Theatre History Studies

Immersed in Witchcraft

I'm sitting in a darkened room, waiting for someone to show up. I'm surrounded by elaborately designed rooms: an office, a hospital, a boudoir, a cemetery, a hotel lobby. Curiosity, fear, and excitement fill me. Characters enter the room, performing dance sequences solo and in pairs, and I'm drawn to the fantastic among them: covens of witches, White Rabbits, Mad Hatters, Red Queens. As I explore the five-story McKittrick Hotel complex or the corridors of the Kingsland Ward asylum, I lose myself, not knowing what lies behind a curtain, through a door, atop a staircase. Powerful female characters ignite my wonder; these witches contest "normalcy" with a set of upside-down rules and rituals. As I reflect on the ten-year history of commercially successful and widespread immersive theatre in the United States, I observe that two of the longest-running such experiences in New York City depend on themes of witchcraft. By aligning authoritative witchlike characters with an audience encouraged into childlike exploration and submission, creators of the performances Sleep No More (2011) and Then She Fell (2012) made use of stage witch tropes to introduce a new phase of immersive theatre.¹

Both productions take place in large, designed spaces and are inspired by canonical literary works: Macbeth and Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, respectively. However, they are not living storybooks; both incorporate other works, such as [End Page 172] Sleep No More's quotation of Alfred Hitchcock films, and both take place within fictional institutions of an earlier time: the 1930s-themed McKittrick Hotel and the Victorian hospital Kingsland Ward. Accompanied by a constant soundtrack, dancer-performers engage each other using a dance vocabulary full of contemporary technique and contact improvisation. Then She Fell consists of several audience tracks in which characters lead audience members by ones or twos through three floors of rooms. Sleep No More is a free-for-all, as characters perform predetermined, one-hour tracks across the six-floor, 100,000-square-foot warehouse and audiences pursue whichever of the twenty-some characters they choose. Daring audience members are rewarded with intimate, "one-on-one" performances in Sleep No More, and Then She Fell provides many personalized experiences. Both have attracted significant internet-based fan followings, and both are frequently contrasted in criticism of New York's immersive scene, due to their roughly contemporary openings, long open-ended runs, and choreographic similarity. To these comparisons I add that they share witchy themes.

The current wave of immersive performance in New York City began around 2010 with the work of several dance- and nightclub-based innovators. The UK-based company Punchdrunk and management company Emursive invested in a major, open-run production of Sleep No More in Chelsea in 2011. Joining Punchdrunk in New York were Third Rail Projects (Then She Fell) and Cynthia Von Buhler's Speakeasy Dollhouse (The Bloody Beginning, 2011). According to American Theatre magazine, similar immersive works had emerged throughout the country by 2013.² The immersive theatre trend was not unique to New York City, but it took on unique shapes due to the environment and talent pool of the city. In particular, early New York immersives from 2011 to 2015 tended to eschew site-responsive or outdoor performances and instead modeled their work on the type of open "sandbox" or warehouse model, as Punchdrunk did, or else in the nightclub model begun a decade earlier with The Donkey Show (1999).³

However, with their nearly completely emancipated spectators, emphasis on one-on-one experiences, and nonlinear structure, the new immersives of the 2010s sold spectacle over story. It was often an expensive ticket, and as a result, Punchdrunk and Third Rail Projects attracted an economically well-off audience but not necessarily an intellectual or high-art one. New York already boasted a rich history of nightlife entertainment and cabaret, site-specific experiments emerging from performance art discourses, and a tradition of relational, community-based, and participatory art in the gallery. Immersive theatre took on a new niche by embracing a more commercial...