Navigating Neverland and Wonderland: Audience as Spect-Character

According to W. B. Worthen, Sleep No More "immerses its audiences in a paradoxical practice: we write our individualized plotlines in our own movements, but are constructed within the spectacle as realist voyeurs, watchers, and readers, not agents."¹ This may be true for productions like Punchdrunk's Sleep No More or Third Rail Projects' Grand Paradise, in which audience members are primarily followers who share physical space with actors. This element of on-the-sidelines participation can be appealing, as audience members are often voyeuristic witnesses to taboo activities. As the level of participation increases, through one-on-one interactions, for example, audience members may feel their status move from watcher to agent. Much scholarship has questioned audience agency in immersive productions. In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop points to "the contradictions between intention and reception, agency and manipulation" as "central problems in the contemporary discourse of participation," challenging the idea that audience participation is equivalent to choice, empowerment, or free will on the part of the audience member.² Keren Zaiontz argues that in immersive and one-on-one performance, "consumptive engagement produces a narcissistic spectatorship," one that is "self-managed."³ The complicated nature of participation in these types of experiences has prompted more recent immersive productions to recontextualize and renegotiate the place of the audience member as participant.

Here, I use two case studies to elucidate how a recontextualized audience participatory element was devised: first, in An Awfully Big Adventure (2016) at Bridgewater State University (Bridgewater, Massachusetts) and, again, in Alice in Wonderland (2017) at Plimoth Plantation (Plymouth, Massachusetts). As the conceiver and director of these two productions, I will discuss the aims of the production team, our creative process, and my observations, with a focus on the "spect-character," my terminology for the audience member. In doing so, I propose one way to consider the audience-actor relationship and hope to add to the discourse around participation in immersive experiences.

The scope and limitations of this study should be noted here. As conceiver and director of both An Awfully Big Adventure and Alice in Wonderland, I was present throughout the entire process: conducting research, attending production meetings, devising/creating the script with student collaborators, attending all rehearsals and performances, and conducting interviews with actors and audience members. My discussion of each process describes how the production team set out to create actor-audience interactions in the context of multiple story lines and considers the role of the audience member from the perspective of the creators. The methodology I used in assessing the outcomes of audience experience unfolded over the course of the creative process, through direct observation of actor-audience interactions, through feedback from audiences, performers, and technical staff, and through personal experience. With this methodology, I follow Gomme in "embrac[ing] the subjective account as our principal mode of access to spectator experience."⁴ My data, of course, does not amount to a large-enough sample to draw conclusions about the nature of the "spect-character" in general. Further research would need to be undertaken to determine whether the characteristics of the "spect-character" are evident across a wider sample of productions and whether such a sample would result in a complete definition of "spect-character" in immersive performance.

Spect-Character

Both An Awfully Big Adventure and Alice in Wonderland fit Gareth White's working definition of immersive experiences as ones that include "dialogue with inrole facilitators; surrendering oneself to an experimental process; mak[ing] use of a physical interior, engag[ing] the whole body of the spectator/participant, and creat[ing] an ambiguous situation whereby it is unclear whether the work is happening around, to, or within the spectator/participant who is invited to explore points of view in relation to the performance and setting. The implication of the term 'immersive' is that it has a special capacity to create deep involvement and commitment from the audience."⁵ These experiences created multilayered identities for participating individuals who moved beyond spectators, voyeurs, and the concepts of Boal's "spect-actor," or Brecht's distanced bystander, to become emotionally...