Towards a Distribution of Local Sensibility—An Overview of Immersive Theatre in Hong Kong, 2017 & 2018

Immersive theatre is the most contemporary response to theatre reforms in Europe and the US since Bertolt Brecht. With his formulation of the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), Brecht revamped the essence of theatre. He denounced the passivity of an audience enjoying theatre in the dark and in silence, advocating that it should engage actively instead. In Brecht’s own practices, however, “audience participation” is only a kind of intellectual engagement. The alienation and mental challenges created by the playwrights, directors and actors on stage force the audience, now awakened from the illusion of the Fourth Wall, to not only emotionally engage with the drama, but to reflect on what they see from a distant and critical vantage point. Contemporary immersive theatre can be regarded as a step forward in the realisation of Brecht’s theoretical ideal. After the rampage of post-dramatic theatre in the 20th century and the intense applications of information technology in technical arts, aesthetics built upon separating the audience and performers by the physical theatre space have endured only in classical works and commercial performances. In some of the most idiosyncratic aesthetic explorations in contemporary theatre, reshaping the line between the stage and auditorium, and between the performers and audience has become a norm, to the extent that theatre is being redefined. In the second half of the 20th century, genres such as environmental theatre, site-specific theatre and happenings demonstrated the possible ways in which an audience could engage in a performance. In the 21st century, immersive theatre epitomises the spirit of these aesthetic practices.