Experiments in Immersive, One-To-One Performance: Understanding Audience Experience Through Sensory Engagement

This book investigates audience experience through the lens of sensory engagement in immersive, one-to-one performance.

It presents a distinct, practice-based research (PBR) framework - a performance research ’laboratory’ - designed to evaluate the effects on diverse audience experiences of two ’sense-specific manipulations’ eye masks and touch. Through a qualitative analysis of responses from seventy-four individual audience participants, this book offers insight into how these popular ’immersing’ strategies might be experienced. What do these strategies achieve? How do audience participants make sense of them? Do audience responses align with artistic intentions? And how does the PBR framework designed to address these questions influence the outcomes? Through an analysis of three sets of one-to-one performance experiments generating comparative data about the experience of sense-specific manipulation, this book proposes the utility of merging methodologies in artistic research with empirical audience research in theatre and performance studies.

This study offers a new perspective on the value of sensory-focused, immersive, one-to-one experience as a means of resensitizing audience participants through performance.

Natalia Esling is an independent scholar who has done postdoctoral research in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia.