Good fiction does not end on the last page of a book or with the credits of a film. It continues to exist in the minds of those who engage with it. How often have you finished a story only to find yourself returning to it later in the privacy of your own mind and creative works? You insert your own character into legacies, into love stories, inhabiting the fictional world that has so captured you.

The opportunities for this type of personal engagement beyond the physical medium — be it digital or analogue — are endless, and psychologically fascinating. Maybe you indulge in heroic fantasy, such as a fan fic epic wherein only you can save the crew of the Starship Enterprise. Or perhaps your preference is something a little more structural, like a thousand-word essay on the socio-economic impact of magic in the Harry Potter universe. Not forgetting the infinite possibilities of the unwritten daydream, which allows for endless erotic encounters between Wonder Woman, Sherlock Holmes, and any version of ourselves we see fit.

Food for the imagination

These examples may not ring true with everyone, but we must all admit that – at one time or another – we have spent a little more time in a world of someone else’s creation than was mandated by the strict limitations of the delivery media. In these situations, we are inspired to think about what else might be happening when the camera pans away, or when the focus of the narrative changes or stops all together. The fiction asks us to consider what it is that we cannot see, and we are engaged enough to respond to that question. We write the next chapter, the next scene, ourselves.

In immersive theatre this is more than just an indicator of a job well done, it is an essential tent pole of the experience. We tell the audience they are in a world and if we do not provide them with enough evidence to support this claim (by which I mean enough to engage their willing suspension of disbelief) they refute the immersion. You want them to accept that they are in remote Antarctica — turn down the heat and turn off the radio.

With unlimited resources we could convert unlimited space to conform to our fiction, but you will not be surprised to learn that theatre makers seldom have unlimited resources. Instead, we must find other more cunning ways to extend the boundaries of our fiction.

What’s behind the curtain?

A simple example of this comes from a performance made with the Velvet Loop theatre company (a group whose work Trajectory has previously explored in another post). Science of Squares was an applied theatre piece that looked to engage the local community around Gillet Square in Hackney, London. Housed in an unusual venue, contributors were tasked with finding a solution to space management that didn’t distract from the work.

A hallway, which needed to be blocked to audience access, suddenly became a chance to engage with the building. With some hazard warning tape, spray paint and a portable stereo, an ‘enclosure’ for zoomorphic scientist characters was created. It was a cheap fix that simultaneously solved a pragmatic issue and extended the fiction beyond the boundary of what the audience could access. Only in their imaginations would they be able to see what lay inside the enclosure.

We fail ourselves as creators when we consider the bounds of the XR experience to be contained to the device. In immersive theatre, the experience doesn’t begin when the show starts. It doesn’t begin when the audience arrives. It doesn’t begin when they buy their tickets. It begins the moment the show enters their bubble of awareness. From that point onwards they are making assumptions, processing information, developing an understanding, and their final reception of the experience is predicated on all these things.

The same is true of XR. Similarly, we can begin to work backwards from the point at which the participant enters the headset, asking constant questions along the way to engage world building. How do we put on the headset? What is the justification for the device? Who instructs us to do this? What do they say? How do they say it? Where is this taking place? Why are we here? Where is here? Where were we before? Where will we be after?

You should never stop asking these questions because your audience won’t. You might not be able to respond to each one immediately, or perhaps at all, but nevertheless knowing the answer is significant. What you will create is a consistent internal logic that may make sense only to you and your team. However, if you can understand it logically the audience can receive it viscerally, and when you come up against a problem — like blocking access to a corridor — you’ll know exactly how to solve it with a quick trip to the hardware store.

Authored by Roderick D. Morgan, Artistic Director Trajectory Theatre

(Originally published on Our Trajectory Medium on 27 February 2019)