Over on Culturebot Dan O’Neil wrote a piece called On the Art of the Immersive, Or is This Even Theater? that I read right up until it was clear I should totally stop reading until I see The Grand Paradise. And maybe avoid it yourself, for now, if you don’t want to see a photo or two.

Third Rail Production’s new piece is getting notices all over the place — and it seems like the question of how to evaluate whether an immersive piece is good or not is coming back hard. Is it good “merely” because it overwhelms us sensorily? Is it good “merely” because it creates another world? What does good and bad mean when it comes to this work?

I’m itching to get in on the conversation (and bring in some Claire Bishop for you), but just can’t bring myself to read all of this stuff before I see the show.

Is it silly to avoid spoilers for a piece that, one would guess, doesn’t have a conventional narrative, if it has a narrative at all? Is it silly to avoid spoilers for a company who seems to build its work not on sequential events, but around an accumulation of movement, spectacle, intimacy, and theme?

In the last couple weeks, the possibility came up that I might conduct a podcast interview in The Grand Paradise space — but I didn’t want to see the space before I saw the piece. Which makes more sense. Maybe.

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In Josephine Machon’s Immersive Theaters: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance, the notion of space gets talked about quite a bit. The point is made that in conventional theater spaces the aesthetic is one of separation. The orientation of the seats, the focus of the lights, the lip of the stage all pull us toward the point where the performance will occur, a space clearly separate from us.

And when the performance does begin, we are pulled from our bodies in some way. An audience in a conventional theater is taken up with the stagecraft — often in wonderful ways, but in ways that melt the body away until we are all eyes and ears, focused on a place forever separate from us.

In immersive work boundaries are blurred, questioned, annihilated. The audience is cast in a role that can evolve and transform — viewer to participant to performer and back again. The body of the audience member is in the space and is always reminded it is in the space, both the physical space of the set and the imagined space of what that set might represent.

How that embodiment in the space happens is different for each immersive piece, and each company or creator has her own style or voice with regard to immersive effects.

Can that experience be spoiled? Impossible, of course. I have my body. You have yours. And each of us will have a different live(d) experience of each immersive piece, as Machon might say.

Still, I don’t want to see the space before I experience the piece. I don’t want to see any more photos. And I don’t want to unearth any secrets beforehand.

I just want to see you in paradise.