Part of the fun of exploring the immersive universe is coming up with ways to talk about things that don’t get talked about all that much. After all, the most common question I get asked is “how is it immersive?”
The “it” being whatever show/experience I just encountered, and “immersive” almost always meaning “how much agency am I going to have and will I be moving around a lot.” Not everything that we cover at No Proscenium involves a boatload of agency. Some things don’t even involve walking around that much. These events often still retain the je ne sais quoi that make them a NoPro show, belonging to that class of work Mikhael Tara Garver calls “open-frame.”
In this realm we find ourselves with terms like “site-specific,” “site-responsive” and “site-adaptive,” the former being lifted from the dance practice of choreographing a work for a specific place and the later two being a little fudgier. I tend to employ them to mean “the work has been retrofitted into the space the artists are working in, but could probably be done in another space to similar effect.” Which is why I use them as that’s a lot of words.
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Yet there’s another class of work for which those terms don’t really fit, and those are the works where a space — often a theatrical black box — is used to either fully recreate a real world space or create the feeling that you are in a real world space. This weekend at the Hollywood Fringe I found myself in a couple of productions that were doing just that, with varying degrees of success. For this work it seemed appropriate to give a new term, since I suspect we will be seeing more and more of this kind of work. Indeed the current production of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest in Burbank is an example of this type of work with high production values.
While in Ashley Steed’s When Skies Are Gray I flashed on the term “site-evocative,” as her show evokes the hospice room where the real life events that inspired the work took place without recreating all the details. It’s an efficient term, and it maps well to Cuckoo’s Nest and other work at the Fringe. It also has the benefit of being accurate while allowing for a wide range of fidelity to verisimilitude on the part of directors and designers without giving a false impression as a descriptor.
So going forward, when a production seeks to recreate a sense of space as opposed to fitting the work into the space that’s given to them, we’ll refer to it as “site-evocative.”
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