Crafting Immersive Pt. 1: Making It Physical

Koryn Wicks is an immersive maker, choreographer and multimedia artist based in LA. Her immersive work has been shown at diverse venues in the U.S. and abroad including Highways, The Bootleg Theatre, UCI and Slamdance DiG. In 2019, her piece Casting took home the Grand Prize at the inaugural LA Immersive Invitational. She recently founded Willing Kompany with Hanah Davenport. Willing Kompany is an immersive production company specializing in movement-based immersive design and digitally augmented work. This summer Willing Kompany is launching Litmus, an intimate, virtual dance experience for one audience member and one performer.

• Part Two of this series: ‘Onboarding the Audience’ is here.
• Part Three of this series: ‘Make It Accessible’ is here.
• Tickets for the free May 25th discussion forum are available here.

What interests me about immersive work is the activation and engagement of audiences. Why? Because I think it creates potential to expand the accessibility and impact of performance, particularly of dance.

Most people raised in Western society associate theatre with quiet, darkened auditoriums directed toward a proscenium stage. There is nothing wrong with this; I myself am an avid consumer of concert dance. However, studies like Dance USA’s “How Audiences Engage,” by research and art consultant agency Wolf Brown, and “Kinesthesia, Empathy and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” by Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds published in the Dance Research Journal, show that enjoyment of the performing arts is mediated, at least in part, by a person’s experience with any given medium. For example, you’re more likely to enjoy the symphony if you grew up listening to classical music, studied the violin and/or took a class in music history. For someone working with the language of movement, this can be disheartening. Dance is not only the least well funded of the performing arts in the United States, it is also the least accessible art in our public education system. Knowing this, I question the role traditional concert dance plays in our culture. Who is it for? How many people is it reaching? Whose lives is it touching?

This is why I’m interested in activating audiences. By enlivening the experience of theatre with action and reaction, audiences are tuned in to performances not only through the process of interpretation, but through forms of participation that employ all the senses. This opens us to embodied forms of meaning-making, ways of knowing based on our experiences rather than literacy of a particular art form. This difference can be compared to the difference between being told, “I missed you,” and having someone run towards you, throw their arms around you, and hug you with all their might upon seeing you. Because of my background in dance, I use movement as the primary language in my work. This has influenced my approach to immersive design, pushing me toward physical forms of interaction.

When creating immersive work, the most important questions I ask myself are: What are the experiences at the center of the work? And how can these experiences be physicalized? Some of my projects have stemmed entirely from an interest in a particular physical experience, while others are driven conceptually and their interactivity is established from a thematic, poetic, or narrative imperative.

Some of the modes of interaction I’ve developed for creating embodied responses from the audience include the incorporation of everyday gestures in improvised and choreographed dance, techniques for moving the audience through space, a structure for interactive duets between a performer and audience member, and the use of interactive digital media.

I recently had a conversation about my approach to immersive design with Brittany Tran and Robyn O’Dell, two dancers I work closely with. The conversation touches on two pieces, I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH and The Wild Hunt.

I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH is an evening length immersive concert exploring codependency. The piece began from an exploration of co-dependency and the immersive design evolved from that concept. In this piece the audience was the performers’ object of affection and interaction with the audience was driven by a need to be loved.

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The Wild Hunt, which I created for the Halogen Project’s 2019 Yule celebration was experience-driven from the outset. The piece was informed by the mythology of the wild hunt, but ultimately focused on the idea of creating a ritual. In The Wild Hunt, members of the audience were invited into the piece to perform a percussive beat that became the undercurrent of both the choreographed dance and audience experience.

Brittany Tran — dancer/performer: The first piece we worked together on was I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH, which dealt with codependency. As performers we were instructed to develop codependent relationships with the audience, both individual audience members and the audience as a whole.

To be honest, I struggled with the whole concept of transmitting meaning [or experience] at first. My background is in concert dance. I’m used to rehearsing and performing dance that is then interpreted by an audience. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t. In your work, there was much more focus on that idea of transmission and I think the rehearsal process was really important to making that possible.

In rehearsals, we did runs with guests and stand-ins. Through this process I learned that basic things like strong eye contact and breathing with the audience were some of the most powerful tools for engaging the audience and helping them connect with the work. It’s impossible to share an experience with another person if you’re not present with them. Seeing someone or mirroring their breath are two great cues to let the audience know, “I’m here with you.” That needs to be established before anything else.

Robyn O’Dell — dancer/performer: Building off that, I think that community is at the foundation of immersive theatre. Creating community necessitates vulnerability and that is a big ask of audiences. As a performer, I feel responsible for exemplifying the vulnerability we ask of participants. That means opening yourself to really respond to an individual rather than approaching people with your own agenda.

Brittany: Absolutely, that was a huge shift in mindset for me! When you’re a trained dancer, particularly if you’re coming from a conservatory education, you’ve got this emphasis on technique and execution ingrained in you. Performing in immersive work forces you to give up some control and cede some of the spotlight to the audience.

Robyn: Right. It’s not a total loss of control because the work has structure and sometimes we need to be somewhere at X moment in the piece, but within the interactivity a given piece offers, we need to really honor the audience and their choices to the best of our ability. With that comes a huge responsibility in terms of making sure our invitations and responses protect everyone involved.

Brittany: Absolutely, that is so important and it starts from the very beginning of approaching an audience member. I feel like so much of what I do in an immersive piece is gauge audience’s readiness or level of comfort. I think being a dancer makes this a pretty natural process for me. Dancers are tuned into the language of movement so we’re generally pretty acute at reading non-verbal cues. I’m not necessarily going to single out someone standing on the edge of a performance space, with their arms crossed and drag them across the stage, but I might give them a wave or another gesture. Sometimes this little invitation can soften them and when I go back to them again I notice more eagerness in their willingness to participate.

Robyn: Yeah. Once you have an audience member who is really gung-ho, I find that the language of movement locks in fairly easily. One of my favorite ways to engage audiences is to teach through demonstration. For example, I thought that the ritual movement and rhythm we had the audience create for The Wild Hunt was so powerful because it employed a form of teaching based on a kind of learning we’re all familiar with, call and response. It also provided such clear evidence of audience success, you were either executing the rhythm or you weren’t. I think providing that kind of feedback is really helpful to sustaining participation.

Brittany: Yes, also in terms of moving audiences through space or playing with them in moments of duet, I found that there was a sweet spot in my approach that balanced vulnerability and directness. On the one hand, if you approach an audience member with uncertainty, you heighten any sense of anxiety or awkwardness they’re feeling. On the other hand, you need to leave space for the response. A really helpful note I got really early on working with Koryn was approaching people with my whole body as opposed to directing people with my arms only, like one might wrangle kindergarteners or direct traffic. You could also think of this comparison in terms of the way you might approach a stray dog vs. a beloved pet. Putting my whole center of gravity into my interactions created a lot more clarity and also gave me a sense of authority that was more subconscious and didn’t undermine the connection and communication I was trying to convey through my facial expressions and gestures.

Another dimension of my work and the kind of expertise Willing Kompany offers is the use of interactive media. My good friend and collaborator Alex Lough has created a number of interactive sound installations for my work and has had a huge influence on the way I conceive of multimedia performance. In I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH, he engineered an interactive sound design that picked up incorporated ambient sound from the audience using microphones and contact mics. We caught up recently and chatted about the ways we think about interactive technology.

Alex Lough — experimental musician, performance artist, sound technician: So, I identify as an experimental musician rather than an immersive maker. A lot of people hear experimental and associate it with “weird” music, but it actually signifies a formal process of experimentation. Any piece or installation I create designed for audience interaction is meant to take the audience through the same process of experimentation I went through in developing it. The interaction that results is a process of discovery, of uncovering interaction, testing its boundaries, and playing.

Koryn: Right. I think the verbs you’re using — experimenting, discovering, uncovering, testing — get at another element of interactive media we both feel strongly about, intuitive interaction. We’ve had a lot of conversations about our frustration with interactive technology that requires laborious instructions or guidelines.

Alex: Yeah, personally I don’t see the point of creating a piece or installation that then needs to be explained or requires a demonstration. I want the audience to uncover the interaction themselves. For example, in I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH, the audience interacted with the sound installation simply by virtue of being in the performance space. I really enjoyed watching the audience pick up on the way they were interacting with the soundscape and testing the boundaries of their influence. To me, that process is what has been most successful in the immersive work we’ve created together.

Koryn: Agreed.

Alex: What transpires between the audience and installation in these interactions is a lot like a conversation with a stranger. When people meet, there is an acknowledgement and then to varying degrees, a process of uncovering the other person through conversation and other forms of social signaling. I think this process is especially pronounced these days in the highly divided political landscape we’re living in.

Defining the experiences at the center of an immersive work is multifaceted. It requires creators to consider both how the meaning of the work is conveyed and the ways in which the performance interacts with audiences. However, interaction implies a two way street and relies on the audience. How do we let the audience know their role in an immersive work? The next column in this series explores the ways in which audience participation is defined and communicated.

Part Two of the series “Onboarding The Audience” will be available on Tuesday, May 18th.

The third part will publish on Thursday May 20th.

On Tuesday, May 25th at 5PM PDT the series will culminate in a live discussion forum featuring Koryn Wicks and some of her collaborators. Tickets are available now at no cost, with a reserve pool for NoPro Patreon backers.

Discover the latest immersive events, festivals, workshops, and more at our new site EVERYTHING IMMERSIVE, new home of NoPro’s show listings.

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