The Burnt City in Performance: Place, Space, and Experience

This chapter analyses The Burnt City in performance as an immersive classical reception. I continue to employ the methodology of Spectator-Participation-as-Research and draw upon my experiences of the production to analyse how both place (as geographic and architectural location) and space (as designed and dramaturgical environment) interacted with the narrative content of The Burnt City. I draw attention to the site-specificity of The Burnt City, which was staged in two former munitions factories in Woolwich’s Royal Arsenal, and to the multilayering of space, which included a sedimentary spatial layer created through the museum entrance experience, the substantive narrative space of the Trojan War, and a deeper spatiality related to the ancient Greek mythological Underworld. In the third and final section of the chapter, I consider spectatorial experience within Punchdrunk’s masked performances more broadly, drawing upon different theorisations of the role of Punchdrunk’s audience, including via Punchdrunk’s own conceptions. I suggest that the frequent coding of the audience in terms linked to the ancient world, whether as shades of the Underworld, members of a tragic chorus, or as ritual initiands, means that the potential for the audience to feel submerged in an alternate reality is heightened in The Burnt City in comparison to Punchdrunk’s other masked shows. The Burnt City’s status as a classical reception increased the possibilities for audience immersion.