Immersion and the Spectator

Margaret Werry, Bryan Schmidt

Theatre Journal, Volume 66, Number 3, October 2014, pp. 467-479 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2014.0085

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/562096

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 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 467

Review essay

Immersion and the Spectator

Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. By

Claire Bishop. London: Verso, 2012; pp. 390.

Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated. By Gabriella Gi-
annachi and Nick Kaye. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011; pp. 240.

Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Perfor-

mance. By Josephine Machon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. 344.

Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning. By Scott

Magelssen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014; pp. 264.

Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. By

Lauren Rabinovitz. Film and Culture series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012; pp. 256.

Spectacle Culture and American Identity, 1815–1940. By Susan Tenneriello. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; pp. 332.

Margaret Werry is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, in the Department of Theatre
Arts and Dance. Her recent book, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race
in New Zealand (2011) examines the relationship among tourism, performance, indigenous politics,
and (neo)liberal statehood at the turn of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first. She has
published on this topic and others—critical pedagogy, spatial theory, photographic criticism, multimedia
performance, museums, and cultural policy—in a range of US and international journals. Her current
research pursues two projects: one on the history of Oceanic performance, indigenous historiography, and
early intimations of global indigenous identity; and the other on the place (and performance) of human
remains in contemporary museums.

Bryan Schmidt is a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Theatre Historiography program.
He holds an MA in theatre studies from Florida State University. His primary research focuses on
the intersection of spectacle, race, and transnationalism in electronic dance-music subcultures. His
work has been published in TDR.

Theatre Journal 66 (2014) 467–479 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

468 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

It was Dennis Kennedy’s sensible premise in The Spectator and the Spectacle that there is
little one can say about spectatorship in general.1 Audiences are notoriously slippery en-
tities: impossible to generalize about, methodologically difficult to access or analyze. Yet
genres, media, and movements frequently define themselves by the practices of specta-
torship they invite. The recent spate of high-profile immersive performance events, such
as Deborah Warner’s The Angel Project, Argentinian export Fuerza Bruta, or Punchdrunk’s
megahit Sleep No More, is no exception. Their practitioners and pundits make grand, often
epochal claims about the interactive, embodied, mediated yet hyper-present, affectively
rich, and/or environmentally embedded mode of spectatorship that these events demand,
suggesting that it engages the audience as coauthors—aesthetically, socially, and even po-
litically. Behind this idealized spectator lies its critiqued counterpart: the spectator as static
witness and obedient consumer, a socially disembodied, ideologically and physically pas-
sive receiver of visual and aural messages. This latter is a mythic figure, of course, and
one with a long history. This history begins with the modern bourgeois theatregoer against
which avant-gardists have railed for over a century; continues with the spectral victim of
Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, paralyzed in the face of capital’s domination of our image-
world; and culminates in the contemporary denizen of a globalized information economy,
supposedly alienated and isolated from “true” human contact by the devices that mediate
his/her incessant communication.2 Even while acknowledging that so-called traditional
theatre spectatorship is a more complex, varied experience than this characterization sug-
gests, immersive theatre’s advocates place the practice on the redemptive cutting edge of
a new paradigm of audience experience.
Here, we bring together a suite of books that examine immersive theatre and its cognates
(participatory art, performance in virtual and mixed-reality environments, simming, and
spectacle) to provide more theoretically persuasive arguments for the significance of im-
mersion as a mode of engagement with and within performance. Immersive spectatorship
is not new: Claire Bishop (Artificial Hells) and Josephine Machon (Immersive Theatres) both
locate immersive performance and participatory art in long and rich genealogies that include
Futurism, the mass performances of revolutionary Russia, Happenings, interactive events
by The Performance Group and Living Theatre, and the site-specific theatre of the likes of
Griselda Gambaro; Susan Tenneriello (Spectacle Culture and American Identity) and Lauren
Rabinovitz (Electric Dreamland), meanwhile, analyze amusement-park rides, panoramas,
landscape paintings, world’s fair displays, and early cinema as immersive technologies
through which modernity took hold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Immersive
spectatorship is not unique to theatre, nor even to artistic innovation: like Bishop’s, Gabri-
ella Giannachi and Nick Kaye’s examples in their book Performing Presence belong largely
to the art world, the technology lab, or the field of social activism, while Scott Magelssen
(Simming) examines immersive simulations in tourism, medical and military training, and
historical scenarios. As these examples suggest, immersive spectatorship is not necessar-
ily politically radical or even progressive; it has been and continues to be harnessed to
projects of nationalism, neoliberalism, and historical revision. Immersivity operates not so
much as a paradigm or genre, but as a mode: a set of aesthetic practices, techniques, and

1 
Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
2 
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; reprint, Brooklyn, NY: Zone
Books, 1994).
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 469

sensibilities, “a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness” among media, contexts,

and institutions, and across time.3
Together, these books argue that the significance of immersion as a mode of spectator-
ship lies not in its formal novelty, uniqueness, or political efficacy; rather, its recent and
growing currency provides new ways of thinking about many of the fundamental ques-
tions that concern theatre scholars interested in the experiential politics of performance:
What is the distinction between actor and audience member, and what are the political
stakes of drawing that line? If audiences can be said, or made, to act, then what else in
the performance scenario acts: the milieu, the scenic or spatial technologies, the spectacle
itself? What may be gained from considering the full sensorium we bring to spectatorship,
beyond sight and hearing: haptics, proxemics, smell, the affective dimensions of perfor-
mance experience? What is the relationship between the spaces of art and the everyday,
between performance and life? What, ultimately, is performative presence? What is its
link to embodiment, to liveness? How has what we understand as presence changed now
that the thorough integration of media into performance has pushed us beyond the post-
Derridean non/opposition of the live and the recorded? If popular culture mimes, mines,
or even preempts the formal innovations of theatre, then what is the ethical role of artistic
autonomy and aesthetic experience? Finally, and most trenchantly: How is performance ef-
fective? Does greater imaginative or corporeal engagement for the spectator lead to greater
activism and political commitment? Or does it lead, on the contrary, to a more powerful,
pedagogical means of interpellating subjects into the social, political, or economic regimes
of the (modern or neoliberal) moment?
Machon, an exception among the authors we examine here, is a professed missionary
for immersion. Her project in Immersive Theatres is to pay homage to what she sees as
an emergent theatrical movement, critically defining it in order to make it accessible to
scholarly analysis and classroom discussion. The book offers transcripts of in-depth (often
very illuminating) interviews with the featured artists, sections profiling those artists and
companies and their key productions, and lists of resources (many web-based) for further
exploration. At its critical core, three chapters define immersive theatre by theorizing its
unifying feature: immersion as a mode of performance experience. Machon breaks down
the concept into three categories: immersion as absorption (being totally engrossed in the ac-
tion presented); immersion as transportation (feeling as if you have traveled to or inhabited
another space, both imaginatively and physically); and total immersion, a combination of
the former two that leads to the audience’s uncanny recognition of their own praesance—
their sensory state of being and feeling in the experience. Immersive theatre proper, she
proposes, can be defined as interdisciplinary performance that incorporates the audience
in the playing area, interacting with the performers, inhabiting an imaginary world that
is realized in sensual dimensions that reach beyond the merely visual to the olfactory,
haptic, sonorous. These “visceral-virtual” worlds establish their own temporality, spatial-
ity, and choreography, inspired by and responsive to actual sites and ecologies; the audi-
ence’s experience of temporarily inhabiting them blurs the boundaries between spectator
and event, reality and fiction, life and art (68). Immersive theatre, Machon argues, causes
a shift in the register of experience akin to being underwater; it results in a kind of imma-
nent aliveness (she invokes Deleuze) that is also a form of awareness of one’s own sensual

3 
Henry James, qtd. in Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas in Black and White from Uncle Tom
to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.
470 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

knowing, of other bodies, and of space: “In this way, immersive theatres can establish links
across sensation, perception, emotion, and moral reasoning in form and content” (142).
This theoretical paradigm usefully illustrates the versatility of immersion as a concept: at
once, it points towards the spectator’s reoriented relation to space, challenges the stabil-
ity of semiotic readings of performance, and suggests the political potential of changing
one’s mode of vision.
Machon is aware of the risks posed by defining a theatrical practice that is professedly
experimental, exploratory, and resistant to categorization. She grounds her conclusions
about immersive theatre in statements by the artists she has selected as representatives of
this movement, and in references to (if not, sadly, thick descriptions of) their work. The
result is a certain circularity in her argumentation, and a parochialism: the companies she
examines (including Artangel, Punchdrunk, Back to Back Theatre, Nimble Fish, Coney, and
dreamthinkspeak) are limited to a very specific echelon of the largely British (and almost
entirely white) theatre scene. In this, she reveals her project as one of genre-making rather
than a critical or historicized interrogation of immersivity. If her three theory chapters seem
sometimes to stretch the definition of immersion so wide that it lacks specificity, they also
reveal her concern with differentiating immersivity’s true prophets from its pretenders.
For Machon, total immersion is partly an aesthetic valuation—one that distinguishes the
potency and efficacy of truly immersive theatre from otherwise “traditional” theatre that
might, for example, merely explore audience participation or site-specificity.
Machon enforces other limits also and reveals some common notions about immersive
audience experience that get thoroughly troubled in the publications we examine below.
Although she acknowledges the kinship of immersive theatre with popular virtual-tourism
attractions, omni-theatres, video-gaming, and virtual-reality environments, Machon insists
on differentiating between popular and artistic manifestations of immersion. Underpinning
this conviction is her suggestion that theatre’s immersive turn is a curative response to
the modern/postmodern condition of technological alienation and dislocation—a spiritual
experience in a secular age. Throughout the volume, she professes faith in the transforma-
tive, restorative potential of immersivity to offer a fuller form of experience, generating
communitas among co-present, percipient, sentient, interacting bodies engaged in acts of
collective and individual imagination. In a somewhat selective uptake of Jacques Rancière’s
The Emancipated Spectator and Umberto Eco’s open works concept, Machon argues that by
enfranchising the audience-community as agents of interpretation and creation, immersive
theatre is necessarily democratizing.4
Significantly, the mode of spectatorship that Machon describes—emphasizing aware-
ness of space, multimedia technologies, co-presence between performers and spectators
(and among spectators themselves), attention to a range of bodily senses, and openness
to multiple forms of meaning-making—is entangled with another historical process of
democratization: the transformation and expansion of citizenship wrought by the onset
of US industrial, urban modernity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
including the attendant sedimentation of liberalism’s ideological constraints. Tenneriello,
in Spectacle Culture and American Identity, and Rabinovitz, in Electric Dreamland, argue that
to understand this shift, one must attend to paratheatrical sites of popular culture that fa-
miliarized the population with new industrial technologies, instituted novel practices of

4 
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009); Umberto Eco,
Opera Aperta, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 471

spectatorship and leisure consumption corresponding with the regime of modernity, and
disciplined bodies to function in this new environment. Cultural historians have character-
ized entertainment of this era as the ascendance of spectacle: an age of the “world picture”
in which a transcendent, objectivist gaze anchored an ethos of technological and imperial
mastery newly available to a mass population. Instead of following this argument of spec-
tatorial distanciation, Tenneriello and Rabinovitz focus on many of the same sites (amuse-
ment parks, spectacular pageantry, panoramas, world’s fairs, and landscape art) to argue
that these attractions achieved their force by merging sensorial stimuli in a multimedia
performative event that encompassed the spectator three-dimensionally—a process that
might be described as immersive.
Rabinovitz focuses on a classic icon of modernity: the amusement park. While previous
studies have drawn a link between the rise of amusement parks in the United States and
the introduction of industrial technologies to a mass public, she argues that the interpel-
lating power of amusement parks lies not in their industrially produced and electrically
powered architecture, but in their ability to engage haptically with the body, “in their sen-
sory overstimulation—their bombardment and exaggeration of sight, sound, and kinesthe-
sia” (24). Fusing the emergent visual apparatus of film with the sensory appeals of theme
rides and other paratheatrical attractions, the parks ushered participants into modernity,
quelling fears of new technology and industrialized living conditions by tooling them to
the interests of leisure and pleasure. The immersive experiences offered by such parks,
Rabinovitz claims, helped install a nationalized, corporate consumer culture dominated
by manufacturing, primarily by establishing its prevailing “perceptual conditions” (2): an
openness to bodily shocks, spatial disorientation, and nervous hyper-stimulation, together
with heightened physical self-awareness (34).
Chapters examine the swift rise and ubiquity of the US amusement park at the turn of
the twentieth century, the range of performance forms they hosted, and the role of post-
cards as a visual communication technology that, like cinema, disseminated both knowl-
edge about and the virtual experience of the parks. At the book’s center, anchoring many
of its key arguments about spectatorship, embodiment, cinema, and modernity, is a chapter
on Hale’s Tours of the World—an immersive global franchise that had patrons sitting in
rattling railcars, assaulted by rushing air, engine din, and smoke as they traveled by film
to both exotic and familiar locales. These chapters are delicately balanced in their claims:
immersive entertainments seemed at times to offer a fantasy world of freedom, release,
and transgression of bodily and gendered norms; but they also encouraged a horizontal
gaze that conditioned subjects to accept and engage in surveillance. If they leveled certain
social differences, they entrenched others, particularly racial distinctions. The book culmi-
nates in an epilogue that examines the opening of Disneyland, the apotheosis of immer-
sive simulation, and simultaneously a sanitized, tamed repetition of a template developed
decades before. Rabinovitz takes this as an indication of how fully the park’s spectatorial
modalities came to define modern US experience, even as its utopic or transgressive pos-
sibilities were foreclosed.
Rabinovitz’s commitment to material context provides an illuminating rejoinder to work
on contemporary immersion, which tends to isolate its examples spatially, socially, and
historically (excepting the explicitly site-specific). For example, she considers the location
of these virtual environments at the geographical margins of US cities, a strategy that both
expanded urban infrastructure and inducted rural subjects into the “metropolitan condition”
(18). Furthermore, it did so by democratizing the subject sensibility of tourism, offering
472 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

“new views of the world” while accustoming all patrons to the visual rewards, ideological
prerogatives, and physical experience of travel (64). More generally, Rabinovitz’s effort to
place immersive attractions within a continuum of performance genres offered at amuse-
ment parks—vaudeville, spectacular melodrama, pyrotechnical disaster shows, panoramas,
plantation shows, illustrated lectures, and ethnological exhibits—invites theatre historians
to reconsider their approaches to spectatorship in nineteenth-century popular culture. The
theoretical underpinnings here are not new: Rabinovitz follows faithfully from Jonathan
Crary’s work on modern vision and Tom Gunning’s equally influential theorization of
the “cinema of attractions” in questioning the assumption that spectacular representation
entailed the engagement of a detached subject with an externalized, illusionistic world.5
But her analysis of the “reality effect” of these modern cultural forms is illuminating for
scholars of immersion: they relied, she argues, upon sensual assault as “a means for inte-
grating or smoothing over the virtual space of visual observation and the physical space
of bodily cognition” (36), offering virtual participation as a “prophylactic against a world
that heralded an increasing sense of disembodiment” (99).
Tenneriello, like Rabinovitz, focuses on this combination of multisensory technologies
in the development of the modern US subject, although from a different angle; whereas
Rabinovitz examines the impact of technological innovations in entertainment on the per-
ceptual experience of US citizenry, Tenneriello examines how the development of spatial-
izing and haptic techniques impacted the perception of the seemingly fixed visual economy
of “American” land itself. She tracks, for example, the development of painted landscape
panoramas, multimedia performances, exhibition settings, and artfully staged museum di-
oramas, noting how these spectacles “distributed a societal lexicon suggesting an ongoing
discourse with the landscape” (2). This, she claims, assisted westward expansionism by
reinforcing notions of Manifest Destiny and encompassing land and landscape in regimes
of economic value. Central to her argument is the question of “how scenic spectacles pass
back and forth fitfully from the physical phenomena of land to mythology, fantasy, illu-
sion, or reality . . . defining the meaning of the word America” (3).
Tenneriello illustrates the phenomenological process that makes the supposed fixity
of nature and land discursively malleable through immersive visual media. Taking, for
example, the panorama that circumscribes the Capitol rotunda, her analysis extends be-
yond the representation’s visual narrative to how the medium itself communicates. She
describes how visitors become immersed in a series of scenes depicting touchstones of US
history framed through the Northern victories in the Civil War and through US industri-
alism, an arc that projects the rise of industry, the steady genocide of Native Americans,
and a narrative of “progress” from east to west and north to south. Because the rotunda’s
panorama is painted in episodes that unify a temporal series of events, she argues, the act
of walking through it activates the narrative corporeally, inscribing how “transgression
through space propels the sense of movement toward a share in shaping future destiny”
(35; emphasis in original).
Fusing a performance perspective (and its emphasis on the messy openness of real-time
bodily engagement) with careful art-historical analysis (and its reliance upon static signi-
fication and narrativity), Tenneriello describes the evolution of what she calls “spectacle

5 
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992); Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-
Garde,” Wide Angle 8, nos. 3–4 (1986): 63–70.
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 473

presence”: a defining mode of American realism that operates through the “interface of
social space and sensory mediums: static, live, and virtual” (196), rendering spectatorial en-
counters with panoramas, world’s fairs, and dioramas inherently performative and motile.
Characterizing such attractions as proto-filmic technologies (deploying terminology like
“motion effects,” “cross-cuts,” “visual montage,” and “multimedia performance”) allows
her to consider how transformations in spectatorship propelled expansionism and indus-
trialism throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sowing a mythology of
the land that was both discursive and experiential. Tenneriello names immersion as a key
factor in the “dramatic formula” of these spectacles, noting that it helped to impart what
Allison Griffiths refers to as a feeling of “visual splendor” to the triangulation of space,
illusion, and presence (55).6
Tenneriello follows her discussion of static panoramas with chapters on moving panora-
mas, Imre Kiralfy’s historical, site-specific spectacular dramas, and large-scale exhibitions
and world’s fairs like the Philadelphia Centennial of 1873, which marked a major shift by
moving “from single building exhibition sites to immersive grounds in which visitors moved
through a self-reflecting, dynamic, and ever changing landscape” (123). This immersive
ground, she argues, became a site for the “active diplomacy of geopolitical circumstanc-
es,” performed by the spectator as she/he navigated through imagined regional spaces,
which brought industry, technology, art, and science to signify progress and social good.
This “motivated public attraction to discriminate among cultural powers within compet-
ing domains of economic growth and geopolitical influence” (128), and the triangulation
of multiple large-scale exhibitions in geographically disparate areas like Philadelphia, San
Francisco, and New Orleans helped establish US national presence on a global economic
playing field. Tenneriello’s idiosyncratic prose style often makes it difficult to understand
precisely the intervention she seeks to make, but read alongside Rabinovitz’s volume, the
work illustrates how a performance perspective can reframe the historical archive of spec-
tacle. Together, they illuminate a cluster of modernizing technologies that prepared audi-
ences for the immersive mode of contemporary mediatized reality, and link this to the larger
frame of political economy and the development of the modern Euro-American subject.
In a similar vein, Magelssen’s Simming considers how immersive technologies continue
to be utilized in contemporary re-performances of history and the political projects to-
wards which they participate. He begins, for instance, with a provocative description of
a simulation at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in which youths can “act” as the
former president in a constructed scenario of the 1983 Grenada crisis. Moving through
three-dimensional sets of the Oval Office and Situation Room, students get briefed on the
circumstances of the crisis, make decisions about the proper course of action, and then
learn the consequences of those decisions. Immersed in this atmosphere, participants get
prodded towards the conclusion that Reagan’s actions regarding Grenada were wholly
justified and the only proper course of action, and this conclusion gets reinforced through
these students’ corporeal and affective engagement during the simulation. This vignette—
a prelude to more substantial analyses covering embodied simulations like Underground
Railroad journeys or Civil War embalming operations—illustrates the efficacy of immersion
as a means of connecting with history in a contemporary moment, but also demonstrates
how contemporary ideologues make use of this technology.

6 
Allison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
474 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

For Magelssen, simming signifies “a bounded action that bears performative reference
to another action, which is or stands to become more legitimate or weighty in another
time and context” (4). As he notes, such a definition risks sliding into the open-endedness
of theoretical concepts like Butler’s performativity (and this suggests the kinship between
simming and questions of performance’s ontology), and so he focuses his study on “live,
three-dimensional, immersive environments in which spectator-participants engage in the
intentionally simulated production of some aspect of real or imagined society, recognized
as such by all parties” and that “include some notion of pedagogy or social change” (5).
While part of the introduction theorizes the manifold forms that simulations take, the
book’s main thrust is to examine case studies in great detail in order to understand their
efficacy and politics. Central to this analysis is the author’s decision to personally par-
ticipate in each of the simulations he examines, which allows him to attend to his own
corporeal and affective engagement as a way of analyzing the mode of spectatorship that
such performances demand. While risky in its reliance upon the author’s subjective ex-
perience to make larger theoretical claims about reception, such work uncovers valuable
dimensions of immersive simulations that elude discursive or semiotic readings. Magels-
sen deftly avoids the pitfalls of his methodology, creating thick descriptions of his objects
of study that scaffold into solid arguments about the ability of simulations to powerfully
invoke the past, bear witness to the present, and reimagine the future.
Ultimately, what undergirds Magelssen’s work is a search for ways that performance can
be used as an ethical pedagogical tool, an investigation of ways to connect the “self” and
the “other” in the present and across time. In Conner Prairie’s “Follow the North Star,” for
instance, participants play the part of nineteenth-century slaves escaping to the North and
must travel through a cold, dark, physically uncomfortable environment while participat-
ing in a theatrical scenario. Magelssen correctly observes that this experience in no way
resembles the terror, pain, and violence of an actual journey to freedom, but he points out
that “there is a certain power to be found in [the participant’s] discomfort—often it is only
when one’s realm of comfort is perturbed that thinking can take place” (43). He thus sees
the participatory nature of immersive simulation as potentially useful in creating ethical
engagements that challenge participants to encounter “inaccessible” others not just imagi-
natively, but materially and corporeally. Another chapter looks at “aging simulation suits”
that offer young participants the opportunity to temporarily assume the bodied experience
of the elderly by selectively inhibiting certain physical abilities like sight, movement, and
hearing. Magelssen finds these particular simulations ultimately ineffective for (and pos-
sibly counterproductive to) the suit developers’ stated goal of generating empathy for the
elderly, but he shows that such experiments illustrate a faith in immersive engagements
to perform a kind of presencing between subjects separated by gulfs of time, experience,
or ability. This is the productive power of simming, but also its limitation: while purport-
ing to physically and affectively bring one subject into the presence of its perceived other,
simming gets bound up with the social conventions and political desires of its producers
(while remaining open to bounded improvisations by participants) that might just as eas-
ily widen the gap between them.
The notion of presence forms a central component to discussions of immersion, dis-
cussed in different ways by Magelssen, Tenneriello, and Machon alike. While not all of
the performance analyzed in Giannachi and Kaye’s Performing Presence could be described
as immersive, their study rigorously theorizes the often unexamined terms that dominate
the discussion of immersive spectatorship—liveness, embodiment, reality, simulation, site,
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 475

sense, awareness—through an inquiry into presence, the term to which these others are
all anchored. The volume grew from a UK AHRC-funded research project that operated
among the University of Exeter, University College London, and Stanford University be-
tween 2005 and 2009, bringing together new media scholars and practitioners, computer
scientists, performers, performance theorists, artists, and archaeologists. Giannachi and
Kaye’s argument addresses debates in technology and communications studies about the
“import and impact of technological mediations on social and personal encounter” (2) in
the information age, insisting that the mechanisms of representation need to remain central
to such inquiry and that contemporary artwork offers the best laboratory for pursuing it.
For the authors, these are open questions to be investigated through nuanced performance
analysis and empirical experiment, not foregone conclusions about modern alienation,
distanciation, and so on.
The book contains few grand claims and a great deal of granular theoretical attention
to the experience and dynamics of presence. Presence, they propose, is not an absolute or
static quality of a performer that gets displaced, deferred, or elided in mediation and repre-
sentation (the post-Derridean position), but must be understood as an effect or experience
produced in the dynamic, tensive, and always-mediated encounter between perceiver and
perceived, self and other; presence is, in short, “societal and thus cultural,” and ultimately
ethical (5). Presence’s immanence, one’s sense of being in the “here and now,” emerges
from an ecology, a network of processual positionings in time and space in relation to pasts,
futures, elsewheres, and others. The work the authors examine manipulates this process
of positioning and perception, leading to moments of uncanny awareness, fascination, or
intense reflexivity about the role of mediation in our engagement with social reality.
Their approach is broadly phenomenological, focusing on precise descriptions of how,
where, and when presence (be it of material or virtual entities) is sensed in performance
encounters—by both performers and spectators. They conduct exhaustive analyses of their
collaborators’ work in the “Performing Presence” project: artists, ensembles, and research
collectives whose productions cross the boundaries among performance or visual art, per-
vasive gaming, multimedia theatre, virtual and mixed reality, and pure experimentation in
all these forms. Many of Giannachi and Kaye’s objects of analysis are already well-known
in the field of performance art, including the early video experiments of Gary Hill, the
hybrid digital/“real” performances and installations of Blast Theory in collaboration with
Mixed Reality Laboratory, or the networked, multimedia performances of The Builder’s
Association. Others are more familiar from other disciplinary conversations; using pres-
ence as an analytical lens, the authors hone in on these artists’ innovative investigations of
temporality, simulation, and the ontology of performance. For example, in examining Lynn
Hershman Leeson’s Roberta Breitmore and Hotel Dante projects from the 1970s—works more
often examined from the perspective of feminist performance—they concentrate on how
the viewer gets positioned as an animating agent whose witnessing and trace-gathering
enacts the virtual scenario’s integration into the fabric of the everyday. Life Squared, cre-
ated in the mid-2000s using the virtual interface of the game Second Life, simulated and
re-performed these two works, giving Giannachi and Kaye a chance to consider the ques-
tion of archival presence. They examine such works in exemplary detail, often incorporat-
ing interviews with the artists, which provokes readers to dwell on the liminality between
the virtual and real in these performances.
It is easy to get lost in the thickets of these readings, but persist and the take-aways sur-
prisingly and significantly invert many of the presumptions that frame studies of immer-
476 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

sive theatre and performance. A definition of immersion/presence inherited from gam-

ing and technology studies—“the extent to which interface technology blots out sensory
input from the real world to replace it with input from a virtual world”—for example,
often tacitly informs the practice and theory of immersive theatre (see Machon’s work as
well).7 Giannachi and Kaye’s findings, however, suggest that it is not the completeness or
impermeability of a simulacrum that lends a heightened sense of presence; instead, this
sense arises from the play across the boundaries of the real and virtual environments and
of living and simulated characters, where differences, slippages, and displacements trou-
ble the terms of that reality at the level of subjectivity itself. The authors connect presence
to liminal states, to “acts between the live, the mediated and simulated” (25; emphasis in
original). Their conclusions about the role of live embodiment in immersion are similarly
insightful: while other authors posit that the popularity of immersive theatre heralds a
recommitment to the promise of live, fleshy, human performance in a mediated age, Gi-
annachi and Kaye claim that “it is in the dematerialization of the performing body . . . that
presence is resurgent in these various movements and events: as a theme, a question, and
as an aesthetic practice” (20).
In Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop presses deeply into the related problems of efficacy and
audience agency. The book is a rich, bracing discussion not of immersive theatre per se, but
of participatory art, which Bishop defines as when “people constitute the central artistic
medium and material, in the manner of theatre and performance” (2). Like immersive the-
atre practitioners, participatory artists seek to produce situations rather than objects, and
embrace the audience as co-producers or active participants. While the work she discusses
is largely not narrative-based and does not seek to immerse its participants in an imaginary
world, she notes that participatory art’s proponents also make familiar claims about the
coauthorship it offers its audiences: that it will “restore and realize a communal, collec-
tive space of shared social engagement,” opposed to capitalism and its associated regime
of spectacle (275). Bishop offers a thoroughgoing critique of such claims and the polarities
around which this discourse of betterment has been arrayed in the art world. In focusing
on social value and efficacy, she argues, critics and curators have neglected to engage par-
ticipatory art critically as art—an autonomous realm of experience and a singular thing that
mediates between the artist-provocateurs and the larger publics that their work engages.
Casting back over a century of avant-garde artistic and performance practices and cul-
minating in the so-called social turn in the art world over the past two decades, Bishop
demonstrates that coauthorship is neither simply achieved nor an inherent political good.
In fact, she forcefully argues that, in part, participatory art owes its contemporary promi-
nence in the UK to its compatibility with “soft social engineering” embraced by the na-
tion’s neoliberal government. That is, participatory art gets funded so generously because
it fulfills a “social inclusion agenda” that looks to “responsibilize” individuals marginal-
ized by the defunding of social services and changes in the labor market, incentivizing
them to contribute their “creative” energies to the economy (5). Not only is participatory
art often complicit with economic instrumentalism, Bishop contends, but the goals of so-
cial amelioration that dominate its production result in a kind of ethical pragmatism that
can blunt/norm the most politically controversial work (16). These arguments lead her

7 
Steve Benford, qtd. in Giannachi and Kaye, Performing Presence, 233.
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 477

to focus not on the creative rewards or social virtues of the participatory process,8 but on
aesthetics, accentuating the capacity of participatory art to make visible social and politi-
cal contradictions in ways that, while not constituting action, certainly demand attention.9
Bishop’s chapters hone in on singular artistic events, in their historical contexts and
with respect to the prevailing politics of their milieux. The sections of this volume look
at the years preceding and following the upheavals of three different revolutions: 1917 in
Russia, May 1968, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989—watershed historical moments
that prompted a turn to participatory aesthetics. She attends to the enactment of audience
agency in specific works, the aesthetic strategies undergirding it, the relationships it cre-
ates between artists and participants, and the ideas, images, effects, and critical ruptures it
generates—the way that participatory art (in the words of Rancière, a pivotal player in this
argument) “redistributes the sensible.” Bishop examines a lineage of participatory precur-
sors leading from Futurism, Proletkult theatre, and mass spectacle in Bolshevik Russia, the
Saison Dada of 1921, and proceeding to the Situationist International and the Happenings
of Jean-Jacques Lebel. Other chapters tread less well-trafficked ground, examining inti-
mate, often underground artists communities in Czechoslovakia and Russia and invisible
theatre and gallery experiments in Argentina from the 1960s to the ’80s (one of the few
examples throughout all these volumes that look outside the Euro-American ambit). This
critical genealogy of immersion traces the themes of contemporary discourse regarding
participation (individual versus collective authorship, equality versus quality, and so on)
to early century roots. It also suggests that the desire to activate an audience in some way
has always positioned itself as a negation—of citizens’ passivity in the face of consumer
capitalism, socialism, or military dictatorship, for example; that is, participatory art has
always had a political impetus. That impetus, however, has always been historically and
culturally specific, as likely to result in an artist-audience that is coercive or antagonistic
as one that is therapeutic or equalizing.
The most dynamic chapters here are on the Euro-American “social turn” in art since the
early 1990s, moving from celebrated site-specific, socially engaged projects like “Culture
in Action,” to a chapter on delegated performance (the ethically controversial practice in
which artworks feature nonprofessional participants, often from less advantaged groups,
hired to perform their own identities), and finally one on pedagogical initiatives. Our “post-
political” era lacks the leftist consensus to which previous generations anchored their work,
and participatory art instead unwittingly aligns with the neoliberal status quo: if certain
recent works bear close resemblance to reality television (Bishop singles out Anthony Gorm-
ley’s 2009 project One and Other), it is because the unpaid, voluntary “commodification of
human bodies in a service economy” and “consensual consumption of one’s own image”
has become a cultural norm: “Far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has

8 
Artificial Hells continues Bishop’s longstanding critique of relational aesthetics as theorized by Nicholas
Bourriaud and championed by the likes of Grant Kester.
9 
Bishop’s introduction and conclusion would be a valuable addition to courses on theatre for social change
for their astute parsing of the antinomies of critical discourse surrounding community-based and activist
artwork, particularly the tensions between avant-gardists and social practitioners. By the same token, the
more sophisticated scholarship in this field challenges Bishop’s somewhat object-oriented theorization of
aesthetics. Aesthetic experience, theatre scholars might argue, is emergent not just in audience engagement
with an artistic product, but also in the process of participatory production. The ethical challenges engaged
by artists are not after-the-fact judgments, but are generative, indeed constitutive of its aesthetic singularity:
they articulate the very ruptures and contradictions that Bishop most values in art.
478 / Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt

now entirely merged with it” (277). This, for Bishop, places the onus even more heavily
on the singular, difficult choices of immersive or participatory aesthetics to communicate
“the paradoxes that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturb-
ing and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our
relations anew” (284).
In bringing together this admittedly disparate collection of scholarly work, we have sought
to draw attention to the ways that contemporary writers are engaging with the spectatorial
encounter as a valuable site for theorizing the intersection of aesthetics, politics, episte-
mologies, and technologies in performance. On the one hand, we suggest that they reveal
immersion as an aesthetic strategy that emphasizes the rhizomatic flows among performers
(actors and nonactors alike); the three-dimensionality of performance space; indeterminacy
in the event’s scripting; polyphonic, audience-driven forms of meaning-making; and the
multisensory impact of stimuli. On the other hand, they forward it as a theory of spectator-
ship/audienceship (and clearly neither word is adequate) that attends to these same dimen-
sions where they appear in all performance phenomena, historical or contemporary. This
theory is allied with the “relational turn” in arts and humanities underway since at least
the turn of the millennium, a turn against discursive or semiotic critique and the subject/
object oppositions it appears to reinforce, and towards embedded, embodied, spatialized,
or affective approaches.
In both these instances, as aesthetic strategy and analytic optic, immersion gets invoked
as an antidote to spectacle—a polemic opposition more than an actual one. Through the
lens of spectatorship’s critical historians like Rabinovitz, Tenneriello, and Bishop, “spec-
tacle” looks increasingly like an ideological chimera: like immersion, it describes an ideal-
typical assemblage of perceptual practices and performance technologies that operated in
the interests of varied (and always political) projects of capitalist modernities, and like im-
mersion, it can never exist in a pure form. As Debord feared of spectacle during the 1960s,
immersion seems today to be becoming a cultural dominant in both popular and theatri-
cal culture, with audiences primed by social media and reality television, live immersive
activities (LARPing or playing quidditch, for example), “pervasive” video games, or bars
luring customers with Punchdrunk-inspired pop-up theatrical offerings. From museums
to lecture theatres, tourism attractions to medicine, no narration is deemed effective with-
out audience interaction, feedback, immediacy, dimensional modes of verisimilitude, var-
ied forms of sensory stimulation. We are “simming” all over the place. If this is the case,
then it indicates not that immersion has superseded spectacle, but that the spectatorial as-
semblage—linking perceptual practices, publics, performance technologies, and capitalist
modernity—has merely modulated in shape and character.
The implications for performance analysis are significant. For artists and critics, it indicates
that immersion as an aesthetic strategy cannot be legitimated in advance (Bishop 278): it
must be constantly critically tested as a mode of politicized engagement and tasked with
the reflexive examination of its own medium and sociopolitical context. For performance
analysis more generally, it suggests that the precise character of the mode of spectatorship
needs to be a site of historiographic inquiry into past and present alike; that is, scholars
should direct pointed questions at both immersion’s popular and artistic exponents: What
kinds of perceptual practices are being promoted, what kind of audience is being culti-
vated, and what political imperatives do these serve?
 BOOK REVIEW ESSAY / 479

A study of spectatorship organized as a rigorous disciplinary project would demand that

we test the methodological limits of the volumes reviewed here, opening up provocative
questions for our field. First, historical and popular cultural studies in this group (Rabino-
vitz, Tenneriello, Magelssen) bound their analyses of immersion within the US nation-state,
yet the performance genres they examine have global genesis and circulation. What can be
gained from studying the politics of spectatorship on a global scale? To what extent can
we see immersion as a perceptual practice aligned with the global emergence of moderni-
ties, and how is it differently configured in cultural contexts with divergent traditions of
spectatorship? Second, the works selected by those analyzing immersion as an aesthetic
strategy (Giannachi and Kaye, Bishop, Machon) follow the historiographic habit of iden-
tifying the avant-garde as a uniformly white, Euro-American field. Placing these volumes
together with the historical and popular cultural studies (to which questions of race and
nationality are so pivotal) suggests that this limitation might not be merely habitual, but, in
fact, symptomatic of something quite significant: the centrality of immersive spectatorship
in the production of whiteness. While these questions seem far afield from the arguments
pursued in these books, the authors’ collective insights provide a valuable foundation for
beginning to address them.