Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation

By Liam Jarvis

This book offers a wide-ranging examination of acts of ‘virtual embodiment’ in performance/gaming/applied contexts that abstract an immersant’s sense of physical selfhood by instating a virtual body, body-part or computer-generated avatar. Emergent ‘immersive’ practices in an increasingly expanding and cross-disciplinary field are coinciding with a wealth of new scientific knowledge in body-ownership and self-attribution. A growing understanding of the way a body constructs its sense of selfhood is intersecting with the historically persistent desire to make an onto-relational link between the body that ‘knows’ an experience and bodies that cannot know without occupying their unique point of view. The author argues that the desire to empathize with another’s ineffable bodily experiences is finding new expression in contexts of particular urgency. For example, patients wishing to communicate their complex physical experiences to their extended networks of support in healthcare, orcommunities placing policymakers ‘inside’ vulnerable, marginalized or disenfranchised virtual bodies in an attempt to prompt personal change. This book is intended for students, academics and practitioner-researchers studying or working in the related fields of immersive theatre/art-making, arts-science and VR in applied performance practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030279714

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© The Author(s) 2019

L. JarvisImmersive EmbodimentPalgrave Studies in Performance and Technologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27971-4_1

1. Introduction: Immersion as ‘Perceptual Embodiment’

Liam Jarvis¹  

(1)

Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

Liam Jarvis

Email: [e-mail]

In 2016, I participated in a performative virtual body-swapping transaction staged by anti-disciplinary international art collective BeAnotherLab using Creative Commons technology called The Machine to be Another (see Fig. 1.1) .¹ Inspired by knowledge derived from neuroscientific studies in embodiment, this system uses live camera feeds and two Oculus Rift virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) to enable a ‘user’ and a volunteer refugee performer—located in the same room but hidden behind a screen—to take up the first-person position of the other. While inhabiting the refugee’s virtual body, the user interacts with objects and the refugee mimics their physical actions in real time. The deployment of this illusion is conceptualized by the artists as a means of ‘increasing empathy’ by visually and proprioceptively occupying the position of the other (‘Understanding the Refugee Crisis via Virtual Reality’ 2016). The ethics of an expression of empathy that is conceived as an audience member’s temporary inhabitation of a virtualized other using live video feeds—one who may be vulnerable, displaced and/or disenfranchised—is a complex proposition that I have grappled with in my own practice and scholarship (Jarvis 2017). But an eccentric perceptual illusion of othering the self through virtual means is just one manifestation of a more pervasive trend. From smartphone apps that offer downloaders first-person simulations of neuroatypical pathological phenomena in the simulated symptoms of autism in the National Autistic Society’s Autism Too Much Information (TMI) Virtual Reality Experience (examined in Jarvis 2019), to ‘out-of-bodiment’ wearables that enable new visual perspectives beyond human binocular stereoscopy in the field of art engineering in Berlin-based art collective The Constitute’s Eyesect helmet (see pages 117–119). Temporary transformations of the participant in the immersive artwork are occurring in parallel to an ever-growing scientific understanding of the plasticity of bodily selfhood. Correspondingly, the notion of an ‘immersed’ body is accompanied by the seductive promise of its porousness to a range of remote experiences and phenomena.

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Fig. 1.1

BeAnotherLab ’s The Machine to be Another. BAL ©

‘Immersion’ is a multifarious concept—it has been defined using a variety of analogous theories and it pertains to a diverse range of aims in different cultural practices. From levels of attention and engagement in ‘game immersion’ (Brown and Cairns 2004),² to the state of ‘flow’ in which ‘people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter’ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990: 4).³ From the extent to which presence is felt in virtual environments (Slater et al. 1994; Witmer and Singer 1998; Di Luca 2010) to the belief that the consequences of the actions taken are unfolding as they might in reality in simulation-based training (Hagiwara et al. 2016). From empathic third sector public awareness raising VR apps (e.g. ‘feeling’ as a mediatized other does or to enhance symptom recognition, etc.) to the intensification of affects in entertainment (e.g. feeling what we imagine a character/avatar does).⁴ In theatre, the temporary transformation of the spectator into something other than a ‘spectator’ might be understood, in part, as a reconciliation of the paradox that is intrinsic to many immersive theatres. Namely, the desire for an immersant’s physical presence in a circumstance beyond their immediate ‘here and now’. It is a central contention in this book that an ontological and relational desire that undergirds much immersive experience is to feel more fully with the body of another. This ‘onto-relational’ desire concerns reconciling the physical gulf between one’s being and others’—‘ontology’ deriving from the Greek ōn, ont- ‘being’ + -logy (‘Ontology’) and ‘relational’ meaning the ‘way in which two or more people/things are connected’ (‘Relational’). This notion aligns to some extent with the correspondence Rosi Braidotti identifies between ‘ontological relationality’ and the posthuman subject, epitomized by an ‘enlarged sense of connection between self and others, including the non-human or earth others’, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other’ (Braidotti 2013: 49). While the desire to be other bodies is unfulfillable, it has precipitated new modes of participatory reception and interaction for different kinds of beneficiaries in actor training, gaming and applied practices in health care, etc. And one such expression of the impossible grasp towards onto-relationality is the qualitative integration of scientifically tested body transfer illusions (BTIs) in the example that started this introduction—BeAnotherLab’s ‘body-swapping’ system, The Machine to be Another .⁵

Immersive Embodiment examines nascent ‘layered reality’ practices at the intersection between gallery-based installations, immersive performances, scientific studies in body-ownership/self-attribution and bodily realities that are ‘postproduced’ as assimilative empathic prosthesis. Hito Steyerl has argued that with the digital proliferation of imagery in networked practices, ‘too much world’ has become available to us (Steyerl 2013). Connected to this frenzied excess, even the realm of the subjective experience of others becomes fetishized as phenomenologically accessible through reproducible and proprioceptively inhabitable mediatized body images.⁶ I use the term ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’ as a loose container for a plurality of artistic cultural forms that may, or may not, be situated by the artists within the paradigm of ‘theatre’. Hybridized practices that draw on the combined tekhne or ‘know-how’ of different disciplines inevitably resist fixed definitions and can be framed within a multitude of presentational contexts. BeAnotherLab’s descriptor of themselves as ‘anti-disciplinary’ might be viewed as a rejection of the very idea that knowledge is discrete in digital immersive practices. But a commonality between the boundary-querying case studies that will be discussed in this book—which are situated in fields as diverse as applied practices in health care and VR multiplayer video gaming—is that they are giving new and varied expression to the unrealizable promise that we might become the other body. For example, in Jane Gauntlett’s intersensory VR documentary performances, immersion ‘in’ her virtual body (VB) is followed by de-immersive dissonances that are generated between the spectating body’s different sense modalities as a proximate reconstruction of sensory disturbances associated with her experience of epileptic seizure (discussed in Chapter 5). ‘Immersion’ in this respect implies the promise of a plenitude of knowing through virtualized conflations of the minimal phenomenal self (MPS) with the ‘other’ within what neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran has described as an ‘era of experimental epistemology’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998: 3). MPS refers to the ‘experience of being a distinct, holistic entity capable of global self-control and attention, possessing a body and a location in space and time’ (Blanke and Metzinger 2009: 7). The extent to which the promise of ‘knowing’ other bodies is ever actuated within individual acts of immersion requires sustained critical scrutiny, which is a significant part of this book’s project in Part II.

Perceptual quirks of different orders such as cognitive forms of ‘blindness’ have long been examined in psychology. For example, in a famous study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants were invited to count the number of passes made with a basketball between players on a video. But most viewers failed to notice the person dressed in a gorilla suit walking directly through the viewer’s field of vision as the ball was passed (Simons and Chabris 1999). This experiment in ‘inattentional blindness’ demonstrates how little viewers ‘see’ and reaffirms the notion that the brain is a prediction machine. Philosopher of mind Andy Clark similarly proposes that we see the world by ‘guessing the world’ (Clark 2016: 5), a notion that is frequently exploited in various acts of ‘misdirection’ in entertainment (e.g. magic tricks). Mislocalization might be understood as another kind of perceptual quirk. In common parlance, the verb ‘mislocalize’ means to ‘localize incorrectly […] to make an error of perception involving the position of (a sensory stimulus)’ (‘Mislocalize’). Correspondingly, the noun ‘mislocalization’ can mean ‘mistaken, erroneous, or abnormal localization’ (‘Mislocalization’). Regarding the physical matter of bodies, the ability to identify and ‘localize’ limbs such as our hands in evolutionary terms has been described as ‘crucial for survival’ (Brozzoli et al. 2012). In scientific studies in body-ownership, localization specifically concerns attribution of self-identity to a body—‘the spatial localization of the self, or the I of experience and behavior’ (Olivé and Berthoz 2012). ‘Erroneous’ localization or ‘mislocalization’ of the body in a medical context can concern a variety of different phenomena—for example, disturbances in body-ownership caused by neurological conditions such as alien hand syndrome (Goldstein 1908), the mislocalization of stimuli to a phantom limb (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998) or referred sensations in ‘peripersonal space’ (the region of space immediately surrounding our bodies) (Knecht et al. 1996). Beyond neurological disorders, mislocalization also occurs in ‘healthy’ bodies in proprioceptive illusion studies such as the rubber hand illusion (RHI), which refers tactile sensations to a humanoid external object (Botvinick and Cohen 1998), the experimental induction of out-of-body experiences (OBE) using VR (Lenggenhager et al. 2007; Ehrsson 2007) or body substitution illusions (BSI) in which participants experience a sense of first-person ownership over a virtual surrogate body (Petkova and Ehrsson 2008; Slater et al. 2010). A wealth of scientific investigations in body-ownership has evidenced the effects and affects of ‘owning’ a body other than our own—for example, illusorily inhabiting the virtual body of a child (Banakou et al. 2013), or a rubber hand of a different ethnicity in laboratory experiments (Maister et al. 2013). Regarding the latter, objective measures using implicit association tests (IAT) have demonstrated a reduction in participants’ implicit bias against different racial body-types in the short term (Maister et al. 2013). In correspondence with these scientific developments, mixed reality and soi-disant ‘post-immersive’ theatre-makers such as ZU-UK are apprehending VR technologies associated with video game shoot ‘em ups to place audiences in a 6-year-old’s body in Goodnight, Sleep Tight (2017–). In this performance, VR’s first-person vantage point, which is routinely utilized in psychological embodiment studies, is used in an aesthetic experience to explore themes of intimacy, childhood and homesickness. Installation and multimedia artists such as Catherine Richards, Carsten Höller, and Lundahl and Seitl have also long integrated body illusions of different perceptual orders into their work—not to scientifically test the mechanisms of bodily selfhood, but rather to experientially transport immersants elsewhere or provoke questions as to the parameters of being one’s body. The practices that I gather under the umbrella term of ‘theatres of mislocalized sensation’ may acknowledge a debt to extant knowledge from experimental studies in embodiment and directly smuggle scientifically tested illusions into aesthetic experiences, or they may stage less conscious resonances with related sets of scientific findings. But mislocalization understood as the occupying of a position outside of one’s bodily borders or towards a virtual proxy (e.g. a rubber hand, a virtual body, a computer-generated avatar, etc.) provides a useful conceptual framework to examine a deep-rooted immersive promise that much, but not all, immersive work seeks to realize. Immersive Embodiment offers a comprehensive examination of the promise I have identified of the immersant’s self-transportation via the artwork through its corollaries with what philosopher of cognitive science Frédérique de Vignemont has described as an ‘explosion of experimental work on body representations’ over the past twenty years (2018: 2).

‘Embodiment’ is a word that has also carried innumerable distinctions, with poststructuralist commentators rejecting the notion that the body is a container of the self (Manning 2013), media theorists since the 1960s arguing that technology is itself an ‘extension’ of the human senses (McLuhan 2001 [1964]) or transhumanist discourses disavowing ‘the’ body entirely through universalizing narratives towards its post-evolutionary obsolescence (Paffrath and Stelarc 1984). Performance scholar Shaun May makes a valuable distinction between ‘bodies’ as physical matter contained within the ‘epidermal boundary’, and ‘embodiment’, as a body’s phenomenological correlate which can extend both beyond and behind the skin (May 2011). For Mia Perry and Carmen Liliana Medina, ‘embodiment’ refers to bodies as ‘whole experiential beings in motion, both inscribed and inscribing subjectivities’ (2011: 63). For them, the ‘experiential body is both a representation of self (a text) as well as a mode of creation in progress (a tool)’ (63). But I argue that the conflation of body-as-tool here requires reconsideration in the light of studies in scientific body-ownership, which have demonstrated that a body experiences a very different sense of ownership over ‘tools’ because they are not ‘part of us’. For example, a pencil is not usually part of one’s felt experience of the world in the same way as the biological hand that grips it. Frédérique de Vignemont and Alessandro Farnè argue that ‘tools are embodied but only motorically, and not perceptually’ (de Vignemont and Farnè 2010: 209). They use RHI studies to identify that when a rubber hand is threatened with a hammer, participants react ‘as if their own hand was threatened’, and correspondingly, the object ‘needs to be perceptually embodied for one to react affectively towards it’ (de Vignemont and Farnè 2010: 209). Tools do not prompt the same affective responses precisely because they are not experienced as incorporated within the body schema, despite some phenomenological discourses that predate the RHI paradigm erroneously arguing otherwise (Leder 1990: 83).⁷ My particular usage of ‘embodiment’ in the title ‘Immersive Embodiment’ refers explicitly to ‘perceptual embodiment’—the selection of case studies in this book places an emphasis on artists experimenting with the plasticity of the immersed participant, enabling affective experiences of a self that hyper-extends beyond the protective layer of the skin to incorporate experiences of otherness as a proposed fulfilment of the immersive promise to feel with the body of the other.

The Paradox of ‘Presence’ in Immersive Theatres

Emergent trends in immersive performance have been couched in theoretical discourses that position the whole of a spectating body and its perceptual faculties as the locus of meaning-making. The centrality of the audience’s bodies has led to broader ontological claims on behalf of immersive theatre and its attendant promise that the ‘haptically incorporated’ spectator (Machon 2009: 207) might experience different phenomena ‘more fully’ (Trueman 2015). These are claims that may or may not be sustainable when subjected to rigorous critical scrutiny. As an audience-participant over the last decade, I have been cast by theatre-makers as a refugee,⁸ the survivor of an apocalyptic event,⁹ part of a trapeze double-act,¹⁰ a date,¹¹ an attendee at a swingers party,¹² a re-enactor,¹³ a thief or grifter (con-artist),¹⁴ a rebel,¹⁵ a player,¹⁶ a user,¹⁷ a voter,¹⁸ a passenger,¹⁹ a voyeur²⁰ and, without significant recourse to the ethical implications, a Jewish prisoner at the ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau’ concentration camp.²¹ The promise of such ‘immersive’ acts is that they might function as a threshold experience to transport unrehearsed audience members not just mentally, but physically inside a particular spatio-temporal circumstance or subjunctive ‘otherworldly-world’ (Machon 2013a: 63). In narratology, intrusions into a story such as an extradiegetic narrator becoming a character in a diegetic universe have long been referred to as metalepsis (Genette 1988 [1983]). However, notions of physically ‘entering’ a dramatic universe have always been problematic. Keir Elam in The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (1980) cites philosopher Nicholas Rescher to substantiate his argument that, ‘Access to all possible worlds – including the dramatic – is, naturally, conceptual and not physical, since ‘one must begin from where one is, and WE are placed within this actual world of ours’ (Rescher 1975: 92)’ (Elam 97).²² The ‘here and now’ of the theatrical circumstance is always the obstacle to the ‘there and then’ of a dramatic situation. Some scholars have argued that fiction in the interface of immersive theatre, as with theatre more broadly, is prone to ‘collapse’. Environmental façades that insist on authentically belonging to the fiction—and in turn insisting that the bodies within those environments might also belong—are susceptible to failure when acts of deliberate or unintentional disobedient participation can derail ‘any hope of owning, or possessing, an experience that was not ours to possess’ (Alston 2016b: 263). As Elam contends, ‘counterfactual worlds’ are only ‘actual’ for their imagined inhabitants, and audiences can never genuinely experience their ‘condition’, since it would involve a transformation of the ‘here’ of our physical context into a remote and hypothetical ‘there’ (Elam 97–98). The only exceptions Elam acknowledges are conditions through which an alternative state of affairs is perceived as more immediately real than the actual, such as ‘oneiric (‘dream world’), hallucinogenic (other-worldly ‘trips’) and psychotic (e.g. schizophrenic) experiences’ (98). Notably, all of Elam’s caveats are anomalies of perception that are produced by a body itself or through its contact with foreign substances, not by art experiences. Thus, Elam hints at the obvious limitations of any mode of cultural practice that overstates its claim towards our ‘transformation’ or physical immersion ‘inside’ a distant elsewhere. The Möbius strip of actual/virtual hyphenated selves that are performed in immersive experiences by spectators—a spectator-prisoner, for example in Badac’s The Factory —is raising ethical considerations reminiscent of historical psychological experiments—for example, Philip Zimbardo’s hastily abandoned Stanford Prison experiment (1971), which cast university students as ‘guards’ in a mock prison. The guards habituated this ‘dramatic’ situation and its inequities of power, exercising total control over fellow student-prisoners who protested by staging a real hunger strike. The ‘prisoners’ in this simulation became deindividuated others, dressed in identical smocks as ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1979 [1975]). Zimbardo’s experiment was an early demonstration that bad fictional situations can corrupt good people and social behaviour arises from the interplay between people’s dispositions, situations (‘mock’ or otherwise) and immersion in systems that account for social behaviour (Zimbardo 2007). Recent accounts from actors in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (Jamieson 2018) and The Guild of Misrule’s The Great Gatsby suggest that they were sexually assaulted by fantasy emboldened audience members, who in Punchdrunk’s work are also ‘deindividuated’ by identical and anonymizing masks. Such incidents have prompted urgent debates about the importance of safeguarding performers from ‘immersed’ audiences (Gardner 2018), suggesting the need to revisit the ethical lessons from these earlier psychological immersive simulations.

Bodily mislocalization in both embodiment illusion studies and through neurological conditions such as phantom limb pain (PLP) has demonstrated that one need not be delusional or ‘psychotic’ to unconsciously believe in a reality that is consciously known to be ‘counterfactual’. For example, PLP can be felt in a missing hand, irrespective of one’s awareness that the limb is absent. Embodiment in VR is providing a safe virtual environment in psychology for empirical studies of phenomena that is off-limits in the real world for ethical reasons, such as obedience experiments—for example, Stanley Milgram’s controversial 1960s ‘obedience’ experiment has been revisited in VR, in which subjects were instructed to administer an ‘electric shock’ to an unseen (and fictitious) human respondent when they answer questions incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time (Slater et al. 2006). Simulations such as this are often premised on one’s belief in the counterfactual circumstance. Correspondingly, body image illusions have been re-appropriated in immersive performance practices to enable participants to self-deceive and proprioceptively ‘own’ the body of different kinds of others for entertainment, communication, cyber-therapy, rehabilitation in health care and other applied practices enacted for social or political change. Despite conscious awareness of being inside an illusion, neuroscientific experiments have used different measuring techniques to demonstrate the efficacy of illusions that elicit a feeling of ownership over a virtual body such as physiological measures (e.g. skin conductance response [SCR]), neural measures (e.g. positron emission tomography [PET]) and conscious behavioural measures (e.g. participants’ introspective reports). The extent to which the belief that a mediatized body image is one’s own body is also prone to being misread as understanding the felt ‘experience’ of another (e.g. a refugee in BeAnotherLab’s work) raises further profound ethical considerations that are part of this book’s aim to investigate. Over the chapters that follow, I examine the interstices where science and art coalesce in different respects as attempted realizations of the immersive onto-relational promise of crossing the threshold by ‘entering’ simulated experiences.

I should acknowledge that there are many examples of non-technologized immersive performance practices that implicate the audience-participant within a live encounter while not inviting them to become someone other than themselves. For example, Adrian Howells’ intimate one-to-one performances engendered what Deirdre Heddon and Dominic Johnson have referred to as situations of ‘accelerated friendship’ through intimate acts of bathing, holding and the washing of an audience member’s hair or feet (2016: 10). Although this kind of ‘immersive’ work is not an equivalence with performances that invite the participant to experience with a virtualized body, immersion in an eclectic variety of artistic practices signal a shared desire to mobilize the injunction of ‘jumping beyond oneself’ (Heddon 98). Of this injunction, Johnson questions, ‘How does an individual take the leap to a subject-position outside of the confines of biography, of physical or emotional limitation?’ (Heddon 98). The core hypothesis of Immersive Embodiment is that immersion involves myriad strategies that seek to realize the promise of a position beyond the confines of one’s body, its immediate locale or its finite set of lived experiences. The imagined fulfilment of a ‘beyond oneself’ position has taken diverse cultural forms, from disability simulations in health care such as Wolfgang Moll’s GERontologic ‘age simulation suit’ to testimonies of an individual’s altered perception, remediated within first-person VR experiences. For example, Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (2016) was a VR experience released to coincide with a feature film inspired by theologian John M. Hull’s audio cassette recordings that documented his experience of going blind in 1983. Hull took listeners on his long journey from clinging to the idea of vision to an epiphanic acceptance and understanding of a world ‘beyond sight’. He articulates his need to bridge his changed perceptual experiences with others when he says that ‘to gain our full humanity, blind people and sighted people need to see each other’ (Hull in D’Apice). Hull’s cassettes were an expression of yearning towards interperceptual ‘seeing’ and the subsequent VR experience positions immersants in Hull’s imagined first-person vantage point when going outside.²³ Blindness in this context is paradoxically expressed to sighted immersants synesthetically as binaural sounds in a virtual environment that trigger visual activity and make visible the topography of the virtual surroundings. In silence, the visuals recede to blackness, when for Hull ‘the world dies’ (in Hull’s words on his tapes). Correspondingly, immersion in this book’s specific investigation constitutes acts primarily pursued as a potential onto-relational affordance towards momentarily habituating different perceptual experiences of otherness.

Towards Reconciling the Problem of the Spectator’s Presence ‘Elsewhere’

Cognizance of the particularity of one’s own immersed body, or what N. Katherine Hayles defined as the ‘resistant materialities of embodiment’ (1999: 245), can serve to counter the underlying immersive promise that one’s flesh might cross the threshold and ‘enter’ the simulacrum. In immersive theatre, various kinds of cloaking or masking of participating bodies have sought to circumvent this obstacle, akin to the way a VR HMD occludes its wearer’s body. In location-based VR, Mat Collishaw’s Thresholds (2017) restaged the world’s first major exhibition of photography, enabling visitors to walk through a minimalist whited-out space in Somerset House (and other touring locations) that was digitally reconstructed in their HMDs to revive William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1839 exhibition in King Edward’s School in Birmingham (see cover image). Akin to the scenographic environments in immersive theatre, participants could physically interact with bespoke glass vitrines, fixtures and experience the heat and scent of a coal fire burning. Infrared sensors tracked visitors’ movements who appear to one another in the virtual environment as ‘shadowy digital avatars’ (Ellis-Petersen 2017). The presence of anonymized co-visitors in the virtual space performed a practical purpose of avoiding unwanted collisions, while emphasizing their displacement in time as ghostly spectres that were not of the environment that was being navigated. Beyond anonymization through the obstruction of wearable HMDs in real-world spaces and abstracted graphical representations in virtual environments, a hallmark of Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre work has been the audience’s donning of masks in shows such as The Masque of the Red Death (2007–2008) and The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable (2013).²⁴ In these productions, immersants ‘free-roamed’ through Battersea Arts Centre and a disused postal sorting office in Paddington, London, that had been scenographically transformed into the macabre universe of Edgar Allan Poe and 1960s ‘Temple Studios’ in Hollywood, respectively. The latter offered the promise of entry into the dramatic universe of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1879) from which the piece took inspiration.²⁵ Adam Alston has described The Masque as ‘a delirious romp through the haunting, morbid imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe’ (2016a: 1). The word ‘delirious’ is interesting here because like the company’s name, ‘Punchdrunk’, it implies a physiological state or ‘condition’, much as Elam’s aforementioned discourse implies that physical access to the dramatic is synonymous with altered ‘oneiric’ states. Correspondingly, Goat and Monkey’s Reverence: A Tale of Abelard and Heloise (2007) cloaked its audience in robes and cowls as medieval monks to blend their bodies into the resurrected world of historical theologian, Peter Abelard (1079–1142). I would argue that strategies towards the audience’s concealment problematize scholarly claims that ‘bodies are prioritized’ in immersive theatre (Machon 2009: 207), since the audience is staged only to be anonymized as ‘part of the scenery’. The obfuscating of bodies in immersive theatres resonates more broadly with what Drew Leder had identified in The Absent Body (1990) in Western culture as ‘intrinsic tendencies towards self-concealment’ (3)—the effacement of both one’s own body in day-to-today life and its hidden internal operations. Furthermore, the promise of ‘transporting’ the audience beyond their immediate ‘here’ necessitates a transformation of the spectator that is more typically associated with the performer; as well as being ‘themselves’, immersion ‘inside’ the conceptual space of drama or re-enacted historical events often carries the further promise of their becoming someone else. The specific kind of ‘someone’ can vary significantly from a ‘character’ to the dispensation of drama and mimesis entirely through aesthetic forms such as non-matrixed performance (e.g. the removal of spectatorial distance in ‘para-theatre’) or altered behaviours inscribed through eccentric arrangements of spectating bodies in relation to their environment to prompt different ways to physically contemplate—for example, Patrick Killoran’s Observation