What is an ‘immersive’ experience in the context of 2024? It feels like every event’s marketing is using this word as a catch-all for any degree of environmental engagement or activity, hoping that this magic phrase will bring a few more bodies in the door.

In many cases, these buzzword-happy events may provide some live actors portraying one-sided scenes, some set pieces for guests to wander around in, or offer the option for folks to dress up. In the worst cases, offenders have thrown up some wall projections, played music over speakers, and provided Instagram-friendly photo spots — there’s no other way for guests to engage with the design that’s going on around them but the event has provided some ‘environment’ beyond four white walls and some poseur tables.

Not so for the Adult Social Care Sandbox Immersive Day held in early October.

LOTI’s goal was to provide a more engaging away-day than the standard industry reports & breakout groups (or worse: death by powerpoint). Over the course of several months the team developed carefully researched & tailored case studies with the intention of bringing them to life for and with attendees through curated activities — not just live actors performing static scripted scenes but reaching out and directly engaging with the audience to bring them into the human experience of the issues at hand.

This is where I come in as an immersive performance/practice consultant. While immersive practice has its deepest roots in the theatrical world (have a look at the No Proscenium glossary for a deep dive into what this realm covers), corporate roleplay it is most assuredly not. Immersive practice critically differs from roleplay in several key ways, including actively designing the environmental experience, curating positive audience engagement, and promoting individual agency. The core goal of immersive practice is to bring an audience as far into the world of the scenario as possible and ensure they feel they have a stake in and can affect what’s happening around them — to make a place for the individual guest and say “This spot is reserved for you, we’re glad you came because it’s important that you personally are here.”

Basically: immersive practice means the audience member needs to exist within the created world and that their actions (or inactions) have an effect on it.

In LOTI’s Adult Social Care Sandbox case, this involved a wide range of scenic changes (living rooms, a hospital, and a civil service office), costumes and even scent design. These all then serve the critical use of performer-driven points of interaction where the audience becomes active participants in the character’s story. Attendees fulfilled a wide range of roles while interacting directly with the characters: delivering important narrative news to the characters as members of their in-world community, sparking casual conversation in a pharmacist’s waiting room, gathering critical personal information to help complete a healthcare-related survey, scanning messages trying to identify the ones which related to the case at hand. 

In all cases the goal was to ensure attendees felt personally involved and engaged in the characters’ journeys, to invite them to become an active part of the process and therefore better empathise with — and be more motivated in proposing solutions to — the challenges the characters faced. When examples pass from just being case studies into being someone you’ve talked to in their native environment (maybe even reminding you of a neighbour or relative), the creative juices may flow that much more freely; as the day progressed we witnessed plenty more heads nodding and sighing knowingly as the participants engaged with the stumbling blocks they came up against alongside our characters, and the breakout groups were full of personalised reactions to “Mrs. S” and “Aleesha”, not just “Scenario 1 & 2”.

While not every conference and event day may adapt as easily to the theatrical lengths LOTI’s Sandbox Immersive Day achieved, immersive practice is a bold tool for promoting attendee engagement. It essentially gamifies the event, encouraging players to be creative in taking control of the story while living through it. Activities and touchpoints where guests have a direct effect on a plotline or narrative puts stakes in place and motivates participants — where suggestions may start out slow and guarded, offerings generally become get more experimental, decisive, and invested when the outcome isn’t just the end of a predetermined railroad, but tantalisingly open-ended. 

This blog post has been written by Shelley Snyder, Immersive Practice Consultant and London Curator for No Proscenium & Everything Immersive.