1. Immersive theatre is comprised of “events that assimilate a variety of art forms and seek to exploit all that is experiential in performance, placing the audience at the heart of the work…At every stage of this process the work is responsive to the actions of its audience, moulding them as co-authors of their experience” (Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres 22-23, emphasis mine).

4. Imagine how Punchdrunk’s pre-performance rituals might make you feel as a spectator. How might the Punchdrunk experience compare with the opening of The Last Supper? What is similar about the effect of Punchdrunk and Littoja’s choices? What is different?

5. “We’re trying to break the formulaic conventions of going to the theatre. At the theatre you’re in a pack. There is safety in numbers. We want the audience to feel the rug has been pulled and they’re having to make conscious decisions about what to do next…Once you’ve had that beat of slight rising concern, then you’re there in the space, you’re active, you’re part of it…It’s all about presence.” (qtd in Hemming)

7. “in a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them" (16)
“[s]pectatorship…is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know, as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and said, done and dreamed…We don’t need to turn spectators into actors. We do need to acknowledge that every spectator is already an actor in his own story and that every actor is in turn the spectator of the same kind of story” (17).
The spectator “participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way…They are thus both distant spectators and active interpreters of the spectacle offered to them” (13).

8. “Sleep No More…materializ[es] a rather depoliticized vision of Jacques Rancière 's active, emancipated spectator” (Worthen 82)
Think back to The Last Supper, or forwards to Gambaro’s Information for Foreigners. When compared to Littoja and Gambaro, do you think Punchdrunk is, as Worthen says, “depoliticized”? What might be the value of using immersive theatre towards either political, or non-political ends? What might be some of the ethical implications of political or non-political immersive theatre?

9. References:
Hemming, Sarah. “It’s all about presence.” Financial Times 7 June Web.
Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Print.
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, Print.
Worthen, W.B. “‘The written troubles of the brain’: Sleep No More and the Space of Character.” Theatre Journal (2012): Web. 21 Oct 2013.