CAUTION: THIS PIECE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MANIKINS: A WORK IN PROGRESS
Fittingly, for a show that deals in the uncanny territory between dream and waking worlds, the breakthrough in Deadweight director Jack Aldisert’s mission to fully immerse his audience in the world of The Manikins: A Work in Progress came to him in a nightmare. “The breakthrough was: to get through the barrier of identity crisis, that can stop an audience member feeling that they are completely inside the story of the show, make the show about the identity crisis.” The solution he dreamed up led to something so wildly unexpected – a lurch into the unknown bordering on unhinged – that the voidspace dare not describe it, for fear of spoiling the madness for those lucky enough to bag a ticket to this uniquely compelling solo experience.
We are delighted to welcome Jack into the voidspace to tell us the story behind The Manikins, why the weird and interactive performance go so well together, and how the toughest practical challenges can lead to the best theatre.
voidspace:
Welcome, Jack. Thank you for joining me in the voidspace today. If we really were in a dusty and lightly haunted attic, which is where I like to imagine the voidspace to be, I’d be offering you a cup of tea and a bean bag, but we’ll have to make the best of it.
Jack Aldisert:
I’m imagining it. It’s great.
voidspace:
To kick off, just give our readers a sense of who you are and what you do in this space.
Jack Aldisert:
I am a theatre maker, part of an experimental theatre company called Deadweight. This is really the first piece we’ve made that’s had a chance to have an audience in this space, and I’m very excited about it. But I think what I like to do, what I want to do is make work where the audience members feel like they’re inside the story, and if possible, like they are the protagonist of that story.
I am aware when I say that, that it feels like the promise that all immersive theatre makes. But there’s something about that particular use of language that I prefer over the term “immersive”. Being inside the story: that’s what I really want out of it when I go to see something immersive. I think there are particular dynamics that are necessary for it to feel like that’s the case, that you’re really inside the story, and not just like you’re walking around with a barrier, still, between you and the world of the show.
voidspace:
So for you, the key is for the participant to feel like they’re part of the story. How do you, in your work, go about achieving that?
Jack Aldisert:
It’s a combination of things. The biggest barrier, in my view, to feeling genuinely part of the story is the embarrassment factor, for lack of a better word, that can come up when you’re participating in immersive work. There’s a really great essay by Sophie Nield called The Rise of the Character Named Spectator, which was published in The Contemporary Theatre review in 2008. It was written in response to a Punchdrunk show, Masque of the Red Death, that was running during that period, and one or two other shows that were happening at the time.
Nield talks about the experience that she felt as an audience member. The idea is you’re interacting with an in-character performer, and that performer/character, say it’s like a wizard or something, comes up to you and says something like “Follow me to the alchemy lab! I need your help to make a potion!” And in that moment, you’re talking to that performer, and you know who you are, and you know who the performer sees you as, they see you as an audience member. But there’s this weird thing where you’re also talking to the character at the same time, and you don’t know who the hell the character sees you as.
The idea that we started The Manikins with was in large part about trying to overcome that barrier: the embarrassment factor, or identity crisis.
voidspace:
Punchdrunk tried to get around in their masked shows: by giving you that sense that you’re leaving your personal identity at the door, by putting on that mask.
Jack Aldisert:
Which is one really interesting solution to it. That’s something I wrote about when I was starting out on this project – looking at the possible solutions that have already been tried. The first one you think of is the Punchdrunk masks. The mask ends up becoming a mobile fourth wall attached to your face.
What we realised working on this show was that to get through that identity crisis barrier, there are a few things you can do. The breakthrough moment for me actually came from a nightmarish dream that I had. The breakthrough was: to get through the barrier of identity crisis that can stop an audience member feeling that they are completely inside the story of the show, make the show about the identity crisis. And so that was when the whole thing turned meta.
I had thought, that the way to get around this is that you have to go full immersion, because what we’re trying to do here is make you forget about the outside world, forget about the embarrassment, and break through this identity crisis. That’s what we were trying to do for months. I had agreed with myself that we weren’t going to get meta at all in this process. But then at one point, I realised that we had to. In order to go deeper, we had to acknowledge the illusion. In order to make the illusion total, it has to actually be openly acknowledged.
The various writing and performance techniques that we use are all based around that idea. There’s something that’s really big in Tim Crouch’s work, called (and I borrow the term from critic and academic Mark Fisher here) paradoxical entrancement. It’s called that because you’re trying to entrance someone, but the paradox is that you keep telling them: “Hey, look! I’m entrancing you! You’re falling under the spell!” And paradoxically, that makes the trance stronger rather than weaker.
voidspace:
That’s a bit like what Derren Brown does. His take on magic is to say “There is no magic. This is all a trick. I am tricking you.” And while he’s doing that, he’s then, of course, managing to completely pull the rug out from under your feet in other ways.
Jack Aldisert:
Derren Brown has been referenced in response to our work a few times. Which is funny, because I’ve barely watched any of his stuff. People bring up trickery a lot. That is probably what it feels like on the other end of what we’re doing. But at the same time, I think what we are doing comes from a different place. What we do share with that sort of trickery, I suppose, is that you have to have an intimate understanding of how someone views the world, in order to be able to turn it on them in a way that impacts them – to flip it on them in a way that would actually feel like something. And we do play with that. But I wouldn’t describe what we set out to do as that: we aren’t primarily setting out to trick people.
voidspace:
Maybe there’s another way of framing it – in terms of the unspoken contract between performer and spectator, or the suspension of disbelief? When it comes to immersive, it’s there’s an implicit contract, to do with the extent to which I, as a participant, will willingly suspend my disbelief in order to be immersed. I think different creators will expect different levels of suspension of disbelief. Where it doesn’t work for me is when that issue hasn’t even really been addressed and someone’s just talking to me as if I’m in-world and the reason why it would be, and we haven’t made the bounds of that contract clear, particularly.
Jack Aldisert:
Suspension of disbelief is definitely a part of it. A theatre director who I respect a lot, Karl James, came and saw The Manikins. After he saw the show, he said that he felt like he was experiencing real risk, but also total safety at the same time. The risk felt real – it felt like there were real stakes – but at the same time, he knew nothing bad was actually going to happen. If you go too far in either of those directions, it’s no good. And it can depend on what audience you are, I suppose. But the ideal is to have it so that you feel the risk, but you know at the same time, nothing actually bad is going to happen.
This is how Tim Crouch works too, when he does his paradoxical entrancement thing. A couple of his shows start with him addressing the scenario. He’ll say; “Hi! I’m Tim. I’m an actor, I’m up here. You’re an audience, you’re down there. What we’re going to have to do is pretend together. I’m going to be pretending to be this person, and you’re going to also pretend that I’m that person.”
I do something similar, which was directly inspired by that, at the very start of The Manikins. We ended up using that idea and taking it a step further, or a step in a different direction.
I think the potential for interactive performance is to give you the experience of what feels genuinely like multiple realities. That’s something that theatre can do tremendously well already, and what makes Tim Crouch’s work so exciting to me. When you have an actor on stage, Laurence Oliver playing Hamlet for example, you see Hamlet, but you also see Olivier. You can never just see Hamlet. But most productions, especially naturalistic ones, try to make you forget about Olivier and make you only think about Hamlet.
Tim goes on stage and he not only says, “Hey! Don’t forget about me, Tim, the actor”, which might be a technique that Brecht would use. He goes further than that and says, “Hey, look, it’s me, Tim. And I’m not just trying to break you out of the illusion. I’m trying to break you out and say, now the illusion is even going to be stronger because I’ve broken you out”. When you see both, both are stronger, somehow, rather than you seeing me, the actor, making your vision of Hamlet weaker.
And I think that then interactive performance can take that even one step further, because as an audience participant, you’re inside that reality of the work. So, as an audience participant, you’re experiencing the Olivier/Hamlet dynamic, but you’re also split, like the actor is. You’re not just a sole audience member watching split Hamlet/ Olivier. If it’s done correctly, you’re now a split audience member, split into character and actor. And I think that you can play with that, and take it a step further than you can in typical proscenium theatre.
This is also where the weird fiction genre comes into the equation, because what the Weird is about to me is the idea of a base reality and then another reality that either collides with it, or erupts into it, and eventually ends up taking it over. It’s a war between reality and unreality. In interactive theatre, you can tap into that in a way that you can’t fully tap into in literature, because fully tapping into it requires actually co-opting the reader or audience member’s very own reality. The protagonists of the weird fiction genre, they usually experience their realities breaking down, or unreality taking over. As the reader, you can read about them having that experience, but you can’t actually have that weird experience yourself. Authors can try, and a lot of my favourite ones do, using different meta-techniques. For example, they can make their stories about the reader of a story, and then the story takes them over, and blur the line between protagonist and reader. But you can’t ever actually physically reach out and grab them.
In theatre, you start to be able to do that. In proscenium theatre with audience participation, you really start to be able to do that. Then, in my mind, interactive theatre has the most potential for it because you can take the actual audience members’ actual reality and use it, co-opt it, appropriate it, as just one of the many ontological layers in the story itself.
voidspace:
For me, the most immersive and the most genuinely affecting interactive theatre experiences tend to be ones where is a sense of a dream state being evoked, where you can be in the room and feel reality shift on its axis a little bit.
Some immersive or interactive shows lean into that, and others rely more heavily on game mechanics or other ways of creating a more active sense of agency. I’d always assumed that they were mutually exclusive sub-genres, and that it just wasn’t possible to marry the two.
And then The Manikins comes along and manages it. You get a sense of true agency while also experiencing the dream state. How did you go about creating that effect?
Jack Aldisert:
My goal with The Manikins is to make the audience feel like they’re the protagonist of the story. You can’t say that anymore, because it’s such a marketing gimmick. Every immersive experience is going to say that, and it’s never true, in my experience. I wanted to make a feature length – 90 minute – experience where you really are the protagonist. When I was developing the piece, that was always the North Star. I would magpie any elements – from game design, or from escape rooms, or from a David Lynch movie, or from literature or from anything else – to serve that outcome. Because I knew what I was trying to do, and I thought it hadn’t been done before.
And I still think maybe it has been done, but I just haven’t seen it. But I’ve tried to see, or at least to read about, as much immersive theatre as I can, and I haven’t seen it done. I felt that the shows that came closest were limited by money and time constraints.
One of the things that I felt got closest to that was a company called Ontroerend Goed who did a series of shows called The Personal Trilogy. They remounted one of them recently, 2003’s Smile Off Your Face, and our company flew to Amsterdam for 24 hours just to see this show, because we had read so much about it. They put you in a wheelchair, they tie your hands, they blindfold you, and they wheel you through a room for 20 minutes, and you have these experiences with individual performers. It was incredible. The only thing I felt – for what I was trying to do – that was lacking was that as an audience member, you don’t give a lot of input. You’re quite passive. But you do feel like the protagonist, and I find that very exciting.
voidspace:
Some other companies manage that – You Me Bum Bum Train for example.
Jack Aldisert:
I’ve referred to those sort of shows as the conveyor belt immersive model because, as a result of time and money constraints, you’ve got to shuffle audience members through it, one after the other, and as an audience member you move from performer to performer. What I wanted to do was try to break away from that, and from a few other things that are happening in different genres or styles of immersive theatre, and make something where it’s just you, it’s a feature length performance, and you’re fully in it. And any technique or convention that we needed to steal from any form to achieve that goal, we did.
I felt that we needed to work outside genre and outside style in order to accomplish that. Because within the immersive scene, there are these divisions, which I find to be nearly useless, and I think that if you want to make something where you genuinely have that experience of being the protagonist of a substantial story, you can’t work within any of those currently existing niche areas, because each one of them is awesome, but each one of them is lacking in one way or another.
voidspace:
It sounds like you have tried to bring the two sides of the equation together by really keeping the sense of interactivity, but also keeping it feeling theatrically heightened.
Jack Aldisert:
I guess the way that I’ve looked at it is it’s three camps.
There’s interactive theatre, where I would put game theatre, certain of the things that Parabolic does, escape rooms, stuff like that. Then you have another side, which is environmental – the kind of thing that Punchdrunk does – where it’s about being immersed in an environment and experiencing situations scenographically, almost in a film-like way, as opposed to feeling more like you’re playing a game. But then I also think there’s the more traditional theatre part, which often doesn’t want to look at itself as immersive, and which I think – maybe because of that – people in the game and environmental immersive camps also forget about. Then there are, of course, different projects that are floating around between those.
But that’s why I keep bringing up people like Tim Crouch and Sam Ward, because what they’re doing is really exciting, and it could fit into the interactive camp. It could fit into the environmental immersive camp. But because they do it in a theatre, on a stage, they’re somehow discounted from that. In fact, I think that probably some of those artists themselves also wouldn’t count themselves as part of the immersive or interactive scene either.
voidspace:
I think that’s really interesting because I think that is an element of the scene that a lot of us have overlooked as well. Speaking personally, the first thing that I think I saw that was ever truly immersive or interactive, in terms of the reaction that it demanded from the audience, was an RSC production of Richard II in about 2000, where David Troughton, the actor playing Bolingbroke just faced the audience, stared us down and said “I bid you Lords, all rise.” We sat there, there was a beat, and he said it again: “I bid you Lords, all rise.” At that point the lights came up and we rather shamefacedly got to our feet. We’d been made complicit in Richard’s overthrow, and it was brilliant.
But then, rediscovering immersive through Punchdrunk, you realise that nobody likes to talk about those more unashamedly theatrical influences. There’s always this urge to pull away from more traditional theatre. To see proscenium theatre as the enemy. I think that’s really interesting, though, to try and bring them back into the fold, if they’re willing to be brought in, of course, which is a different question.
Jack Aldisert:
In my mind, it’s all theatre. If you look at theatre history, every truly new and groundbreaking theatre movement has been accused, for the first long time after it comes into existence, of not being theatre, in one way, shape, or form. That’s what I saw right away with immersive theatre. People say it’s not theatre. But of course it is.
voidspace:
Taking it back to your creative process: I think it’s really interesting that you were saying that you would use any technique at your disposal to try to create the effect that you’re intending. How have you gone about magpie-ing your influences? What has that process been like?
Jack Aldisert:
I had wanted to do a piece like this, with an audience protagonist, for many years. I have to give so much of the credit to the course that I was on at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama: the advanced theatre practice course. It’s an incredible course, this experimental space where they encourage you to do anything. They encourage you to try to do things which are impossible to achieve, theatrically. And that is the most exciting thing. Originally, I was going to attend the directing MA at Royal Holloway, then because of COVID, we had to knock it back a year. Then I ended up finding out about this programme at Central, and it was a choice, and it was a very difficult choice, but I knew that this programme at Central would let me work on this thing. I knew they would allow me to build what I saw as essentially a new form of immersive theatre.
I didn’t know at first if what I wanted to do was a new form, because I had never seen any immersive theatre until I came to London in 2021. A mentor of mine in undergrad had interned with Punchdrunk when they were first putting on Sleep No More, and she told me about it. I had been watching Westworld at the time as well, and her telling me about Punchdrunk blew my mind. But then lockdown hit right after I graduated. I basically had two years sitting around, where I could think about and imagine immersive theatre and what it could be, without ever actually getting to see it. I would just write pages and pages and pages of ideas, and charts, and different things about the techniques you could use, and what it might feel like, and what you could achieve.
Then I came here, and I started seeing shows, and I realised that nobody was really doing the things that I thought would be what everyone would be trying to do. The second year of the programme at Central is an independent project where you can basically do whatever you want. And I knew I wanted to use that to make this piece where you’re the protagonist, as the audience member.
I decided right at the beginning of the process that I was going to make the most aggressively non-commercial piece that I can possibly make, because right now I’m in school, I don’t have to make any money. So, I’m going to work so hard to make this piece thrive under the circumstances of not having any financial pressure. So, I thought let’s just make the most creatively exciting piece possible and have no considerations for money whatsoever. Two actors, stage manager, one audience member, 90 minutes, whatever. Don’t worry about it! It’s not like it’s going to go anywhere!
I spent a lot of time just walking around long walks on Hampstead Heath and around that area, and through the Barbican, hours walking and thinking about how to tell a story like that. It involved reading a tonne of weird horror, a tonne of weird fiction, watching a bunch of videos on YouTube about game design, my exposure to Tim Crouch’s practice in his rehearsal rooms, going to see as much immersive theatre as I could, and reading theory as well. That was really important to me, the academic part of the programme we were in, reading analysis of different immersive performances that have happened.
Then when something really exciting came up, I’d bring it in the room with all of the collaborators and throw the idea to them, and we all just start to try stuff out in the space. Just a room with five people and an idea, just trying stuff. Trying to work out, how do you make this person truly feel like the protagonist of the story, and then using anything that came up, that we could find from anywhere.
voidspace:
What did you learn through that process? What were the lessons that you’ve come away with?
Jack Aldisert:
Make the work that you would want to see as an audience member. That’s the primary guiding principle, or it should be. Aspire to impossible goals. If it’s exciting, just do it.
What I think is cool about The Manikins is that I think there are a couple moments of real magic in it. There are some moments where the foundations of someone’s reality, their perception of the situation, of what’s happening around them, shifts dramatically in a moment. That moment, that feeling of ontological uncertainty, is captured aesthetically in this piece. I think that is something that I’m going to keep trying to do in any piece that I make from now on. I think there’s a million different ways to do it and a million different genre forms in which you can do it, and styles in which you can do it. But to try to create a moment that feels impossible somehow.
There’s a moment – when we turn to you with the lantern – which everyone says is their favourite part of the show. For me, the reason that that moment is so exciting is because it feels magic, in the sense that it feels like something that could only normally happen in a dream. When I had this nightmare, and I decided that we needed to switch and add these meta elements in, I woke up from that nightmare and wrote that scene immediately. Because it’s that feeling of when you’re in a dream and you’re engaging with someone in that dream, and you know who that person is, even if it doesn’t look like them. People can become figures in dreams, and their appearance doesn’t always match their essence. And somehow in dreams, it doesn’t need to. We still know who they are despite their appearance. That is, I think, what happens in that moment, where who we are, who you are, has changed, the reality has changed, and all that happens at once, and it is dramaturgically incorporated.
voidspace:
And what you thought the rules of engagement were turned out to be something else.
Jack Aldisert:
Exactly.
voidspace:
You take a lot of conventions and tropes that I’ve seen crop up in immersive shows again and again, even mechanical stuff like safe words, and just shake them gently in their sockets and use them to do something radically different, to derail people’s expectations of what an immersive show is going to be. Were you deliberately trying to subvert those conventions?
Jack Aldisert:
Yes, after a certain point in the process. Because at first, like I said, we were not trying to do anything meta. The piece was originally just the scenes with the doctor and the secretary. And what I had wanted to do originally was have a three-act structure where at first you’ve got the little office politics thing going on between the secretary and the doctor. And then in part two, you’d go under the headphones. We were originally going to have a naturalistic office set that you were in. And then when you take off the headphones, it was going to be gone, and you would be in a big dark area. It was this idea, to make you feel like you’re in a dream. And that was what we set out to do, at first. The show itself was all just diegetically within the world of the fiction.
But then, as we started inviting our very first test participants for just one scene at a time, I would just naturally talk to them about what we were doing, and what was going to happen. I’d say “Okay, here’s what it is we’re doing. Here’s what the project is. And you’re going to go in there, and this is what’s going to happen. This is what we’re looking for.” And then I realised at a certain point that I was cheating, because if I was really trying to stay all in the fiction, I wasn’t going to be able to do that stuff. I met with Sam Ward, who was also my mentor on the project, and he had an interesting suggestion. He asked: What would Tim [Crouch] say, at the beginning of the show? He’d probably come out and say something like, “Hi, I’m Tim, and right now I’m being Tim. But in a moment, I’m going to step through that curtain and I’m going to start being Dr. August Ligotti, and I’m not going to stop until the show is over”, and so on and so forth.
Then I went away, had about a month’s break, had that crazy nightmare, woke up from it, and realised that this whole exoskeleton of stuff which had cropped up around the scenes – my telling the audience what was about to happen before it started, asking them how it went after the scene, how it was going, and getting their feedback – if we made that part of the show, we could achieve the goals I had set out much better. So, then we started to incorporate that into the show. And like I said, that lantern scene was the first scene I wrote after that, because that’s that collision point where you realise that the two are combined. Then from there we unconsciously built up all these things, these tropes around an immersive piece that just naturally have to come up. The induction, the feedback session (because it was an MFA project), the safe word. Once I had done that first big subversion with the lantern scene, then it became logical that we start finding other ways to subvert things.
I remember another really useful piece of advice that Sam Ward gave to me. He came and did an early version of the piece, and he said: Once we hit that turning point, I don’t care about the doctor anymore. I don’t care about any of that stuff. I care about the meta stuff because you’ve just done something so cool with it. Don’t lose that. Keep going.
After that, I was chatting with Hannah Gintberg-Dees, another co-founder of Deadweight, and I realised that this was what I was doing from now on. This is still a horror piece, but the horror is the meta-theatre. And that was what really started kicking off the rest of the development process. So then after that point, yes, we were consciously trying to subvert those different conventions. But not just to subvert them for the sake of it – because that’s always annoying – subverting them dramaturgically, trying to subvert those conventions in a way that’s not just saying, “Look how we can trick you and subvert things!”, but subverting them in a way that actually makes the themes and the story of the piece stronger.
voidspace:
That ties back very neatly to what we were talking about before, the comparisons to Derren Brown. Maybe some of your techniques seem superficially similar at a glance, but for you it’s all in service of the storytelling.
The Manikins is a beautiful demonstration of how you can make this experience work for a single audience member. Do you ever think it could be possible to make it scalable, so that more audience members could experience it?
Jack Aldisert:
In terms of scalability, it was always my intention to create a form of interactive theatre in which the audience participant has a very personal experience, and I knew that in order to do that I had to, at the very least, start by making a piece for just one audience member. But it has also always been my intention to find ways of incorporating more audience members. I think it would be difficult to jump from a show for one person to a show for a large group of people, without making a lot of compromises, in terms of the techniques, that I don’t want to make.
However, I have some ideas that I’m very excited about, for shows that could involve two or three audience members, which isn’t that much of a jump, of course, from one, but I think even just having a second audience member would teach us a lot about how to maintain that same intimacy, but within a dynamic where two people, who aren’t actors, are interacting with each other. Once we start to have a handle on that, it’s those kinds of things that might begin to teach us how we might be able to handle larger group dynamics, while maintaining the intimacy, and the protagonist-like experience.
Of course, there’s also the idea of keeping the techniques how they are, around having just one audience member, and trying to fight for a place where the work can exist within a state-subsidised system, but that’s extremely difficult to do. So, in terms of how we scale this work up, I would want to do it gradually.
voidspace:
What is the challenge that you’re proudest of overcoming so far?
Jack Aldisert:
There were a lot of challenges, my god! But actually, the first one that comes to mind is just that we had no money. We had no budget for the show, zero budget. Any money we did have for the show went to getting rehearsal space, which was a ridiculous challenge, in fact. But the creative challenge of having no money. I don’t even think of it as something I’m proud of overcoming. We didn’t overcome it. We used it. We adapted to it, and I think the show was made many, many times better because we had no money. I think it’s a much, much better show than it would have been if I’d had even a few thousand pounds to make it with.
And a big part of that is with the set and my work with the brilliant sceneographer, Min Chien Feng.We had talked about, like I said, this naturalistic office set where the walls would collapse and then you’d be out there in the dark, which theoretically you could do, because it’s extremely simple, but it wasn’t simple enough. The evolution of the set has been from that to: how can we use just really basic flats to do that? But then: what about doors? Doors are really expensive!
It kept going to the point where eventually, after months, it evolved into two rooms of red curtains. That was our first iteration of the piece, where you were surrounded by red curtains on all four sides in both rooms. And then at the end, the curtain would open in front of you. But then we had to remount the show again, and we had less time and less money. We couldn’t even afford to do the curtains anymore. So we stripped it down to one curtain, just in the middle, and then we just have to use light and dark to do everything else.
And I think that that is the best possible version of the scenography for the piece. It’s as simple as possible. And that red curtain is such a potent symbol that works with what the show is trying to do.
voidspace:
What are your plans for the future? You’ve already sold out your first run of The Manikins already, which is brilliant. Do you know what you want to do next?
Jack Aldisert:
I want as many people to see this show as possible. That’s what I’m focused on at the moment. We’re taking it to Gothenburg later this year. I’m not going to say which theatre it is because I haven’t signed anything yet, but we have plans to take it to New York next year, which we had well before we secured this run in London. I would really like to continue teaching the techniques that we use to make this piece. I taught a workshop on those techniques to grad students at Central back in November. I still have that workshop. I’m looking to keep teaching it anywhere. I’d like to do that.
And then we have a lot of ideas for what show to make next. There’s one that keeps coming up, which would be a noir, which I’m very excited about. That’s the idea I’ve had that’s closest in form to this one.
I would really, really like to perform The Manikins in theatre spaces and in state-subsidized theatre spaces, because I think that what I would like to do is bring those communities together, the people who just see immersive stuff all the time and people who just go and see theatre stuff all the time. I think this would be a great piece for bringing those communities together.
We’ve talked about bringing back our first interactive show, which we did for the first year of the programme at Central, which I think was a really cool show. It was a much bigger scale, with a bigger audience size than this. That was called Keep Me In The Loop. We’ve been talking about maybe bringing that back, or revamping that in some way.
We’ve also been talking about getting back in a room and devising something new because while there were a lot of devising elements in the process, The Manikins was also me writing the script, just writing draft after draft. We’re interested in devising something again as a group.
voidspace:
What advice would you give to new creators or aspiring creators in this field?
Jack Aldisert:
I’d like to take this chance to draw people’s attention to the advanced theatre practice programme at Central. It’s incredible. There aren’t that many Masters level programmes out there that are about making interactive or immersive performance. This programme isn’t, strictly speaking, about that, but if that’s what you want to do, you can. It’s a fantastic course. It forces you to be rigorously experimental and it’s constantly putting out theatre companies that are making really exciting work – Clusterflux, Emballage, Emma + PJ – even just in the last few years.
In terms of more general advice, I’d say this: Do something impossible. Learn from what’s out there, but don’t take what’s out there as a rule book or a set of conventions you have to follow. Imagine the coolest thing that you could ever experience in your life as an audience member, that would just blow your mind, and then make that and make the version of it that you can make with the resources that you have. It might actually end up being even better than the version you could make if you had more resources.
voidspace:
Less is more, sometimes. I like that. Thank you very much, Jack.