Abstract
This chapter considers how The Burnt City might reshape our understanding of the history of immersivity. Although theatre scholars traditionally position immersive theatre within a chronology of experiences going back only to the twentieth century, classicists have long interpreted ancient literature through the lens of a poetics of immersion, meaning that immersive experiences can be identified as far back as our earliest examples of ancient Greek literature. In this chapter, I consider how we might align the twenty-first-century immersive theatre phenomenon with this wider history of immersion, initially by examining points of connection between Punchdrunk’s practice and the genre of Greek tragedy. I then consider two ancient concepts that are linked with the idea of immersion, namely mimesis, or representation, and enargeia, or vividness. I showcase how each concept was understood in antiquity and is manifest in ancient literature, drawing upon Aristotle and Plato in my discussion of mimesis and Lysias, Homer, and Thucydides in my discussion of enargeia. By putting Punchdrunk’s work into dialogue with ancient ideas of immersion, I shed new light upon how we might understand immersivity in antiquity, by paying more attention to its relationship with the embodied materiality of performance. Overall, the chapter works to invite one to reconceptualise Punchdrunk’s practice within a broader history of immersivity, and to consider the significance of theatricality and embodied performance outside of the theatre and in relation to textuality as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Allan et al. (2017: 35–36).
- 2.
- 3.
Biggin (2017: 1).
- 4.
HM Government (2018).
- 5.
James (2022).
- 6.
Barrett, quoted in Gayet (2022).
- 7.
Doyle, quoted in Bloodworth (2022).
- 8.
Barrett, quoted in Bloodworth (2022). Punchdrunk’s website quotes reviews describing Punchdrunk as ‘hands down the best immersive theatre company in the world’, ‘pioneers of the “immersive theatre” phenomenon’, ‘immersive theatre on an epic scale’, and ‘pioneers of ultra-immersive drama’. See Punchdrunk (2022).
- 9.
Machon (2013: 65–66).
- 10.
Pimentel and Teixeira (1993: 15).
- 11.
- 12.
See Nield (2008: 531).
- 13.
On the potential for the in-yer-face and postdramatic labels to obscure the differences between works, see Cole (2019: 39–40).
- 14.
Barrett, quoted in James (2020).
- 15.
Ryan (2015: 217).
- 16.
Olsen (2021).
- 17.
Olsen (2021: 167).
- 18.
Budelmann and van Emde Boas (2019).
- 19.
Budelmann and van Emde Boas (2019: 78).
- 20.
- 21.
Gianvittorio-Ungar (2019).
- 22.
Gianvittorio-Ungar (2019: 243).
- 23.
Gianvittorio-Ungar (2019: 244).
- 24.
Ritter (2020: 109).
- 25.
See Tomlin (2016: 55). Diamond notes that Brecht’s anti-Aristotelianism is now well-understood to disguise key connections with Aristotle, and that in some ways Brecht insisted on more mimesis, rather than less, via the idea of mimesis not as representation but as a mode of reading that transforms an object into a gestus or a dialectical image. See Diamond (1997: ii, viii–ix).
- 26.
Lehmann (2006: 100).
- 27.
Machon and Punchdrunk (2019: 277).
- 28.
- 29.
Schaeffer and Vultur (2005: 238).
- 30.
Halliwell (2002: 53).
- 31.
Barrett, quoted in James (2020).
- 32.
Barrett, quoted in Hoggard (2013).
- 33.
Biggin (2015: 306–307).
- 34.
Ritter (2017).
- 35.
Westling (2020: 2).
- 36.
- 37.
Machon and Punchdrunk (2019: 244).
- 38.
Zeitlin summarises that it ‘would not be hyperbole to suggest that no other rhetorical term [than ekphrasis] has aroused such interest in recent years among classicists and non-classicists alike, involving aesthetic considerations, theories of vision, modes of viewing, mental impressions, and the complex relationships between word and image’. See Zeitlin (2013: 17). For a summary of the differences between ekphrasis in antiquity and modernity, see Webb (2009: 1–2). Although the terms are not extensively theorised until the first century CE, they can be found much earlier. The adjective enarges (visible, manifest), for example, is found as early as Homer; see Allan et al. (2017: 35).
- 39.
- 40.
- 41.
Webb (2009: 128–129).
- 42.
Huitink (2019a: 170).
- 43.
See Peter O’Connell’s analysis of this ratio in O’Connell (2017: 239).
- 44.
On this strategy within modern law, see O’Connell (2017: 232–233).
- 45.
Allan et al. (2017), see enargeia as a predecessor of the modern notion of immersion and position it as of key importance within the history of the poetics of immersion.
- 46.
Huitink (2019a: section 4). O’Connell adds to this list deictic pronouns and adverbs, the so-called historical present, and most importantly detailed descriptions. See O’Connell (2017: 226). Although speaking about immersion in ancient literature more generally, rather than enargeia specifically, Allan’s catalogue of immersive textual features is also relevant, and includes the use of proximal spatial and temporal deictics and first- and second-person pronouns. Allan (2019: 18–19).
- 47.
- 48.
While enargeia refers to the reader evoking or imagining the narrated events, ancient critics were also familiar with the opposite phenomenon, namely the sensation of a listener being transported to the narrated events. Longinus saw this dislocating strategy as characteristic of the sublime [On the Sublime 1.4]; on the relevance of the sublime to immersion, see Allan et al. (2017: 37).
- 49.
See Huitink (2019a, esp. p. 176).
- 50.
Huitink (2019a: 178).
- 51.
Wakefield (2019).
- 52.
I borrow the term ‘narrative sting’ from Grethlein et al. (2019: 8).
- 53.
Translation adapted from Huitink (2019b: 188).
- 54.
Richardson (1993: 214).
- 55.
See Gagarin (1983).
- 56.
Radosavljević (2022). Indeed, in Cole (2021) I argue that the fragmentary nature of the underpinning source text in Punchdrunk’s Kabeiroi facilitated a depth of immersion, positing that the sense of lack contained within the fragmentary form provided a productive impetus for the audience to create the unified imaginary world necessary for a ‘deep’ form of immersion.
- 57.
Webb (Forthcoming).
- 58.
Translation adapted from Babbitt (1936).
- 59.
Translation adapted from Babbitt (1936).
- 60.
Walker (1993: 358).
- 61.
On ancient literature as a semantic scaffold in experimental performance see Cole (2019, esp. p. 3).
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Cole, E. (2024). The Burnt City’s Legacy: Immersivity, Mimesis, and Enargeia. In: Punchdrunk on the Classics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43067-1_6
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