Free Will Fakery: An introduction to Immersive Theatre
- Kieran Burgess
- Sep 8
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 10
This free resource is one of a series of units, guidebooks and lesson plans for teachers of Theatre. Although written with the DP Theatre teacher and student in mind, it can be adapted for other ages and curricula quite easily. Resources are adaptable and can be shared with colleagues, but please do not remove the credit to Kieran Burgess and this website. A condensed version of this unit plan was adapted by ISTA and is available on the IB Exchange platform, and the original extended unit is available below.
Overview
This mini-unit introduces students to some key elements and terms in immersive theatre. Students will address skills in research, creation, presentation and reflection, connecting to Collaboratively Creating Original Theatre and Performing Theatre Theory directly, as well as research elements of World Theatre Traditions and design elements of Staging Play Texts.
Teacher materials included in this set:
Teacher Notes: Unit Instructions
Presentation: slide deck for lessons
Student materials included in this set:
Handout 1: The Three Worlds of Immersive Theatre
Handout 2: Immersive Theatre Spectrums
If these free resources have saved you some time and you want to show a gesture of thanks, I'd be so grateful for any small amount you wish to give!
Rationale
By introducing students to immersive theatre, there will be organic opportunities to explore a range of skills and areas that could be developed into further units, should you wish. Design (particularly set design), devising and research skills are primarily developed in these 3+ lessons, and play texts or extracts could easily be slotted in too. Immersive theatre has become incredibly popular in the mainstream over the last 10 years, with companies like Punchdrunk dominating the commercial market with shows like Sleep No More. It’s an exciting, energetic theatre form that is incredibly flexible when it comes to staging spaces, allowing students to quickly understand how great theatre doesn’t even need a theatre!
Students will develop...
Knowledge:
Immersive theatre and some key conventions
Differences between immersive, promenade and site-specific theatres
‘Three Worlds’ theory
‘4 Spectrums’ Theory
Skills:
Design, particularly in set
Groundplan creation
Research, curation and presentation of findings
Devising
Improvisation
Narrative structuring
Conceptual Understanding:
Immersion
Interactivity
Milestoning
Storytolding
Key tasks
The accompanying presentation slides include detailed notes for teachers to aid in side-coaching, background reading, substitutions and potential extension activities. Teachers are advised to read through these carefully before delivering the unit in order to adapt to your own context and requirements, though the unit is ‘ready to go’ as an appetite-whetter. In summary, this unit consists of:
A research task, with given areas of focus. Teachers could add/adapt these foci to suit the level or number of students.
Group ideas formation and set design, including the creation of a groundplan
Narrative creation, using the milestones technique.
NB. Teachers can easily adapt the given starting point, or can expand the creation phase of this piece of theatre significantly in order to create a richer experience for wider participation.
Key assessment
There are no formal assessment requirements written into the slides, to allow the focus to be on skills and conceptual understanding development. It is expected that assessment and feedback are ongoing via observation and discussion, however there are the following opportunities for more structured assessment events if you so wish:
Assessing the presented findings in the Research Quest task: this could adapt criterion A of the Research Presentation task to assess the extent to which students explain the practice of immersive theatre and/or its conventions (note that immersive theatre is NOT a tradition on the prescribed list). Alternatively, you may wish to assess the students’ synthesis of knowledge in the pearl-linking presentation task.
Assessing the groundplan: this could draw from criterion B of the production proposal, making allowances for there being only one visual design idea (plus annotations or explanations in writing).
Assessing the process of creating the piece/narrative: drawing on criterion A1 of the Collaborative Project, students are assessed on their journal/portfolio submissions explaining how the piece was collaboratively created.
In all of the assessment opportunities, the journal is central. Teachers are free to combine criteria or create their own for the purposes of this unit.
Links to the Theatre guide
Collaboratively Creating Original Theatre
Staging Play Texts
Research Presentation
Inquiring
Developing
Presenting
Perspectives of designer; creator, performer
Links beyond the subject
TOK: Does lived experience create more reliable knowledge?
TOK: What is embodied cognition?
DP History: potential to use immersive experience to deeply explore an historical event or perspective.
DP Visual Art: Creation of sculpture and/or hyper-detailed objects based on a specific time and place.
Further potential development
The Research Quest could be developed further into a deeper synthesis task
Linking with other subjects to explore events, people and/or places being studied there
Exploration of the Contextualising and Bridge worlds could develop into lessons and creations in their own right
Practical exploration of the allocated space with flats, blocks and other architectural features. Design and build of bespoke items.
Designing soundscapes, lighting, costume and the relevant plans for the piece of theatre
Developing more milestones for longer narrative
Developing multiple spaces within the Active world.
A while ago, I authored a book on immersive theatre, focusing on design and the use of actors to achieve full immersion. It followed the conclusion of my research Masters in immersive theatre design. This book focuses on a case study of an immersive piece staged in a school, and could give you further ideas for exploring with students concepts such as 'the wow factor' and multimedia that eschews the 'tyranny of the projection screen'. The book is still for sale on Amazon and in other bookstores, should you be interested in developing immersive theatre even more.
The set is provided as a view-only Google Folder of Docs and Slides. Please download or make your own copy of any files you wish to edit. Do not 'Request Access' to the Google files as this will be ignored. Please feel free to adapt or add to these files, but please retain the credit to Kieran Burgess and this website. Please do get in touch if there are any broken links.
If these free resources have saved you some time and you want to show a gesture of thanks, I'd be so grateful for any small amount you wish to give!
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