The Burnt City’s Legacy: Immersivity, Mimesis, and Enargeia

This chapter considers how The Burnt City might reshape our understanding of the history of immersivity. Although theatre scholars traditionally position immersive theatre within a chronology of experiences going back only to the twentieth century, classicists have long interpreted ancient literature through the lens of a poetics of immersion, meaning that immersive experiences can be identified as far back as our earliest examples of ancient Greek literature. In this chapter, I consider how we might align the twenty-first-century immersive theatre phenomenon with this wider history of immersion, initially by examining points of connection between Punchdrunk’s practice and the genre of Greek tragedy. I then consider two ancient concepts that are linked with the idea of immersion, namely mimesis, or representation, and enargeia, or vividness. I showcase how each concept was understood in antiquity and is manifest in ancient literature, drawing upon Aristotle and Plato in my discussion of mimesis and Lysias, Homer, and Thucydides in my discussion of enargeia. By putting Punchdrunk’s work into dialogue with ancient ideas of immersion, I shed new light upon how we might understand immersivity in antiquity, by paying more attention to its relationship with the embodied materiality of performance. Overall, the chapter works to invite one to reconceptualise Punchdrunk’s practice within a broader history of immersivity, and to consider the significance of theatricality and embodied performance outside of the theatre and in relation to textuality as well.