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Productive Participants: Aesthetics and Politics in Immersive Theatre Adam Alston Submitted for the degree of PhD Royal Holloway, University of London July 2013 1 Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed:………………………………………… …… Date:………………..26/06/2013…………………... 2 Abstract This thesis looks at an aesthetics and politics of audience participation in immersive theatre. It asks what it means to be affected by immersive theatre as an audience member and what it means to perceive risk as a participating audience. Moreover, it considers how affect production and risk perception among participating audiences might be approached as aesthetic characteristics that are, at the same time, profoundly political. Inspired by, but departing from, the writing of political philosopher Jacques Rancière, the argument considers whether a politics of audience participation in immersive theatre might be derived from an aesthetic core, a core that emerges from affect production and risk perception and that fundamentally impacts on how participation takes place and how participants are to take their place. Immersive theatre is initially identified as a theatre style that surrounds participating audiences in a coherent aesthetic world. I ask, on the one hand, what might constitute a productive participant and how such a productive participant might contribute to the coherence of an aesthetic world. On the other hand, I ask how these productive participants might also be implicated in its rupture. Drawing especially on the broad disciplinary spectrum of affect studies and risk perception research, new terminology is introduced to frame productive participation based on narcissism and entrepreneurialism. Significantly, points of aesthetic and political alignment are charted between immersive theatre, the value system heralded under neoliberalism and the profitable production of experiences within a growing ‘experience economy’. Through analyses of work by Ray Lee, Lundahl & Seitl, Punchdrunk, Shunt, Theatre Delicatessen and Half Cut, this thesis suggests that immersive theatre’s most valuable political work might be derived from an aesthetics of audience participation that frustrates such points of alignment, unearthing into an affective zone the political consequences and compromises of productive participation. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments 9 Introduction 11 What is Immersive Theatre? 20 Positioning Participation 28 Drowning Audiences 29 Playing Audiences 32 Entrepreneurial Audiences 35 Exclusions 37 Theorising Participation 42 Aesthetics and Politics 43 Affect 45 Risk 48 Neoliberalism 51 Experience Economy 53 A Methodological Aside 54 Thesis Map 58 PART ONE AESTHETICS: AFFECT AND RISK Chapter One: The Production of Affect in Ray Lee’s Cold Storage 63 4 Affect in Philosophical Context: Descartes, Kant and Spinoza 66 Affect and Emotion 71 Affect and Emotion: Distinctions 72 Affect, Emotion and Autobiography 77 Finding Affect in The Cultural Politics of Emotion 79 Affect, Atmospheres and Aesthetics 82 The Production of Affect in Ray Lee’s Cold Storage 86 Narcissistic Participation 87 Possession and Kinesthesia 91 Affect and ESTHETIC DELECTATION 98 Affect and Authenticity 101 Conclusion: The Irruption of the Real 107 Chapter Two: The Perception of Risk in Lundahl & Seitl’s Rotating in a Room of Images 111 Pitch-Black Theatre 113 Risky Thinking, Risky Practise 118 Defining Risk 119 Practising Risk 123 Aesthetics of Risk 128 Affect and Risk in the Dark 137 The Production of Affect in Rotating in a Room of Images 138 The Mutuality of Affect Production and Risk Perception 141 5 Risk and the Real 143 Conclusion: Risk, Trust and Submission 147 PART TWO POLITICS: NEOLIBERALISM AND THE EXPERIENCE ECONOMY Chapter Three: Punchdrunk and the Neoliberal Ethos 156 Neoliberalism and the Neoliberal Ethos 160 What is Neoliberalism? 161 Neoliberal Values 168 Neoliberalism and Risk 174 Neoliberalism and Affect 176 The Masque of the Red Death and Neoliberal Value 183 Privacy 188 Individualism 190 Shifting Responsibility 193 Entrepreneurial Participation 195 Risk 197 Affect 199 Product Placement and the Unpaid Marketer in The Black Diamond 203 Conclusion: Punchdrunk and Exclusivity 213 Chapter Four: Shunt and the Experience Economy 216 6 What is the Experience Economy? 223 Shunt in the Experience Economy 235 The Shunt Lounge and the London Dungeon 235 Money and the Funhouse 242 The Architects as Postdramatic Theatre 247 Conclusion: Fun and Frustration 252 PART THREE AESTHETICS AND POLITICS Chapter Five: Transaction in the Theatre Marketplace 259 Rancière 267 Politics and the Police 269 Aesthetics and the Distribution of the Sensible 272 Aesthetics and Politics 274 Political Zones 277 Dissensus 280 Rancière Revisited 283 Recession, Recession, Recession: Disrupting Austerity 287 Pop-up Theatre 291 Pop-up Theatre as Interstice 295 Aesthetics and Politics in Half Cut’s Half Cut 299 Conclusion: Aesthetic Disjuncture 307 7 Conclusion 312 Works Cited 332 8 Acknowledgments I would like to express a sincere note of gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research (Studentship Award Number: AH/I020012/1). I am indebted to my PhD supervisor, Sophie Nield, not just for her critical and scholarly support, but for inspiring conversation, insight and frank advice. Thank you also to Dan Rebellato, whose thoughtful engagement, as an advisor, with various iterations of this thesis over the past three years has been extremely valuable. Thank you to all the directors, producers, curators, associate artists, performers, administrators, photographers and audiences who have given up their resources and time for interviews and dialogue over the course of this research. Special thanks must go to: Evan Cobb of Scorched the Snake; Ray Lee; Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl; David Jubb of the Battersea Arts Centre; Steph Allen, Katy Balfour and Colin Nightingale of Punchdrunk; Mischa Twitchin and Susanne Dietz of Shunt; Mark Oakley of Merlin Entertainments; Jessica Brewster and Roland Smith of Theatre Delicatessen; and Dan Ball and Joe Iredale of Half Cut. It has been a pleasure to be based in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Thank you to the Research Committee for additional funding. The numerous staff and postgraduate students at RHUL are an inspiration and thank you for keeping me on my toes – but thank you especially to Helen Nicholson, Chris Megson, David Wiles and Liam Jarvis. I would also like to thank the innumerable colleagues and friends, both inside and outside of the University of London, who have had a profound impact on this thesis. Special 9 mention must go to: Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom; Daniel Oliver; Louise Owen; Gareth White; and the TaPRA Performance, Identity and Community working group. Finally, a special note of thanks goes to my family – Jim, Marion and John – for their trust, persevering interest and support. Thank you also to a surrogate family, of sorts – Peter, Shelley and Tom – for hospitality, scepticism and bemusement. And thank you to Hannah, for the perfect balance between affirmation and a raised eyebrow. 10 Introduction 8 February 2013. Winter Storm Nemo was in full swing over New York City and my coat had turned from grey to white under the weight of a thick blanket of falling snow. I knew where I needed to be – 530 West 27th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues – but the blizzard made it difficult to see much beyond a couple of meters. The refuge of Ovest Pizzoteca & Bar provided warm and welcome respite. On the wall by the bar were three white, beaked masks with large, hollowed out eyes. I had seen these before and the sign was encouraging. These were the trademark masks given to audiences in Sleep No More (2011-), the first international commercial venture of the British theatre company, Punchdrunk, reviving a 2003 London premiere and a revisited 2009-10 run in Boston. The performance, at the time of writing, is still running in New York thanks to co-production with the United States production company, Emursive. With runs extending every few months, the show demonstrates that most valuable of theatre ambitions: persistence. Punchdrunk have become synonymous with a kind of theatre that has come to be referred to, especially in the United Kingdom and the US, as immersive theatre. This is a theatre style in which participating audiences enter the world of a coherent aesthetic space that surrounds them fully, usually sharing the space with at least one actor. In Punchdrunk’s particular breed of large-scale immersive theatre, audiences are mostly free to move around typically vast spaces and tend to be masked with something like the masks that were hanging on the wall in front of me at Ovest Pizzoteca. 11 Pointing to the masks, I asked the barman if the venue was nearby. It was only meters away, so I took the liberty of delaying exposure to Nemo and asked him if he had been to Sleep No More. He called over his colleague, who had been twice. ‘I’m outgoing’, said the colleague. ‘It suits me. Others get a bit freaked out by it. It asks too much of them’. When I mentioned that I had flown from London on a research visit to see the show he seemed surprised, at first. But, after a pause, he asked if I had heard of the repeat attenders. These ‘superfans’ of the performance incessantly attend tens of times, sometimes twice a night thanks to an additional late night slot on Friday and Saturday evenings. At the time I was in email correspondence with one of them. His name is Evan Cobb, a.k.a Scorched the Snake and author of the blog, They Have Scorched the Snake… but not killed it, bitches. As of 29 November 2012, Cobb had attended the performance forty one times… and counting: a performance, incidentally, that costs between $75 and $105. I was already familiar with Punchdrunk’s work and had formed ideas as to what it might be that encourages audiences to attend performances like Sleep No More many times over.

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