Guest Blog: Creative Associate Zoe Flint on the Demands and Delights of Immersive Performance in BRIDGE COMMAND

So you want to be an actor* (in immersive and interactive theatre)?  

You do? Great – but let me give you the list of requirements first.  

Over the years, Parabolic Theatre has prided itself on making highly immersive and interactive work, where the audience contributions are not only meaningful, but critical to the experience – and genuinely different every night. But how does this actually happen? While set, costume, tech and, game mechanics all are contributors to any immersive production, ultimately, a show is built on the backs of its performers.

For Bridge Command, and other Parabolic productions, performers are expected to become masterful in five key areas:

1. Acting

Your total embodiment of a character, who lives and breathes with the world shared by the audience. This up-close-and-personal style offers performers the perfect hybrid of performance – the intimacy of film and the live excitement of theatre. Our performers become master longform improvisors, beyond ‘yes, and…?’ but showing characters in their full range of human experience – potentially at the drop of a hat, truly having the ability to laugh one minute and cry the next.

2. Teaching

All our productions involve playable elements, and it’s the performer who shows our audience how to interact and play. This can range from teaching how to use a space-age medical scanner, how to rally a nation to resist an invasion, to how to bring down predicted inflation for the next fiscal year. The real skill here is being able to teach the drunk lad on a stag night, the indecisive intellectual, and the too cool for school teen who was dragged along by their parents, how to fly a spaceship – importantly without it feeling like school.

3. Facilitating

Now the drunk stag, the Oxford grad, and the teen with Mum and Dad have all learned how to fly their spaceship. Now you have to get them to work and play together. The art of facilitating play is to keep it interesting and exciting, not to help them win. Essentially the performer is ensuring the audience are contributing to their (unknown) super-objective at all times – to play at being the Bridge Crew of a Star Ship.

4. Audience Management

Your job as a performer is to communicate both emotions and instructions to an audience. Over time we’ve identified four ‘tools’ for direct audience interaction:

• Eye contact
• Touch
• Proxemics
• Vocal instructions

All of which can be applied in a myriad of ways. Mastery of these tools, and flexibility to empathise with audience members – identifying what they want out of an experience and then giving it to them is what turns a good regular actor, into a great immersive one.

5. Ensemble Awareness

These expectations sound like a lot, and they are, but you’re not in this alone. You and the other actors are all striving towards the same goal, and learning to move and breathe and grow the world together is where the magic really happens. Working with other performers to establish and sustain audience play within a fictional setting should (and does) feel like playing make-believe with your best friends. It isn’t the set or tech or expense that keeps audience members immersed in a world – it’s how the characters made them feel.

If you’ve made it through the whole list and are excited rather than terrified by it, then I have some great news – you already have the first and most important trait to becoming an immersive actor; actually wanting to do the job. If having perfectly polished dialogue and choreographed moments is what you need, that’s fine – but expect to only really dip a toe in the immersive world. But if you’re sure you want more than that…

Be brave. Jump in the deep end.

Read our review of Bridge Command here.

Zoe Flint is an actor and director specialising in immersive and interactive performance. She is currently a Creative Associate at Bridge Command and Artistic Associate with Parabolic Theatre.  

Bridge Command is currently booking until 31 January 2025. 

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