A Practical Dramaturgy for Immersive Practitioners

Immersive theatre is a new, rapidly expanding field of practice, theory, and audience experience. Due to its relative novelty as an experiential artform as well as its inherently interdisciplinary nature, immersive theatre is fraught with conceptual confusion and practical concerns that pose a steep challenge for scholarly discourse and artistic pursuit. Therefore, this thesis serves as a practical dramaturgy for immersive creators and scholars, establishing a common theoretical ground and addressing three primary issues for the genre: audience positioning, blurred boundaries, and framings of consent. Firstly, I explore problems with existing immersive audience ontologies which leads me to posit my own, the “role-to-player,” that better accounts for the many planes of audience engagement across the genre. Secondly, I reveal how immersive theatre boundaries are inherently broken and breakable, offering careful design and game studies as a solution for controlling risk-taking audiences. Finally, I underscore the importance of consent in the immersive environment, reframing it as a tool that aligns and expands immersive capacity—something to embrace and better integrate rather than an obstacle to fear and ignore.