# Immersive Theatre Structures

## Introduction

What is immersive theatre?
Immersive theatre differs from traditional theatre in that it creates performance experiences that invite the audience to participate or self-guide their own experience. Famous examples of immersive theatre experiences include Sleep No More and, more recently, the Van Gogh Experience.

Immersive Theatre Experiences can teach us a lot about how to bring audiences into real or imagined worlds and foster a sense of agency for one to craft their own learning experience. There are many different kinds and ways to create immersive experiences, but all immersive theatre experences must satify the following criteria:

1. Surround the audience with the world of the story. Performers and audience inhabit the same playing space.
2. Keep the audience engaged and active in the performance.
3. Include live performers telling a story.

Ideally, an immersive theatre production provides its audiences with individualized experiences, such that they will swap stories afterwards.

## Participation Structures
**Explored Space:** invites you into a complex set with the goal of uncovering a story. Unlike escape rooms, explored spaces do not have a win/loss component, but may use gating techniques and light puzzles to pace out the story or to reward the most curious.

**One on one:** Features one actor sharing an experience with one audience member. It’s typically short but very intense and intimate. It’s laser-focused on relationship. It can be a monologue, conversation, and/or activity. You’ll often encounter one-on-ones inside larger structures like dark ride or sandbox.

**One on one pipeline:** A series of one-on-one experiences strung together to make a larger experience. The pipeline runs the audience member through different vignettes or scenarios, sometimes seemingly unrelated—but they could be related more directly. It is pipelined to maximize through-put, with an actor or actors in charge of specific zones. On the participant side, it may not be just one individual, but a small group or team that journeys through the scenes together.

**Sandbox:** The world of the production is open access. Audiences can choose what to see and do within the space, acting as their own camera or protagonist. The primary activity is in the constant choice of where to go, so there is often a strong aspect of more-passive “witnessing” in the actor-audience relationship, although some sandboxes may allow audience choices to alter the story. To control the chaos inside a sandbox show, designers often choose a means of delineating the audience from the performers.

**Site-Specific:** Theatre that takes place in a non-theatrical venue, like a restaurant or hotel rooftop pool. Site-specific shows integrate with the unique features of the space, such that moving it to a different location would at least require new staging. Designers can stick to the venue’s architecture as-is or launch on an impressive build-out within it.

**Promenade:** Audiences witness different scenes in different locations in a linear order via a guide. The performers will maintain a fourth wall—ignoring the audience and maintaining a separate playing space.

**In the Round:** Audiences are seated along the perimeter of a playing space where all of the performance occurs. Actors have to perform to 360-degrees. The set in the middle will not have any walls.

**Interactive:** A performance that to varying degrees breaks the fourth wall and involves the audience. Audience members may be asked questions from their seats, pulled up on stage, or constantly participating in the story

## Story structures:

**Linear:** the story progresses from A to Z, once a performance.

**Cyclical:** the story progresses from A to Z back to A through Z again, cycling through the story 2 or 3 times. You will often hear about “reset”—the point when the story begins again—in a cyclical immersive. This style is common in sandbox shows, where audiences are not given any guidance through the story, and so have to fight harder to piece together what’s happening. It also has the advantage of offering you the chance to make a different choice (like to follow a different character) when the same departure-point reappears.

**Non-linear:** nonlinear shows go beyond presenting the story out of chronological order. Often audiences will experience the story in totally different orders from each other, thus allowing for simultaneous use of space instead of pipelining.

**Episodic:** like television, episodic immersives tell stand-alone-stories that culminate in a larger arc, encouraging audiences to catch every episode. Companies often mount one episode at a time, so the entire show requires multiple evenings, sometimes with months in-between.