Wednesday, March 09, 2016
Stage Managing Immersive, Site-Specific, and Participatory Theatre
HowlRound: “Sophia, would you make my bed?” No, I was not asking my stage manager for a personal favor. I was, as artistic director of This Is Not A Theatre Company, asking stage manager Sophia Lana Cohen Smith to get the bed ready for our site-specific performance Versailles 2016, which took place in a New York City apartment—in this case, mine.
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One of the things I found most interesting about this article is the discussion of how stage managing immersive theater has a lot to do with managing the audience. It is interesting how the stage manager both has to blend in and keep the audience along the path that will tell the story, and how she has to call the show based on when the audience does certain things. This aspect of stage managing immersive theater makes me think of discussions I have been having with my team on an upcoming project (Arcade) where we are creating a story for a single audience member. As discussed in this article, in order to call the show, because it is going to be interactive, we will need to be ready to respond to how the audience interacts with the story and the world, and so it will never be the same show twice. In general, I think this aspect of immersive theater is one of the things I find the most interesting. The audience becomes a participant in the story and influences the path the story takes, all the way down to the way the cues are called.
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