Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

While immersive theatre is not new, in recent years it has become ever more popular. Interactive theatrical experiences push the boundaries of traditional theatre, blurring the line between audience and creator. Shakespeare’s Garden: An Immersive Sound Stroll Through His Sonnets, Soliloquies, and Scenes was a multidisciplinary collaboration exploring the intersection of immersive theatre and technology. Guided by spatial audio and images projected onto large room partitions, audience members followed a meandering path through the transformed black box. Actively engaged in their own exploration, audience members experienced recordings of Shakespeare texts and garden soundscapes. The interactive nature of this project was of particular interest to the collaborators. How will audiences react to a “sound stroll”? How will audiences engage with their fellow audience members during the experience? How will spatial, aural, and visual environments affect the way in which an audience responds to and engages with Shakespeare’s texts? Will they “hear” his words more fully, reaching a higher level of understanding? The project proved successful with more than 1,000 audience members attending and several hundred sharing their own experiences through exit surveys and posts on social media. The popularity of the project, led to the development of a online reality version of the work: a new incarnation, expanding the concepts of place, space, and interaction into the digital realm. Sharing observations and reflections on the process and implementation, this case study explores how a group of collaborators, from diverse disciplines, came together to explore the possibilities of storytelling through technology.