We first discussed the idea of giving the audience an Immersive Theatre experience when we decided it was going to be a Cabaret Club. When we initially came up with the idea we could have gone a lot further with it and made it a fully immersive experience. But it gives it a completely different process if you make it immersive, therefore the thought of having Immersive Theatre is still there by including characters that appear in the club, in the bar as pre-show entertainment, but it will be more as if they are all going to the same club, the public audience and the characters. The public don’t have to actively do anything, but we have found a way for them to be included without making decisions that impact on the show. We are basically casting them as people in the show, they will be coming to watch a show not at Conservatoire EAST but at the ‘Saints and Sinners’ Cabaret Club. Also Jimmy referees to the audience as club audience so there won’t be much of a fourth wall.
From watching ‘Working In The Theatre: Immersive Theatre’, Zach Morris CO-Artistic director, explains that Immersive theatre is ‘performance in which the audience really finds themselves within a world’, and that ‘there are no lines between the actor and the audience. They might be allowed to roam and explore the performance space as the performance happens around them’, I feel like we wont necessarily be giving an immersive experience to this scale but we will be giving the audience a feel of the ‘supernatural’ world the characters live in.
But according to ‘The Space’ what we plan to do is Immersive Theatre, by giving the audience a role to play in the show by casting them as the club audience and breaking the fourth wall, they explain that this is a fully immersive experience, they have said that ‘In an immersive theatre production, the audience in some way plays a role, whether that is the role of witness or the role of an actual character.’ I feel like there are several different ways to explain what Immersive Theatre is, but when I think of Immersive Theatre I imagine the audience being aloud to roam the performance space as the performance happens around them, similar to the way Zach Morris explains it. I think we will only be giving a fragment of an experience that a fully Immersive show would.
Referencing:
American Theatre Wing (2014) Working In The Theatre: Immersive Theatre, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C5i6vy3Lyw (Accessed: April 24th 17)
The Space. 2017. What is Immersive Theatre. [ONLINE] Available at: https://space.org.uk/2014/08/04/what-is-immersive-theatre/. [Accessed 24 April 2017].
Wordpress: Josh Ely 