If you’ve been following for a while, you know I’ve been a stage manager for most of my working life and that I am currently working on a PhD in drama. While I’ve talked a bit about how my PhD program works, things I did to get accepted, and plenty of moaning about the financial life of full time students, I haven’t said a whole lot about what I’m researching.

Speaking of, if you’d like to know more about the nuts and bolts of applying to a UK PhD program and life in one, you can read those updates here:

• What I Did in the Year Leading Up to Getting Accepted into my Theatre PhD Program
• My First Week as a Theatre/Drama PhD Student
• My First Year as a Theatre/Drama PhD Student

I am studying, very broadly, risk and immersive theatre. More specifically, I’m looking at the role of production staff (stage and house managers) in how they assess and mitigate risks, particularly psychological and social risks, for immersive audiences.

As far as risk goes, I’m very interested in Paul Slovic’s work. Slovic has been researching how people perceive risk since the 1960s. Risk can be considered both quantitatively and qualitatively. If you’ve ever had any responsibility for risk management in an organization, you’re probably familiar with the quantitative sort of risk management.

Those are the types of risk analysis where you multiply the likelihood that a bad things may happen by the severity of the bad thing and that gives you a number you pop onto a matrix. The matrix is often color coded with green risks having a low number and a low probability of occurrence and severity, orange or yellow risks having a medium number and a medium probability and/or severity, and red being the danger zone with a high probability of something going wrong and a pretty tragic severity level.

Severity essentially ranges from no issue (0), papercuts (1) to death (10 or 5 or some random number because risk matrixes are not standardized across the industry – somewhere on the risk assessment is usually a key to let you know which number to use).

It makes risk seems very straightforward. And in many cases, risk assessments are. Cables are very likely trip hazards. Random cables all over a backstage are probably somewhere between an orange or even red risk. Your risk assessment helps you recognize that. Taping the cables down, running them in places people don’t walk or using cable ramps reduce the trip hazard back down to a green coded risk. Immersive theatre experiences may very well be using cables and assessing them just like that.

But immersive theatre engages with audiences differently than traditional theatre.

Immersive theatre engages with the audience’s senses in a more kinaesthetic way than traditional performances. Breaking the fourth wall really isn’t a thing here because there probably aren’t walls one through three either. Most immersive experiences have performance environments that the audience can walk freely through and there is no clear demarcation between the performance space and the audience space.  The audience often makes choices that influence the sort of experience they have – this isn’t a 100% guarantee but is a very common theme in most immersive performances – and lots of immersive theatre has elements of games and tasks that have to be completed to advance the plot.

If you think immersive theatre sounds cool, some authors who write a lot about the concept of immersive theatre are Josephine Machon, Gareth White, and Adam Alston. If you’re interested in reading more specifically about people who create immersive theatre and the nuts and bolts of how they do it, Joanna Bucknall and Jason Warren have pretty good books on that. And if you’re more of the podcast type, Joanna Bucknall has a podcast called Talking About Immersive Theatre where she interviews a different performance maker/immersive theatre company on each episode.

Because this style of theatre asks so much more of the audience, often pulling them into active roles as participants in the creation of the performance, this can come with some unique risks. The unique risks are the ones I’m really interested in and the ones that fall more into qualitative risk assessment. A lot of immersive theatre engages with psychological and social risks in the creation of their stories.

Also, a quick caveat, I’m not saying in any way that it engages with them irresponsibly (though heaven knows some of the companies I’ve studied do – or did) and risk isn’t actually always a bad thing. Engaging with risk in safe environments can be a great catalyst for growth. It can very satisfying to take on a risk and come out the other side having accomplished something you feel good about. And plenty of immersive theatre, while containing risky elements, is incredible. The risks are thoughtful and considered and handled quite well.

But there is no standardization, no best practices, no collection of any practices really, for how these risks are being considered and managed. Unsurprisingly, I am interested in how the stage and house managers are handling these types of risks in relation to how they are managing the audience in these new situations where the audience’s role is so different than in a more traditional theatre piece. I’m curious if there are additional trainings or skills immersive production staff should be looking to gain.

I’m curious about how we’re safely orienting new audiences to these unusual performances – how we clue them into the rules of a game they may not have any understanding of. Immersive theatre used to be a more niche, experimental type of performance style, but now it’s just as easy to stumble upon an immersive performance on TodayTix. You can buy tickets to Sleep No More or The Burnt City right next to deals on Wicked. It’s exciting that this different style of performance has become more accessible and is engaging with a wider audience, but that may require an adjustment of how we think about preparing the audiences to engage in ways that are safe for them and safe for the performers.

To learn more about all of this, I’ve been reading all I can at the intersection of immersive theatre and risk. I’ve also become very interested in care ethics as a theory for situating this work. Actually, the more I read about care ethics, the more I think all stage managers might benefit from learning a little more about it. I particularly like Joan C. Tronto’s insights to the politics of care ethics.

I’m also doing case studies of theatre companies currently creating immersive theatre where I interview the production staff regarding how they manage the audiences, if they feel they have any skill gaps that are emphasized in immersive, if their companies do any sort of training on how to engage with audience while maintaining the show aesthetic, etc. I also interview the performance makers on their views related to risk and audience management. Finally, I will survey the audience to see what risks they felt they encountered and how prepared to engage with them they felt.

So that’s a brief update on what I’m actually doing over here. If you have any interest in these topics, drop a comment! I love chatting about them.