Looking Back to Look Forward—How Ancient Storytelling Traditions Can Shed Light on Contemporary Practices of Spectating

Elizabeth Swift*

Abstract

The growth in immersive and digital performance is changing the role of the theatre audience. This essay argues that, in exploring how emergent spectatorial practices operate, there is much to be learned from storytelling cultures that pre-date Western drama. It considers ancient narrative traditions from Indigenous Australia, North America and France and explains how these diverse genres anticipate and model certain immersive practices that are increasingly familiar in the twenty-first century. The research draws on field studies undertaken by anthropologists and archaeologists and examines the use of virtual reality in contemporary immersive performance work by the companies Kaleider and Tender Claws.

Keywords: Immersive, narratives, historic, audience, virtual

Immersive Performance: A History Full of Holes

In the summer of 1620, Edward Winslow, one of the Christian Pilgrims who had arrived in America on the Mayflower just a few months previously, forged a friendship with the Indigenous Pokanoket community. He, and a delegation of English settlers, were invited to travel with a group of Native American people to their village—a journey on foot of 40 miles from the coast of Massachusetts. As they travelled, Winslow noticed something unusual. Across the landscape appeared numerous neatly dug holes, each about two feet wide and one foot deep. Whenever the party came across—or stumbled upon—a hole, the walk would stop, and a story would be told about an event that had taken place in that location. These were “story holes” which, as Winslow learned, were routinely dug in the precise spot where a notable incident had happened within the Pokanoket community—a marriage, a dispute, a celebration, a death. Anyone who discovered a hole and asked about it would be told its particular story. Not only that, but the responsibility for the upkeep of the holes, and for the re-telling of the stories, was carefully passed on, through the community and down the generations so that, without recourse to written or other documentation, they were kept alive.

Frontispiece to Good Newes from New England 1624. Photo: Web/Wikipedia

Winslow describes the tradition in his 1624 book, Good Newes from New England, or a True Relation of Things Very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plimoth in New England, one of the earliest accounts of the Pilgrims’ experiences in America.

And lest such holes should be filled, or grown over by any accident, as men pass by they will oft renew the same: by which means many things of great antiquity are fresh in memory. So that as a man travelleth, if he can understand his guide, his journey will be the less tedious, by reason of the many historical discourses that will be related unto him.
47–48

In his work on the history of story holes, contemporary historian Fred Prouty identifies that the colonialists recognized that they were: “traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past” (Prouty). The Pokanoket people understood the importance of the action of preserving these simple holes, and of the activity of walking the landscape and finding the holes and their stories, to maintaining the cultural cohesiveness of their community. They realized the significance of physical agency to the emergence of story; it is this significance in particular that has been re-emerging in recent times as the culture of contemporary immersive arts has developed.

Today, the term “immersive” has become a ubiquitous label for cultural events that share, with the ancient tradition of story holes, a dependence on the actions and agency of interactors, in response to a specific environment, as an aesthetic strategy. Examples of contemporary events that adopt the tag of immersivity are vast and varied. Live action role play; pervasive video games; “spook-tacular” Halloween events; escape-rooms; murder mystery nights; museum experiences and no end of tourism and marketing novelties are among the diverse experience-based activities that serve to evidence the immersive turn in our culture since the millennium.

Unlike these recent adopters, theatre has been dealing in immersivity for centuries, due to its distinctive capacity for involving its live audience in enacted storytelling. Some genres have emphatically immersive qualities, such as medieval mystery plays, participatory magic shows, Elizabethan open-air theatre and promenade performance, whereas others, like naturalistic theatre, which uses the tradition of the fourth wall to separate the audience from the players, have considerably less. All theatre has some immersive characteristics, but there is a graded scale between work that keeps its audience at a distance and that which envelopes it in its workings and awards it physical agency.

Different aesthetic strategies used within different types of immersive performance make it difficult to generalize this polyvalent concept. Immersion is a metaphorical term which conjures the experience of being submerged in water. Applied aesthetically it denotes, as Janet Murray describes, “the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality” (98–99). Murray goes on to identify agency as a key quality of immersive work which gives the spectator the “satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices” (126).

Recently, advances in digital technology that extend the possibilities of immersivity and agency through the development of sophisticated interactive interfaces, have been rapidly co-opted into immersive theatre. This essay focuses on the specific use of virtual reality (VR) in theatre. In doing so, it explores the interactive dynamic between audience and performance, made possible by VR. As Marie-Laure Ryan explains, VR enables metalepsis, a narratological concept that refers to the linking of two disconnected narrative worlds through a rhetorical figure. When applied to VR, metalepsis connotes a transgression of the ontological environments of the spectator’s actual world and the fictional world of the virtual space (Ryan 458–60). When the experience of theatre involves the use of VR to access performance, the specific actions of the spectator in their physical world, for example, the hand and head movements made when operating the control device, are able to influence narrative events in the virtual world. The literal meaning of metalepsis is “a jump across” (Kukkonen and Klimek 1); in VR, the audience is able to effect this jump from their world to the virtual world via a metaleptic link.

I will examine two immersive theatre productions which both use virtual reality: the VR production of Shakespeare’s Tempest by Tender Claws (2020) and the site-specific/virtual piece by Kaleider, Our Dancing Shadows (2021). Both of these pieces demonstrate metalepsis by establishing a metaleptic link between the real and the virtual environments through the participant’s use of the VR equipment. The intimate connection that is set up between the action of the spectator and the happenings of the virtual world will be considered alongside the operations of two further ancient narrative practices; the cave paintings of Palaeolithic France and the Indigenous storytelling practices of Australia. These entirely different historic traditions have both been the subject of recent scholarly interpretations by anthropologists and archaeologists which have separately proposed that the early works each positioned their audience/participant in an active and creative role at the heart of the aesthetic experiences (Wachtel, Zabashi, Barrett, Hopkins and others). Furthermore, each of the new interpretations identifies similarities between ancient aesthetic structures and the structures of certain contemporary digital and cinematic work. The essay builds on this scholarship by proposing specific commonalities between each of the ancient forms and aspects of VR theatre practice concerning the phenomenological impact of immersion. It also draws on the notion of ergodics, as developed by digital theorist Espen Aarseth, to reason about the significance of audience agency. It goes on to consider how ancient story telling traditions can model practices that evade familiar notions of artistic production and reception and unlock new possibilities for aesthetic dynamics.

Far from immersivity being a new idea, this essay will show how contemporary immersive performance hearkens back to the earliest cultural traditions. As playwright Caridad Svich has commented, “today theatre is on its way to transforming itself into something perhaps less defined by rigid, codified notions of theatricality and the ‘rules’ of spectatorship” (528–29). In order to understand this transformation and to find ways to reason about a new era of participation in which the rules of play are unfixed, it is helpful to examine narrative practices which are not dominated by the sense of intransient hierarchy and separation between storytellers and receptive sedentary audiences, which characterize dominant Western traditions.

**The Tender Claws Tempest: Searching for Story in a Virtual World**

Tempest is a one-of-a-kind immersive theater [sic] experience! Travel through time and space to enact an exciting story of love & revenge—with a little magic, of course!
Tender Claws

My first worries on encountering Tender Claws’ Tempest were to do with my physical interaction with the work and the virtual reality kit I was using to access it. Would I be able to manage the controls? Would I get stuck? Would I get motion sickness? After all, I was not at the theatre surrounded by helpful front of house staff but on my own at home, in the middle of the COVID lockdown, just me and my Oculus.

The U.S. company Tender Claws is at the forefront of virtual reality theatre. Its 2020–22 production, Tempest, directed by Samantha Gorman, is made to be experienced within a virtual world called The Under. Once logged into the site, audience/participants are invited, as masked avatars, to visit “Prospero’s island,” where a solo actor-avatar greets them and relates the story of Shakespeare’s Tempest.

Despite the lush vastness of the virtual world created for this production, this is essentially an intimate experience because there is just one actor and six participants. There were plentiful opportunities to explore and interact. We could move around and, using our hand controllers, grab objects and interact with them. The image below illustrates a moment when we were given torches to illuminate the action.

Image from Tender Claws’ virtual reality *Tempest*, 9 July 2020, directed by Samantha Gorman, showing a participant avatar (with torch) and actor avatar. Photo: Tender Claws

Sometimes, we, as avatars, sat around a campfire to hear the tale of love and revenge; other times, we were asked to help the story along, so we took part in a banquet and explored the wreck of Alonso’s ship. However, it was the pre-show activity that particularly sticks in my memory. Having donned the VR headset, I found myself in a bleak muddy landscape, completely disorientated until, on turning around, I saw signs to a theatre box office. But in order to get there, I had to drag my avatar-self through the mud, by literally using the VR touch controllers as if they were climbing axes to do this—a tricky physical task which foregrounded the relationship between my action in the real world and the in-world narrative through a metaleptic link. I experienced my arrival at the virtual box office as a visceral/virtual achievement due to what Astrid Ensslin refers to as “interactional metalepsis [whereby] the audience is pulled into the fictional world” (6).

Image from Tender Claws’ virtual reality *Tempest*, 9 July 2020,directed by Samantha Gorman, showing the virtual box office for Tender Claws’ *Tempest.* Photo: Tender Claws

This prelude mirrors the original story in which the shipwrecked characters similarly experience a physical struggle on arriving at the island. While Shakespeare conjured his Tempest in words for the audience to listen to and imagine, this virtual tempest is conjured in code, and it is our interaction with this encoded environment that activates the story. “The line between real and virtual, and truth and fiction, blur as audience members are cast as Prospero’s spirits to realize an interactive, virtual version of the story,” announces the show’s publicity (Tender Claws). In this VR production, we are explorers, unfamiliar with the terrain, bumping and stumbling into story. And when story emerges, we are, through our actions, partly responsible for the way in which it is shared. Consequently, each iteration of Tender Claws’ Tempest is unique, as manifested through the efforts of the audience /participants and the artist present.

Promotional video for Tender Claws’ virtual reality Tempest 2020, directed by Samantha Gorman. Video: Tender Claws

Games theorist Espen Aarseth introduced the concept of the ergodic spectator in his analysis of the evolution of the computer game. Ergodic, a term derived from the Greek words for “work” (ergon) and “path” (hodos), is appropriated by Aarseth in identifying the “non-trivial effort” required to allow the reader/participant to engage with an artwork by following certain rules and behaviors and through active collaboration (Aarseth 1–2). Its application in both game theory and, more recently, performance theory (Swift 167–68) illustrates the growing significance of meaningful and material interaction as an aesthetic strategy. The concept of an ergodic spectator is fundamental to reasoning about the operation of contemporary immersive works. Furthermore, it also assists an understanding of recent archaeological discoveries which suggest that prehistoric artworks were not only immersive but also demanded a specific kind of ergodic collaboration from their spectator (Ouellette).

Cave Art—a Palaeolithic Virtual Reality

Lascaux cave in Southwest France is made up of a network of huge underground connecting chambers. When it was discovered in 1940, the internal walls and ceilings were found to be completely covered in huge paintings of animals dating back 17,000 years to the Palaeolithic Age. To the modern eye these images, seen by electric light and in photographs, make the cave seem like a huge gallery, and its discovery provided evidence that our ancestors could create representational pictures to be appreciated by viewers in the same way as we appreciate paintings in galleries today. Yet, as historian and blogger Sean Zabashi describes, this interpretation fails to explain why many of the paintings—for example, the bulls in the Great Bull Chamber, pictured below—include the same animal repeated again and again at different sizes and scales, or why the images flow into one another preventing them operating as discrete “pictures.”

Lascaux cave paintings. Photo: Traumrune/*Wikimedia Commons*

Lascaux cave painting. Photo: Public domain, *Wikimedia Commons*

Archaeologist Edward Wachtel has proposed that these images were designed specifically to be experienced by people purposefully moving around the spaces with hand-held lamps made of shells and animal fat (Wachtel 135–37); the flickering of multiple flames having the effect of animating the overlapping creatures on the uneven walls, turning them into a vast 360-degree cinematic artwork that was activated by the ergodic action of onlookers and their firelight. VR specialist Catherine Allen believes the cave would have been used for special occasions and, when accompanied by music and performance, could have produced the ultimate proto-virtual experience (Allen).

There is a growing body of evidence that Palaeolithic art was designed as immersive and ergodic and was technologically sophisticated. Archaeological remains in cave sites have revealed distinctive types of torches capable of producing different intensities and colors of flame. As Jennifer Ouellette explains, these indicate that a range of lighting effects was possible in the caves and that Palaeolithic practitioners understood how human vision and movement influenced the affective impact of art (Ouellette).

The findings of the archaeologists suggest that the aesthetic experiences of our Palaeolithic ancestors resonated closely with an immersive model of reception, as seen particularly in VR theatre work when the audience transcends their own reality and moves into a created world where they have some agency. Far from being passive consumers, our ancestors were actively and creatively involved in events that were designed as experiences encompassing all the senses, including the kinaesthetic sense, and which relied upon the ergodic spectator for their efficacy.

The Practice of Spectating

Theatre concerns a live and active relationship between artists and audience that is necessarily precarious and precious. Yet, for all its precarity, the negotiation of this dynamic in a live performance is usually predictable because mainstream Western theatre operates according to conventions that suppress audience agency, action, and creativity. As Hans-Thies Lehmann, author of the ground-breaking Postdramatic Theatre, has suggested, since the Enlightenment, and particularly with the development of Naturalism, the idea of the audience being a group of individuals with the capacity for creative involvement has been stultified by the structure of theatre in which “the subjectivity of persons is transcended by the form” (94). According to Richard Sennett, this was not the case in ancient history. His research into pre-classical practices suggests a much more fluid relationship between artistic production and reception.

In the archaic theatre there was relatively little divide between spectator and performer, seeing and doing; people danced and spoke, then retired to a stone seat to watch others dance and declaim. By the time of Aristotle, actors and dancers had become a caste with special skills of costuming, speaking, and moving. Audiences stayed offstage, and so developed their own skills of interpretation as spectators.
Sennett 125

Scholarship in this area faces a particular difficulty because, as Rachel Fensham has discussed, traditional ways of considering the audience role are so entrenched that we do not even have the language to accommodate new ideas or reason about the “hidden messiness” of spectatorial practice (13). The word “audience” is an example of this, as it is a collective noun without a singular version, making the discussion of an individual’s experience of theatre linguistically cumbersome, notwithstanding the fact that the word’s etymology suggests it is concerned solely with the hearing sense. The alternative term, “spectator,” prioritizes, instead, the visual sense. So, neither is adequate and neither, as Fensham argues, acknowledges the significance of other senses involving movement or feeling: “language has done a disservice to the collective sensibility of the viewing experience for theatre audiences” (13).

Behind the linguistic difficulties concerning the practice of spectating is another issue relating to the hierarchical relationship between aesthetic production and reception. Much of our culture, and the economy surrounding it, is predicated on the idea that performer/creatives undertake the labor of generating performance, and their work is passed onto the audience/consumers, who, as literary critic Norman Holland describes, are culturally conditioned to suspend their disbelief in a state of physical passivity (Holland).

While there have been significant artistic objections to this overly simple power-laden binary opposition, as the history of avant-garde and participatory performance demonstrates, these are exceptions against a rule that functions as a general aesthetic status quo. It is against this background that immersive culture has had its rapid growth in popularity since the turn of the millennium. Advances in technology, along with what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore labeled the “experience economy,” have driven a swath of new work which extends the remit of theatre from playhouses to extraordinary real and virtual immersive environments that break the fourth wall, and all the other walls too, as they place the audience as active participants at the center of aesthetic experiences. The result of this paradigm shift in the formulation of theatre is that audiences are having their role and function questioned as never before, both through the rise in scholarship focused on spectator studies and through new performance work that interrogates the balance between performing and spectating and that exposes the problematic production/reception binary. As Werry and Schmidt outline in their essay on the growing import of immersive performance:

the significance of immersion as a mode of spectatorship lies not in its formal novelty, uniqueness, or political efficacy; rather, its recent and growing currency provides new ways of thinking about many of the fundamental questions that concern theatre scholars interested in the experiential politics of performance: What is the distinction between actor and audience member, and what are the political stakes of drawing that line?
469

A company at the forefront of the interrogation of the roles of performer and spectator in VR immersive work is UK intermedial performance company, Kaleider.

Layering Realities in Kaleider’s Our Dancing Shadows

In autumn 2021, I took my third-year drama students to experience performing in virtual reality as part of the production, Our Dancing Shadows, by Kaleider (director Seth Honnor). It was an outdoor show set up on a traffic island in a housing estate outside Gloucester, U.K. There was lighting, atmospheric music, smoke, and seven red circles marked out on the “stage” in rope. My students and I were each given a VR headset and a shiny gold jacket, directed to position ourselves in one of the circles and to move around as expressively as possible as we navigated the virtual world. We were immersed in a starry galaxy and instructed to chase the brightest stars we could see with our hand controller which operated like a magic wand in the virtual reality. Without our being particularly conscious of it, our balletic movements created a kind of rough dance spectacle to be enjoyed by the audience which gathered around the stage—so much so that when our 10-minute slot was up, and we removed our headsets, we were greeted with a hearty round of applause. Here are some of the comments made by my group:

“Ok that was fun, so what exactly were we doing ?”
“It didn’t feel like performing, but it kind of was.”
“I thought I was playing, or kind of travelling in space.”
“I was just trying to follow the rules, I didn’t want to mess up.”
“I felt completely alone and free.”
“Where was I?”
“I thought I was coming to see a show?”
“So, who made this performance—the VR designer or us?”

Kaleider’s production was originally commissioned for a “layered realities weekend” produced by the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, U.K., and its publicity describes the show’s unusual facility to offer “two sides of the same experience” (Kaleider). In merging the visceral and the virtual, the spectacle and the immersive, the piece performatively engages with the shifting aesthetic responsibilities of artists and audience.

Promotional video for Our Dancing Shadows, by Kaleider, directed by Seth Honnor. Video: Barney Witts, Fluxx Films

Students from University of Gloucestershire taking part in *Our Dancing Shadows* by Kaleider, directed by Seth Honnor, on a traffic island in Matson Estate, Gloucester, U.K., 15 October 2021. Photo: Elizabeth Swift

As the students’ responses demonstrate, Our Dancing Shadows exposes some key issues concerning VR immersion. It can be argued that the work gives agency to participants and, to an extent, illustrates notions of audience emancipation, alluded to by digital media and immersive scholars from George Landow to James Frieze. However, it also reveals a characteristic immersive problem of participants being bound up within a system and being unable to evaluate it from the critical distance of conventional audiences. While the students had agency within the virtual galaxy, they had little control or understanding of how their role functioned within the artwork or how to appraise it. Yet, the phenomenological impact of taking a personal route through the work, through a process that could not be labelled as either artistic production or reception, was significant. The piece demonstrated how VR theatre can foreground pertinent issues concerning the evolving roles of performer and audience.

Emergent spectatorial practices challenge the aesthetic categories of audience reception and artistic production because, as digital theorist George Landow explains, “participants are not locked into any kind of particular organization or hierarchy” (58). In reasoning about these issues, recent research into links between ancient narrative and digital literature become significant. In this area, the work of digital scholars has dovetailed with emerging work by anthropologists specializing in the culture of Indigenous Australia, who have found in the ancient narrative traditions resonances with contemporary immersive practices.

Story Custodians and the Songline Traditions of Indigenous Australia

Across the Australian continent, the ancient stories of the Indigenous culture are inscribed in the landscape. They tell of totemic animals, plants, stars and planets, and they also function as vital mapping devices, recording locations of waterholes, mountains and hunting grounds. The entire landmass contains a network of stories that are meshed together like a giant fishing net laid out over the land. Known as songlines or dreaming tracks, stories are shared by clans living across vast areas with individual clan members having custody of the part of it that relates to their homeland. The complete songline can only be realized through each “custodian” relating their portion of the narrative by walking the across land that it belongs to, singing its story to life through their voice and movement. As Marcia Langton, anthropologist, explains: “the person relating the story will then meet up with the next clan who will know the next part, and so the journey of the story will cross the continent.”

*Seven Sisters Songline* 1994 by Josephine Mick, Ninuku Arts. © the artist/Licensed by Viscopy. Photo: National Museum of Australia (2017)

Fundamentally, the operation of songlines subverts the notion of a binary opposition between a producer (artist) and a consumer (audience). Instead of these roles being different and in opposition, they are combined in the role of the person who has custody of the story as both producer and receiver as well as responsibility for re-inscribing it in the land through their actions. While many stories have been lost, as a result of the destructive effects of colonialization, there are, according to Langton, enough songlines still in operation to evidence this structure of co-dependent performative narratives whose existence functions as a multilinear model of connectedness that melds space, time, action and story. Furthermore, many have been pictorially illustrated as the image above shows.

Songlines, of course, have little in common with dominant naturalistic theatre traditions in which the narrative is presented and passed over from performer to sedentary audience. However, they are able to demonstrate how performative stories can operate, in a manner outwith the dominant Western conventions of hierarchical production and reception, and their operation is of untapped relevance to contemporary concerns about the aesthetic dynamics of immersive practices. Songlines are inherently interactive in the same way as the VR performances above. Both forms involve environments that have stories built into them and depend on a user’s ergodic interaction with the space to produce those stories.

It is important to recognize and consider the historical problems of engaging with First Nations’ cultural practices from a Western standpoint. These difficulties, as Richard Martin has explained, have been present throughout Australian colonial history up to the present day. Attempts to comprehend and analyze the nature of songlines have been often characterized by a lack of understanding of the sacred and singular nature of cultural practices and by unsuccessful efforts to translate the songs into other forms, particularly written forms, in order to enable them to engage a wider audience. However, as John Bradley states, it is the songlines’ very resistance to being resolved into Western forms of aesthetic production and reception that denotes their singularity, and I would add, their relevance to a debate concerning the contemporary challenges to the traditions of artistic exchange that are posed by recent forms of immersive practice. He comments on the incommensurable nature of Western cultural mores and aboriginal traditions of storytelling which have “nothing to do with Western systems of categories; rather it is about the relatedness of humans, non-humans, and objects and the potential power to move between them” (Bradley 134).

While Bradley and others reject any Western appropriation of Aboriginal forms, positing the radical alterity of Indigenous understandings to Western ways of thinking, other anthropologists, scholars and artists, particularly those with an interest in emerging aesthetic forms, identify a resonance between the networked structure and implicit interactivity of songlines and the operational assemblages of contemporary digital and immersive technology. This synergy between Aboriginal story systems and contemporary immersive digital modes was recognised as early as the 1980s by Barbara Glowczewski. She noticed that advances in technology, facilitated by the development of hypertext mark-up language (html), were altering and extending narrative practices, and contemporary interactive and reticular models of storytelling bore remarkable similarities to ancient Indigenous structures. Both digital and Indigenous systems:

stress the fact that there is no centrality to the whole, but a multipolar view from each recomposed network within each singularity—for example, a person, a place, a Dreaming—allowing the emergence of meanings and performances, encounters, creations as new original autonomous flows.
Glowczewski 28

Similarly, James Barrett observed that digital media and Indigenous narratives “each had shares in basic concepts of co-creativity, mediation and spatiality” (4), and he argued that narrative structures characterized by types of immersion and interactivity resonate more closely with structures that exist in Indigenous storytelling traditions like those of Australia and “do not function according to the uses developed under material regimes of Western storytelling particularly since the Enlightenment” (4).

Indigenous art curator Candice Hopkins also recognizes the wider significance of a narrative being formed as a mutating network, describing Indigenous stories as continually “changing, individualized and communal, original and replicated, authored and authorless”(341). This characterization particularly is relevant to VR theatre, where it becomes apt because it describes the increasingly common situation in which the “audience” becomes involved in performative actions that operate as a generative process to instigate the aesthetic event.

Partial Conclusions: Looking Back to Go Forward

All the works discussed here share a requirement for the active ergodic input of the audience member, who consequently ceases to be a spectator and becomes a custodian, or co-creator, of an artistic experience. The roles and functions of the people and environments in these works do not accord with the dominant Western model of production and reception. Immersive work of this kind in fact dislocates the categories of production and reception and in doing so necessitates a revisiting of assumptions about how dynamics between performer and audience operate. In short, it reveals immersion as a strategy for foregrounding key aesthetic questions.

In breaking away from the dominant theatre traditions contemporary immersive theatre is not so much forging new pathways in storytelling, but re-discovering ancient routes. It is ironic that it is partly the use of the newest digital immersive technology in performance and storytelling that has brought about new understandings of ancient narrative culture.

Alongside the recent growth in immersive practices has been a matched increase in audience scholarship. It is through this that we are starting to discover the significance of the task of reconsidering the audience’s role in the operation of new kinds of cultural practice. As contemporary work opens up new possibilities for the relationships between audiences and art, it is not just the existing terminology around performance that needs, as Fensham has argued, to be reconsidered, but also many existing assumptions about the politics, culture, and economics that surround artistic production and reception – all projects beyond the scope of this essay, but areas for future explorations.

Ancient work, that has been traditionally dismissed or wrongly interpreted, offers a useful anchor in this time of cultural turbulence, demonstrating that interactive processes have been a significant bedrock to cultural practices in the past, and can lead to a new awareness of what is possible in the future of storytelling.

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*Elizabeth Swift (PhD) is a writer and director of intermedial performance. She lectures in Drama at the University of Gloucestershire, U.K., and she has an MA in Contemporary Performance Practice from Lancaster University and a PhD in Drama from the University of Exeter. Liz is the director of Void Projects performance company that has toured internationally with intermedial performance work. Publications include articles in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Body Space and Technology and in Palgrave’s Framing Immersive Theatre and Performance. Liz represented the U.K. at the 2019 British Academy International Forum in Australia on Future Storytelling.