Speculative Futures

Chapter 6 expands upon fundamental arguments put forth in the preceding chapters to further assert the importance of centering choreography within the discourse that surrounds the field of immersive theater studies. In addition, this chapter looks forward, speculating on the potential contributions of dance to the changing landscape of immersive performance, as strategies used to create participatory performance and experiential entertainment are increasingly adopted within commercial business sectors. The book concludes with a defense of dance as a broad field of study, and a call to properly acknowledge its contributions to the development of new cultural forms, including the innovation of immersive performance.

Elicitive Dramaturgy

Chapter 3 suggests that with the emergence of immersive productions, wherein spectators now constitute a component of performances, a novel form of dramaturgical thinking has developed to account for the spectator as a mobile entity with agency. Elicitive dramaturgy is proposed as a dance-driven theory and practice of composing immersive performance affords spectators agency while simultaneously managing their contributions through carefully designed choreographic parameters. Three specific considerations of elicitive dramaturgical thinking are identified and analyzed, including how practitioners attempt to manage the degree to which spectators participate, the possibility that spectators can participate outside of the structures designed for them, and lastly, the ethical concerns of choreographing participation.

Insider Dynamics and Extended Audiencing

Drawing on theories of kinesthetic empathy and research on embodied cognition, insider dynamics is proposed as a theory of embodied affective engagement that occurs for spectators during immersive performance in four distinct phases: complicity, porosity, contagion, and inclusion. Insider dynamics occurs as spectators access their kinesthesia, and these dynamics function to guide the decision-making of audiences as participants during performances. Insider dynamics also makes it possible for immersion to extend beyond the boundaries of performances through communities known as fandoms. Reflecting upon their experiences of participatory engagement in highly sensory, choreographic performances, fans transform those experiences into creative responses such as fan fiction and art through a recursive process identified by the author as extended audiencing.

Designing Differently with Dance

Chapter 2 brings to light the fact that although choreography has been overlooked in discussions of immersive performance, it has in fact long been invisibly operating as a strategy for immersing spectators in these productions. Drawing upon interviews with practitioners of immersive productions, the author examines how the compositional tools of dance are being adapted and combined with tools from other disciplines to create choreographic structures for both dancers and spectators. The chapter also considers the ethical and political implications of creating productions that seemingly offer spectators opportunities to perceive performances as singular and customized when in fact the choreography is functioning as a powerful mechanism to guide experience.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the main aim of the project—to uncover choreography’s role in immersive productions—and suggests that two specific challenges must be addressed in order to do so. The first challenge concerns the ways that dance and theater have long been maintained as separate academic disciplines and continue to be disconnected in the research surrounding contemporary performance, including participatory forms such as immersive theater. The second challenge when foregrounding choreography’s role in immersive productions is to address the questions about power and control. By recognizing the generative interplays within immersive productions—tensions between agency and control, between performer and spectator, between scriptedness and improvisation—we are able to understand choreography’s nuanced role as a primary mechanism for shaping audience participation to effectively engender immersion as an affective outcome.

Coauthorality

Chapter 5 introduces the idea of actuating to argue that once spectators are actuated, they can shift into states of being coauthorial, or coauthorality. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ theory of the “death of the author,” in which he relocates the authority for making meaning of a text from author to reader, this chapter ties into larger debates concerning coauthorship and the embodied participation of audiences in immersive performance. It is argued that choreographic structures compound spectators’ perceptions of coauthorship for two reasons: spectators’ direct physical engagement in improvisational scores and the interpretive flexibility of dance itself. In immersive productions, dance provides opportunities for audiences to conceive of their participation as generating and coauthoring content that contributes to the production.

Tracing Choreography

Chapter 1 contextualizes choreography as integral to, yet invisibilized within, immersive performance. The chapter's focus is the thematic concerns of choreography in Western dance history, specifically the intentionality with which it is created, the portability of its concepts outside of the realm of formal dance, and its resulting ubiquity across domains in the twenty-first century. Deployed by European aristocrats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a practice for reinforcing structures of ritual and power when assigning societal roles, choreography as a term emerged alongside the professionalization of dance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the mid-twentieth century, choreography became a tacitly borrowed resource for creators of physical theater. In the twenty-first century, choreography is seen as an expanded practice, having surged beyond the bounds of dance to the point that it can be used to organize the behavior of spectators such that they perceive themselves to be immersed.