Josephine is a lecturer at Brunel University and the author of (Syn)aesthetics: Redefining Visceral Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). With Sue Broadhurst she is Co-editor of The Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology Series which includes, Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (Broadhurst & Machon Eds. 2006), and Sensualities/Textualities & Technologies: Writings of the Body in 21st Century Performance (Broadhurst & Machon Eds, 2009). Josephine is currently writing a book on Immersive Theatres and collaborating on a site-based project, exploring performance as a medium for research into human relationships with the environment.

Immersive Theatre is a term increasingly applied to diverse theatre events that assimilate a variety of art forms and seek to exploit all that is experiential in performance, placing the audience at the heart of the work. Here experience can be understood in its fullest sense; to feel or undergo. The desire to experience more fully is true of the most intimate of one-on-one performance as it is of the large scale works of internationally renowned companies such as Punchdrunk. Examining the work of Punchdrunk in particular this 20 minute informal paper presentation will scrutinise the ways in which immersive practice has opened up new territories of intimacy and immediacy and has evolved new approaches to audience interaction and appreciation as a result. It will focus on the myriad ways in which the audience are thrown into Punchdrunk theatrical environments, seemingly without stipulations and often with different expectations for participation, thereby forced to negotiate new forms of engagement with theatre (evolved from the worlds of underground gigs, festivals, carnival sideshows and performance art more than traditional literary theatre) and, consequently, are required to acquire new processes for appreciating and analysing such work.

I am a Collaborative Doctoral Award student at the University of Exeter studying immersion and audience experience in the theatre of Punchdrunk.

I am researching immersion and audience experience in the theatre of Punchdrunk. Punchdrunk emphasise that the creation of a unique, individual ‘theatrical experience’ for each audience member is at the heart of their work. Part of this project therefore entails studying individual and, necessarily, highly personal responses. For this presentation, I will present three pieces of audience response taken from Punchdrunk’s archives, in relation to one of their shows (possibly Masque Of The Red Death), in order to discuss the potential problems of measuring and/or analysing audience response to a theatre form that is defined by being individual.

I am an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the Drama Department of Royal Holloway, University of London, looking into participation and immersion in contemporary performance, with a particular interest in late-Marxist aesthetics. I completed MAs in International Performance Research at the Universities of Amsterdam and Warwick and taught Performance Studies at the latter. I will be co-editing the next edition of the peer-reviewed journal, "Platform". I organised and curated the debate “New Music – New Audience” in Amsterdam in 2009 and have published work in "Dutch Journal of Music Theory" and "Shakespeare Revue". I am an award-winning composer for Curious Directive.

One-on-one performance festivals have exploded onto the London fringe theatre scene in recent months. I will question whether or not a politically engaged theatre emerges from immersive and participatory one-on-one encounters by looking at what “risks” might be involved for both performer and audience – failure, embarrassment, awkwardness, responsibility and uncertainty – and ask whether the “risky” encounters on offer at BAC, Theatre Souk, and Sprint festivals might prompt a reflexive questioning of politically anchored affective responses. Taking as a point of departure Hans-Thies Lehmann’s call for an “aesthetics of risk”, I will apply Nicolas Bourriaud’s "Relational Aesthetics" as both a methodological and conceptual means of approaching one-on-one performance, focusing not on content, nor a participant’s experience, but the potentially discomforting and politically charged relations between performer, audience, and mise-en-scène, which might produce a refreshingly “risky” encounter. My suggestion is that the “alternative social models” in “concrete” aesthetic space, which Bourriaud claims of the artwork as an “interstice”, are ripe for consideration in terms of precariousness and uncertainty (as opposed to “antagonism”). I will conclude by posing provocations for further research geared towards the relationship of aesthetic to social space within the contemporary capitalist context of a (global) “risk society”.