Think of the pre-show experience in Sleep No More, Then She Fell-even Accomplice. I like aggressive worlds, worlds that bleed into the street if possible, with hosts who contribute to the make-believe instead of tearing it down. Escape rooms with actors are the only times I’ve felt motivated to play along. (Note that this is where actors inside the game can really help. No one really expects me to start acting like a cursed archaeologist now, do they? After treating it as a game for so long, I’d feel silly, and making that transition to play-acting would make me feel self-conscious. You spend a good 15-20 minutes checking in, signing waivers, chatting up the gamemaster, hearing the rules of the game, getting the lock tutorial (oh lord), and then, THEN you cross the threshold to your exciting Egyptian Tomb adventure. I think escape rooms in particular suffer from starting their worlds way too late. The earlier your participants can pass through that transition, the easier it will be for them to believe. No matter what you do, there will always be an awkward transition from real world to imaginary world. It’s just easier for me to behave like I’m in a hospital if it looks like a hospital. While I don’t know of any immersive productions that have done so, you can ask your participants to use their imaginations like black box productions do, but you risk losing a few people in that leap. If you do your job right, they won’t even realize they’re making believe.ĭo you have to have a big-budget build-out? No, of course not. The more you can WOW your audience with a sense that they have been transported, the more they actually have been transported and can act in that world with ease. Immersive actors can help tremendously-they belong to the world, so interacting with them requires adopting their world-but production design also plays a major part. The less your audience has to imagine, the easier it is for them to believe. And make no mistake, make-believe is our ultimate goal. But adults must preserve their dignity and need much more help to get them to a point of make-believe. The entire world still feels novel to them, so behind a bush is as rich a secret hangout as the fanciest speakeasy with trick-wall entrance. Here are my Meisner-inspired design principles for killing self-consciousness and eliciting truthful behaviors from your audience…Ĭhildren have no trouble with imaginative play. Armed with an understanding of the Meisner technique, designers can help slay self-consciousness for audience-actors, so they, too, can live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. Training audiences to be in-the-moment like actors are trained isn’t possible, but what we can do is design environments that engender real interaction. Lest we forget, there’s this thing called stage fright. Let’s run as far away from that kind of “interaction” as possible. This is the OPPOSITE of immersive theatre. The performer points up the audience member’s behavior, and the audience subsequently laughs at that person’s expense. Performances that pull an audience member on stage typically thrive off that person feeling awkward. Most folks associate interactive theatre with self-consciousness, and with good reason. The audience doesn’t need to worry about not listening-they are hearing the script for the first time-but they do need to overcome the bigger demon: feeling self-conscious. Hell, I love it so much, I extended Meisner language to include the audience and enshrined it in the Strange Bird mission statement: We’re in this together.īut if audiences are truly actors, then they are now facing the same pitfalls all actors do. It’s precisely this radical reconception of the audience that energizes immersive theatre. When sold out, The Man From Beyond has a cast of 10. In immersive theatre, the audience becomes actors. I am particularly excited by the genre’s promise of a scene partner who has no script. Last week, I examined the Meisner technique for the immersive actor.
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