Immersive Intimacy: Violation and Transformative Justice in Immersive Performance

Abstract

This chapter analyzes contemporary theater’s treatment of allegations of sexual misconduct and attempts to support survivors in plays with actor-audience interaction. I focus on the example of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an immersive production in which performers and staffers reported allegations of sexual violence to Buzzfeed, who broke the story in 2018. After detailing the allegations, I argue that much immersive performance poses unique challenges for consent, given its often-improvisatory structure and the difficulty of shaping audience responses. I examine the sexually charged history of immersive performance dating back to Happenings of the 1960s, which often advanced what I call an aesthetic of violation; they attempted to shake their audience out of their usual ways of inhabiting the world. However, in contemporary performance, audiences have at times violated performers. Addressing this history and the allegations at Sleep No More, immersive productions have begun to enlist intimacy choreographers, who have the difficult task of pre-choreographing the actor-audience contract. I frame the use of intimacy choreography in immersive performance as a transformative justice intervention—not merely an opportunity to challenge individual perpetrators but also to remake the fundamental labor conditions for staging sexuality in theater. Through negotiations over the actor-audience contract and artists’ concrete labor contracts, artists are calling for greater control over their working environments in a precarious gig economy.