Interviews and Research

My goal with Sovereign Song was to create a production that functioned as a community-building tool. In order to accomplish that, I first needed to learn how to create a community. I approached the research from two angles; first on a sociological level, which led me to McMillan and Chavis’s tenets for building a sense of community (1986) and Peck’s stages of community (1987), and then from a theatrical level, which led me to Biggin’s exploration of meaning-making in Punchdrunk’s productions (2017) and Ritter’s commentary on the ethnography of superfans surrounding Sleep No More (2017). I noticed many similarities between both lenses of community, and ultimately decided to use McMillan and Chavis’s (1986) tenets as a guideline for designing Sovereign Song.

I also reached out to current immersive theatre practitioners to discuss how their productions shaped their community, and vice versa. Much of my early focus was on the role of audience identity, and how that identity can affect an audience’s communal experience. However, in speaking with Tom Black and Owen Kingston (2020), they advised me to focus more on the invitation of the piece, or ‘The moment when the definition of the theatrical situation changes,’ (White, 2013, p.9). I was also focused on the difference between an Artaudian (1958) and Brechtian (Barnett, 2014) approach to immersive productions, and whether that had an effect on the communal experience, and while Black and Kingston had plenty to say on the matter, ultimately they concluded that one isn’t more effective than the other, they are simply very different approaches (see Appendix B).

I also interviewed Alex Wright (2020), Bertie Watkins (2020), and Ben Chamberlain (2020) about their thoughts on community in immersive theatre. The consensus was that while companies dedicate a significant amount of effort towards creating and supporting a community, there was a lack of empirical methods to track the impact any production had on the community. In response to that report, I decided to use McMillan and Chavis’s tenets for sense of community (1986) not only to create the show, but as a rubric to determine the effectiveness of a production’s community-building tactics. In order to test this method of evaluation, and to gauge the current efforts of community-building within the immersive community, I conducted a comparative case study between Parabolic’s We Have a Situation, an immersive zoom production focused on a political and military conflict between fictional bordering nations, and COLAB’s Crooks 1926, a live immersive production about the notorious Elephant and Castle Mob (see Appendix B). I ultimately concluded that while Parabolic elicited more constructive conversations regarding the themes of their production, COLAB’s production was more effective in forming a community. The case study supported the use of McMillan and Chavis’s tenets as an effective empirical measurement of a production’s community-building tactics.

While performing Sovereign Song, I collected audience responses in order to gauge the show’s success in building a community (Romeo, 2021). However, through my analysis I concluded that the data we collected, while supporting the production as a strong community-building tool, was tainted by the collection methods. Dr. Kirsty Sedgman (2019) notes that collection methods are social interactions in and of themselves, and therefore have the capacity to influence data. By commenting on themes of community at the end of the performance, audience data may have been swayed in support of our efforts. Regardless, the production itself appears to have successfully created a short-lived community with each performance.

Bibliography

Artaud, A. (1958) The theatre and its double. New York: Grove Press.

Barnett, D. (2014) Brecht in practice: theatre, theory, and performance. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Biggin, R. (2017) Immersive theatre and audience experience: space, game, and story in the work of punchdrunk. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Black, T. and Kingston, A.(2020), Interviewed by Danny Romeo, 20 October.

Chamberlain, B. (2020), Interviewed by Danny Romeo, 18 November.

McMillan, D. and Chavis, D. (1986) Sense of community: a definition and theory. Journal of community psychology, 14.

Peck, S. (1987) The different drum. London: Random House.

Ritter, J. (2017). Fandom and Punchdrunk's Sleep No More: Audience Ethnography of Immersive Dance. TDR: The Drama Review, 61(4), pp. 59-77. Available at: http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=19&sid=3444456a-2c69-4823-a72a-81d7030ce6c2%40pdc-v-sessmgr04&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=126509611&db=lfh (Accessed Nov. 12, 2020).

Romeo, D. (2021) Crafting Audience Communities: How Can an Immersive Production be Used as a Community-Building Tool? Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Sedgman, K. (2019). On Rigour in Theatre Audience Research. Contemporary Theatre Review, 29(4), pp.462-479. Available at: http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=15&sid=763e5109-4e03-440f-85e8-61a50405d3e0%40sessionmgr4008&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmU%3d#AN=140465570&db=edb

Watkins, B. (2020) Interviewed by Danny Romeo, November 18.

White, G. (2013) Audience participation in theatre: aesthetics of the invitation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Wright, A. (2020) Interviewed by Danny Romeo, November 9.

Appendix A

Romeo, D. (2020) Interview with Alex Wright, digital image, London.

Romeo, D. (2020) Interview with Tom Black and Owen Kingston, digital image, London.

Appendix B

Black, T. and Kingston, A.(2020), Interviewed by Danny Romeo, 20 October.

Wright, A. (2020) Interviewed by Danny Romeo, November 9.

Romeo, D. (2021). Crooks 1926/We Have a Situation Comparative Case Study. [unpublished]