The availability and development of advancing technologies have fostered a “participatory culture” in which individuals more actively engage with material by reshaping or contributing to content and sharing it (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2006). Within the realm of live theatrical performance, one sees this trend most during immersive productions, where audience members become part of the show through diverse forms of participation and individual choice. Theater scholars, such as Adam Alston (Reference Alston2016), Rose Biggin (Reference Biggin2017), Josephine Machon (Reference Machon2013), and Gareth White (Reference White2013), have laid the groundwork discussion on immersive theater by framing participants as artistic material used for production, articulating the way that “experience” itself becomes an art object, and questioning levels of spectator agency. Within this dialogue, even though topics of embodiment and the organization of participant action arises, dance and choreography remain undertheorized or completely overlooked.
In Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance, dance scholar and practitioner Julia M. Ritter brilliantly addresses this gap and illuminates the essential role dance plays in immersive theater. Ritter argues that immersive artists employ choreography as a technology to both construct productions and actuate the experience of immersion for the audience. This reveals that choreographic approaches are not only present during immersive performances but central to their success. By bringing choreography and movement to the forefront of discussions happening in theater studies, Tandem Dances raises awareness of the important role dance plays within other performance arts and additionally explores larger questions surrounding the ethical and political effects of choreography, particularly when the performance physically involves and relies upon audience members.
To situate her theoretical contributions, Ritter places dance studies, theater studies, and design studies into conversation and analyzes interviews with immersive spectators, producers, and performers, media sources, documented materials, and her own firsthand experiences as an audience member. These personal passages of embodied language within Tandem Dances truly enliven the text with thick description, and spark their own type of immersive experience for the reader, who suddenly feels like an active participant at Fiona Templeton's YOU-The City (chapter 2), Third Rail Projects's Then She Fell (chapter 3), and bluemouth inc.'s Dance Marathon (chapter 5). They additionally function as an example of Ritter's theoretical concept extended audiencing covered in chapter 4, “Insider Dynamics and Extended Audiencing: Punchdrunk's Sleep No More.” Ritter applies the phrase “extended audiencing” to explain how spectators continue to connect with their immersive experience postshow by creating new artwork and stories based on immersive performances, building and participating in online communities that review and analyze the works, and attending multiple showings of the same production to obtain different perspectives and interactive opportunities. Tandem Dances cleverly displays Ritter's own participation in extended audiencing, as she shares her lived experiences from the scene and furthers voices from the immersive community as a continued investment into the practice.
Ritter claims one reason audience members feel the need to reactivate their immersive experience through various outlets deals with the “resuscitation of their kinesthesia” (an awareness of one's movement) that occurs due to choreography's role in immersive performance (165). Placed in comparison to physical dramaturgy and relational dramaturgy, Ritter proposes the term elicitive dramaturgy to account for this process (see chapter 3). Spectators become a choreographic element of the show itself, and therefore affect its meaning and execution. This transformation happens as they engage with the show's narrative, space, and performers—the production's track, which has been created to elicit spectator involvement. The spectators then enact their own type of improvisational scores in interaction with these other three components to create the immersive performance and gain a deeper, lasting embodied experience.
This kinesthetic awakening for the spectators is fostered by insider dynamics, which Ritter divides into four phases: complicity, porosity, contagion, and inclusion (see chapter 4). First, spectators must comply with the production's rules or narrative reality, including the willingness to explore new modes of participation. The spectators’ openness to being affected and affecting those around them—their level of porosity—then shapes the degree to which they dive deeper into the experience. “Through individual porosity, each audience participant finds themselves confronting interpersonal (between self and other) and intrapersonal (within self) boundaries of, or barriers to, engagement” (152); in overcoming or pushing these boundaries, spectators further immerse into the performance. The nature of contagion assists with this process as it indicates how spectators, as well as performers and scenery, ignite other spectators into action. Ritter illustrates contagion with an example of how one participant, picking up an object or running after a performer, encourages others to do the same. After this, a type of community or collective develops, and in order to cultivate this sense of inclusion, spectators further commit to their role in the performance.
Inspired by Roland Barthes's “The Death of the Author” (Reference Barthes1978), Ritter claims the spectator's role is best understood with her concept of coauthorality, in which the spectators’ involvement drastically shapes the show's outcome and meaning, placing them “into states of being coauthorial” (203). However, this is not to be confused with “the collaborative processes of collective creation” for, while the spectators’ improvisational scores shape the show, they function within guidance from the hired performers, the production's space, and applied props (205). In other words, viewers’ decisions occur within boundaries that are constructed to both actuate engagement—further immersing them into the show via improvisation—and contain them within a particular framework. This throws into question the level of agency participants truly have during immersive performances that often market themselves on notions of freedom and choice. Ritter presents the term tandemness to account for this blurring of agency and control, and frequently returns to the theme as it relates to choreography and audience participation throughout her book.
With this in mind, Tandem Dances is an important text to read for those interested in choreography's power dynamics. Ritter dedicates much of chapter 1, “Tracing Choreography,” and chapter 2, “Designing Differently with Dance,” to situating choreography within Western concert dance history as a managing system for bodies. To support her argument on how immersive productions employ choreography to organize and enact audience participation, she specifically highlights how elements of postmodern dance—such as improvisation, pedestrian movement and practices of daily life, probability, and site specificity/site sensitivity (57)—come through in immersive performance. In conversation with dance philosophers and theater scholars such as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Reference Sheets-Johnstone2015), Susan Leigh Foster (Reference Foster2011), and Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Reference Reynolds and Reason2012), Ritter additionally establishes how choreography is inseparable from topics of kinesthetic affect and kinesthetic empathy, and further, how we might extend our understanding of choreography to encompass everyday interactions. Although Ritter ultimately utilizes this theory to support her immersive-specific argument, her research could also support scholars considering broader concepts of performativity, ritual, habitus, and even managerial or pedagogical practices that may unknowingly pull from choreographic processes. I personally could see Ritter's work extending into a deeper analysis on the role nonhuman elements play in choreography as an immersive technology; she sets up a strong foundation for future research on this theme when discussing location, architecture, and the use of props.
Tandem Dances is an essential book for those invested in immersive performance or, broader yet, any body-based performance that incorporates the audience's participation and physicality as core elements to the production itself. Ritter articulates how such processes occur, as well as their immediate and lasting effects on those involved, and considers the way concepts of agency and power are negotiated within these performance.
