The Apolline, the Dionysiac, and Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s Masked Performances

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Two key trends stand out within recent scholarship on spectatorship in immersive performance. The first is methodologically driven and falls into the theatre and performance studies sub-field of audience studies and considers individual audience experiences of performance. The second is theoretically driven and uses Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator as an interpretative lens through which to consider audience experience in general, specifically in terms of agency. Here, I argue that the time has come to introduce additional rubrics for the analysis of spectatorship in immersive theatre, to further discussion and to add a new dimension to our understanding of the phenomenon. To do so, I attempt to unify the methodologically driven with the theoretically driven and propose a new rubric for the analysis of spectatorial experience of immersive performance based upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the Apolline and the Dionysiac as articulated in The Birth of Tragedy. I take Punchdrunk’s 2013–14 production The Drowned Man as a paradigmatic example and analyse the co-presence of the Apolline and Dionysiac drives at the point of reception. I utilise a mixed-method approach to surveying the audience experience of three key components of performance, namely scenographic engagement, large-scale, crowd-drawing choreographic sequences, and one-on-one experiences, and suggest that audience records of satisfying moments of performance reflect a balancing of the Apolline and the Dionysiac, whereas frustrating experiences reflect an imbalance. Overall, I argue that by continuing the tradition of developing Nietzsche’s binary to understand contemporary practice we gain an additional tool that holds productive possibilities for unpicking how and why moments of immersive performance might be particularly alluring or, conversely, frustrating for difference audiences.