August Highlight; The Immersive Spirit (or, letter to a young immersive artist) - pt 1

I'm in the woods! Wi-Fi is limited (in the WOODS?! Who could have anticipated?), so I'll be staggering the last releases of August as I catch as catch can). This is part one of several of entries in a piece of writing inspired by my favorite Robert Henri book, which has the following opening; let it also apply here:

MANY students have asked for this book, and that is the reason the fragments which are its composition have been brought together. No effort has been made toward the form of a regular book. In fact the opinions are presented more as paintings are hung on the wall, to be looked at at will and taken as rough sketches for what they are worth. If they have a suggestive value and stimulate to independent thought they will attain the object of their presentation. There are many repeats throughout the work, many times the same subject is taken up and viewed from a different angle or seen in relation to other matters. At the end there is a complete index which will make up for the absence of chapters and sections and the general scarcity of headings. ‘There is no idea that anyone should agree with any of the comments or that anyone should follow the advice given. If they irritate to activity in a quite different direction it will be just as well. The subject is beauty—or happiness, and man’s approach to it is various.

When I was in University, every time I saw a show I really loved, I would make every effort to talk to the creators or someone from the team. I felt a burning need to find something out, to ask them something, but despite the countless hours spent waiting in lobbies, in back alleys, hanging like a wreath on any number of stage doors, I never managed to devise a question better than the one I asked every time: “how did you make this?”

This was not a good question, though looking back I can understand why I was asking it; the art that was most exciting to me looked nothing like the parade of musicals and Oscar Wilde plays I had done at a public high school in Florida, and while I was beginning to gather tools for devising theater in my classes, I couldn’t see a through line from those exercises to the fully formed, fully strange pieces that moved me most. Pig Pen’s The Old Man and the Old Moon, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz — and yes, Sleep No More—I knew what I liked when I saw it, but I didn’t know how to make it. 

“How did you make this?” Some folks were kind enough to hide their bafflement, or to give a general overview of the development history of a piece. Others simply said “I honestly couldn’t tell you,” and even then I couldn’t blame them. But now a decade and change and some very good fortune has put me on the other end of that conversation, and I’ve had a small but steady trickle of young artists interested in or beginning to dabble in immersive asking me quite a few of those questions: “how do I create work for one person?” “Where can I learn the skills to do this?” “What should I study?” “How do I find the form I want to work with?”  “How do I make something that matters to me?” 

What follows here are things I’ve found myself repeating again and again in reply, which I set down perhaps to save some time, and perhaps to finally give me some of the answers I was looking for.

“How do I find the form of my work?” 

It’s possible to start from form—it’s possible to start from anywhere. But if this question holds any heat or fear for you, I’d advise strongly you put off answering it. Take this invitation to procrastinate; form can do very well when it follows function, and in all likelihood the form will vary from project to project.

Rather than trying to create a style or format, look to cultivate a few Concerns. Questions are good; if you come up with a question substantial enough, you can spend your whole life answering it—or better still, asking it and seeing what happens. One question you can borrow (and absolutely should ask yourself) is, “Why is the audience here?” Questions can be topic-specific (“What does it mean to miss someone?” “What makes some love true?” “What would be an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?”) or more general (“What can two strangers share?” “What is intelligence?”).

Principles are also good; notice the ideals you want to stand for, the ethical lines you don’t want to cross. Notice what you think could and must be better in your field. Notice how you want to treat others, and how you want to be treated. Notice the behaviors that you want to affirm in the universe—designing participation requires you to at least suggest behavior, and you’re going to be building an incentive structure, which basically means you’re an animal trainer. If you have a question to ask and some principles to uphold, you’ve basically created a math problem for yourself. Now go solve for x. 

Do that 1-10,000 times and you’ve got a career.

Reps

Trust reps above anything. Talking about it is fine, to keep yourself engaged; writing about it is fine, to make yourself clear; imagining it is fine, to keep yourself motivated. But nothing replaces doing it. The question is what you like and how to make it; to intuit that is miraculous; to ascertain or extrapolate it exhausting; but simply do enough, and you can notice the answer on the way. 

Make something. Be messy be imperfect be incomplete be woefully under-resourced be completely unsure what you’re trying to do—so long as you hold yourself accountable, the making will clarify, will accumulate, will move it forward, will refine. When I was a dancer doing composition exercises, the best work always came from the first groups on their feet. So soon as inspiration strikes and an idea excites you, scheme the quickest path to putting it on its feet—making it tangible.

Getting your reps in can come from doing many different things.  Between education, early career obscurity and inevitable poverty, you’ll have at least one “try anything” phase, in which you take any work that’s offered, encountered, or discovered behind a back-alley dumpster. Don’t be afraid to hop around — for as long as you don’t have a specific thing you want yet, lean into the variety - sample as many things as you can, notice relentlessly. About playtesting, Tommy Honton says “participants leak data”— which is to say, you can learn most of what you need to know before a play tester ever gives you feedback if you pay attention. When you’re bouncing through a ton of jobs, and picking up any role in everyone else’s work, you’re the playtester. Notice. 

If you have the good fortune (and enormous debt) to be in college, know that this is some of the best opportunity for reps you'll ever squander. You'll never have lower barriers to certain resources, chief among them a ready cohort of young, open-minded people down to try weird stuff.

Don’t be afraid to stick around if you like something but don’t know why. Trust that it’s giving you something, and do your best to let yourself receive it.

Don’t be afraid to stick around for a long time. So many things become possible when you’ve learned to do anything over and over. So long as you stand by something and don’t harm yourself or others to run it, go be Bruce Li and do one kick 10,000 times. If you can be disciplined and engaged and really strive in each iteration (or as many as the spirit can take), then certain core things will become automatic and you’ll be able to consistently surprise yourself with what else you can find, and what other muscles you can develop. 

Rumi said: 

“Work. Keep digging your well.

Don't think about getting off from work.

Submit to a daily practice.”

Playtesting

You have to test your assumptions. If your work is immersive as the 7 year old child of Jeff and Andy Crocker once defined it, “switching between scripted and unscripted,” then the piece doesn’t begin until you have an audience to do the unscripted part. Too many creators do their first full playtest the night before opening—which is also the first dress rehearsal—which is also the first tech rehearsal. You can’t only practice the right hand of a piano piece and expect to play beautifully when it counts — and you shouldn’t think of even the scripted portion of your work as complete until you’ve tested your assumptions about what will happen in the unscripted portion.

Lines will need to change. Cues will need to adjust. The entire point of your show will shift, either slightly or enormously. You haven’t started working until you’ve begun play testing.

You don’t need a full space and a paid test audience to check your assumptions. On day 2 of development, take the smallest portion of your work you can and test it. Talk it through with a friend. Build a cardboard cutout. Have someone close their eyes and imagine what you’re describing, and then ask them “what would you do next?” All of the words you use, all of the images you present, all of the production elements you build are going to provoke a range of responses. The more data you have about the bell curve you are building, the more you can tweak until it represents a range of outcomes you can be proud of. The more data a performer has about the ways things might go, the more they can use their skills to make every outcome seem at once both improbable and inevitable. 

You can save a lot of time, money and energy but making as many things, settings, and circumstances as possible real. Reality is very high fidelity; it has lossless audio, there is no subscription fee, and you don’t have to recharge any batteries for it. 

The closer your characters’ actions, intentions and goals align with the performers, the less you need to mess about with acting, or finding people who are Actors before anything.

“I’m confused - isn’t immersive an adjective? Because I keep hearing people use it as a noun?”

It it a point universally belabored by now that the usage of the term “immersive” has been so wanton, scattershot and undisciplined that the word holds meaning today about as well as a fork holds cereal. Plenty enough ink has been spent on the subject, and I will do my best to not trot out the dead horse for more beating.

Still, I think this particular bit of syntax holds a good lesson. From what I’ve seen, people generally use “immersive” as a noun when they don’t want to say what noun they are actually describing. If pressed, they would likely clarify by saying “it’s an immersive experience.” This clarifies nothing. If the overuse of ‘immersive’ gets you huffy, the use of ‘experience’ should have you blowing down pigs’ homes. Of course it’s an experience—everything is an experience. Eating a sandwich is an experience. So no small wonder that if you tell someone “I have an idea for an immersive experience,” the word ‘immersive’ was the only one worth remembering and repeating—if barely that.  

So why don’t people want to say the noun that it actually is? There are three groups of people whose motives are worth noting here. The first don’t want to say what it is because they have no idea. Certainly this group includes audiences and critics, but it also can absolutely be the creator of a piece that hasn’t a clue what they are trying to make—or have already made, or have been running for years. The audiences can be forgiven for not knowing the right noun—particularly when it was never offered—and while they’ll live perfectly rich fulfilling lives without having one, if you’re the creator it can do wonders to make talking about your work easier for those who actually enjoy it. The creators will be attended to in a moment.

Before that, we should mention the second group, which is people who claim to know what the thing is, but to just be at a loss for the right noun. This is an understandable problem, as your immersive work is a new and unique creation, distinct to your imagining and crafted at the intersection of all your various interests. However, it’s not that understandable, as everyone else’s work is just as unique, indescribable and special, and however much you each may consider your work ineffable, I assure you that someone who cares less will freely eff- it whatever may come to mind (or just “immersive,” equally dismal). If this is you, and you’re truly abstaining from choosing a noun on principle, you’re probably very passionate, a little pretentious, and just a bit stupid*. Which is not to say you’re not right— there very likely isn’t a word that perfectly captures what you’re doing. So it goes. Pick the best one you can, get over it, and do your job.

The third group of people awkwardly dodging the noun are those who do know what it is they have made, but are scared to say it to audiences, as they worry people won’t like it or will be scared off or won’t see the appeal. Instead of inviting people to precisely what it is they are doing, the cash the blank check of an industry-wide vagueness and bank on making something so interesting, enjoyable, or mind-blowing that participants won’t mind that they were never actually told specifically what it is that blew their mind.

It is possible for anyone to be in all three groups at once. In fact, if you’re in group two, you almost certainly belong to one of the other groups as well—though I can’t say which is worse.

If you’re a creator, and this applies to your own work, then regardless of which of these reasons keep you from specifically describing what you do, the outcome is rather lame. You run a restaurant where every menu item is just listed as “edible food.” Lucky for you, nearly everyone else does the same, and you’ll probably never be in trouble for it. Instead, you have to choose if you’d ever like to be accountable. In any case, at the very least it’s useful to know which group you’re in at a given time.

*incidentally, dear reader, this is the group I belong to most of the time, and I am, I am, and I certainly am.