Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance

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Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance

edited by E.B. Hunter and Scott Magelssen

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07740-3

Paper: 978-0-472-05740-5

eISBN: 978-0-472-90500-3 (OA)

About the Book

2026 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Edited Works Award Winner

Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.

Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms; Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.

About the Author

E. B. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance.
Scott Magelssen is Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Performing Flight: From The Barnstormers to Space Tourism, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, and co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions.

Reviews

2026 Edited Works Award Winner

— Association for Theatre in Higher Education

"Through a vibrant and diverse complement of case studies, Enveloping Worlds tracks the “ascendence of the immersive” in a US context, revealing how immersive performance uniquely illuminates the socio-political dynamics of American democracy and capitalism. By analyzing the ways immersive experiences invite audiences to “play attention” as active participant-collaborators, navigating flows of power, agency, and access, the collection reveals how these performances can serve as both critiques of systemic inequities and as spaces for reimagining collective political engagement. Enveloping Worlds makes a vital contribution to transnational conversations on immersivity within and beyond the theatre proper, equipping scholars and students with an expanded critical vocabulary and set of methodological approaches to examine the political potential of immersive performance."— Natalie Alvarez, Toronto Metropolitan University

"Given the ways the collection productively builds on preceding scholarship of immersive theatre and audience participation—let alone how much I have been celebrating, debating, teaching, and recommending this collection over the last few months—it is clear that a discourse of immersive performance has been strongly advanced by Hunter, Magelssen, and their collaborators."

— D.J. Hopkins, Theatre Journal

“Ironically organized into three sections—Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—Enveloping Worlds documents fifteen compelling offers of the American experience that audiences can't refuse: immerse yourself.”— Joseph Roach, Yale University

“[A] helpful resource for students, educators, performance practitioners, and researchers defining how immersion operates as an experiential mode in contemporary performance forms. It will be specifically helpful to those in US theatre programs who are finally beginning to recognize the powerful allure of all things immersive.”

— William W. Lewis, Theatre Survey

“Hunter and Magelssen bring the conversation of immersive theater state-side with a compelling collection of essays analyzing the ways in which we interact with and become part of the performance. Enveloping Worlds is an engaging piece of scholarship that is bound to make a strong contribution to American theater and media studies.” — Jill Stevenson, Marymount Manhattan University