Comparative Practice: Immersive Theatre in Western Europe and East Asia

Thesis Abstract

This study investigates how immersive theatre practices differ and converge across Western Europe and East Asia, addressing the problem of limited cross-cultural understanding of audience engagement, dramaturgy, and space design in immersive performance. It aims to reveal how regional histories, socio-political contexts, and contemporary aesthetic trajectories shape immersive strategies, audience experiences, and post-performance reflections. The specific objectives are (1) to compare dramaturgical conventions, space configurations, and audience-participant dynamics between representative immersive productions in Western Europe (Germany, the United Kingdom, and France) and East Asia (Japan, South Korea, and China); (2) to assess how cultural norms, ritual verbality, and staging technologies influence the perceived agency, immersion, and safety of participants; (3) to analyze audience responses through multi-method triangulation to identify cross-cultural similarities and divergences in emotional engagement and cognitive processing during and after performances; (4) to evaluate the role of director-led authorial stance and audience co-creation in shaping meaning attribution; and (5) to propose a framework for cross-cultural best practices in immersive theatre design and curatorship. The study adopts a comparative cross-sectional design combining qualitative and quantitative methods anchored in reception theory and practice-based research. The population comprises immersive theatre productions staged between 2018 and 2024 across ten cities in Western Europe and East Asia. A purposive sample of 20 productions (10 per region), with 300 participating audience members per region, yields a total of 6,000 survey responses and 120 in-depth interviews with directors, designers, and performance staff. Data collection instruments include a standardized post-performance questionnaire measuring immersion, perceived agency, emotional arousal, and safety perception; semi-structured interviews with creators exploring dramaturgy, spatial design, and cultural adaptation; ethnographic fieldnotes from rehearsal and performance venues; and documentary analysis of program essays, press material, and design schematics. Validity and reliability are ensured through pilot testing of the survey with 60 participants, triangulation across data sources, inter-coder reliability checks for interview transcripts (Cohen’s kappa = 0.82), and member checking with a subset of practitioners. Analytical approaches combine thematic analysis for qualitative data, descriptive statistics and inferential tests for quantitative data, and regression-based mediation analysis to examine how dramaturgical variables predict immersion and perceived agency. A multilevel modeling framework accounts for nested data (participants within productions within regions). The theoretical frame draws on phenomenology of perception, Bakhtin’s dialogism for audience-creator interaction, and Goffman’s dramaturgy to interpret spatial arrangements and performance rituals; social identity theory is integrated to interpret cross-cultural audience expectations. The conceptual model posits pathways from cultural context and dramaturgical choices to immersion, agency, and post-performance reflection, moderated by perceived safety and prior exposure to immersion. Key findings are anticipated to reveal that Western European productions emphasize narrative complexity and spatial inversion to cultivate dispersed attention and collective meaning-making, whereas East Asian practices foreground ritualized interaction, embodied presence, and heightened sensory immersion through scripted audience roles. Cross-regional commonalities likely include the centrality of space as a narrative medium and the transformative potential of co-created meaning, though modes of interpretation and emotional valence diverge. The study expects that higher perceived agency enhances immersion consistency across contexts, while safety considerations variably constrain participant risk-taking due to differing regulatory regimes and cultural comfort with ambiguity. The contribution to knowledge includes a robust comparative corpus of immersive theatre across Western Europe and East Asia, an empirically grounded framework linking dramaturgy, space, audience behavior, and cultural context, and practical recommendations for designers and curators to optimize cross-cultural accessibility, safety, and interpretive depth. It advances theory by integrating phenomenological and dramaturgical perspectives with reception analysis in a cross-cultural setting and provides a transferable analytic toolkit for researchers and arts professionals examining immersive performance globally. The study concludes that successful cross-cultural immersive practice requires intentional negotiation of ritualized forms, spatial sequencing, and audience agency, guided by context-sensitive risk management and inclusive design principles. Recommendations include developing localized dramaturgical templates, standardized safety protocols adaptable to varied regulatory climates, and professional development programs for creators to cultivate intercultural competence in immersive theatre production.