction; in the process, experience is fetishised. By positioning and often
celebrating affective experience as a seduction, the audience’s role as a
productive participant is less likely to be flagged as a part of the means of
production, alongside its resonances with immaterial labour, neoliberal
value and the experience economy.
In what follows, I will be looking at the aesthetic and political roles of
productivity and its relation to affective experience in two of shunt’s large-
scale productions: Money and The Architects. In particular, this section
explores the politics and aesthetics of frustrating the productive participa-
tion of immersed theatre audiences. As with all the performances featured
in this book, shunt’s large-scale work promotes embodied experiences of
fictive worlds that surround audiences completely and that seem to ask
something of prospective participants; however, instead of celebrating
affective experience as a seduction, or an indulgence, shunt muster into an
embodied consciousness the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics. They
frustrate producing consumers. In one sense, shunt frustrate increases in
an audience’s productivity by seemingly offering but actually hindering
166 A. ALSTON
opportunities to participate forthrightly in the action of performance; in

another, the frustration of an audience’s productivity arouses feelings of
frustration among theatre audiences, who may find themselves annoyed
by the fact that they are disallowed opportunities to develop a more
physically active engagement with a piece, or by the difficulty of piecing
together the ambiguous ‘sense’ of a work and their role within it. Once
the production of affect becomes a hindrance to an audience’s immersive
involvement in a world as a productive participant, then a kind of politics
takes place that flags the space between desire and the seductions of a
schema for productivity that resources an ‘actively’ involved and affected
participant. What becomes perceivable – because it is frustrated – is the
audience’s own productivity as a producing consumer.
In Money, a performance based on Émile Zola’s L’Argent, audiences
enter into a large, multi-storey set – a dystopian factory vitalised by drip-
ping liquids and the groans and sounds of pumping pistons that at once
pinpoints outmoded Victorian industrialism and the smoggy progress of
technology (see Fig. 5.1). Once inside the factory – a remarkable feat of
immersive design – the audience enters an antechamber. They are plunged
into darkness as the groans of the machine overwhelm the space while
wind machines blast air across the bodies of the audience. Taken together,
this promotes a sense of being transported somewhere at rapid speed. The
audience then find themselves inside a wood-panelled room where they
take seats at either side of a traverse space. Performers sit in among the
audience, one of whom plays an entrepreneurial stock market speculator
seeking financial investment – Aristide Saccard, in Zola’s book. The audi-
ence follow his progress across the three floors of the machine, celebrating
his rise to fortune with glasses of champagne and catching glimpses of
covert exchanges through transparent panels fitted in the floors above and
below the audience. A strange, spider-like human clambers all over the
machine and can be watched through these transparent panels. Despite
being seated, or at least fairly stationary, for most of the performance, the
audience is encouraged to crane their necks to look up, across and down
within this immersive space which, as a consequence of these transparent
panels, extends the immersive environment beyond walled spaces. The
effect can be disorienting, not least because of the oddness of experiencing
such multidimensionality.
The great machine that audiences enter in Money is reminiscent of a
fairground funhouse, albeit one that seems more threatening, harsh and
cruel, which is made all the more so by starkly contrasting bunting that
Fig. 5.1 ‘The Machine’ from shunt’s Money (2009–2010) (Photography by

Susanne Dietz ©)
hangs around the machine. As Shannon Jackson notes, contemporary

performance forms have ‘re-activated’ the funhouse by installing mov-
ing audiences within interactive landscapes, ‘placing triggers and cuing
surprises’ that alter a space, and encouraging receivers to ‘submit to an
environment that simultaneously makes them want to escape’ (Jackson,
2011, pp. 176–7). Money is just such a form; it references the funhouse
in the machine’s appearance and cued surprises, and also invites audiences
to submit to an environment that may well prompt a desire for escape –
not least at the performance’s conclusion, where Saccard fleas with both
his investors’ cash and the door handles, locking the audience inside the
machine. While a key lay in the centre of the room, the audience on the
night I attended was reluctant to use it as we waited for the cast to return
and take their bow (I have never seen the performers take a bow in their
large-scale shows – the ending of each is often ambiguous). After applause,
silence and then a nervous hubbub, a member of the audience took the
168 A. ALSTON
initiative and let us out of the space. While a ‘productive’ act, it was an
initiative that facilitated escape from the machine. Therefore the machine
does reference the funhouse, but it also evolves its triggers and cued sur-
prises by drawing on the possibilities of liveness in a theatre scenario where
a contract for participation is ambiguous, and a context for immersion is
more menacing and strange.
Echoing Jackson, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink suggests that ‘labyrinthine
staged environments’ are a common characteristic of experientially driven
theatre and performance practices (Groot Nibbelink, 2012, p. 416),
just as they are elsewhere in the experience economy. This link with the
contemporary experience economy is especially clear in one of the first
installations that visitors encountered at the London Dungeon’s London
Bridge site: the ‘Labyrinth of Lost Souls’. The Dungeon’s Labyrinth was
a disorienting mirror maze complete with ‘cued surprises’, such as a skel-
eton which violently shook a caged gate whenever a visitor walked past.
The Dungeon’s Labyrinth, the funhouse and the ‘labyrinthine staged
environments’ of immersive theatre performances, like Punchdrunk’s
Sleep No More, all target the affective potential of audience immersion in
evocative and atmospheric spaces; they seek to elicit thrill, for instance,
or exhilaration, fear, trepidation, nervousness, anxiety, excitement, and
countless other affective goings on. In each case, ‘experience’ is the prod-
uct, environments the cue.
However, the Money machine incorporates audiences within a land-
scape that places triggers and cues surprises, like the funhouse, but in ways
that imbue fun with a different sense to that enjoyed in the labyrinths of
other immersive environments. Fun can refer to a source of pleasure and
enjoyment, but as the late Middle English fon suggests – ‘make a fool, be
a fool’ – the term can also denote trickery and hoax (OED, 2005, p. 700).
The funhouse, the Dungeon and many immersive theatre performances
playfully fool audiences, and this playful fooling can be both enjoyable
and alluring. At the same time, experiences of fon in Money are not lim-
ited by a preoccupation with the experience of being fooled or enjoying
pleasure, but rather open out these experiences to a critical awareness of
their production. Fun tends to be both enjoyed and undermined in Money,
just as interactivity is seemingly offered, but ultimately negated, unless it
facilitates exit from the machine.
Daniel Oliver, a performance scholar and live art practitioner, suggests
that shunt’s work promotes a ‘critical paranoia’ that is suspicious of par-
ticipation, identifying a heightened self-awareness of not participating in
an environment that seems to invite participation.6 This is a useful means

of describing the meta-theatrical critique of the performer-audience rela-
tionship that is at stake in Money. In the funhouse, the London Dungeon
and immersive performances like Sleep No More, the experiencer might
not care all that much about the process of fooling, preferring instead
the enjoyment of being fooled and discovering the next affectively reso-
nant moment. What separates Money from these other immersive experi-
ences is that experience production is revealed as just that – production.
For instance, there is a moment in the performance when plastic balls
are released and bounce over a large table around which the audience
stands sipping glasses of champagne; the audience toasts Saccard’s suc-
cess in achieving investment at a moment in the performance when he is
about to run away with his investor’s money, leaving the audience locked
in the machine. This becomes one of the more explicitly participatory
moments of the performance, when audience members take to chucking
the balls at one another in pleasingly childish fits of glee and sanctioned
naughtiness. The chucking of these balls is a trivial, patronising invitation
to contribute as a participant to the performance – but that, as I see it,
is the point. Where the experience economy rewards the affective experi-
ence of participation, cosmetic or otherwise, Money draws attention to the
production of an affective text by encouraging audiences to question why
they do what they do.
Champagne, playtime, fun – all of this is intended by Saccard to lure
attention away from his unscrupulousness, but shunt want the audience
to recognise his subterfuge. The ridiculousness of the invitation to par-
ticipate is meant to be annoying and frustrating, which encourages a
questioning of why an audience, as a cosmetically participating audience,
should be happy with Saccard’s role in the narrative and their own role in
relationship to him. However, it is not just the respective roles of Saccard
and the audience that come under scrutiny in the logic of Money’s fic-
tive world; given the thematisation of involvement in celebration and the
cosmetic nature of the participation on offer, audiences are also encour-
aged to question the terms of their participation and involvement in the
6
On 12 February 2013, I organised a small research event on shunt’s work involving
Sophie Nield, Louise Owen, Gareth White and Daniel Oliver. I am referencing Oliver’s com-
ments at this event, which I believe drew on Douglas Kellner’s book Media Spectacle. It is
worth adding that the notion of a ‘critical paranoia’ has roots in Salvador Dalí’s ‘paranoid-
critical method’, which the surrealist artist used to explore irrational links between visualised
objects that carry no intrinsic or logical connection to one another (see Dalí, 1935).
170 A. ALSTON
work. A hollow invitation to participate by toasting Saccard in this way

encourages reflection on complicity in his deceit, turning a blind eye, and
the audience’s own involvement within a framework for audience engage-
ment that only offers a superficially productive and cosmetic form of par-
ticipation. The audience still participates in the production of an affective
text that results in fun, but a problematic fun that is not a reward, but
an issue that relates to both the fictive world and the audience’s role in
world-construction; they are therefore resourced as affected participants,
but their productive role as an affected audience is also complicated by an
uncomfortable awareness of the seductive qualities of an affective experi-
ence and what these qualities might smother.
Money consequently relies on and complicates an affectively productive
mode of audience engagement, while also frustrating audiences – both
in their capacity to affect the world in which they are immersed, and as
a feeling of frustration that is linked to this capacity. The Money machine
is a designed space that is entered for the purpose of encountering the
shunt experience: a confusing, complex and cool theatrical experience that
thrives on the sensuous and absorbing fact of the live moment. But this
sensuous and absorbing fact does not pander to pseudo-agency; rather,
the frustrating experience of agency, as a lack, reveals urges and invitations
to be more productive as an expectation.
The thrust of my argument may seem to bear similarity with the analy-
ses of relational art presented by Claire Bishop in her influential article
‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’. Bishop critiques the ‘angelic’
project of relational artworks that allow the ethics of participatory engage-
ment and conviviality to trump aesthetic quality and the politically chal-
lenging tensions among viewers and participants that might otherwise be
sustained in relational art. However, a crucial part of Bishop’s argument,
which dwells on the ‘relational antagonism’ produced in work by Thomas
Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra, is that these tensions are not ‘collapsed’
into the work (Bishop, 2004, p. 70). By contrast, shunt integrate ten-
sions between audiences and the work they experience as a feature of the
work. Unlike the relational art of Hirschhorn addressed by Bishop, for
instance, Money is premised on ‘the viewer’s literal activation’ (Bishop,
2004, p. 75), but in a way that also calls the activation of audiences into
question as an issue. The audience’s ‘literal activation’ (always an enhance-
ment of extant activity) is premised on the arousal of affect in relation to
the cosmetic participation that Saccard – and shunt – offer to the audi-
ence, which also frustrates the notion of an ‘activated’ audience as a notion
to be celebrated or romanticised. Shunt allow the form of a work to be

thematised in the fictive world of a performance, while also encouraging
audiences to question a framework for immersion and participation, as a
feature of immersive theatre aesthetics, which is assigned to them.
Shunt’s next performance, The Architects, builds on a similarly para-
noid and critical framework for audience immersion and participation.
The Architects is very loosely based on Jorge Luis Borges’s The House of
Asterion and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Audiences navigate
their way through a maze at the beginning of the performance, which also
functions as a funnel that channels audience members into the interior of a
cruise ship, implicitly casting them as the ship’s passengers once immersed
in its interior. They take their seats at cabaret bar tables that face a small
stage, and in an interminably long wait for the show to begin might feel
compelled to order a drink from a bar which is tucked away in one corner
of the room – a wait which seems to encourage consumption of the bar’s
offerings as audience members who took up the invitation to arrive an
hour before the actual start of the performance find ways to pass their time.
Eventually, a band begins to play on the stage – the only inhabitants of
that stage throughout the performance – as a prologue to very brief, epi-
sodic moments of performance that pop up around the audience, and that
are cut short by blackouts: episodes that are shorter than a fully fledged
scene, and sometimes lasting only as long as the utterance of a single
word. ‘This is your trip of a lifetime,’ announces one of four Scandinavian
on-board hosts, who both entertain and reprimand the audience after
accusations abound of tomfoolery and sordidness. A passenger has appar-
ently taken a shit by the BBQ, and a human finger has been discovered
without an owner to claim it. The one male host’s bedroom has attracted
numerous guests in the morning’s early hours. Children have infiltrated
the adult-only boat, but no one is quite sure who is responsible for them.
The heating breaks down, which finds an all-too-real and uncomfortable
counterpart in a space which is incredibly cold. The Scandinavian hosts
also have doppelgängers, played by the same performers, who appear as
binge-drinking, orgiastic and gluttonous overlords – participants in a con-
temporary Dionysian rite – mediated via film projection on screens above
the audience’s heads at either end of the space. They describe a machine
at the disposal of the ship’s passengers that enables and facilitates sex with
a dolphin, echoing the contraption created by Daedalus for Pasiphaë to
copulate with a bull in the Minotaur myth. There is also a hollowed-out
statue of a bull that can be entered by audiences in the cabaret bar, which
172 A. ALSTON
references Daedalus’s machine – but the reference, like the bull, is hollow;
the facilitation of erotic participation that it might otherwise bring about
is obviously unavailable. Participation is therefore implied as a potential in
the performance’s scenography and narrative, and encouraged, however
ludicrously, by the doppelgängers, but it remains at arm’s length from a
primarily sedentary audience; it is pastiched as a seduction.
After a long sequence of such fragmented episodes, the audience is
asked to evacuate the space with men and women exiting through differ-
ent doors. In the first of two remaining spaces, the male audience – and
here I write as a part of the male audience – is asked to obey the com-
mands of scrolling text that appears on a television screen, mostly encour-
aging audiences to shout out simple yes and no responses, or to make
nonsensical noises such as the sound of monkeys screeching. A final space,
revealed after a curtain is pulled back, hosts a volatile acrobatics routine
and the brutal massacre of a surreal, boy-like and vulnerable-looking
Minotaur figure standing at one end of a broken bridge, which provides
a false ending after the Minotaur’s slaughterers take a bow to audience
applause – a gesture of participation and ‘a moment in which the collec-
tive aims to assert itself over the individual […and that indicates] a giving
up of individual judgment’ (Kershaw, 2007, p. 182). The performance
concludes with the doppelgängers appearing on an elevated platform in
various stages of undress, hobbling about their enclosure alongside the
hollowed-out bull, as if enduring the last vestiges of a party that the audi-
ence were never a part of (see Fig. 5.2). Drawn by the sound of the band
back on board the cruise ship, the audience finally leaves the performance
by following a red thread, perhaps that of Ariadne, back through the laby-
rinth and into the outside world.7
For Peter Boenisch, the ‘principle of meaning’ is no longer located in
the interpretation of a given text in work by shunt; instead, ‘The dramatic
text and its (dramatic and narrative) textures function as an indispensable
dramaturgic mediator’ that energises what he calls the ‘relational com-
ponents of dramaturgy’: that is, anything within the live theatrical event,
which includes an audience, that impacts on the generation of mean-
ing between what is produced and received (Boenisch, 2012, n.p.; see
also Boenisch, 2010). ‘As a result,’ he writes, ‘the focus shifts from the
7
This element of the performance – the red thread – was not used in the preview perfor-
mances, but was added during the run. Altering material over the course of a run is common
with shunt.
Fig. 5.2 ‘Red Room’ from shunt’s The Architects (2012–2013) (From left: shunt
associate artist Nigel Barrett, shunt co-founders Gemma Brockis and Hannah
Ringham. Photography by Susanne Dietz ©)
representation of meaning to the “sense” generated’ (Boenisch, 2012,

n.p.). While he is analysing shunt’s Money, similar ‘relational compo-
nents’ also inform the dramaturgic underpinnings of The Architects; the
Minotaur myth and The House of Asterion ‘energise’ an immersive drama-
turgy and a ‘sense’ of these texts that is generated in a live theatre situa-
tion among performers, audience members and an immersive world that
surrounds them. However, the ‘sense’ generated also relates to a very par-
ticular involvement of the audience in an immersive world that seems to
welcome them, on the one hand, and frustrate them, on the other. This is
due primarily to two features of the performance that will draw attention
in what remains of this section: first, the modes of producing and receiving
an affective text within the performance, particularly as those modes relate
to a sensuous involvement in an immersive environment and the ‘sense’
of its source texts; second, the use of an affective text to problematise the
co-optation of sensuality and the positioning of an immersive performance
within the experience economy.
In The Architects, the pastiching of participatory impulses has a signify-
ing function, rather than an activating function; it brings about a meta-
theatrical layering of theatrical signs and draws attention to the ‘concrete’
174 A. ALSTON
production of a theatre situation that both references and denies a physi-

cally active audience involvement. A ‘joint text’, or affective text, ends up
being produced within this situation that is premised on the unavailability
of a meaningful form of physically active participation as an intervention in
the creative trajectory of a performance. All of these features suggest some
degree of alignment with Lehmann’s identification and reading of ‘post-
dramatic theatre’, especially when read alongside the fragmentation of
narrative episodes that are cut off by blackouts, sometimes mid-sentence.
The frequent disruption of dramatic narrative in The Architects produces
what Lehmann calls a ‘rift between the discourse of the text and that of
theatre’ (Lehmann, 2006, p. 46). However, this does not mean that The
Architects evidences a performance tradition that remains separate from
a dramatic theatre tradition. As Stephen Bottoms observes, bifurcating
theatre and postdramatic theatre in this way overlooks a ‘centuries-long
history of metatheatrical awareness in drama, whereby the real, material
circumstances of staging – far from being “excluded” – are played off in
unstable oscillation against the less-than-whole construction of the worlds
represented’, not least in Shakespeare’s plays – from the ‘wooden O’ in
Shakespeare’s Henry V, to direct address (see Bottoms, 2009, p. 68).
Rather, such features in The Architects build on the inherent instability
of world representation in theatre, using this instability to draw attention
to the less-than-whole construction of an immersive world and the audi-
ence’s role within that world.
The Architects is partly based on material from classical antiquity. The
myriad and esoteric references to Greek myth in The Architects suggest
a need for at least some awareness of an oral tradition concerned with
mythic world-making. By fragmenting narrative episodes and cutting off
these episodes with sharp blackouts, shunt leave their audience grasp-
ing for a sense of dramatic coherence – which is to say, the performance
builds on an impulse to find dramatic coherence in a situation where
meaning is rife with ambiguity. It builds on and responds to drama, and
the ‘emancipated’ spectatorship of an audience, within the purview of
theatre and specifically immersive theatre. Their grasping takes on its
own significance – it is a productive feature of spectatorship – but in a
way that also ties in with sensuality and embodiment. The spoken word
seeks to convey meaning, but its meaning is incomplete whenever it is
disrupted by darkness; nonetheless, the disruption of narrative carries its
own ‘sense’ within the logic of the performance that audiences are free
to decode.
The temporal qualities of narration in The Architects take on a special

significance, leading to a sense of indefinitely passed time. Experimentation
with narrative in the performance produces among audiences an experi-
ence of time running on its own, constructed terms; more Bergsonian
duration than clock time. As Lehmann writes:
If time becomes the object of ‘direct’ experience, logically it is especially

the techniques of time distortion that come to prominence. For only an
experience of time that deviates from habit provokes its explicit perception,
permitting it to move from something taken for granted as a mere accom-
paniment to the rank of a theme [… turning] time as such into an object of
the aesthetic experience (Lehmann, 2006, p. 156)
This elevation of time to the rank of a theme plays an important role in The
Architects and is very much in keeping with the durational atmospheres
that Borges tends to craft in his short stories, which often engage with
warped senses of time, or duration. In The Architects, this object of aes-
thetic experience is an affective experience of time that permits the trans-
mission of the ‘sense’ of these stories, and especially a sense of Borgesian
(or Bergsonian) duration. Shunt treats the experiential as a site for the
transmission of a sensory understanding of performance. It is the experi-
ence of warped time that takes precedence, as opposed to a description
of it. At the same time, though, an experience of time takes on a peculiar
quality, drawing attention to itself as an oddity. It is not just time as such
that moves beyond the habitual, but the generation of its experience. The
production of aestheticised experience therefore plays an important role in
The Architects, but it is also made strange as a productive process.
In each of the immersive theatre performances explored in the book’s
earlier chapters, affect is used as a channel that connects audiences to a
fictive world, making them feel included as a part of a world that they
help to produce. The aesthetic experience that results from their produc-
tive endeavour is what tends to take aesthetic precedence in these perfor-
mances either as an overwhelming feature of audience engagement, or as
a reward to be chased. However, once the production of affect becomes
a hindrance to an audience’s involvement in an immersive world and that
hindrance makes affect’s role in world-construction perceivable, then the
hindrance calls attention to itself. The less-than-whole construction of
an immersive world – which is the inevitable fate of all immersive the-
atre performances – is highlighted and experimented with as a feature of
176 A. ALSTON
immersive theatre aesthetics. What emerges from this experimentation is a

system of aesthetic production that still relies on frameworks of immersion
and participation that involve the productive engagement of audiences,
but in ways that problematise the terms of their productivity and the par-
ticipatory expectations and assumptions that might otherwise be courted
in an immersive theatre performance.
The Architects engages with these expectations and assumptions in a
number of direct and indirect ways, both within a fictive world and as part
of a meta-theatrical critique of that world. First of all, audiences are asked
to arrive an hour prior to the start of the performance proper so that they
can make the most of this performance space as a themed bar, comparable
to a range of themed bars elsewhere in the experience economy. Second,
audience members are hailed by the Scandinavian hosts as pleasure seekers
within the fictive world of the performance and are consequently intro-
duced, via narrative description in episodic moments of performance and
immersion in the entertainment area of a cruise ship, to symbols of leisure
and experiential indulgence that are reputedly available on board, includ-
ing a Jacuzzi, a pub quiz, a machine enabling sex with a dolphin, and the
bedroom of the one male host. But as interpolated subjects, the audience
is only ever told, via imagined recollection, of their own hailed charac-
ters’ antics that are meant to have taken place in the past. For instance,
the inferred discovery of a shit by the BBQ, the severed finger without
an owner to claim it, and the male host’s bedroom all imply that the
audience-tourists have engaged in debauchery once they are reprimanded
as potential culprits by the hosts, without actually offering the audience
an opportunity to shit, sever or knock on the male host’s door in the early
hours. Third, actualising these forms of audience involvement is unlikely
to occur in the context of an immersive theatre performance; however,
referencing them as actions that are realised in a fiction’s backstory, but
unrealised by prospective audience participants, pastiches the experience
economy by exaggerating or perverting its seductions and presenting
them either as unappealing, or as an imagined feature of the ship’s attrac-
tions that will provoke plural responses to their potential – either way, the
framing of the ‘leisure experience’ is shorn of glossiness and achievability
as satiated desire. Furthermore, their unlikely realisation in a live theatre
situation also serves to highlight the audience’s status as an intelligent
bystander – one who is nonetheless productively involved to the extent
that they are affected, and who strives to piece together a performance
puzzle – rather than a productive participant who might otherwise have
been asked to do something, anything, as a surplus to the inherent pro-

ductivity of spectatorship.
With Rosenberg, I think it is important to recognise the positive aspects
of presenting audiences with the difficulties of a performance in a way that
might upset, confuse, surprise, or revolt them. Shunt muster into an embod-
ied consciousness the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics, encouraging
their audiences to question connections between production, consumption
and affective experience. In both Money and The Architects, opportunities
to participate in the action of performance may be expected, but are rarely
offered; when they are offered, participation only arises in a cosmetic form –
for instance, throwing plastic balls at one another in Money, or screaming
like monkeys and applauding the brutal murder of the Minotaur in The
Architects in an assumed conclusion to the performance. The frustration of
productive participation – and by extension a form of producing consumer-
ism that pervades the experience economy more broadly – arouses feelings
of frustration among audiences who may find themselves annoyed by the
lack of opportunities to participate more forthrightly and to produce in a
more ‘active’ and ‘involved’ way. However, such frustration also serves to
represent, within a less-than-totally-immersive world, a troubling frame-
work for audience participation and immersion that questions a pervasive
romanticism of productivity and the stimulation of a desire for involvement.
In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed defends the right to be
unhappy, annoyed, anxious and frustrated. These ‘bad feelings’ are not so
much in the way of some better, more hopeful future, as they are produc-
tive obstacles. ‘We might need to attend to bad feelings not in order to
overcome them,’ she writes, ‘but to learn by how we are affected by what
comes near’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 216, original emphasis). Shunt encourage
audiences to question the terms of participatory invitations in relation
to the motives that drive participatory desire. They present and pastiche
neoliberal capitalism and/in the experience economy not as something in
which the self might find some kind of fulfilment, but as something that
presents an obstacle to fulfilment. A bodily productivity is harnessed and
an embodied experience of a theatre scenario is targeted, but in frustrat-
ing productivity and arousing frustration shunt also jeopardise a pervasive
romanticism of productivity; productivity, participation and experiential
engagement are all posed as difficulties in which the feeling of difficulty
pulls attention away from indulgence in the richness of an experience,
and toward the means of experience production – means that include the
activities of producing consumers.
178 A. ALSTON
CONCLUSION
While audiences may be watching theatre more than interacting with it in
shows like Money and The Architects, scenography is nonetheless tailored
toward the experiential. The experience machines provided by shunt make
no qualms about opportunities for audience collaboration or claims about
audience empowerment. Neither Money nor The Architects is collabora-
tive or empowering in the sense of handing over a more physically ‘active’
agency to an audience that allows for intervention in the action of perfor-
mance, which is a gesture that also undercuts agency because of its being
distributed. In both performances, the participatory impulse and its posit-
ing as a seduction are critiqued. Audiences are confronted with empty par-
ticipatory offers, hollowed out in fairly meaningless episodic scenes, in their
own right. For instance, when the male and female audiences are segregated
and explicitly invited to participate by reading out words from a television
screen in The Architects, or when the bouncing balls are released in Money, it
is desire to participate as a producing consumer that is called into question.
In a response to Bishop’s writing on relational art, Shannon Jackson
critiques her polarisation of conviviality and antagonism, legibility and
illegibility, radical functionality and radical unfunctionality, and artistic
heteronomy and artistic autonomy (Jackson, 2011, p. 48). Jen Harvie
has also addressed how the presence of criticality and difficulty in par-
ticipatory art, theatre and performance, including the work that Bishop
champions, risks alienating audiences and may also give rise to bad feeling
(Harvie, 2013, p. 10). The argument proposed in this chapter departs
from Bishop’s in several ways, not least in its study of work that integrates
tensions between audience and environment as a feature of the work,
and utilises – and problematises – the affective involvement of audiences
within an immersive environment; nonetheless, these particular criticisms
still provide a useful touchstone to help clarify a set of conclusions.
This chapter has addressed how immersive theatre can challenge the
hegemony of neoliberal production and value: in particular, how immer-
sive theatre performances can challenge schemes of production and sys-
tems of value in political and economic contexts that embed and inform
modes of production, reception and consumption. My argument has not
looked to position ‘frustration’ as a superior feature of immersive aesthet-
ics in comparison with fun and pleasure. Fun and pleasure have important
roles to play in work by shunt; furthermore, the shunt collective explores
relationships between fun and frustration that challenge the bifurcation of
conviviality and antagonism. However, the more important point is that
shunt subvert a particular casting and appropriation of production and

value. This chapter has explored how neoliberal politics and economics co-
opt fun, pleasure and desire as valuable sources of profit. In the experience
economy’s brandscapes, for instance, they facilitate the derivation of profit
and value by matching the seductions of neoliberalism with the possibility
of self-fulfilment. Fun, pleasure and desire are of course not indelibly linked
to neoliberalism, but they have found uses in its structures. In experiment-
ing with frustration, shunt encourage recuperation of these more ‘positive’
features of affective experience. That is not to say that frustration ought to
be deployed in achieving this recuperation; rather, shunt’s experimentation
with frustration offers up a compelling challenge to neoliberal modes of
production and renderings of value. It is these modes of production and
the neoliberal rendering of value that form the main target of this chapter’s
critique – not so much a particular kind of affect, as particular uses of affect
in immaterial production and the subversion of those uses.
The production and experience of affective texts in immersive theatre
performances might encourage a sense of personal importance and self-
entitlement once the production of rich experiences is centralised within
schemes of aesthetic production in immersive theatre, or a brandscape. In
brandscapes, an affective engagement with the seductions of neoliberalism
is mediated by the movements of capital, which results in a form of pro-
ducing consumerism that builds on the production and consumption not
just of branded products, but of affect. However, immersive theatre is also
capable of challenging this scheme of producing consumerism, frustrating
the innovative logic of an experience economy that has marked out affect
as a productive source of profit. Shunt’s immersive theatre is manipulative,
but it deploys manipulation as an annoyance, or a strangeness, that high-
lights the always-less-than-totally-immersive boundaries of an immersive
theatre environment. The shunt collective challenge the coherence and
unquestioned appeal of an immersive world that invites productive partici-
pation, and in doing so pose a challenge to the romanticism of productivity
in the experience economy. This is what makes frustrating participation,
both as a frustration of participatory impulses and as a feeling of frustra-
tion, a compelling political feature of immersive theatre aesthetics.
REFERENCES
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bennett, S., & Schweitzer, M. (2014, Winter). In the window at disney: A lifetime
of brand desire. TDR, 58(4), 23–31.
180 A. ALSTON
Bishop, C. (2004, Autumn). Antagonism and relational aesthetics. October, 110,

51–79.
Boenisch, P. M. (2010). Towards a theatre of encounter and experience: Reflexive
dramaturgies and classic texts. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20(2), 162–172.
Boenisch, P. M. (2012). Acts of spectating: The dramaturgy of the audience’s
experience in contemporary theatre. Critical Stages: The IATC Webjournal,
7(December), n.p.
Botibol, C. (2015). Immersive experiences, Event, 23 February. http://www.
eventmagazine.co.uk/experiential-marketing-trends-2015-immersive-
experiences/agencies/article/1329235. Accessed 15 Apr 2015.
Bottoms, S. (2009). Authorizing the audience: The conceptual drama of Tim
Crouch. Performance Research, 14(1), 65–76.
Castells, M. (2000 [1996]). The information age: Economy, society and culture:
Volume I: The rise of the network society (2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Cobain, I. (2006, December 21). The Guardian journalist who became central
London organiser for the BNP. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/
uk/2006/dec/21/thefarright.politics. Accessed 1 Dec 2014.
Dalí, S. (1935). The conquest of the irrational. New York: Julien Levy.
Jackson, S. (2011). Social works: Performing art, supporting publics. London:
Routledge.
Joseph, M. (2002). Against the romance of community. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Kershaw, B. (2007). Theatre ecology: Environments and performance events.
Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Klingmann, A. (2007). Brandscapes: Architecture in the experience economy.
London: MIT Press.
Routledge.
Lenderman, M. (2006). Experience the message: How experiential marketing is
changing the brand world. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers.
McKinnie, M. (2012). Rethinking site-specificity: Monopoly, urban space, and the
cultural economics of the site-specific performance. In A. Birch & J. Tompkins
(Eds.), Performing site-specific theatre: Politics, place, practice. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Mermikides, A. (2010). Clash and consensus in Shunt’s “Big Shows” and the
Lounge. In A. Mermikides & J. Smart (Eds.), Devising in process. Basingstoke,
Oakley, M. (2012). Email correspondence with the author, 1 August.

OED. (2005). 2nd revised edition.
Pd3. (2015). www.pd3.co.uk/#/who-are-we. Accessed 15 Apr 2015.
Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. (1998, July–August). Welcome to the experience
economy. Harvard Business Review, 97–105.
Pine, B. J., II, & Gilmore, J. H. (1999). The experience economy: Work is theater &
every business a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Reverend Billy. (2015). www.revbilly.com. Accessed 15 Apr 2015.
Ridout, N. (2013). Passionate amateurs: Theatre, communism, and love. Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Schmitt, B. H. (1999). Experiential marketing: How to get customers to SENSE,
FEEL, THINK, ACT, and RELATE to your company and brands. New York:
The Free Press.
Shunt. (2010, January 15). Finance Manager Application Pack, www.shunt.co.
uk/JobOpportunities/ApplicationPackFinance.doc. Accessed 15 Feb 2013.
Steen, S. (2014, March). Neoliberal Scandals: Foxcon, Mike Daisey and the turn
toward non-fiction drama. Theatre Journal, 66(1), 1–18.
Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. London: Pan in association with Collins.
Twitchin, M. (2009, November 3). Mischa Twitchin on the history of SHUNT
and their new show Money, interview with Andrew Eglinton, London Theatre
Blog. http://www.londontheatreblog.co.uk/mischa-twitchin-on-the-history-
of-shunt-and-their-new-show-money/#lounge. Accessed 15 Feb 2013.
Wickstrom, M. (2006). Performing consumers: Global capital and its theatrical
seductions. New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER 6
Theatre in the Marketplace: Immaterial

Production in Theatre Delicatessen’s
Theatre Souk
Reaching consensus about which forms of immersion are politically laud-

able, or which forms of immersion have ethical integrity, or aesthetic qual-
ity, is not necessarily a desirable project; the important thing, to borrow
from Jennifer Doyle’s commentary on ‘difficulty’ in art and performance,
is that a conversation is staged around these terms (Doyle, 2013, p. 93).
This conversation needs protagonists and antagonists, defectors and pro-
vocateurs; it needs ‘good’ theatre and ‘bad’ theatre so that attitudes that
shape judgements can be formed, refined, contested and reformulated as
theatre makers and their audiences continue to experiment and engage
with cultural production and the possibilities of audience immersion. All
immersive theatre implicitly participates in this conversation, although it
often does so as a silent participant. The roles of the political in immersive
theatre are often muted by immersive theatre makers in correspondence
with apolitical goals and ambitions. There is nothing wrong with apolitical
goals and ambitions and there is nothing wrong with admiring work that
does not appear to lend itself to a political project. However, the politics
of immersive theatre aesthetics might have very little to do with political
content, or deliberate attachment to a political agenda, deriving instead
from the forms and styles of diverse performances, and the exposure of
these forms and styles to diverse audiences.
There are a handful of immersive theatre companies in the United
Kingdom who garner a great deal of attention among a strong fan base, in
the media and in theatre and performance scholarship. Punchdrunk are a
case in point, although dreamthinkspeak, Secret Cinema and shunt have

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_6
184 A. ALSTON
also benefitted from fairly extensive media coverage and modest scholarly
interest. These companies have set important benchmarks around which
definitions of immersive theatre and approaches to its analysis have been
crafted in scholarship and journalistic theatre criticism. However, there
is a substantial field of immersive theatre production that remains in the
peripheral vision of discourse on immersive theatre, which includes work
by Ray Lee and to a lesser extent Lundahl & Seitl, as well as a large and
heterogeneous group of artists and companies who struggle or choose
not to create work within popular and well-established institutions like
the Battersea Arts Centre, which has played an important role in fostering
and staging the work of companies featured throughout this book. This
prompts me to consider fringe theatre performances that operate outside
of theatre festivals, theatre buildings and off-site programming through
large institutions like London’s National Theatre, and to represent and
engage with contributions to immersive practice that fall outside of an
immersive theatre mainstream.
For theatre critic Lyn Gardner,
the health of a city’s theatrical landscape must be measured not just in what
happens on its funded theatres’ main stages, but also by the amount of
theatrical activity that bubbles up in the city away from those stages. One of
the problems caused by our overbuilt funding infrastructure is that a small
number of well-funded arts organisations are able to accumulate significant
cultural clout and assets, while the vast majority cling on by their fingertips,
barely visible. (L. Gardner, 2015)
I am wary of advocating the ‘artrepreneurial’ activity of theatre makers

who fall outside of an ‘overbuilt funding structure’ and who may inadver-
tently justify its diminishment (see Chap. 4), but it is nonetheless impor-
tant to recognise and respond to the valuable work of immersive theatre
makers who operate at the fringes of immersive theatre production. While
Gardner ultimately supports ‘ditching’ the term ‘fringe’ because of its
pejorative connotations, rebranding theatre at the fringes of cultural pro-
duction unfortunately does not alter its culturally and often financially
marginal(ised) status. This chapter seeks instead to document and explore
theatrical activity that bubbles up in the city not just away from the main
stages of publicly funded theatre venues, but the appropriated immersive
environments that house popular, well-known and well-funded theatre
companies as well.
IMMATERIAL PRODUCTION IN THEATRE DELICATESSEN’S THEATRE SOUK 185
In London, the fringes of immersive theatre production are developing

in publicly funded venues, not least thanks to theatres including Camden
People’s Theatre (CPT) in North London and Ovalhouse in Kennington,
which are currently both regularly funded by Arts Council England (ACE)
as National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs), at least for the duration of
the 2015–2018 funding cycle (ACE, 2015c). Both theatres foreground
work, including immersive work, by emerging companies and artists,
young practitioners and theatre and performance makers who choose to
resist more mainstream venues, or who might otherwise find it difficult to
find a platform that welcomes them. Ovalhouse, especially, actively sup-
ports black and Asian theatre companies, which tend not to garner the
same amount of media and scholarly attention as white practitioners in
the British immersive theatre scene (see Werry & Schmidt, 2014, p. 470).
Furthermore, work by members from a young demographic, particularly
by those who may still be in education or who are yet to cut their teeth
on festival and receiving theatre circuits, tends not to receive recognition
in scholarly study, at least in studies of immersive theatre. This is partly
because of the emphases placed on expertise as an important feature of
immersive theatre making (Machon, 2013, p. 100), and partly because
‘the privilege of using skills in satisfying labour remains the prerogative of
a comparatively small group – an elite class – of experts’ (Harvie, 2013,
p. 48) who have already managed to secure their own place within econo-
mies of cultural production. No doubt, the difficulties that these artists
face in finding a platform for presenting work have a hand in promoting
a lack of scholarly attention, which risks excluding an important set of
voices who might otherwise contribute to fields of cultural production
and be able to participate and be recognised as participants in a conversa-
tion about its parameters and value. There is a part to be played by those
who might not otherwise be able to partake in a context that counts them
as practitioner and interlocutor.
Theatres including CPT and Ovalhouse play important roles in
responding to the difficulties faced by these demographics, but there is
only so much they can do in the spaces available to them, and only so
many that they can accommodate. Getting programmed in fringe theatre
venues is still fairly competitive. This is why I choose to address in this
chapter a ‘pop-up’ company – Theatre Delicatessen – that proposes an
alternative. Pop-up theatre raises a number of compelling issues relating
to the sustainability of an arts infrastructure, but forms and styles of audi-
ence immersion that are explored and supported by Theatre Delicatessen
186 A. ALSTON
also mark out the disruptive potential of arts programming that does not
comply with the aims and ambitions of particular theatres, arts centres and
long-term public funding initiatives.
Theatre Delicatessen was formed in 2007 by directors Roland Smith,
Jessica Brewster and Frances ‘Effie’ Loy. According to Smith, Theatre Deli
was founded in response to the difficulties faced by the three directors in
getting work programmed, despite the options opened up by London’s
fringe theatres and partly because of the scale of the work that they wanted
to produce.1 As a pragmatic response to these difficulties, the company
explored the possibilities of pop-up theatre after they were introduced
to a property developer contact of Loy’s, who was working on a disused
Boosey & Hawkes office space at 295 Regent Street. Their early work,
performed in this space over a 2-year period, was diverse, ranging from
productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2008) and
The Winter’s Tale (2009), to a verbatim physical theatre piece devised by
the company called Pedal Pusher (2009, 2014). The Regent Street space
enabled the company to produce work in spite of the difficulties they faced
in finding alternative spaces. However, it also characterises, from the com-
pany’s outset, a dependency on temporarily vacant commercial properties.
Since its inception, Theatre Deli has been nomadic and reliant on a fluctu-
ating private property market, popping up in the interim periods between
the buying and occupation of commercial premises.
After leaving 295 Regent Street in 2010, the company moved to the
former home of the Uzbekistan Airways offices at 3–4 Picton Place in
West London. Henceforth, Theatre Deli was to function as both a maker
of theatre and a curator of work, providing a platform for other artists to
develop, rehearse and stage work which they felt was lacking when they
first emerged as a theatre company. Building on their own experiences
of forming and maintaining a theatre company and the difficulties faced
by the company in securing funding from ACE, Theatre Deli developed
a series of platforms to help foster work by young artists that they call
‘Souks’, which the company describe as ‘theatre marketplaces’. Theatre
Souk was the first of these marketplaces (hence the generic shorthand
‘Souks’), followed in 2012 by the Bush Bazaar, which popped up in the
newly relocated Bush Theatre in the old Shepherd’s Bush Library on
Uxbridge Road in West London. The Bush Bazaar stamped the company
1
The exposition of Theatre Deli’s history and ethos in this chapter is based, in part, on a
personal interview (2013) with Jessica Brewster and Roland Smith, unless otherwise stated.
with an institutional seal of approval that had previously eluded them,

marking an exception to the initially enforced, but increasingly accepted
and harnessed, rule of working outside of established venues. The Bazaar
was followed by two more theatre marketplaces, at the time of writing –
Spaced 2014 (2014) and Horror Souk (2014) – which took place at
the former BBC London studios on Marylebone High Street in Central
London and a former Woolworths store in Sheffield, respectively, mark-
ing a return to spaces beyond more conventional institutional affilia-
tion. At the time of writing, Theatre Delicatessen is based in the former
headquarters of Guardian Newspapers Limited at 119 Farringdon Road,
which was acquired by the Real Estate company Viridis in 2012 and has
accommodated Theatre Deli since the late Summer of 2014. The build-
ing is currently awaiting redevelopment, which looks set to coalesce with
the infrastructural improvement of nearby Farringdon Station as part of
Transport for London’s ‘Crossrail’ scheme: a major railway development
in London and the South East of England.
All of Theatre Deli’s Souks follow a similar format: a modest cover
charge to enter the building is paid in advance and the gesture of transact-
ing is reiterated outside of a series of performance spaces. Individual com-
panies and artists are able to do what they want with one of these spaces,
which are usually spread across several floors. Audiences are invited to
negotiate payment with the artist(s) for each short performance that they
choose to experience – some lasting a few minutes, others around twenty.
Haggling is encouraged and a typical price is around £3 per person. The
process of paying ends up as a functional and an aestheticised gesture
of exchange. The money collected directly by the performers is theirs to
keep, while the money collected at the door is split between Theatre Deli,
to fund running costs, and a start-up budget for future marketplaces and
other Theatre Deli initiatives.
Given the intimate size of each space – accommodating anywhere
between one and around twenty audience members – the performances
tend to involve at least some aspect of direct address and usually audience
participation and rough immersion. I specify ‘rough’ as the materials that
Theatre Deli and the companies involved can afford to work with tend
to be limited, or begged and borrowed, which means that the poten-
tial otherworldliness of immersive environments rarely coheres around a
pristine and polished aesthetic. Examples of work featured in the Souks
include direct-address table-top puppetry (Flabbergast Theatre’s Puppet
Poker Pit [2010], Theatre Souk); an immersive, deconstructed rendering
188 A. ALSTON
of Chekhov’s The Seagull, set in a casino (.dash’s Chaika Casino [2010],

Theatre Souk); a performance via voicemail for walking participants (Paper
Tiger’s Securing Your World [2012], Bush Bazaar); and an immersive per-
formance about food and including the consumption of edible curiosities
(You Are Mine’s The Sandwich Shop [2014], Spaced 2014).
Theatre Deli’s Souks are not platforms for amateur theatre, but they
do trouble figurations of amateurism and professionalism. Most, but not
all, of the work that they curate is by young, non-professional or semi-
professional artists who are either at the outset of their careers, or who
seek a forum to experiment with ideas that might struggle to get pro-
grammed in a permanent theatre venue. Consequently, the Souks affect
cultural production in London – and, more recently, in South Yorkshire
with the Horror Souk – by widening the demographic of theatre makers
who are able to contribute to the making of theatre for presentation to a
paying public. They provide platforms for young companies to create per-
formances which might not otherwise be created. Some performances will
be ‘scratch’ versions of work that the creator(s) hope to perform elsewhere
at some future point, and others will be devised specifically for a particular
Souk, either in response to a call for project proposals by Theatre Deli,
or by invitation. Each Souk gathers together disparate performances that
are ‘curated’ only to the extent that they feature a theatricalised financial
transaction. Theatre Deli’s approach to ‘curation’ is therefore to be under-
stood very loosely, with performances primarily correlating around the
shared theme of financial transactions. Beyond this, specific kinds of con-
tent remain largely unaffected by a curatorial agenda. The result is audi-
ence immersion in a ‘theatre marketplace’ that functions as context for a
diverse series of performances, many of which experiment with incongru-
ent frameworks for audience immersion and participation.
The aims of this chapter are twofold; first, it theorises the importance of
the contributions made by young and emerging theatre makers to a con-
temporary form of cultural production; second, the chapter explores the
production of affective experience in Theatre Deli’s Souks and the alerting
of audiences to their own political and ethical roles as productive partici-
pants. What interests me most about the Souks is how they ‘reorder’ the
incursion of a marketplace that embeds and impacts Theatre Deli’s pro-
duction of the curated environments that they present to audiences. What
is the significance of paying for theatre within a live theatre scenario? How
can the act of purchasing bring about a different relationship to the thing
purchased? What is the nature and importance of this relationship?
Taken together, these two concerns of the chapter prompt me to turn

much more forthrightly to the work of Jacques Rancière, in comparison
with the previous chapters. Theatre Deli widens the space available to a
demographic to participate in the development of cultural practice and to
be seen and heard within fields of practice that may otherwise sideline such
contributions; they count the uncounted, to use a Rancièrian turn of phrase
(Rancière, 2010a, p. 33). However, the Souk format is also premised on
a redistribution of what can and cannot be ordinarily sensed – in terms
of both apprehension and understanding – by foregrounding the labour
relations that support immersive theatre production and theatricalising a
real payment inside of an immersive performance space. Consequently,
Rancièrian theory – which explores the political ramifications of redistrib-
uting what can and cannot be perceived and understood – also lends itself
to the analysis of audience engagement in the Souks.
The rest of this chapter is split into three sections and a conclusion:
the first explores Rancière’s thinking around aesthetics and politics; the
second sketches the economic context and ideological decisions informing
the curation of Theatre Deli’s Souks; and the third focuses on Half Cut’s
Half Cut (2010) as a case study performed at Theatre Souk. In the third
section I return to Rancière, but in appropriated form, arguing that Half
Cut’s political potential resides in the performance’s capacity to reorder
what can be perceived and understood in a theatricalised marketplace. The
chapter examines how Theatre Deli and Half Cut rely on a material con-
text that can be seen to compromise the independence and integrity of
the Souks; however, it is also concerned with how they problematise the
affective labour of performers and productive participants in an immaterial
scheme of production by disrupting the aesthetics of transaction and the
productive consumption of participating audiences.
DISRUPTING THE SENSIBLE
There are risks involved in applying Rancière’s philosophy to the analysis
of audience immersion and participation, not least because of his staunch
criticism of invitations to participate as something other than an intel-
ligent spectator (Rancière, 2009b). This partly accounts for why I have
resisted using some of his more idiosyncratic terms and concepts in this
book so far, choosing instead to develop my own ideas independently of
the baggage checked in with Rancière’s complex and dense approach to
aesthetics and politics. However, in exploring how the Souks ‘reorder’
190 A. ALSTON
the perceivable and understandable, and in turning toward the work of

theatre makers operating at the fringes of cultural production, it proves
useful to dive headfirst into Rancière’s oeuvre at this juncture. Some of the
terms that follow will be familiar to those unacquainted with Rancière’s
writing, but nonetheless uniquely defined; others are of his own making.
What emerges is a lexicon and conceptual landscape that I want to adapt
to enhance my own thinking about the aesthetics and politics of audience
immersion and productive participation.
Rancière uses very particular and original definitions of aesthetics and
politics. However, the ways in which these definitions are approached in
his various articles and books, particularly those emerging in the mid-
1990s through to the mid-2000s, occasionally throw up subtle nuances.
I will be drawing mostly on Dis-agreement, first published in French in
1995; Dissensus, a collection of articles, the most significant of which is
‘Ten Theses on Politics’, written from 1994 to 1996 and first published
in French in 1998; The Politics of Aesthetics, a series of interviews first col-
lated and published in French in 2000; and Aesthetics and Its Discontents,
first published in French in 2004.2 I will also be touching on a number
of other works by Rancière, as well as scholarly reflections on his various
publications. The nuances in an otherwise consistent theoretical approach
to political philosophy in Rancière’s work partly relate to the growing
space he gives to aesthetics. Dis-agreement marks an early engagement
with an aesthetico-political approach to equality, but a decade later, in
Aesthetics and Its Discontents, the influence of his thinking around aesthet-
ics impacts, even more explicitly, on how he conceives of politics as well.
In Dis-agreement, Rancière draws on Plato to highlight what democ-
racy tends to overlook: a ‘miscount, which is, after all, merely the funda-
mental miscount of politics’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 10). In thinking about
politics and democracy, Rancière challenges his readers to consider this
‘miscount’ in terms of how the notion of ‘a people’ excludes those who
do not fit so neatly under its umbrella, particularly as this notion manifests
through democratic processes, such as voting. In Todd May’s reading of
early Rancière, politics occurs ‘only when the traditional mechanisms of
what are usually called politics are put into question’ (May, 2009, p. 108;
see also Hinderliter et al., 2009, p. 7). This draws on Rancière’s claim
in Dis-agreement that ‘the presupposition of the equality of anyone and
2
I base what follows on English translations of his work, but it is worth noting the original
date of publication in French to give a clearer sense of chronology.
everyone, or the paradoxical effectiveness of the sheer contingency of any

order’ ought to function as a foundational point of departure for poli-
tics to emerge (Rancière, 1999, p. 17; see also Rancière, 2007, p. 51–2).
Politics then appears not as something concerning equality of liberty, or
equality of opportunity, but equality per se as something pre-existing the
distribution of liberty, or opportunity, for instance.3 Fundamentally, pol-
itics is understood in Dis-agreement as existing only ‘when the natural
order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part for those
who have no part’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 11). As such, a narrow under-
standing of politics is put forward, where politics can only be said to exist
once those excluded from supposedly democratic processes – processes
which stand for the whole, as a consensual representation, a ‘people’, to
the detriment of some individuals – are able and recognised as being able
to disrupt that exclusion.
A cornerstone of Rancière’s political philosophy is that politics must
involve a specific break with the logic of arkhê, meaning beginning or
originating: as in an originating source of power and consequently leader-
ship and sovereignty that is the target of anarchist (an-arkhê) theory and
praxis (Rancière, 2010b, pp. 29–31; see also Rancière, 1999, pp. 13–15).
Rancière invites his readers to acknowledge that ‘no social order is based on
nature, no divine law regulates human society’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 16). In
the absence of any such natural authority, law, or arkhê to politics, compet-
ing political claims have equal valence. This observation is what grounds
Rancière’s defence of politics as necessarily including a part for those who
have no part, because any political system that excludes a minority from
having a political stake, he suggests, has no legitimate authority to do so.
An important claim of Rancière’s, then, is that equality must be a foun-
dational presupposition for politics. For him, the notion of liberty being
distributed is antithetical to equality. To clarify: ‘Where there is distribu-
tion there must be a distributor’ that, more often than not, is likely to be
government, or some form of governance that may well be extended to
include the governmentality of neoliberalism (May, 2009, p. 109). Where
equality is distributed – such as equality of liberty or opportunity – it is
not politics which is at stake, as Rancière understands the term in Dis-
agreement, but what he calls ‘the police’. He distinguishes this from the
3
See also G.A. Cohen’s notion of ‘socialist equality of opportunity’ (Cohen, 2009, p. 17).
Cohen builds on a more nuanced exploration of types of equal opportunity, albeit without
Rancière’s emphasis on the presupposition of equality.
192 A. ALSTON
‘petty police’ on the beat, or the secret police. The petty police ‘is just a
particular form of a more general order that arranges that tangible reality
in which bodies are distributed in community’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 28).
This more general order is what Rancière calls the police and he aligns
this order with a commonly, though, for early Rancière, mistakenly under-
stood notion of the political. He rejects an understanding of the political
which is premised on ‘the aggregation and consent of collectivities […]
the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the
systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 28). In Dis-
agreement, politics opposes the police, but at the same time it comes into
being as something dependent on it, as a consequence of being opposed
to it. Where the police is an ordering process which figures subjects in
particular roles and assigns – or distributes – to them certain capacities,
politics disrupts this distribution.
At first glance, Theatre Deli appear to distribute opportunity to young
theatre makers in a way that mirrors how the police operates for Rancière.
They appear as an enabling force which is at the same time oppressive
insofar as they can be seen to ‘empower’ those they seek to help, which
presumes a position of disempowerment. However, Theatre Deli invert ‘a
more general order’ that arranges parts and places within wider fields of
immersive theatre practice and production. Theatre Deli do not stick their
colours to the mast of a given theatre venue’s programming agenda – the
exception to this rule being the Bush Bazaar – but instead seek to create
their own spaces that, in the case of the Souks, also ‘redistribute’ the parts
that might be played by young theatre makers in the context of a much
wider system of cultural production. But to fully grasp what this redistri-
bution means in the logic of Rancièrian theory – and the ‘distribution’
that is being reformulated – it is necessary to incorporate his thinking
around aesthetics into an understanding of politics.
Drawing on Immanuel Kant, Rancière defines one sense of aesthetics
as ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense
experience’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 13). This goes some way toward clarifying
what he means by the police as a concept which is first and foremost about
aesthetic order. For Rancière, the police concerns what is sensible, or open
to apprehension by the senses – hence the need to consider politics and
the police in relation to aesthetics. The police structures apprehension
and perception through what Rancière describes as the ‘distribution of
the sensible’. The distribution of the sensible ‘simultaneously discloses
the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define
the respective parts and positions within it’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 12). For
instance, to have an occupation ‘determines the ability or inability to
take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is vis-
ible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc.’
(Rancière, 2004, pp. 12–13). This ability or inability, then, relates to the
stake which an individual can be said to have in governance, especially
self-governance. The police distributes and structures the sensible, or what
is open to apprehension and perception. What I notice about something
may well be different from what you notice and this difference can be
tantamount to a form of exclusion, particularly if it leads to different life
chances. That is why aesthetics also, fundamentally, concerns politics for
Rancière.
To illustrate, drawing on Aristotle, Rancière suggests that a slave’s abil-
ity to understand the language of rulers is not the same thing as ‘possess-
ing’ that language (Rancière, 2004, p. 12). This lack of possession informs
what the distribution of the sensible means. The ability to perceive some-
thing in common, such as language, does not necessarily correlate with
an ability to change the terms on which that supposed commonality is
based. The same might be said of law. The ability to understand the legal
system, especially the modes of writing and speaking that exist within, for
instance, court procedures, does not necessarily mean that any one indi-
vidual has the capacity to alter the terms on which that system operates.
In this instance, there are some occupations – such as politicians, lawyers
and judges – who will have much greater influence over the operation of
that system in comparison with others, despite the ‘commonality’ of law.
There are some who might be able to speak, but not be listened to and
understood in quite the same way as others, just as there are some that
might be able to listen, but not speak in a way which will have the same
perceived valence or efficaciousness as others. While some are presumed to
be qualified to speak, others are presumed not to have qualities that hold
equal validity and are therefore excluded.
Fortunately, Rancière also provides an example to illustrate how this
rather bleak envisioning of the politics of perception might be disrupted:
the 1832 trial of the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui. In this trial,
Blanqui referred to his profession as ‘revolutionary’, a profession initially
unrecognised by the magistrate. But once informed that this was ‘the pro-
fession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off their labor and who are
deprived of political rights’, the judge acquiesced (Rancière, 1999, p. 37).
Blanqui took possession of the term ‘profession’ by reinscribing it as ‘a
194 A. ALSTON
profession of faith, a declaration of membership of a collective […] the

class of the uncounted’ (Rancière, 1999, p. 38). Rancière therefore uses
the trial to illustrate how exclusions in the specific case of a law court
might be countered and counted: that is, countered because an excluded
person and a group of ‘revolutionaries’ to which he belongs are counted
on terms that conflict with a prevailing order, an order of appearing and
being understood that is both aesthetic and political.
The idea that modes of perception can be exclusionary is at the heart
of Rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible – a notion that
arises from recognising its aesthetic role. To appreciate what this role
is for Rancière, it is worth returning to his writing on the police. ‘The
police,’ he writes, ‘is not a social function but a symbolic constitution of
the social. The essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even
in control over the living. Its essence lies in a certain way of dividing up
the sensible’ (Rancière, 2010b, p. 36). Hence, for Rancière, there is an
aesthetic core to politics, defined in Dis-agreement as ‘conflict over the
existence of a common stage and over the existence and status of those
present on it’ (Rancière, 2010b, pp. 26–7). This refers to the aesthetic
playing space of privileged modes of appearance which obscures an under-
lying equality between subjects. It is aesthetic because it is concerned with
modes of appearing and being seen to appear, or heard. Politics emerges
as that which reconfigures the existence of this aesthetic playing space – a
stage – and its entry points, affecting how things and people appear to one
another, or are heard, understood and counted.
Rancière’s figuration of politics, at least this particular figuration of
politics, is therefore very narrow and also risks simplifying the ways in
which Rancière has engaged with and defined politics over time. Gabriel
Rockhill (2009) suggests that Rancière puts forward, in his later writing
(Rancière, 2009a), a broader definition of politics, at least as it relates to
art, that is ‘first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific
sphere of experience’ (Rancière qtd in Rockhill, 2009, p. 199). While
Rancière’s earlier, more widely understood definition of politics – in Dis-
agreement, especially – refers specifically to a break in the traditional mech-
anisms of politics, or the police, his later definition approaches the police
as already containing within it a form of the political. ‘In other words,’
writes Rockhill, ‘the epithet “political” would be better understood nei-
ther in terms of what Rancière earlier defined as politics qua subjectiviza-
tion (la politique) or the police order (la police), but according to what he
sometimes calls “the political” (le politique), that is, the meeting ground
between la politique and la police’ (Rockhill, 2009, p. 200). In other

words, there is a twofold understanding of politics in Rancière’s writing,
taken as a whole: as a radical form of politics (early work and throughout),
and as framing a specific sphere of experience (later work, recognising the
politics of the police as a disenfranchising order).
The hallmark of a more radical figuration of politics in Rancière’s work
is what he has come to call ‘dissensus’. ‘Dissensus’ identifies his approach
to democracy in support of those who, otherwise conceived, have no part
in the political. It is important not to confuse dissensus with articulations
of oppositional disquietude. Dissensus refers to something much more
specific to Rancière’s theoretical approach to politics: ‘Dissensus is not
a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration
(manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself’ (Rancière, 2010b, p. 38).
In other words, dissensus is fundamentally an aesthetic intervention: a
reordering of appearance and of what can or cannot be said, done and/
or understood by others. Dissensual theatre can be convivial, provided a
‘gap in the sensible itself’ enables better access to, or apprehension of,
aesthetico-political ordering and disordering.
Recognising distinctions between Rancière’s understanding of politics
in his early and late work, he has nonetheless remained committed to a
radical form of politics. ‘Politics,’ writes Rancière, ‘consists in reconfigur-
ing the distribution of the sensible which defines the common of a com-
munity, to introduce into it new subjects and objects, to render visible
what had not been, and to make heard as speakers those who had been
perceived as mere noisy animals’ (Rancière, 2009a, p. 25). While Rockhill
is right to claim a change of emphasis in Rancière’s writing, where the
concept of the distribution of the sensible gains increasing traction and
specificity, there is a maintenance of thought concerning an aesthetic core
to politics – a core that can be disrupted – and a politics to aesthetics that
emerges from seeing both aesthetics and politics as ‘two forms of distribu-
tion of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2009a, p. 26).
Twofold understandings of ‘sense’ have emerged in immersive theatre
scholarship that are of much relevance to Rancièrian theory, but which
also offer alternative figurations of how the ‘sensible’ is distributed not just
across a public, but within particular bodies. Josephine Machon’s study of
the relationships between sense-as-meaning and sense-as-feeling in ‘(syn)
aesthetic’ theatre performances offers a case in point (see Chap. 2), as does
Peter Boenisch’s commentary on the multi-sensual communication of a
source text’s ‘sense’ to an audience, as opposed to the literal conveyance
196 A. ALSTON
of a text’s meaning (see Chap. 5). In both cases, the term ‘sense’ takes
on a compelling doubleness as both feeling and understanding, whereby
feeling produces its own kind of understanding among affected audiences.
However, while Rancière clearly shares an interest in different forms of
sense, his theorisation of sense’s various forms follows a different path
that is incompatible with much immersive theatre theory. For Rancière, a
‘dis-agreement of sense and thought’ – particularly as it appears in Jean-
François Lyotard’s writing on the sublime – implies ‘enslavement’ of rea-
son and the mind ‘to the law of otherness’ (Rancière, 2010a, p. 10; see
also Rancière, 2009a, p. 128; Lyotard, 1994). This particular form of
disagreement reduces, for Rancière, the politics of an aesthetic experience
to its ethical interpretation (Rancière, 2003, p. 10). In Rancière’s think-
ing, the evasiveness of a sublime experience binds an experiencing sub-
ject to a law that cannot be understood and that binding simultaneously
marks enslavement: hence, his trouble with the notion of an opposition
between sensory perception and understanding, or sense-as-feeling and
sense-as-meaning.4 Where ethics, particularly Levinasian ethics (Levinas,
2003), concerns itself with commitment to the law of otherness and infi-
nite responsibility for the other, Rancière is more interested in the ‘eman-
cipation’ of subjects from any sovereign law, or arkhê.
Despite Rancière’s qualifying remarks, I want to reclaim a potential
dis-agreement between sense (perception) and sense (as understanding)
as being politically charged, which is a charging that Machon chooses not
to take up in her examination of aesthetic experience in (syn)aesthetic per-
formance and immersive theatre.5 While Boenisch’s model of a ‘relational
dramaturgy’ does concern itself with a politics of action and reaction in
immersive theatre spectatorship, I am more interested in theorising the
biopolitics of affect as something that can provocatively disrupt relation-
ships between perception, feeling and understanding. I do not mean this
in the sense of nullifying the mind’s capacity to understand something
4
While it might be argued that a ‘“recalibration of the senses” is impossible in an ethically
neutral space’ (Charnley, 2011, p. 51), Rancière’s rejection of ethical enquiry indicates an
attempt to refuse enslavement of political interrogation to a sovereign moral code.
5
While Machon does briefly comment on the politics of audience engagement by turning
to Rancière’s ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ (Machon, 2013, pp. 117–20), she does not have
space in the book to represent and engage with Rancière’s more nuanced approach to the
relationships between aesthetics and politics. This is perhaps not surprising in a book that
really serves as an introduction to immersive theatre aesthetics, which needs to offer space to
a broad range of relevant theories.
arising from sense perception implied in the notion of the sublime, as

Rancière fears might plague such a project; rather, I mean it in the sense
of addressing how communicative pathways derived from sources other
than sight and sound might impact on an engagement with something,
or someone – pathways that are, fundamentally, both aesthetic and politi-
cal. In other words, I want to adapt Rancière’s writing on aesthetics and
politics by inputting corporeality into his theory, and apply this adapted
theory to a context that Rancière would likely reject given his wariness of
work that seeks alternatives to the inherently creative activity of watching
and listening to theatre as a spectator.
Rancière approaches the body as an abstracted and categorisable object.
He is not concerned with the experiential beyond the primacy of sight,
sound and thought. This is evident in how he figures aisthesis, which refers
to sense perception and understanding, as well as feeling. For Rancière,
however, feeling is largely factored out of the equation. He understands
aisthesis in broad terms that take on board both the conditions of art pro-
duction and the sphere of experience that art offers up to sense perception,
which involves ‘modes of perception and regimes of emotion, categories
that identify them, thought patterns that categorize and interpret them’
(Rancière, 2013, p. x). For Rancière, emotion is approached as an object
that appears in a ‘regime’, in particular the regime of aesthetic discourse;
he is not concerned with how emotion is embodied and how it appears
directly to individual subjects who experience art multi-sensorily and in
ways that might elude systematic disciplining and regimentation. The
production of affect does not just emerge as top-down impositions upon
bodies, but from the dynamic interrelations between a particular subject,
environment and context.
My desire to reformulate Rancière’s approach to aisthesis partly stems
from a note of surprise articulated by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink: ‘I think it
is remarkable that Rancière’s distribution of the sensible hardly pays atten-
tion to the possibility of corporeal intelligence: knowledge that is present
in affects and sensations […] Rancière seems caught into a distribution of
the sensible of his own, which borders on logocentrism’ (Groot Nibbelink,
2012, p. 418, original emphasis). While remarkability might be tamed on
the basis of Rancière’s concerns about the biopolitical just accounted for,
it nonetheless seems important to explore how two ideas that regularly
appear in Rancière’s oeuvre – the distribution of the sensible and the poli-
tics of partaking – might take on board the weaving of affect into a theory
of aesthetics and politics. If politics begins with a break in the logic of
198 A. ALSTON
arkhê, then perhaps affect seems an odd place to start given the fact, to risk
tautology, that it affects people. However, if biopolitics, affective labour
and the experience economy are enjoying increasing influence across a
range of economic sectors and political ideologies, then perhaps explor-
ing the disruptive potential of affect in immersive theatre performances is
ripe for experimentation. Furthermore, if immersive theatre is susceptible
to absorption within the experience economy, and if it reflects neoliberal
values and immaterial modes of neoliberal production, then affect produc-
tion is surely one of the most appropriate subjects of enquiry to explore in
a critical study of politics and aesthetics in immersive theatre.
Relationships exist between a participant and the thing participated
in and the foregoing chapters have explored the political significances of
these aesthetic relationships, tying immersive theatre into wider contexts
that embed and inform production and reception – particularly neoliberal-
ism and the experience economy – and evaluating the politics of aesthetics
in immersive theatre in light of these contexts. In what remains of this
chapter, I want to further my analysis of immersive theatre by considering
how Rancièrian theory can inform the disruptive potential of immersive
theatre aesthetics. As the next section explores, Theatre Deli’s Souks rely
on the support of – and end up supporting – commercial enterprises that
provide an alternative to public funding programmes and an alternative
to permanent theatre venues with competitive programming agendas.
While public funding of the arts is currently under threat in the UK, which
impacts on the stability and security of theatre infrastructure, Theatre
Deli operate even more precariously within a private market that ensures
Theatre Deli’s nomadism and reliance on fairly short-term planning as
they move from one vacant commercial property to another, which can be
seen to subordinate their practice to the movements of capital. However,
the company is able to persist despite the difficulties it has faced and con-
tinues to face in a funding climate that champions artistic ‘excellence’,
broadly conceived (ACE, 2010, pp. 2–3); in doing so, they challenge
the authority of legitimating some forms of excellence over others, and
therefore a partisan process of legitimation. They also enable important
voices to be heard and bodies to be seen in fields of cultural production
that risk excluding marginalised contributors to creative practice – not in
a context that separates off a particular demographic (for instance, the-
atre by or for young people) from ‘proper’ cultural production, but in a
context that presents creative practice, quite simply, as creative practice.
Furthermore, by encouraging artists to toy with the relationships between
action, transaction and appearance, the Souks pose important challenges
to the constructed economic realities on which the Souks also depend,

promoting alternative renderings of transaction that exist within, but also
problematise, a neoliberal market economy.
INTERSTITIAL POP-UPS
For Roland Smith, Theatre Deli’s relationship to the commercial property
market ‘is simply pragmatic. As Lenny Bruce says, “I’m a hustler. If they’re
giving, I’ll take”’ (Brewster & Smith, 2013).6 Theatre Deli functions at
the meeting point between pragmatism, dependency, entrepreneurialism
and uncertainty, which Smith pitches in terms of ‘hustling’ the market
in circumstances that do not readily proffer alternatives to the market
as the company operates largely without the support of public funding.
Between its formation and 2013, despite numerous applications, Theatre
Deli received only £9536 through ACE’s ‘Grants for the Arts’ funding
scheme, which the company used to fund the wages of performers, and
have only received one further Small Grant since then worth £14,792.7
This is minimal when compared with the £225,000 that Punchdrunk, a
National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), was awarded in 2012–2013 alone
(ACE, 2014). Theatre Deli does not benefit from the support of reliable
infrastructure, but nonetheless produces work that might not otherwise
find a platform. They persist in a period of public funding austerity (see
Chap. 4) and provide a platform for others to start out as theatre and per-
formance makers in a context that makes such first steps tricky and exclu-
sive. However, Theatre Deli’s pop-up theatre, as with much site-based
work, also periodically improves the productivity of a place that might
otherwise become unproductive. The sites that they work in and with are
put into production (see McKinnie, 2012, p. 30). By sustaining productiv-
ity, the motor of capitalism, is it not therefore the case that Theatre Deli
acquiesces to capitalism? What does their relationship to the commercial
property market mean for their independence as theatre makers and for
the integrity of the work that they produce, which aims to problematise
capitalism and the influence of neoliberalism on public arts funding?
6
Will Kaufman records the Lenny Bruce quote as follows: ‘I’m a hustler […] As long as
they give, I’ll grab’ (Kaufman, 1997, pp. 109–10).
7
The earlier grant was awarded on 4 January 2011 to fund an all-female adaptation of
Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (2011), directed by Frances Loy (ACE, 2015b). Subsequently,
Theatre Delicatessen received only one additional Small Grant from the Arts Council total-
ling £14,792 for Horror Souk in August 2014, awarded under the trading name of
CurvingRoad (ACE, 2015a).
200 A. ALSTON
Immersive theatre has, to some degree, become closely associated with

non-theatre spaces. All of Punchdrunk’s major work has been performed
in appropriated industrial or municipal off-casts with a limited lifespan,
albeit with the Masque of the Red Death occurring in a permanent the-
atre building with municipal heritage. Likewise, shunt perform in spaces
susceptible to limited duration, as their eviction from the London Bridge
Vaults makes especially apparent. There are important permanent the-
atre venues in London that programme work by immersive theatre artists
and companies on a fairly regular basis, including the BAC, Ovalhouse,
Shoreditch Town Hall and Camden People’s Theatre; however, despite
this, immersive theatre makers often operate outside of more conventional
theatre venues – either by choice, or necessity.
Relevant implications have been insightfully explored by Jen Harvie
(2011) in a critical analysis of Roger Hiorns’s installation Seizure (2008–
2010): an Artangel commission in a council housing block, scheduled
for demolition, near Elephant and Castle in the London Borough of
Southwark. Hiorns and Artangel filled a three-room flat in this housing
block with copper sulphate solution. Three weeks later, the solution was
drained to reveal a sparkling interior with every surface covered in vibrant
blue crystals. While acknowledging the potential social and aesthetic worth
of interventions like Seizure, Harvie maintains a number of significant res-
ervations. The most pertinent of these for the current context addresses
the notion of heteronomy: ‘one of the risks of a spatially responsive art
practice such as Seizure is that its maker’s volition is more than limited
by what is available (or, what is available to the art market) and that the
work is necessarily significantly determined by that dependence’ (Harvie,
2011, p. 120). This is important when the limitation refers specifically to
the spaces – the infrastructure – that house artworks, as available spaces for
pop-up art and theatre end up relying on the buying and selling of proper-
ties. Where Hiorns and Artangel rely on the interim between a space’s use
as social housing and its planned demolition, Theatre Deli depends on the
interim periods between a business vacating a premises and another busi-
ness taking over. Both scenarios provide temporary accommodation, but
also ensure precarity and a persistent nomadism.
Theatre Deli’s pop-up Souks benefit both the company and whatever
business currently owns an unused premises, which has a hand in sustain-
ing, not disrupting, the logic of the marketplace. As Smith explains:
If you have a commercial property, the owner or tenant of the commer-

cial property has to pay business rates, which is the commercial version of
council tax […] Councils have to give charities [up to] an 80 % mandatory
relief on their business rates. And the council can give a discretionary reduc-
tion of 100 %, so you’re not paying any business rates. Theatre Delicatessen
is a charity […] If we, as a charity, take a lease, without paying any rent, on
the understanding that [a commercial property owner] will pay the remain-
ing 20 % of the business rates, they will still save. (Brewster & Smith, 2013)
If a charity like Theatre Deli inhabits a commercial property in an interim

period between the purchase of the property and redevelopment by and
for a given business, then the owner can receive a substantial discount in
business rates. In the case of Theatre Deli’s occupation of Marylebone
Gardens, for instance, this meant striking a deal with the new owners,
Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP). By virtue of Theatre
Deli’s ratified occupation of the building, SWIP pays only a fraction of its
business rates. In return, Theatre Deli have no need to pay anything other
than utility bills with regard to the building itself. They are also in a posi-
tion to ask SWIP for a proportion of what they have saved to cover these
bills and to fund artistic activity.
While this signals a form of acquiescence to capitalism, Smith and
Brewster nonetheless view this kind of relationship as pragmatic. After all,
in the absence of public funding, it is difficult (but not impossible) to see
how a company like Theatre Deli could provide the kind of platform they
do for other young and emerging theatre companies without this kind of
initiative. Nonetheless, Harvie encourages wariness of the alleged avail-
ability of such spaces; at least in the case of Theatre Deli, that availability
relies on market volatility, the precarious interim between business inhabi-
tations, and the private revenue of a business like SWIP.
Harvie also observes how pop-up theatre risks naturalising ‘what is oth-
erwise lacking or underfunded: a stable, “purpose-built” arts infrastructure
that allows for long-term support and planning rather than simply oppor-
tunistic and usually short-term responsiveness’ (Harvie, 2011, p. 121).
She is critiquing the artists exploiting pop-up theatre opportunities to the
extent that they help to sustain, indirectly, the lack of a sustainable arts
infrastructure. Her concern is not so much levelled at the perseverance of
the artists in question as the context they find themselves in and the effects
of their pop-up activities. Without public art funding to support their
work, Theatre Deli must either perform work that is not so dependent on
large spaces in buildings – and arguably forego the rehearsal and perfor-
mance platform they offer to other young companies – or embrace explic-
itly private, commercial, corporate, or philanthropic funding initiatives,
202 A. ALSTON
or squat, all of which have their own compromises. It is in this context,

I believe, that Brewster and Smith consider their enterprise in terms of
pragmatism, however compromised that pragmatism might be.
Theatre Deli’s production practices naturalise the dissolution of a sus-
tainable arts infrastructure for the companies they seek to help. At the
same time, in the midst of recession, austerity and cuts to public arts fund-
ing, they are able to curate small-scale work within the larger-scale Souks,
despite all of these obstacles. Maintaining a strong public funding infra-
structure is worth fighting for, tooth and nail. However, if Theatre Deli
is not rewarded with a steady public cash flow, and if the companies they
want to help are not rewarded either, then they must either exploit an
alternative, quite possibly imperfect solution, or make and promote a dif-
ferent kind of theatre that is more ‘legitimately’ fundable by public means
and identifiable as making an ‘excellent’ contribution to the arts, in the
rhetoric of current Arts Council policy.
Rancièrian theory, at this juncture, proves illuminating. Theatre Deli
challenge the distribution of parts within a contemporary theatre land-
scape that, partly because of a reduced public arts funding pot, has become
increasingly cut-throat. On the one hand, Theatre Deli rely on private
enterprise and this reliance will sustain their nomadism; on the other,
their resilience disrupts the ordered distribution of parts within a cultural
domain, opening up opportunities for other theatre makers to participate
in the creation of theatre who might not otherwise have an opportunity
to participate as valued contributors within a field of cultural production.
Furthermore, the contributions that these theatre makers offer up are
enriching precisely because they are not separated off within an enrich-
ment or outreach programme. The Souks bubble up from within the
infrastructural cracks of British theatre making and producing. They stem
from a company that takes as a point of departure the entrepreneurialism,
opportunism, risk and responsibility that characterise the neoliberal ethos,
asking ‘where do we go from here?’ As such, there is something uncan-
nily Third Way and ‘artrepreneurial’ about Theatre Deli, but only to the
extent that pragmatic responses to the supposed facticity of neoliberalism
are adopted in an attempt to count an otherwise uncounted demographic
of cultural producers.
While the inclusion of marginalised theatre makers in the Souks reflects
the social inclusion agenda of the Third Way, Theatre Deli also call into
question the notion of inclusion by encouraging experimentation with
the terms of inclusivity within the Souks. The series of transactions that
precede each performance experienced in a Souk highlights the labour

of theatre making in ways that might not be so readily apparent in other
theatre contexts; as a result, these performers are able to incorporate trans-
action within their work as a theme, exploring alternatives not so much
to the act of transacting, but the immaterial affects that arise from trans-
action.8 To this extent, the Souks function as ‘interstices’: trading com-
munities that do not explore radical alternatives to financial transactions,
necessarily, but do explore alternative modes of relating to transaction and
the subjects involved in a transaction. As Nicolas Bourriaud observes, Karl
Marx used term the term ‘interstice’ to
describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by

being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types
of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human relations which fits
more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests
other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system. (Bourriaud,
2002, p. 16)
In Theatre Deli’s Souks, the capitalist economic context is hardly eluded

if the focus remains on the spaces used by Theatre Deli and their complic-
ity with the motivations and interests of businesses in a neoliberal market
economy. These are spaces that benefit commercial businesses through
reduced business rates, which will impact on profit and the cultural capital
that accrues with helping a theatre company like Theatre Deli. What is
more, the transactions at stake in the Souks are clearly defined financially.
Audiences are asked to hand over real money in return for a performance
that has been valued in monetary terms. However, the Souks function as
interstices in a particular sense; they operate within an economic context
that sustains that context, while at the same time disrupting the smooth
operation of transaction within temporarily inhabited spaces. The Souks
are neither radical, nor ideal. Nonetheless, the efficacy of these curated
events does not lie in creating sustainable and ambitious alternatives to an
existing economic order; rather, it lies at the interface between Theatre
8
Elsewhere, I have questioned the ‘revelation’ of labour in theatre performances, raising
concern about comparable revelations of labour in the service economy and the solidification
of a bourgeois relationship between buyer and seller (Alston, 2015). While Theatre Souks
might be enjoyable, theatricalising payment for the labour of theatre making in theatre mar-
ketplaces foregrounds the intermeshing of production and consumption in ways that thema-
tise service as an issue.
204 A. ALSTON
Deli as curator of immersive theatre, performers assigned to young and

emerging theatre companies that create diverse theatre performances and
often immersive theatre performances, and audiences who participate via
theatricalised financial transactions. In other words, the Souks offer up
‘spaces in human relations’ among these parties, contextualised and sup-
ported by a material context that is also problematised as an issue. These
spaces fit ‘more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system’,
but suggest ‘other trading possibilities than those in effect within this
system’ – possibilities that refer primarily to the rendering of transaction as
an affectively difficult exchange.
The monetary basis of transactions and the business rates bargain struck
by Theatre Deli with private property owners are what slip harmoniously
into the ‘overall system’ of a capitalist market economy; however, they
also champion ‘alternative possibilities’, in Bourriaud’s terms, that pro-
pose alternative relationships between actors (both performers and audi-
ence members) and transaction. Whereas the human relations on which
transactions depend tend to be masked under capitalism, Theatre Deli
foreground these relations through theatricalised payments for perfor-
mance that affect the ‘sense’ of a performance and a sensual relationship
to performance. Therefore, to locate the politics at work in Theatre Deli’s
marketplaces, it is necessary to dig down into an aesthetic core.
Theatre makers sometimes have to subscribe to funding practices that
will ultimately be detrimental to the sustainability of their future, or else
face the prospect of not being able to stage and explore the kind of work
that they want to stage and explore. While it is important to retain a sense
of idealism when faced with an ideology that is antithetical to this ideal-
ism, idealism is counterproductive if it leads to a scenario that prohibits
the persistence of opportunities to experiment with alternatives to the sta-
tus quo. As the previous chapters have suggested, a compromise that I
have difficulty in accepting is one that allows for the neoliberal ethos not
only to affect how theatre is funded (both privately and publicly), but for
neoliberal values to be unquestionably valorised within theatre aesthetics.
This becomes a particularly compelling issue in immersive theatre per-
formances, where the thrills and seductions of an involving, absorbing
and transporting performance risk normalising and celebrating the values
of neoliberalism in a seemingly ‘otherworldly-world’ – values that derive
from an aesthetic core that resources the affective potential of producing
consumers. A compromise that I’m happier to reach is one that serves to
reveal the systemic forces that promote the need for a compromise that
ultimately serves neoliberal capitalism. As the next section explores, the

compromise that I’m happier to reach is therefore one that opens up
space for dissensus, which theatre audiences are then free to respond to in
their own way. While the financial means of immersive theatre production
are compromised in this model, there remains scope for the immaterial
means of aesthetic production to be challenged. If neoliberalism is turn-
ing toward the immaterial as a means of production and a source of value,
particularly the affected bodies of producing subjects, then the production
and reception of affect seems a ripe target for exploring and experiment-
ing with the modes and values of immaterial production, despite a reliance
on – or ‘hustling’ of – private enterprise.
DISRUPTING IMMATERIAL PRODUCTION

Inside Theatre Deli’s Souks, market relations are referenced in a curated
environment for immersive theatre performances and these relations are
given a peculiar strangeness. Market relations function as ready-mades,
much like Duchamp’s Fountain alluded to in Chap. 2, that are made
strange because of their contextualisation in a live theatre situation.
What makes transactions interesting as ready-mades in the Souks is that
audiences are encouraged to rethink an economy not just as an abstract
entity that demands deficit reduction and austerity, for instance, but as
an economy of subjects who act. Moreover, audiences are encouraged to
reflect on the endorsement, legitimation and valuing of particular kinds of
action within an economy of productivity and service by considering how
their own participation in transaction affects others via a process of being
affected. By foregrounding transaction within theatre spaces, audiences
must value the work they engage with in monetary terms and in response
to the appeals of performers. Audiences are asked to financially value the
labour of those who produce work to present, and which may also involve
audiences as participants, calling into question the value of a particular
kind of value. But audiences must also navigate the immaterial production
of affect when faced with an appeal to remunerate a performer, whose
efforts are geared toward the satisfaction of an audience’s desire to experi-
ence the fruits of their labour.
I want to unpack the politics of immaterial production in the Souks
by honing in on one particular case study curated by Theatre Deli for the
first Theatre Souk: Half Cut’s Half Cut, which was the company’s debut
performance. Half Cut is a young theatre company with three artistic
206 A. ALSTON
directors in the early stages of their careers: Astor Agustsson, Dan Ball
and Joe Iredale. In Half Cut, audiences were enticed into a small annex
from the broader context of a theatre marketplace by a shady barterer.
Using an illustrated stick-figure attached to a wall, with arrows pointing
to different parts of its anatomy, the barterer explained the varying prices
associated with plucking, cutting, shaving or waxing hair from his human
model’s body. The model, he assured, was waiting next door. In my case,
£1 a pluck seemed a fair deal – although the barterer was keen to shunt
the invasiveness and therefore the monetary value of my epilatory efforts
up a couple of notches.
Having made a payment, the barterer opened a door to another room
where I met the mostly naked model, aside from a pair of tight-fitting and
prominently branded trunks, who greeted me with a smile. He brandished
red marks from recent hair removal, most notably in thick strips across his
chest. To my right was a surgeon’s tray with razors, tweezers, scissors and
waxing strips spread across it. The transaction which had just taken place
in the room next door seemed to weigh down on the scenario. It was an
utterly ridiculous circumstance to be in, trivial and laughable, but the kind
of laughter that follows a faux pas: part defensive, part guilty, part tactic
to make light of a situation. At the same time, transaction prompted a
commitment to pluck. A performance contract materialised the moment
I handed over payment to the barterer in the room next door. Of course,
the contract could be broken. I was free to walk out. But then again, why
else was I there? Grabbing the tweezers, I approached the model, located
and then plucked a single hair from his left breast.
The audience in Half Cut is in an important respect seduced from
their window-shopping-like behaviour in the Souk with the promise of
an intimate liaison. The audience pays to be physically proximate and
experientially ‘close’ to a labouring performer – a model who is spoken
of but not seen prior to payment. Fintan Walsh, in an excellent article
titled ‘Touching, Flirting, Whispering: Performing Intimacy in Public’,
recognises that ‘intimacy has long been an implicit dramaturgical concern
for performance (from Aristotelian catharsis to Brechtian estrangement,
for example)’, but that it has ‘increasingly become the core subject of
inquiry’ in participatory theatre and performance forms (Walsh, 2014,
p. 57; see also Zaointz, 2014). Half Cut is an example of this kind of
practice, presenting intimacy as a theme in a participatory and immer-
sive encounter; however, while I agree with Walsh that many participatory
(and some immersive) performances have engaged with intimacy as a ‘core
subject of inquiry’ in recent years, including work by Adrian Howells,

Ontroerend Goed and Tino Sehgal, which are presented as three case
studies in Walsh’s article, the majority of immersive theatre performances
do not. Most immersive theatre performances engage intimate experiences
and exchanges as a core part of a theatre aesthetic, but do not treat inti-
macy as a subject of inquiry. Rather, most immersive theatre performances
treat intimate experiences as a ‘seat’ for a theatre aesthetic that may well
be overwhelming or indulgently rich, without questioning or thematis-
ing what makes intimacy seductive and how its seductive qualities can be
exploited; instead, they stimulate or encourage the pursuit of overwhelm-
ing or indulgently rich experiences in ways that detract from intimacy as a
subject of inquiry. Intimacy may well be sought in these performances, but
it tends not to be queried or scrutinised.
Half Cut are more in line with the theatre and performance practices
surveyed by Walsh that do treat intimacy as a subject of inquiry; they
thematise intimacy by making an intimate exchange the result of a theat-
ricalised transaction and consequently explore relationships between inti-
macy and the movements of capital.9 They also thematise the promiscuity
of prospective participants who are open to the possibilities of intimacy
with unknown others in uncertain conditions (see Kartsaki & Zerihan,
2012, p. 166). However, while intimacy is important to the piece, its core
subject of concern, I argue, is with making perceivable the immaterial
relationships between performers and a producing consumer. Half Cut
is concerned with these relationships as both aesthetic and political phe-
nomena, and approaches them by upsetting – or disrupting – how they
are made to appear.
Discussing Howells’s one-on-one performance Foot Washing for the
Sole (2008), in which the artist bathes, anoints and kisses the feet of a
single audience member, Walsh identifies the work as an ‘intimate experi-
ence’ that occurs within an economy of service:
we are not just here to see, think, and freely feel, but to work affectively.
[…] In this the performance perhaps inadvertently reveals the complex
affective-economic bind in which the desire for intimacy is experienced in
9
Alison Matthews’s creative practice and research is also relevant here. Like Half Cut, her
practice-based research thematises labour and monetary exchange in theatricalised settings –
sometimes within and sometimes outside of theatre buildings – often exploring these themes
within the participatory frameworks of one-on-one performance (see Matthews 2012;
Matthews 2015).
208 A. ALSTON
the contemporary world: seeking it out publicly, we pay for it, we work for
it, we even pay to work for it, and in this labyrinthine circuit there appears
to be little difference between intimacy and industry. (Walsh, 2014, p. 59)
Cleansing the audience’s feet in this performance has symbolic value,

resonating with Judeo-Christian notions of purgation and servitude and
the artist’s own experiences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it also
presents a space for escape, perhaps, or therapy, that is predicated on the
provision of a service and which prompts audiences to consider why they
may feel what they feel about the artist’s service. Therefore, while there
is symbolic ‘meaning’ to be construed from the work’s theological reso-
nances, the sense of the work also stems from the performance’s form:
a participatory encounter between artist and audience that prompts
reflection on an economy of service, and the desires that lead audiences
toward engagement with such an economy. While, as Walsh points out,
the audience works affectively in this exchange – perhaps from a sense
of duty to the performance, and to Howells, and to ensure that the
audience does not ‘fail’ either (Walsh, 2014, p. 59) – it is ultimately
Howells’s physical labour that is rendered potentially ‘difficult’ as a
service.
Walsh is particularly drawn to how work like Foot Washing for the Sole
‘may well respond to a genuine desire for intimacy’, while also rerouting
‘our desire for intimacy back towards us, by making us work for it in the
production of performance […] These encounters ultimately undermine
(sometimes inadvertently) the idea that intimacy can be acquired as readily
as money for goods or services’ (Walsh, 2014, p. 66). Half Cut also seems
to respond to a desire for intimacy among an anticipated audience, rerout-
ing that desire back to the affective labour of an audience participant,
which makes the audience productive as a producing consumer. Indeed,
the rerouting of desire takes a literal form as the exchanges between the
model and a series of participating audience members were filmed and
live streamed to a television screen in a bar designed and run by Half Cut
on the third floor of the Souk complex. The live streaming presents the
performance as an inquiry into intimacy that is available to a public to
watch, abstractly, from a screen installed in another space. However, with-
out condoning the camera, which does not feature as part of a contract
for performance and may go unnoticed by participants, I want to orient
attention away from the pitching of intimacy as a consumable seduction
in and of the work – albeit one that is subject to inquiry – and toward a
‘redistribution’ of immaterial production that can be sensed as something

felt, and made sense of as something understood.
While Half Cut highlights the commodification of intimacy in the
service – or experience – economy, there also appears to be a more fun-
damental critique of relations of service at stake. The performance does
engage with desires for intimacy and a service that caters for those desires,
but it also problematises the resourcing of bodies in immaterial produc-
tion; it draws attention to the affective labour of both performers and
productive participants as a mode of production in a way that upsets the
valuing of immaterial production – a valuing that has been utilised and
converted into capital in the political and economic frameworks of neolib-
eralism. Intimacy is a potential seduction of neoliberal consumerism that
the performance arraigns, but Half Cut also stages and exposes immaterial
production, bringing into a field of perceptibility a feature of neoliberal
productivity that risks being fetishised amid such seductions.
Immaterial production in Half Cut is embarrassed. As Nicholas Ridout
explains: ‘Sharing origins with the word embargo, an embarrass is “an
obstacle”, and “embarrasser” is “to block” […] So to embarrass might be
to do something to someone by speech or action, to act or speak in such
a way as to introduce obstacles or complications’ (Ridout, 2006, p. 81).
An ‘embarrass’, then, resonates with dissensus as a disruption of a coher-
ent sensory fabric, in Rancière’s terms. On the one hand, to be affected
by embarrassment might emerge from breaking with social convention,
therefore functioning as a mechanism that sustains the operation of that
convention given the Pavlovian corrective discomfort that may ensue
while embarrassed; on the other hand, embarrassment might alter the way
in which that convention is understood to be just that – a convention. In
other words, embarrassment might enable an unearthing of something
immaterial that is otherwise not perceivable, or an unmasking of some-
thing that is perceivable, or knowable, but is then open to be perceived
or known differently. What is more, an embarrass need not necessarily
refer to embarrassment, but any disruption of, or obstacle to, what can
be sensed and made sense of. In the case of the Souks, the embarrassing
source in question is transaction: specifically, a financial transaction. The
Souks encourage audiences to question who or what they are paying for,
why they pay for it, and the correspondence between monetary value and
aesthetic quality. In Rancièrian terms, the distribution of the sensible – the
distribution of parts and places under capitalism and modes of perception
that are engendered through and limited by capitalism – is redistributed.
210 A. ALSTON
In Half Cut, the transaction itself takes place in an annex adjacent to

the epilation room. The contents of that room remain largely anticipated
and imagined for potentially participating audiences prior to entering.
In negotiating the transaction with the barterer, audiences negotiate an
uncertain performance contract, albeit a contract that is more uncertain
for audiences than it is for the performers. It was only upon entering
the room that risk perception was fully mustered, despite the fact that
risk, as an operative potential, was already set in motion while negoti-
ating the monetary transaction. Being faced with the responsibility of
doing something and potentially doing something wrong, or something that
I might regret, particularly in relation to another human being – these
were the risks to be negotiated. It was through an aesthetic experience of
an interhuman relation – a relationship with a labouring and objectified
performer – that the risky nature of transaction and the unpredictable set
of affective responses that might ensue from it manifested as a disruptive
embarrass: that is, as an obstacle to the otherwise smooth and ultimately
hidden operation of risk within a risk-laden transaction.
The performing model in Half Cut is a labouring performer. The
money that audiences hand over to the barterer will ultimately be owned
by Half Cut; it is not Theatre Deli but the theatre companies involved
with Theatre Souk that pocket these monetary contributions. The thing
paid for is the performance that ensues from the monetary transaction
and the potential objectification of the model. The thing that is sold to
audiences relies on – and in this case ultimately is – the labour which is
explicitly bound up in the model’s objectification.
The explicit here does not necessarily refer to sexual gratification, but
it does engage sexuality. What is purchased is the opportunity to use a
male actor’s body in a prescribed way, plucking, cutting, shaving or wax-
ing hair from his body. This is a particularly charged source of immaterial
production that must, of course, be contingent on the individual partici-
pant. Their gender and sexuality, but more importantly their culturally,
socially, ethically, politically or religiously inflected views of both, may well
bleed into the encounter between audience and performer and funda-
mentally contribute to the generation of affect. The performer’s appar-
ent submissiveness is prostituted to a promiscuous participant, but the
production of a theatre aesthetic is not limited to how the prostituted
actor makes himself appear; it is the product of a more complex interplay
between the model, an audience that is affected by the model and their
own prospective participation, and a situation that is conditioned by a
financial transaction. As a result, submissiveness and domination are not
polarised and are not applicable to any one subject within that scenario –
both parties affect one another and both are affected by one another.
Nonetheless, there is a danger here of rubbing over a historically loaded
human relationship between performer and audience. There are numer-
ous and deeply troublesome historical links between the ocular availability
of the (usually female) actors’ bodies on the stage and their sexual avail-
ability off the stage. As Erin Hurley suggests, commenting on the his-
torical research of Kirsten Pullen: the prostitute, as an ‘age-old metaphor
for the actress’, can be traced back at least to the Greek ‘auletrides, who
entertained and then sexually gratified the hosts of the symposia as early
as the fifth century BCE’ (Hurley, 2010, p. 65). Correlating the ocular
objectification of the actor on the stage and an assumed sexual availability
off the stage has consistently emerged in a number of guises for centu-
ries, from the commedia dell’arte, to ‘the early modern French theatre,
the English Restoration stage, and pre-twentieth-century Chinese theatre’
(Hurley, 2010, p. 65). A significant consequence of this correlation ‘thus
negatively marked actresses’ gender exceptionalism as much as it slurred
their affecting emotional and physical labour – in other words, their act-
ing’ (Hurley, 2010, p. 66). What is made available to an audience’s sense
perception – the actor’s objectified body – is co-opted as potential sensory
pleasure (experience) because of how it is made sense of (understanding).
What emerges is an aesthetic order that is phallocentric and possessive.
Half Cut engages this history and this issue from a critical standpoint.
First off, the model is male. The gender and sexuality of the audience,
together with their views on both, will impact on how the male model is
perceived, understood and interacted with. However, this does not alter
the framing of that model as being prone to objectification. The male
model’s body is something that is paid for prior to entering the epilation
room and that financial relation fixes him as a labourer and the audience
as one who pays for his labour, albeit as an uncomfortably producing par-
ticipant. While the performer submits to the audience’s participation and
productive power as one who drives forward and completes the perfor-
mance, the relations of power and objectification set up in this scenario
are intermeshed. The audience ends up having to navigate the affects that
arise from his or her own complicity and productivity in a theatre sce-
nario that objectifies the model, and which resources the audience’s pro-
ductive participation; as a result, neither party is readily positioned as a
dominant force. The male performer is placed in an explicitly objectified
and objectifiable role, objectified through the monetary transaction and
objectifiable through the realisation of the invitation to epilate; however,
212 A. ALSTON
the audience is positioned in a way that also demands a labour of sorts: an

immaterial, affective labour. For the audience, affective labour is something
paid for and may even be desired, as opposed to something engaged with
to maintain subsistence and the development of craft and artistic explora-
tion. Nonetheless, the audience’s affective labour remains an important
consideration in a scheme of immaterial production that includes ‘produc-
tive’ contributions from both the model and a participating audience.
Both performer and audience in Half Cut are resourced as productive
labourers, albeit in different ways, in a context that raises labour to the
level of aisthesis. Transaction, labour and objectification become objects of
direct experience; they deviate from habit to promote its explicit percep-
tion, ‘permitting it to move from something taken for granted as a mere
accompaniment to the rank of a theme’ (Lehmann, 2006, p. 156). What
is put into play is Rancièrian dissensus – an aesthetic rupture, or disorder-
ing of the police – that characterises this work’s political status within the
larger context of a curated immersive theatre marketplace; however, the
performance also demands a remodelling of Rancièrian dissensus if it is to
be applied as an analytical tool, turning to corporeal embodiment as the
seat of a work’s disruptive ‘sense’. While the invitation to participate is
fixed – to epilate, or not to epilate – the aesthetic web operating between
performer and audience is volatile; it is to be negotiated in an affective
framework that neither performer nor audience can fully anticipate or
determine. The disruptiveness of Half Cut is therefore rooted in a set of
material and affective relationships between two performers (barterer and
model) and a productive participant (the audience). These relationships
are both aesthetic and political. More specifically, their political potential
resides in an aesthetic reordering of how transaction and the subjects who
transact are made to appear within a scheme of immaterial production
that no longer values or unquestionably romanticises productivity and the
intimate seductions of neoliberal consumerism; rather, a scheme of imma-
terial production – which serves as both theme and form in a participatory
exchange – is anatomised as a problem that co-opts and affects the uses
and productive possibilities of audience engagement.
CONCLUSION
Theatre Deli, despite trying, fails to benefit from sustainable public finan-
cial support; as a pragmatic response to this lack, they turn to possibilities
in the commercial property market that allow them to both house and
potentially fund their projects. Their creative entrepreneurialism arguably

risks undermining a stable public funding infrastructure. If the company
can get along without it, why should they be offered public funding and
why should other companies that are similar to them? With Harvie, I am
concerned by the implications this question has for public arts funding
in the future. However, it is also worth recognising that in persisting,
despite the adversity of austerity, Theatre Deli make contributions – how-
ever small – to the evolution of immersive theatre practice in ways that
are not limited to companies and artists whose aims and ambitions align
with parameters of legitimation set within permanent theatre venue pro-
grammes, public arts funding criteria, and tried and tested models of audi-
ence immersion. Theatre Deli might acquiesce to capitalism, but they also
work with young and emerging artists and companies in redistributing the
parts available to cultural producers within wider fields of cultural produc-
tion. They reach a compromise that risks legitimising capitalism, but the
choice they are left with is either to give up making work, or to make a
different kind of work.
In choosing such a compromise, then, if indeed they remain committed
to projects like the Souks that are both anti-austerity and anti-capitalist,
it becomes all the more important to explore scope for generating dis-
sensus. The aesthetic forms that they explore, and specifically ready-made
transactions that are appropriated from the material contexts that embed
the Souks, upset the ‘commonness’ of what is open to sense perception.
In Half Cut, an intolerable affect emerges as something strange in the
encounter between model and participant, as well as the transaction on
which that encounter is based. The intolerable element is an aesthetic ele-
ment which is, at the same time, the crux on which the politics of par-
ticipation in this work rests. Something is not so much made visible, as
Rancière might characterise a political intervention in the distribution of
the sensible, as it is made feelable, as an affective intervention. Theatre
Deli’s curatorial model provides scope for interhuman relations to be
restored, embarrassingly, to an economic context that has the misleading
appearance of being abstracted from these relations.
Rancière may well dismiss the kinds of political and artistic organisation
that come with Theatre Deli’s marketplaces. Ultimately, the companies
involved in the Souks, some of which have since become associate compa-
nies of Theatre Deli – including Half Cut – must subscribe by association
to Theatre Deli’s organisational approach to pop-up theatre production.
As far as theatre production and curation is concerned, Theatre Deli
214 A. ALSTON
thrives on consensus among a community of artists who are increasingly

affiliated with them. However, that is not to say that the theatre produced
through Theatre Deli must act in the same way.
The Souks are affected by neoliberalism’s debilitating effect on a public
funding infrastructure, and by a private funding strategy that ensures their
continued nomadism; however, the Souks also open up space for dissen-
sus. Their reliance on and occupation of buildings that are privately owned
means that Theatre Deli are complicit with market capitalism and benefit
private businesses by allowing them to profit, potentially, from reduced
business rates. However, despite such a compromise, or ‘hustling’, Theatre
Deli are able to disrupt a field of cultural production that risks excluding
an important set of practitioners who may otherwise find it difficult to find
a stage that welcomes them. These practitioners, within the context of the
Souks, are also able to explore and experiment with immaterial production
as an issue. While relying on the whims of the market, Theatre Deli and
their collaborators also revalue a means of immaterial production that is
gaining increasing currency – as something contemporary, as something
prevalent, and as a source of profit – in the neoliberal economy.
Over the course of this chapter, I have argued that the Souks oper-
ate as interstices, raising labour relations into the realm of aisthesis. In
that raising, an aesthetic disruption takes place that redistributes what
can be perceived and made sense of. It is in this sense, of approaching
politics through aesthetics, that Theatre Deli, and companies like Half Cut
associated with them, foster and make political interventions. This is the
dissensus produced by their work. What arises is an aesthetic disjuncture
with a neoliberal market that also enables immersive theatre production, a
market that affects immersive theatre and that can be undermined none-
theless, even from a precarious position, with a minimal budget, with few
resources, and on the smallest of scales.
REFERENCES
ACE. (2010). Achieving great art for everyone: A strategic framework for the arts.
London: Arts Council England.
ACE. (2014). Punchdrunk. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/browse-
regularly-funded-organisations/npo/punchdrunk/. Accessed 8 Dec 2014.
ACE. (2015a). Awards made by area and artform. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/
funding/grants-arts/awards-made-area-and-artform/. Accessed 22 Apr 2015.
ACE. (2015b). Grants for the arts. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/
uploads/xls/201011_Gfta_artform.xls. Accessed 22 Apr 2015.
ACE. (2015c). National portfolio, 2015–18. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/

funding/our-investment-2015-18/national-portfolio/. Accessed 20 Apr 2015.
Alston, A. (2015). Performing labour in Look Left Look Right’s Above and
Beyond. RiDE, 20(1), 50–61.
Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational aesthetics (S. Pleasance & F. Woods, Trans.).
Dijon, France: Les Presses du Réel.
Brewster, J., & Smith, R. (2013, March 22). Interview with the author. London:
Marylebone Gardens.
Charnley, K. (2011). Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice. Art &
The Public Sphere, 1(1), 37–53.
Cohen, G. A. (2009). Why not socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Doyle, J. (2013). Hold it against me: Difficulty and emotion in contemporary art.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Gardner, L. (2015, April 16). Fringe theatre? There’s no such thing. Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/apr/16/fring-arts-
theres-no-such-thing-as-fringe-theatre-funding-theatre-in-manchester.
Accessed 20 Apr 2015.
Harvie, J. (2011). Democracy and neoliberalism in art’s social turn and Roger
Hiorns’s Seizure. Performance Research, 16(2), 113–123.
Hinderliter, B. (2009). Introduction. In W. Kaizen, V. Maimon, J. Mansoor &
S. McCormick (Eds.), Communities of sense: Rethinking aesthetics and politics
(pp. 1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kartsaki, E., & Zerihan, R. (2012). Slots, slaps, sluts and other cheap thrills:
Promiscuity, desire and labour in one-to-one performance. Performing Ethos,
3(2), 155–171.
Kaufman, W. (1997). The comedian as confidence man: Studies in irony fatigue.
Detroit, MC: Wayne State University Press.
Routledge.
Levinas, E. (2003 [1972]). Humanism of the other (N. Poller, Trans.). Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1994 [1991]). Lessons on the analytic of the sublime (E. Rottenberg,
Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Matthews, A. (2012). The libido-maker’s apprentice: Working the window’s
proscenium. Performing Ethos, 3(2), 121–137.
216 A. ALSTON
Matthews, A. (2015). Ali Matthews is the Bitchuationist. http://www.bitchua-

tionistinternational.com/. Accessed 23 Apr 2015.
May, T. (2009). Rancière in South Carolina. In G. Rockhill & P. Watts (Eds.),
Jacques Rancière: History, politics, aesthetics (pp. 105–119). Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
McKinnie, M. (2012). Rethinking site-specificity: Monopoly, urban space, and the
cultural economics of the site-specific performance. In A. Birch & J. Tompkins
(Eds.), Performing site-specific theatre: Politics, place, practice. Basingstoke, UK:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Rancière, J. (1999). Dis-agreement: Politics and philosophy (J. Rose, Trans.).
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Rancière, J. (2003). The thinking of dissensus: Politics and aesthetics, Proceeding
from Fidelity to the disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the political.
Goldsmiths College, London, 16–17 September.
Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible
(G. Rockhill, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2007). On the shore of politics (L. Heron, Trans.). London: Verso.
Rancière, J. (2009a). Aesthetics and its discontents (S. Corcoran, Trans.).
Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Rancière, J. (2009b). The emancipated spectator. In The emancipated spectator
Rancière, J. (2010a). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics (S. Corcoran, Ed. &
Trans.). London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2010b). Ten theses on politics. In Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics
(pp. 27–44, S. Corcoran, Ed. & Trans.). London: Continuum.
Rancière, J. (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the aesthetic regime of art (Z. Paul,
Trans.). London: Verso.
Rockhill, G. (2009). The politics of aesthetics: Political history and the hermeneu-
tics of art. In G. Rockhill & P. Watts (Eds.), Jacques Rancière: History, politics,
aesthetics (pp. 195–215). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
public. TDR, 58(4), 56–67.
Werry, M., & Schmidt, B. (2014, October). Immersion and the Spectator. Theatre
Journal, 66(3), 467–479.
Zaointz, K. (2014). Narcissistic spectatorship in immersive and one-on-one
performance. Theatre Journal, 66, 405–425.
CONCLUSION:
BEYOND THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE
Theatre, for Nicholas Ridout, ‘conceives itself as an apparatus for the pro-
duction of affect by means of representation, in the expectation that the
most powerful affects will be obtained at precisely those moments when
the machinery appears to break down’ (Ridout, 2006, p. 168). Producing
affect is what theatre does: all theatre, good theatre and bad theatre, for
better or worse. Catharsis, exhilaration, boredom, annoyance, desire,
pleasure, and so on, are produced through engagement with theatre.
Furthermore, as Ridout points out, the possibility of something going
wrong – a forgotten line, a faulty lamp, an animal on stage that pursues
its own agenda – jeopardises the stability and cohesiveness of world rep-
resentation in the live moment, and threatens the audience’s investment
in performance as a spectator whose attention is absorbed by a repre-
sented world. This, too, produces affect and expressions of being affected:
from nervous hubbub, to startled gasp or awkward titter. For Ridout,
whether or not the machinery of representation in theatre actually breaks
down is not as important as the possibility that it might, at an ontological
level, which is a possibility that allows the actor’s aura to mesmerise and
the designer’s craft to flourish, and a possibility that might be subjected
to experimentation in contemporary theatre and performance practices.
All theatre fails or thrives because of the production of affect, difficult
or otherwise, and particularly the role played by affect production in the
machinery of world representation.
Immersive theatre also conceives itself as an apparatus for the production
of affect; however, immersive theatre resources the productive capacities

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6
218 A. ALSTON
of prospectively or actually participating theatre audiences, which includes

the audience’s role in the production of affect, and focuses their atten-
tion on affectively voluminous experiences; these common features tend
to be key elements in the production and reception of immersive the-
atre aesthetics. Affect is produced via an engagement with a represented
world – a world that often seems, but only seems, to achieve ‘total’ closure
from contexts beyond an immersive environment’s boundaries – but it
also accrues a special aesthetic significance. This significance relates not
so much to an aesthetic emotion, which might be provoked by any work
of art, theatre or performance, but an aestheticised experience. The expe-
rience of affect is presented as a seduction or goal in immersive theatre,
one which is often pursued, literally, by audiences who are immersed in a
theatre environment that they can usually engage with through physically
explorative processes, uncovering the depths, nuances and secrets of an
immersive world. Ideally, within the logic of most immersive theatre per-
formances, the audience both enters an immersive world, and allows that
world to pervade their thought and feeling and to motivate action. Such
audiences enter experience machines and become part of the machine.
Philosophical aesthetics, particularly in the Kantian tradition, theorises
the ‘disinterested’ observation of an art object or some other form of cul-
tural expression, and particularly the interplay between a perceived object
and the racing mind of an imaginative perceiver who pieces together its
various aesthetic elements. This process of piecing together might be
viewed in terms of subordination to ethnically inflected and gendered
notions of beauty, quality and goodness, or it may be viewed more radi-
cally, as it is in Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory, as an inherently eman-
cipatory process – one that assumes an intelligent spectator who is able and
willing to interpret and reflect on what they watch in any number of ways
that are not hierarchised as being of more or less value in relation to other
translations of something watched. However, it is also worth noting the
importance of embodiment in processes of interpretation and reflection
that risk exclusion in Rancièrian aesthetics. As Colette Conroy recognises:
‘Aesthetics enables us to activate analysis of the experience itself, to think
in terms of our visceral and sensory responses and to extrapolate these
into understandings of human agency and experience’ (Conroy, 2015,
p. 2). This is a view that is predicated on a capacity to critically observe
the demands that art can make of individual observers, and a capacity to
critically observe the affect that art can have on spectators. In both cases,
criticality is not something divorced from affective experience; instead,
CONCLUSION: BEYOND THE EXPERIENCE MACHINE 219
embodiment plays a key role in constructing the sense of a work in terms

of both understanding and sensuous experience, whereby sensuous expe-
rience produces its own kind of knowing that may or may not be graspable
by means of conscious rational reflection.
Immersive theatre does not eliminate these capacities; spectators, how-
ever manipulated they might be, are still able to activate analysis of aes-
thetic experience, to think in terms of a bodily engagement with a theatre
event, and to extrapolate these into understandings of how immersive the-
atre figures and affects an immersed spectator. However, the most power-
ful affects in immersive theatre are usually achieved when the machinery
of world representation is in full flow, and the audience’s critical capaci-
ties give way to the seductiveness of indulging in affective experience.
The multitude of affects that might be generated through an audience’s
immersion in and engagement with the very small, very cold box in Ray
Lee’s Cold Storage is illustrative, in which the pleasures or anxieties that
arise from an encounter with an immersive environment, for instance, take
on a certain precedence that attracts attention and impacts on the idiosyn-
cratic interests that a given spectator might derive from the box’s interior.
The roots of such interests in an immersive environment provide affect’s
cues, which lend themselves to the promotion of some degree of subor-
dination to a designed environment, but the power of these affects is not
reducible to the absolute subordination of audiences; rather, a more com-
plex continuum of power arises that balances the productivity of audiences
as co-generators of affect, and hence of an immersive theatre aesthetic,
and an immersive environment that assigns audiences to a scheme of pro-
duction that rewards productivity with the promise of rich experiences to
be relished in their own right.
Yielding to the seductiveness of an ever-deeper involvement in per-
formance as a sensuously engaged participant is celebrated in immersive
theatre, a yielding that opposes equation with passivity by aligning sub-
mission and activity as a productive participant. Unlike other forms of
aesthetic engagement, immersive theatre often calls the audience’s atten-
tion to affect not as a consequence of engaging with something other
than affect – a painting, a movement, the spoken word, and so on – and
not even as a potential source of embodied understanding of some other
object that is contemplated; rather, the audience’s own involvement in
immersive theatre, as a productive participant, tends to be objectified as a
centrally significant component of a theatre aesthetic that is not meant to
morph into an understanding of human agency, necessarily; it is there to
220 A. ALSTON
be enjoyed or endured in and of itself. The rewards that accompany com-

mitment to productive participation are the same that make participation
in immersive theatre especially productive: the production of powerful
affects as a centrally significant feature of immersive theatre aesthetics, a
feature that can also be pursued and hunted out by entrepreneurial means
in free-roaming immersive theatre.
A particularly potent affective involvement with immersive theatre
plays an important role in striving to achieve the (impossible) goal of total
immersion; it is not just that immersive theatre places audiences in an
environment that surrounds them completely, but that they must invest
something of themselves in this environment that builds toward a sense of
an immersive world’s cohesiveness. The sense of an immersive work tends
to be linked to the richness and evocativeness of affective experiences,
which are produced in a reciprocal relationship between audiences and the
world in which they are immersed, but that are also predicated on a com-
mitment to immersion as a productive participant. Without producing on
the terms set out, implied or otherwise, and without participating pro-
ductively enough as an emotionally and physically engaged subject, many
immersive theatre performances will fall flat; in such cases, the spectator
‘fails’ the performance.
What makes the celebration of an affectively ‘interested’ engagement
with immersive theatre so compelling, and what tends to set it apart from
spectatorial audience engagement with theatre while sat in a theatre audi-
torium, is a particular and fairly recurrent set of values and meanings that
are attributable to a scheme of aesthetic production that is assigned to
audiences, and to which they are expected to posit themselves as produc-
tive participants. Forty years after the publication of Jean Baudrillard’s
book The Mirror of Production, which questions a pervasive romanticism
of productivity across the political spectrum, the nature of production
and modes of productivity have changed in ways that were at a fairly
early evolutionary phase in the 1970s. Production has become increas-
ingly immaterial. The biopolitics of productivity has become more acute
in the transition from industrial capitalism to post-industrial neoliberalism,
which is most telling in the emergence of jobs that replace alienation from
bodies in manual labour with affective and emotional labour that produces
an important source of value to be extracted from workers; however, the
experience economy’s producing consumers are also affected, emblemati-
cally, by the biopoltics of neoliberal productivity, whose affective engage-
ment with products and involvement in the production and marketing of
products have become increasingly entwined in the movements of capital

as economies turn toward the economic valuation of experience. The pri-
macy of the economic is therefore asserted in ways that no longer just
inhibit or deter from alternative valuations of material objects, but alterna-
tive valuations of immaterial experiences, along with other kinds of mental
endeavour and physiological activity.
While capitalism has always contained a biopolitical element within it,
for the most part based on the alienation of manual labourers from their
bodies, neoliberalism approaches the abilities, competencies and desiring
bodies of producers and consumers as particularly special sources for the
production of capital in post-industrial societies. In the neoliberal era, the
psychological and physiological are prime targets in a scheme of produc-
tion and consumption that is assigned to workers and producing consum-
ers and to which they are expected and encouraged to posit themselves as
productive subjects – subjects who produce physically and via immaterial
processes of production and producing consumerism that involve the pro-
duction of affect. Furthermore, by appealing to what ‘interests’ producers
and producing consumers – by fostering a preoccupation with what affects
individuals, at a personal level – neoliberalism is able to mitigate threats
against it. As Richard Sennett puts it, a preoccupation with the self – one
which is narcissistic in character – ‘has seduced us from converting our
understanding of the realities of power into guides for our own political
behaviour. The result is that forces of domination or inequality remain
unchallenged’ (Sennett, 1974, p. 339). The seductions of neoliberalism,
which promise individual (and unequal) empowerment and fulfilment as
someone who can make the most of their own human capital and abilities
as a productive subject, participate in its perseverance.
In the UK, the emergence of neoliberalism and the promotion of indi-
vidualism have been fostered by the willingness of successive governments
to embrace its supposedly empowering liberties. Margaret Thatcher and
David Cameron’s Conservative and coalition administrations, and Tony
Blair’s turn toward the Third Way, either ushered in or furthered the polit-
ical institutionalisation of neoliberalism in ways that applied neoliberal
principles to social and cultural realms that bear no intrinsic relationship to
economics. An active and positive embrace of risk, individualism, private
enterprise, personal responsibility and entrepreneurship became the guid-
ing principles of a neoliberal ethos, which affected and continues to affect
degrees and intensities of productivity in the welfare state, and approaches
to public expenditure, including expenditure on the arts.
222 A. ALSTON
Many of the more established immersive theatre makers working today

were either born during or grew up under Thatcher’s premiership, and
make work in the wake of her legacy. While immersive theatre tends not
to address the material conditions that affect immersive theatre produc-
tion and arise from the counterintuitive institutionalisation of neoliberal-
ism – and while there is no need for it to do so, necessarily – it still reflects
neoliberal values and neoliberal modes of production. This is especially
evident in the ways that many immersive theatre performances resource
audiences as productive participants, either as immaterially productive
subjects, or as physically productive subjects who embrace risk, take the
entrepreneurial initiative of pursuing an individual journey of discovery
by seeking out moments of performance within an immersive world, and
accept personal responsibility for their activity or docility.
All theatre – all cultural production – is not abstracted, but embed-
ded in material conditions of production and reception. While immersive
theatre is also imbricated in the material conditions of theatre production
and reception at a given point in time and in a specific location, this is
not necessarily what connects immersive theatre aesthetics most funda-
mentally to the neoliberal ethos – although such connections may still
prove illuminating. Rather, what connects immersive theatre aesthetics in
a range of forms to neoliberalism, at a fundamental level, is a romanticism
of productivity in a scheme of production that draws value from affected
subjects: a scheme that resources an audience’s participation in immate-
rial production, including their feeling bodies, intellectual and imaginative
abilities, as well as the more noticeably productive exertion of energy in
physical endeavour. Furthermore, the manifold possibilities of prospective
participation charge thinking and feeling as a spectator in ways that render
these activities all the more productive as an engagement with futurity
unfolds. It is not a piece of machinery, or a tool, that facilitates increases
in productivity in immersive theatre, although lighting, sound, masks, and
so on all have their parts to play; rather, it is the human capital of produc-
tive participants.
The politics of immersive theatre aesthetics relates to notions of
empowerment, liberty and equality, but it also relates to how audiences are
used in the production of immersive theatre aesthetics, which is a feature
that informs and affects such notions. Cold Storage elicits especially high
degrees of productivity from audiences even while they are shut inside
a small, cold box, by appealing to an audience’s productively interested
engagement with their own private experience and role in an immersive
environment as an affected subject. Lundahl & Seitl’s theatre in the dark

thrives on the ways that prospective participation can affect the productiv-
ity of spectatorship as audiences engage with the risky and uncertain possi-
bilities of darkness. And in Punchdrunk’s free-roaming immersive theatre,
a particular mode of productivity is encouraged and valorised that builds
especially on an audience’s entrepreneurial endeavour, and capitalises on
an active and positive embrace of risk.
However, other immersive theatre performances explore frameworks
for audience engagement that problematise the resourcing of audiences
as productive participants; work by shunt, Theatre Delicatessen and Half
Cut, for instance, frustrate the appeal and romanticism of affective and
physically productive participation as an assigned condition for partici-
pating effectively. While not advertised as ‘political theatre’, these com-
panies engage with the politics of aesthetics by experimenting not just
with themes and content that might take on a political edge, but aesthetic
forms and styles that already contain within them a kind of politics that
risks elision with neoliberal values and modes of production and produc-
tivity. While work by each of these companies is not abstracted from the
material conditions of immersive theatre production, they are nonetheless
finding ways to experiment with the productive processes of immaterial
production. In doing so, they engage with a key component of neoliberal
politics and economics and encourage audiences to question the valorisa-
tion of neoliberal production and productivity. Immersive theatre aesthet-
ics in these latter examples calls attention to the productive participation
of an immersed theatre audience. Immersive theatre form is not treated as
being inherently emancipatory; instead, a responsiveness to and sensitivity
toward the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics is demonstrated in ways
that do not rely on the framing of performance as political theatre. The
politics of immersive theatre aesthetics is consequently broached in such
work as a politics of productivity.
My critique of immersive theatre aesthetics and celebration of work
that addresses the politics of productivity in immersive theatre is not
meant to imply an outright devaluation of productivity; rather, the argu-
ment presented in this book has primarily sought to question, theorise and
critique particular modes and valuations of production and productivity in
immersive theatre that take on a peculiarly economistic, individualistic and
intense character in terms of the demands made on an individual’s think-
ing, feeling and action. As New Left philosopher André Gorz observes,
‘The desire for high productivity doesn’t always imply a productivist ethos.
224 A. ALSTON
Productivism is when you say production has got to get faster and faster
so we can produce more and more, because more equals better’ (Gorz,
1985, p. 70). For Gorz, a meaningful politics ought to imply ‘a critique of
economic thought in general, on the basis that any adequate conception
of wealth must necessarily exceed the economist’s impoverished notion
of “value”’ (Turner, 2007). While Gorz was ultimately drawn to the pos-
sibilities of productive consumption, albeit in a form that sought to elude
incorporation within a capitalist scheme of production – and while these
possibilities became bound up in the movements of capital as neoliberal-
ism further entrenched itself in politics and the experience economy – he
nonetheless recognised and critiqued a tendency for economics to frame
and affect values, and especially political, social and cultural values (Gorz,
1985, pp. 81–91). He was a staunch opponent of capitalism’s monopo-
lisation of time as work time, for instance, which is a process that risks
escalation as neoliberalism continues to embrace immaterial production,
and produce affective hangovers and anxieties that bleed between spheres
that are no longer so easily distinguishable as ‘work’ and ‘leisure’.
Neoliberalism models the productivist ethos around a peculiarly indi-
vidualistic scheme of production that has in many respects relied on
overpowering or dismantling collective bodies and communal forms of
productivity. Moreover, its philosophy is predicated on deeper, more thor-
ough, more involving forms of productivity, and these forms find their
counterparts in frameworks for immersion and participation in immer-
sive theatre performances that embrace activity not as an inherent condi-
tion of watching, feeling and thinking, but as something to be sought,
adopted and celebrated as a productive state to be enacted – forms that are
realised through an imaginative, physiological and/or physically explor-
ative involvement in the production of a sense of immersion and close-
ness to performance. Producing more and more as a producing consumer,
within and beyond immersive theatre, is not of itself a better or more
empowering form of productivity; it might be valued as such, but it is not
necessarily better and may end up being disempowering. The politics of
immersive theatre aesthetics, then, is a politics of productivity that might
take a number of forms, but the predominant form – a form that is com-
mon without holding a monopoly, and that might also be frustrated – mir-
rors neoliberal productivism.
Frustrating productivity, particularly the immaterial productivity of
affected audience members, is one way that contemporary immersive the-
atre companies are approaching the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics.
It is therefore worth asking whether such companies are not just opening
up the otherworldly-world of an immersive theatre environment to the
economic contexts that are purportedly or seemingly ‘beyond’ a totally
immersive world, but are also, and consequently, experimenting with the-
atre aesthetics that move ‘beyond’ audience immersion: a ‘postimmersive
theatre’, perhaps. However, an important line of enquiry pursued in the
previous chapter was that a broad spectrum of theatre makers and artists
who experiment with different and alternative forms of audience immer-
sion risk marginalisation and exclusion from fields of cultural production
because their work, for a range of reasons – some of which relate to cultur-
ally inscribed notions of quality and expertise – fail to receive institutional
validation and support. Rather than sidelining such work as falling short of
aesthetic standards and types that have been set by more established com-
panies and artists, which might otherwise lead to prescription of a lauded
immersive theatre style (and that risks association with large budgets, par-
ticularly once coupled with attempts to reach ever-more total degrees of
immersion), a more progressive approach is to recognise and welcome
the potential for immersive theatre aesthetics to adapt and evolve. This
is not to suggest that the integrity of immersive theatre as a coherent
entity should be preserved; rather, it is to recognise the promiscuity of the
immersive moniker, and to accept that the next generation of theatre mak-
ers may soon grow tired of its usefulness and recurrent features, while also
allowing the notion of audience immersion to inform plural practices of
audience engagement. The issue then relates not to a movement beyond
immersion, necessarily, but to the ability of immersive theatre to adapt to
different contexts either directly or indirectly, and the abilities of a broad
range of practitioners to test and recode aesthetic forms and styles that are
in a constant evolutionary state, recognised as such and without forget-
ting innovations that precede innovation. This is not so much a question
of immersive theatre participating in an eternal process of perfecting itself
as it is a question of exploring chartered, rechartered or unchartered ter-
ritory in ways that remain responsive to the politics of form, and open to
the possibilities of failure.
The kinds of experimentation that have been celebrated in this book
have for the most part focused on notions of frustration and difficulty,
which arguably risks painting a bleak picture of immersive theatre’s polit-
ical potential. However, particularly in Theatre Delicatessen’s Theatre
Souks and the companies associated with them, these notions take on a
much more positive and hopeful hue, which is already present, I argue,
226 A. ALSTON
in the presentation and testing of alternative values and modes of pro-

duction and productivity. Such theatre does not foreclose impactful
imaginings and doings of alternative forms of togetherness; rather, it
inspires because of the manifold nature of experiencing and producing in
an inquisitive mode, and in a way that does not romanticise or fetishise
productivism. Immersive theatre does not need to dwell on frustration
and difficulty if it is to engage with the politics of immersive theatre
aesthetics, and might just as well explore hope, desire and utopia as
experimental concerns; nonetheless, frustrating the logic of productiv-
ism, particularly as it exists in a neoliberal mode, informs and illuminates
especially clearly the potential for immersive theatre aesthetics to pro-
mote and explore alternatives to the seductive resourcing of audiences as
productive participants.
The ambition of creating a totally immersive theatre environment, one
that assumes that contexts beyond an immersive boundary can be closed
off from a fictive world, will always contain within it a lack that at the same
time promises a profound political potential. Immersive theatre environ-
ments surround audiences, but a sense of immersion relies on something
more than the placing of audiences within a panorama that may or may
not captivate attention; it also relies on what an audience brings to the
production of an immersive theatre aesthetic, and invests in immersion
as an engaged audience member. The terms of their participation might
be productivist, or might work toward alternative modes and valuations
of production and productivity. While immersive theatre and particularly
the imaginative and physiological involvement of audiences as produc-
tive participants tends toward a romanticism of productivity, there is no
necessary reason why the forms and values that a scheme of production
might take needs to assert the primacy of the economic, where individu-
als exchange their own productivist involvement for a range of affective
rewards. Instead, immersive theatre can jeopardise productivism in the
pursuit of something else – the subversion of complicity in a productivist
agenda, perhaps, or an engagement with others that undercuts the neo-
liberal ethos and celebrates the fostering of interpersonal connections.
Immersive theatre aesthetics may resonate with neoliberal productivism,
or produce dissensus. Either way, the politics of immersive theatre derives
from an aesthetic core – one that both risks complicity with productivism,
and inspires its reformulation.
REFERENCES
Conroy, C. (2015). EDITORIAL: Aesthetics and participation. RiDE, 20(1),
1–11.
Gorz, A. (1985). Paths to paradise: On the liberation from work. London: Pluto.
Sennett, R. (1974). The fall of public man: On the social psychology of capitalism.
New York: Vintage Books.
Turner, C. (2007, November 7). André Gorz. Guardian. http://www.theguardian.
com/news/2007/nov/07/guardianobituaries.obituaries. 13 May 2015.
INDEX
A darkness, 75–77, 86, 92–93, 103

ACE. See Arts Council England (ACE) embarrassment, 92, 134,
ACT marketing, 155 209–10, 213
Adorno, Theodor, 48 emotion, 16, 43, 45–46, 48–50,
aesthetic emotion, 50, 218 58–59, 63–65, 86, 90, 126,
affect 197, 218, 220
aesthetics, 7, 8, 10, 27, 29, 36, 39, emotional labour, 14, 35, 43,
44, 46, 48-51, 53, 55, 60, 68, 65–66, 211, 220
91, 145, 164–65, 175, 204, productivity, 69, 76–77, 93,
210, 217–20 103–104, 128, 155, 157,
affect studies, 25, 27, 36, 39–47 165–66, 170, 176–77, 179,
affective labour, 16, 27, 29, 66–67, 205, 211–12, 217–19,
146, 153, 165, 189, 198, 205, 220–24, 226
207–08, 211–12, 220; See also representation, 8–10, 39, 58–61,
Hardt, Michael 175, 217–19
affective memory, 45–46, 57–58, risk, 76–77, 85–86, 89, 91–93,
61; See also Arnold, Magda B. 100–101, 104, 210
affective text, 28–29, 148, 158–64, time, 87, 175
169–70, 173, 179 transaction, 203–05, 210–13
assemblage, 42 agency, 18, 40–42, 105, 137, 170,
autobiography, 27, 39, 43–47, 51, 178, 218–19
55, 57, 61 Agustsson, Astor, 206
biopolitics, 16, 27, 36, 43, 47, 61, See also Half Cut
64–66, 68–69, 76–77, 93, Ahmed, Sara, 46, 177
100–01, 103–04, 196–98, Amato Saltone (2005–2006), 147
220–21 Analogue, 5

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6
230 INDEX
…and darkness descended, 24, 28, Bennett, Jane, 41–42

125–26 Bennett, Susan, 57, 153
ANU Productions, 5 Berghaus, Günter, 79
Antoine, André, 78 Bernstein, Peter, 87, 94
The Architects (2012–2013), 22, 24, Big Society, 28, 116–21, 123, 130, 138
28, 147–48, 165, 171–78 See also Conservative Party
Arnold, Magda B., 45–46 binaural sound, 81
Art of Disappearing, 5 biology, 36, 40, 43, 56–57
Artangel, 200 biopolitics, 16, 27, 36, 43, 47, 61,
Artaud, Antonin, 6, 25 64–66, 68–69, 76–77, 93,
artrepreneurialism, 118, 120–22, 130, 100–01, 103–04, 196–98,
141, 184, 202 220–21
Arts Council England (ACE), 29, 118, See also affect; Foucault, Michel;
120–22, 185–86, 198–99, 202 Hardt, Michael; Negri, Antonio
austerity, 126, 128, 199, 202, 205, 213 The Birthday Party (1957), 79
Bishop, Claire, 19, 98–99, 117, 150,
170, 178
B The Black Diamond (2011), 24, 28,
Bad Physics, 82 82, 124–25, 127
See also Sunday Morning at the Blair, Tony, 16, 95–96, 99, 114,
Centre of the World 130, 221
Badac Theatre, 5 See also New Labour; Third Way
Balka, Miroslaw, 82 Blanqui, Auguste, 193–94
See also How It Is Blindekuh, 80
Ball, Dan, 206 See also darkness
See also Half Cut blindfolds, 82
The Ballad of Bobby François (2000), 147 See also darkness
Barrett, Felix, 110, 123, 133, 140 blindness and visual impairment, 79,
See also Punchdrunk 81–82
Battersea Arts Centre (BAC), 1, 37, Boenisch, Peter M., 172–73
80–81, 84, 109, 130, 184, 200 Bond, Kate and Morgan Lloyd, 5
Baudrillard, Jean, 11–12, 68, 220 Borges, Jorge Luis, 171, 175
Beck, Ulrich, 94, 114 Botibol, Cat, 155
See also risk society See also Pd3
Beckett, Samuel, 79 Bottoms, Stephen, 61, 174
See also Not I Bourjeily, Lucien, 5, 82
Bell, Clive, 50 See also 66 Minutes in Damascus
Belt Up, 5 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 19, 203–04
INDEX 231
The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face Cold Storage, 24, 27, 29, 37–39,
(2014), 22, 147 49–56, 59–62, 64, 67–69, 84,
brand evangelists, 127–28, 155 164, 219, 222
See also Lenderman, Max Coming Up Festival (2011), 140, 163
brandscapes, 126–28, 151–54, 157, Commonwealth Theatre, 5
161, 179 Coney, 5
See also Klingmann, Anna Conroy, Colette, 218
Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 25, 206 Conservative Party, 13, 16, 28, 97,
Bretherton, June, 80 113–17, 221
Bretton Woods, 14 See also Cameron, David; coalition
Brewster, Jessica, 186, 199, 201–02 government
See also Theatre Delicatessen corporate partnerships, 28, 82, 113,
British Theatre Consortium, 26 120, 122–24, 126–28, 140–41,
Brown, Gordon, 96 154–55, 157–58
Büchner, Georg, 54 See also funding
See also Woyzeck corporeal memory, 45
Burke, Edmund, 85–86 See also affective memory
critical intimacy, 26
See also Groot Nibbelink, Liesbeth
C critical paranoia, 168–69
Calleja, Gordon, 17, 112 cultural policy, 98–99
Camden People’s Theatre (CPT), See also Arts Council England; funding
185, 200 Curious Directive, 160
Cameron, David, 16, 115–18, 121, See also Return to the Silence
139, 221
See also coalition government;
Conservative Party D
Chaika Casino (2010), 188 dA dA DUMB, 80
Chicago School, 13 Dalí, Salvador, 169
See also neoliberalism Damasio, Antonio, 41–45
Civilised Mess, 154 Dance Bear Dance (2003), 147
Clegg, Nick, 115 darkness
See also coalition government; blindfolds, 82
Liberal Democrats complete darkness, 27–28, 69,
Clinton, Bill, 95 75-82, 90-91, 93, 99, 164
coalition government, 16, 97, 115–16, Dark/Noir festival, 80
118, 120, 122, 221 darkening of theatre auditoria, 75,
Cobb, Evan, 136 77–80
232 INDEX
darkness (cont.) Dolan, Jill, 8

Dialogue in the Dark, 79–80, 82 Doyle, Jennifer, 183
dining in the dark, 79–80 Doyle, Maxine, 124
Tenebrae, 78 See also Punchdrunk
theatre in the dark. See Antoine, D’Oyly Carte, Richard, 78
André; Bad Physics; Beckett, dreamthinkspeak, 5, 183
Samuel; Bourjeily, Lucien; The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable
dA dA DUMB; Extant; (2013–2014), 54–55, 110, 124
Kennedy, Adrienne; Mądzik, dualism, 40
Leszek; Morris, Tom; Duchamp, Marcel, 51, 205
Ontroerend Goed; Pinter, The Duchess of Malfi (2010), 110
Harold; Projet in Situ;
Punchdrunk; shunt;
Sound&Fury; Wagner, E
Richard East London Partnership, 96
possibilities of darkness, emancipated spectatorship.
76, 87, 89, 92, 100, See Rancière, Jacques
103–04, 223; See also emotional labour. See affect
Welton, Martin Emursive, 134
watching darkness, 75–76, enterprise allowance, 113
86–93, 103–04, 164; entitlement and self-entitlement, 8,
See also Lundahl & Seitl; 52–53, 55, 161, 179
risk; uncertainty entrepreneurial participation,
.dash, 188 10–11, 21, 28, 113,
See also Chaika Casino 129–40, 154
The Day of the Locust, 54 entrepreneurialism, 16, 28,
De La Guarda, 1, 5 96, 115, 117–20,
Debut Theatre, 140, 163 130, 133, 137–41, 166, 199,
Deleuze, Gilles, 41–42, 45 202, 213
democracy, 118, 121, 139, eroticism, 20, 82, 88, 172
190–91, 195 escapist, 2, 156–57
See also social democracy Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, 121
Descartes, René, 40–41 experience economy
di Somi, Leone, 77–78 brand evangelists, 127–28, 155
Diderot, Denis, 58 brandscapes, 126–28, 151–54, 157,
Dinesh, Nandita, 5 161, 179
disinterest, 10, 47–51, 218 Disneyland, 146, 149–51
Ditch (2010), 162–63 The Experience Economy: Work is
Do You See What I Mean? A Theater & Every Business a
Blindfolded Journey Through the Stage, 146, 149, 151,
City (2005-2011), 82 154, 156
INDEX 233
experiential marketing, 16, free-roaming, 1, 3, 9–11, 28, 54, 109–10,

154–57 112–13, 124, 129–131, 135,
London Dungeon, 28, 148, 158, 137–40, 147, 164–65, 220, 223
161–64, 168–69 Fried, Michael, 47–50
pastiche, 164, 172, 176–77 friendship schemes, 122
producing consumers, 28–29, See also funding
146, 148–58, 161, 165–66, frustrating productivity, 4–6, 18–23,
177–79, 204, 207–08, 29, 141, 148, 164–79, 223–226
220–21, 224 Fuerzabruta (2005–), 1–3
product design, 150, 153–54, 157 Fry, Roger, 50
experience machine, 2–5, 10, 23, 27, fun, 1, 168–70, 178–79
30, 39, 53–54, 61, 64, 178, 218 See also fon
Extant, 5, 81–82 funding
See also Sheer corporate partnerships, 28, 82, 113,
120, 122–24, 126–28, 140–41,
154–55, 157–58
F foundation, 28, 113, 120–22, 126,
Fabre, Jan, 59–60 128
See also The Power of Theatrical mixed economic funding, 113, 118,
Madness 120–23, 128
failure, 23, 61, 90, 135, 208, 217, National Lottery, 118
220, 225 philanthropy, 28, 113, 117–18,
Faust (2006–2007), 109, 123 120–23, 126, 128, 201–02
FEEL marketing, 155 public funding, 19, 120–22, 186,
Fiction (2014-), 81 198–99, 201–02, 213–14
fictive cosmos, 59–61, 67, 112 See also Arts Council England;
See also Lehmann, Hans-Thies cultural policy; Key Holder
Fillìa, 79–80 scheme; pop-up
See also Tactile Dinner Party Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), 79
film noir, 54 Futurism, 79–80, 110
The Firebird Ball (2005), 109
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 50, 56
Fiumara, Gemma Corradi, 40 G
Flabbergast Theatre, 187 Gardner, Lyn, 1, 123, 184
See also Puppet Poker Pit Geddes, Annabel, 162–63
Flaherty, Jennifer, 18, 136 Gent, Martin, 80
fon, 168 See also dA dA DUMB
see also fun Giddens, Anthony, 95–97, 100, 103,
FoolishPeople, 5 114, 139
Foot Washing for the Sole, 207–08 Gideon Reeling, 123
Foucault, Michel, 15–16, 66, 115 Gillick, Liam, 19
234 INDEX
Gilmore, James H., 16, 146, 149–151, I

154–56 Iball, Helen, 26
globalisation, 97, 114 Il Pixel Rosso, 5
Goat and Monkey, 5, 163 Illouz, Eva, 63–65
See also Reverence: A Tale of Abelard Imagine Nation, 5
and Heloise IMF. See International Monetary
Going Dark (2010-2014), 81 Fund (IMF)
Gorz, Andrè, 223–24 immaterial production, 12, 14, 66,
See also productivism 68–69, 76, 128, 149, 179, 189,
Grant, Stuart, 89 198, 205–06, 214, 220–22, 224
Green, Christopher and Ursula disrupting immaterial production,
Martinez, 5, 140 29, 205–12, 214, 223–24;
Grid Iron, 5 immaterial labour, 16, 101, 165,
Grimm Tales (2014–), 155 212; See also affect
Groot Nibbelink, Liesbeth, 26, immersive theatre
168, 197 environment, 1–4, 9–11, 17–18, 22,
25, 27–29, 35–36, 39, 42, 45,
49–56, 59–62, 64, 67–68,
H 93–95, 99, 109, 111–12, 119,
Half Cut, 5, 21–22, 24, 29, 189, 205, 124–29, 135, 137, 140–41,
207–08, 210–11, 213–14, 223 145–46, 150–52, 154, 161,
Half Cut (2010), 24, 29, 189, 163, 164–69, 173, 178–79,
205–13 184, 187–88, 205, 218–20,
Hardt, Michael, 16, 65–66, 149 222–23, 225–26
Harris, Geraldine, 20–21 experience, 2–3, 7–11, 16,
Harvey, David, 13–15 21–22, 24, 26–27, 29,
Harvie, Jen, 20, 25, 118–21, 123, 35–37, 47–68, 75–77, 82,
126–28, 137–38, 150, 152, 178, 89, 91, 93, 99–100, 103,
185, 200–01, 213 122–23, 128–130, 133–35,
Heddon, Deirdre, 26, 44 137–39, 145–48, 158–59,
hedonistic, 2, 88 161–65, 168–170, 175–77,
Heinecke, Andreas, 79 179, 205, 207, 210–12,
See also darkness 218–21; See also affect;
Hesmondhalgh, David, 13–15 experience economy
Hiorns, Roger, 200 experience machine, 2–3, 5, 10,
See also Seizure 23, 30, 39, 53-54, 61, 64,
Hirschhorn, Thomas, 170 178, 218
Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 65–66 imaginary, 5, 12, 21, 23, 101
How It Is (2009), 82 postimmersive theatre, 225
Howells, Adrian, 67, 207–08 total immersion, 17–18, 23, 28, 61,
See also Foot Washing for the Sole 69, 111–12, 139–40, 150, 165,
Hurley, Erin, 8, 67, 92, 211 177, 220, 225–26
INDEX 235
individualism, 28, 63–64, 112, labour, 11, 16, 20, 27, 65–68, 94, 96,
114–15, 118, 130, 133–34, 101, 117, 119, 123, 146, 153,
139–40, 145, 221 155, 165, 185, 189, 198, 203,
individualisation, 102 205–12, 214, 220–221
interstice, 203, 214 See also immaterial production
interstitial pop-ups, 199–205 Labour Party, 15, 95, 97, 114
intimacy, 3, 8, 10, 22, 52, 67, 77, 94, Labour Party Constitution, 95,
104, 128, 134–35, 206–09 114–15
critical intimacy, 26 See also Blair, Tony; New Labour;
presumptive intimacy, 55; Third Way
See also Zaointz, Keren Lasch, Christopher, 63
irruption of the real, 59–61, 69 Lash, Scott, 94
See also Lehmann, Hans-Thies Laybourn, Keith, 15, 96
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 14 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 111
Iredale, Joe, 206 Lee, Ray, 5, 24, 27, 37, 59, 184, 219
See also Half Cut See also Cold Storage
It Felt Like a Kiss (2009), 110 Lehmann, Alfred, 43
Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 59–61, 160,
174–75, 212
J Lenderman, Max, 127, 155
Jackson, Shannon, 19, 167–68, 178 Letwin, Oliver, 116
Joseph, Miranda, 157 Levinasian ethics, 196
Liberal Democrats, 16, 97, 115
See also Clegg, Nick; coalition
K government
Kant, Immanuel, 40–41, 48–49, Live Action Role Play, 125
192, 218 Living Theatre, 111
Kartsaki, Eirini, 207 Lloyd, Morgan. See Bond, Kate and
Keay, Douglas, 113, 116 Morgan Lloyd.
Kennedy, Adrienne, 79 The London Dungeon, 28, 148, 158,
See also Funnyhouse of a Negro 161–64, 168–69
Key Holder scheme, 122–23 London Tourist Board, 162
Kindle Theatre, 5 Look Left Look Right, 5
kinetic sound machine, 37 Louis Vuitton, 24, 28, 113, 124,
Klingmann, Anna, 126, 150 126–27, 154
Knight, Frank H., 88, 94 Loy, Frances, 186, 199; See also
Kursk (2009-2011), 81 Theatre Delicatessen
Lundahl, Christer. See Lundahl &
Seitl
L Lundahl & Seitl, 5, 24, 27, 69,
La Fura dels Baus, 5 77, 83–84, 86–87, 90–91,
La mort du Duc d'Enghien, 78 94, 99, 102–03, 164, 184, 223
236 INDEX
Lundahl & Seitl (cont.) Morris, Tom, 81

See also The Memory of W.T. Stead; My Voice Shall Now Come from the
My Voice Shall Now Come from Other Side of the Room (2006), 84
the Other Side of the Room;
Recreational Test Site; Rotating
in a Room of Images; Symphony N
of a Missing Room narcissistic participation, 10–11, 21,
Lynch, David, 54 27, 35–36, 39, 51–58, 66–68,
Lyng, Stephen, 101–02 84, 154
Lyotard, Jean-François, 196 allopoiesis, 56–57
autopoiesis, 56–57
culture of narcissism, 61–64,
M 68–69
Machon, Josephine, 5, 17–18, 45, heteropoiesis, 56–57, 61, 68
48–49, 63, 86, 110, 112, 119, Ovid, 52–53
126, 133–34, 147, 185, 195–96 National Campaign for the
See also (syn)aesthetics Arts, 118
Madame Tussauds, 162 National Lottery, 118
Mądzik, Leszek, 80 See also funding
See also Tchnienie National Portfolio Organisations
Matthews, Alison, 207 (NPOs), 121, 185, 199
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 79, 110 See also Arts Council England;
Martinez, Ursula. See Green, funding
Christopher and Ursula Martinez National Theatre, London, 140, 184
Marx, Karl, 203 National Union of Mineworkers, 15
masks, 1, 3, 18, 130, 132–35, 222 Neath, Glen, 80–81
The Masque of the Red Death (2007– See also Fiction; Ring
2008), 1–3, 24, 28, 109, 113, Necessary Weather (1992), 80
124, 129–33, 137–39, 165, 200 Negri, Antonio, 65–66
May, Todd, 190–91 Nield, Sophie, 18, 169
McKinnie, Michael, 162, 199 neoliberalism
The Memory of W.T. Stead (2013), 83–84 Long Downturn, 14
Mercuriali, Silvia, 5 Mont Pelerin Society, 13
Mermikides, Alex, 158–59 neoliberal ethos, 20, 28, 129–30,
Mervant-Roux, Marie-Madeleine, 60 138–40, 152, 202, 204,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2008), 221–222, 226
186 neoliberal policy and governance,
66 Minutes in Damascus (2012), 82 4, 13–15, 19, 95–96, 99, 112,
Money (2009–2010), 22, 24, 28, 114–16, 121, 141, 146, 191;
147–48, 165–71, 173, 177–78 Third Way, 19, 77, 94–100,
Mont Pelerin Society13 103–04, 114–15, 138–39, 202,
See also neoliberalism 221
INDEX 237
neoliberal production and Not I, 79

productivity, 4, 12, 16–17, Nozick, Robert, 2–3
20–21, 36, 66, 68, 76, 98, 101, See also experience machine
104, 112, 115, 129, 141,
145–46, 158, 177–79, 198,
204–05, 209, 212, 214, O
220–24, 226; entrepreneurial Oakley, Mark, 162
participation, 10–11, 21, 28, one-on-one, 26–27, 29, 37, 67, 82,
113, 129–40, 154 134–36, 141, 207
neoliberal value, 2, 13, 20–21, Ontroerend Goed, 5, 82, 207
28–29, 66–67, 69, 77, 94, 99, See also The Smile off Your Face
101, 104–05, 111–121, 123, Ovalhouse, 185, 200
128–29, 141, 145, 165, Owen, Louise, 88, 94, 96, 98,
178–79, 198, 204–05, 221–23 114–15, 169
neoliberalism and risk, 28, 69, 76,
95–98, 100, 102, 104, 114,
118, 120, 130, 139, 221 P
producing consumers, 28–29, 146, Palmer, Scott, 77–78
148–158, 161, 165–66, 177–79, Paper Tiger, 188
204, 207–08, 220–21, 224 See also Securing Your World
proto-neoliberal theory, 12 Papaioannou, Spyros, 18, 137
seductions of neoliberalism, 129, participation. See entrepreneurial
152–53, 161, 179, 209, 212, participation; narcissistic
221, 226 participation; productive
See also affect; biopolitics; experience participation; prospective
economy; immaterial participants
production Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 121
New Democrats, 95 Pedal Pusher (2009, 2014), 186
new individualism, 114, 118 Pd3, 154–55
See also individualism; neoliberalism philanthropy, 28, 113, 117–18,
New Labour, 16, 19, 28, 77, 95–99, 120–23, 126, 128, 201–02
114–18 See also funding
See also Third Way; Tony Blair Pine, B. Joseph II, 16, 146, 149–151,
New Left, 62, 223 154–56
The Night Chauffeur (2010), 124–25 Pinter, Harold, 79
Nightingale, Colin, 121–22 See also The Birthday Party
See also Punchdrunk pleasure gardens, 149–50
Nimble Fish, 5 Poe, Edgar Allan, 1, 129–32
Nixon, Richard, 14 pop-up, 29, 80, 185–86,
Nixon Shock, 14 199–205, 213
nomadism, 186, 198, 200, 202, 214 postdramatic theatre, 59–61, 174
non zero one, 5 See also Lehmann, Hans-Thies
238 INDEX
postimmersive theatre, 225 Man: A Hollywood Fable; The

The Power of Theatrical Madness Duchess of Malfi; Faust; The
(1984), 60–61 Firebird Ball; It Felt Like a Kiss;
precariousness, 9, 94, 198, 201, 214 Louis Vuitton; The Masque of the
presumptive intimacy, 55 Red Death; The Night
See also Zaointz, Keren Chauffeur; Sleep No More; Sony;
ProKreate, 154 Stella Artois Black; Tunnel 228
producing consumers, 28–29, 146, Puppet Poker Pit (2010), 187
148–58, 161, 165–66, 177–79,
204, 207–08, 220–21, 224
productive participation, 3–12, R
21–23, 25, 27, 29, 36, 39, Radford, Colin, 58
55–56, 61, 67–69, 101, 104–05, Rancière, Jacques, 6–7, 25, 29, 44, 50,
112–13, 128, 136, 139–41, 55–56, 68–69, 87, 110–11, 139,
145, 148, 151, 154, 157–58, 189–98, 209, 213, 218
164–66, 176–77, 179, dissensus, 195, 205, 209, 212–14,
188–90, 209, 211–12, 226
219–20, 222–23, 226 distribution of the sensible, 192–95,
See also entrepreneurial participation; 197–98, 209, 213
frustrating productivity; emancipated spectator, 6, 11, 25,
narcissistic participation; 44, 55–57, 87, 110–11, 139,
prospective participants 174, 198
productivism, 223–24, 226 police, 191–95, 212
See also Gorz, André; productivist Rational Actor Paradigm (RAP),
ethos; romanticism of 39–42, 45
productivity reader-response theory, 57, 91
productivist ethos, 223–24 Reagan, Ronald, 13, 95
Projet In Situ, 82 Recreational Test Site (2007), 84
See also Do You See What I Mean? A Reith, Gerda, 87–88
Blindfolded Journey Through Reitz, Dana, 80
the City RELATE marketing, 156
prospective participants, 3, 9, 35, 89, relational aesthetics, 19, 170
91, 93, 101, 103–04, 164–65, relational dramaturgy, 196
176, 207, 210, 218, 222–23 Resistance 3, PlayStation game, 125
prosumer, 152 Return to the Silence, 160
Punchdrunk, 1, 3, 5, 18, 24, 28, 54, Retz. See Rift
82, 105, 109–13, 119–41, 147, Reverence: A Tale of Abelard and
150, 154, 163, 165, 168, 183, Heloise (2007), 163
199–200, 223 Reuben Feels, 154
Punchdrunk Enrichment, 119, 121, Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping
126 Choir, 153
See also …and darkness descended; The Ridout, Nicholas, 8, 23, 78, 157, 209,
Black Diamond; The Drowned 217
INDEX 239
Rift, 5 Schiller, Friedrich, 48–49

Ring (2012-2014), 80–81 Schmitt, Bernd. H., 155–56
risk, 10, 21, 25, 27–29, 69, 76–77, Schneemann, Carolee, 111
85–105, 112, 114–15, 118, 120, Schweitzer, Marlis, 153
130, 133–35, 137–40, 145, 154, Scottish Widows Investment
202, 210, 221–23 Partnership (SWIP), 201
edgework, 101–02; See also Lyng, The Seagull, 188
Stephen secrets and secrecy, 10–11, 122–24,
risk perception, 21, 27, 77, 85–94, 133, 140, 159, 218
100, 102–03, 138, 154, 210 Secret Cinema, 5, 183
horizon of risk, 91; See also White, Securing Your World (2012), 188
Gareth Seitl, Martina. See Lundahl & Seitl
risk culture, 94; See also Lash, Scott Seizure (2008–2010), 200
risk scenario, 98–100 Sennett, Richard, 62–65, 221
risk society, 27–28, 77, 94–95, 97, SENSE marketing, 155
101–02, 104; See also Beck, Shakespeare, William, 80, 129, 136,
Ulrich 174, 186
risk-bearing, 96, 98, 100, 114–15; Shaughnessy, Nicola, 44, 56, 63, 86
See also Owen, Louise Sheer (2012), 81–82
risk-taking, 28, 76–77, 87, 96–98, shunt, 5, 21–24, 28–29, 81, 147–48,
101, 112, 114–15, 133, 158–79, 183–84, 200, 223
138–40; See also uncertainty See also Amato Saltone; The
Rockhill, Gabriel, 194–95 Architects; The Ballad of Bobby
romanticism of productivity, 4–5, 11, François; The Boy Who Climbed
21–22, 29, 145, 148, 154, Out of His Face; Dance Bear
157–58, 170–71, 177, 179, 212, Dance; Money; Tropicana
220, 222–23, 226 Shunt Lounge, 24, 28, 147–48,
See also Baudrillard, Jean; 158–64
productivism; productivist ethos Shunt Vaults, 147, 158, 160, 163
Rose, Nikolas, 62–63, 65 Sierra, Santiago, 170
Rotating in a Room of Images (2007–), Skantze, P. A., 92
24, 27–28, 77, 84–87, 90–94, Sleep No More (2003), 24, 28, 109, 113,
99–105, 164 124, 129, 134–39, 165, 168–69
Rosenberg, David, 80–81, 147, 177 The Smile off Your Face (2003-2013), 82
See also Fiction; Ring; shunt Smith, Roland, 186, 199–202
Royal Festival Hall, 80 See also Theatre Delicatessen
Rudner, Sara, 80 social democracy, 95, 97, 114
Sony, 113, 124–27, 154–55
Sorensen, Roy, 85–86
S Sound&Fury, 5, 80–81
Sakellaridou, Elizabeth, 127 See also Going Dark, Kursk, The
The Sandwich Shop (2014), 188 Watery Part of the World,
Santone, Jessica, 18, 111 War Music
240 INDEX
spectator-participation-as-research, 26 Third Way, 19, 77, 94–100, 103–04,

See also Heddon, Dee; Iball, Helen; 114–15, 138–39, 202, 221
Zerihan, Rachel See also New Labour; Tony Blair
Spinoza, Benedict de, 39–42, 45–46 THINK marketing, 155
Strategic Experiential Modules Thompson, Hunter S., 101
(SEMs), 155–56 Tipton, Jennifer, 80
See also Schmitt, Bernd Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 19
Steen, Shannon, 129, 152–53 Toffler, Alvin, 121, 152
Stella Artois Black, 82, 113, 124–27, Tomkins, Silvan S., 42–43
154 Tower of London, 162
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the Toynbee, Polly and David
World (2011), 82 Walker, 116
superfans, 136 Tropicana (2005–2006), 147
SWIP. See Scottish Widows Investment trust, 28, 77, 86, 90, 94, 102–05
Partnership (SWIP) Tunnel 228 (2009), 110, 125, 163
Symphony of a Missing Room (2009–), Twain, Mark, 78
83–84 Twitchin, Mischa, 159
(syn)aesthetics, 48, 195–96 See also shunt
See also Machon, Josephine
U
T uncertainty, 3, 44, 49, 81, 86–91,
Tactile Dinner Party, 79–80 93, 97–100, 103, 199, 207,
Tait, Peta, 59 210, 223
Tate Modern, 82 See also risk
Tchnienie (1992), 80 Unsicht-Bar, 80
Teatro de los Sentidos, 5 See also darkness
Tenebrae, 78
Thatcher, Margaret, 13, 15, 113–14,
116–18, 221–22 V
Théâtre de Complicité, 80 VAULT Festival, 163
Theatre Delicatessen, 5, 21–22, 24, Visual Respiration, 5
29, 185–89, 192, 198–205, 210, voyeurism, 134
212–14, 223, 225–26 vulnerability, 52, 89–91
Bush Bazaar, 186–88, 192
Horror Souk, 187–89
Spaced 2014, 187–88 W
Theatre Souk, 24, 29, 186–90, 192, Wagner, Richard, 78
198–206, 208–10, 213–14, Walker, David. See Toynbee, Polly and
225–26 David Walker
theatricality, 47 Walsh, Fintan, 18, 67, 206–08
Third Rail Projects, 5 War Music (1998), 81
INDEX 241
The Watery Part of the World Woman’s Own magazine, 113

(2001–2004), 81 Woolf, Brandon, 60
welfare Worthen, W. B., 18, 124
welfare reform, 19, 97, 115–17
welfare state, 15, 96–97, 99,
113–16, 221 Y
Welfare to Work, 96 You Are Mine, 188
Welton, Martin, 8, 75, 77, 85, 92, See also The Sandwich Shop
103
West, Nathanael, 54
Westlake, Hilary, 140 Z
White, Gareth, 7, 9, 18, 50, 57, 68, Zaointz, Keren, 8, 18, 54–55, 129,
90–91, 134, 169 138, 206
Wickstrom, Maurya, 126, 151 Zecora Ura. See ZU-UK
WildWorks, 5 Zerihan, Rachel, 26, 207
The Winter’s Tale (2009), 186 Zola, Émile, 166
Woyzeck, 54 ZU-UK, 5

Beyond Immersive Theatre - Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Beyond Immersive Theatre - Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Participation

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

BEYOND

ISBN 978-1-137-48043-9 ISBN 978-1-137-48044-6 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936675

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: © Susanne Dietz

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Oliver, Tassos Stevens, and colleagues in the Department of Drama and

1 Introduction: Theatre as Experience Machine 1

2 Theatre in a Box: Affect and Narcissism in Ray Lee’s

3 Theatre in the Dark: Spectatorship and Risk in

4 Theatre Through the Fireplace: Punchdrunk and

5 Frustrating Theatre: Shunt in the Experience Economy 145

6 Theatre in the Marketplace: Immaterial Production in

Conclusion: Beyond the Experience Machine 217

Fig. 2.1 Ray Lee’s Cold Storage (2011) 37

Introduction: Theatre as Experience

My interest in immersive theatre was piqued in 2007 after experienc-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

spinning many metres above the spectators’ heads on a reflective silver

by the experiential qualities of a performance. However, they also invite

of audiences – demands to make more, do more, feel more, and to feel

to studies of neoliberalism in socially engaged art and performance, and

on, each geared toward the promotion of peculiarly intense or profound

attending theatre, even if it might revel in it at times, or rely on audience

between aesthetic experience and aestheticised experience relates to an

as a whole. The entrepreneurial participant therefore strives to make their

NEOLIBERALISM AND IMMERSIVE THEATRE

hegemony in the absence of more radical alternatives. From this point of

man has learned to reflect on himself, to assume himself, to posit himself

Even if the revolutionary imagination is not haunted to the same extent

the evolution of neoliberalism’s institutionalisation that impacted on the

capitalism, but by radicalising its operation. Labour movements were

identification of meanings and values that derive from immersive theatre

engaged analysis of contemporary theatre and performance forms that

However, I maintain that many immersive theatre performances still

audience productivity in immersive settings, and interrogate the commod-

participation. Consequently, there tends not to be a need to ask these kinds

in London, which affected the decision to focus on the capital, along-

participant – by constructing a cross-disciplinary methodology suited to

imaginaries and as a part of the means of experience production, which

developed and radically pervasive state of unknowingness in a globalised

with a ‘sense’ of a cultural or material product, and secondly as a produc-

contemporary experience machine – it does so because the author finds a

Machon, J. (2013). Immersive theatres: Intimacy and immediacy in contemporary

White, G. (2012, October). On immersive theatre. Theatre Research International,

Theatre in a Box: Affect and Narcissism

Immersive theatre audiences are frequently invited to engage with their

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 35

cogitating and feeling. However, affective experience takes on aesthetic

The chapter focuses on a performance by the sound artist Ray Lee

wasn’t smiling. I was, though. After a short ride in an experience machine,

physiology, biology, the cognitive sciences, cultural geography, pedagogy

capable of reasoning and reflection. So in affecting others, the rational

both humans and non-humans, because affect is defined as a flow of move-

Defining and clarifying what constitutes a ‘visceral’ response to some-

of affect and its consequent impact on thought, feeling and behaviour in

Affect, then, involves autobiography, but in a way that promotes

the production of affect as a result of autobiographical contributions.

sculpture – ‘establishes the experience itself as something like that of an

and sense-as-meaning, albeit in terms that replace reciprocal action with

affect production are prone to taking receptive precedence over whatever

Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, though not initially intended as objects