Creating Worlds: How to Make Immersive Theatre by Jason Warren

Author:Jason Warren [Warren, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781848424456
Google: K-NaMQAACAAJ
Publisher: Nick Hern Books Limited
Published: 2017-11-15T23:31:41.199182+00:00

Choosing Factions II

Before we move on to look at how these Factions can interact with your play, it’s time to come clean – I lied when I said there were three rules. There is a fourth, and much more important rule.

RULE 4: Ignore these rules.

When you understand how and why these rules work, you can start rejecting them. It’s important to understand why these groups work so well because you can then approach other kinds of Faction with open eyes. When you break these rules, you’ll have a good understanding of what obstacles you’re creating to overcome later. I might break Rule 3, and decide it’d be very interesting to make my audience kings and popes while the cast are mere dukes and bishops… But because I looked at these rules, I now know I’m going to have to plan for their ability to affect the story. Maybe I go the other way, and make them downtrodden peasants because it’d be exciting to see them rebel against the play and their place within it. Again, I’m armed with the knowledge of what problems this is going to throw at me.

Influence

Having the power to interact and shape a play can be intoxicating for an audience member; we’re so used to sitting down and listening that a new, different dynamic is exciting. If you’re going to manage what the audience throw at you, the production’s non-interactive elements need to be just as engrossing! The first step in creating manageable interactions is making sure that the audience are never so bored that they become disruptively proactive when you haven’t planned for it.

This means, and I’ll say this repeatedly, that the traditional elements of your show must be as honed and professional as the immersive parts!

Let’s assume you’re going to make that happen and that you already know how to make your scenes compelling. Our next stop is looking at the interactive segments themselves. One of our first concepts here is Influence. This is simply a shorthand way of saying ‘How extensively can this interaction affect the production?’ It’s how we distinguish the small-scale interactions that go on all the time from the large game-changing ones that profoundly affect the play. This isn’t a binary choice (big or small) but a sliding scale. How you identify and rate the Influence of your interactions is up to you, but one possibility is to consider how much work the cast have to do (both in rehearsal and in the production itself) to react successfully to that interaction. Strictly speaking, these are separate considerations, and in your early explorations of this kind of work you may wish to separate this concept into Impact (the level of work required by the cast) and Influence (the level of importance the interaction has on the production’s progress).

Examples will be more helpful here… In Loveplay, audience members would often ask a cast member a simple question. That’s a very small and easily handled interaction. It didn’t have much Influence, as it

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