Punchdrunk

Punchdrunk




At the beginning of the lesson, we sat down and watched a clip from the famous Punchdrunk piece 'The Drowned Man'. The type of theatre used here is 'immersive theatre' in which the audience is free to choose what to watch and wear to go. 'The Drowned Man' is based in a 4 story house, making it a 'site specific' piece. The audience are made to wear masks, and they are taken on multiple journeys and stories around the house, with each audience member coming out with a different lead narrative, depending on the route they took.

To explore this type of theatre we were ordered to create a single file, which was lead to various places in the school, with separated groups of the class left in each location. My group were left in the locker area, with a stimulus of about 20 or so masks. We had to create a ritualistic immersive and audience engaging piece. We came up with a number of ideas, with our basis obviously the masks, and also the 200 lockers.

We finally decided on hiding masks in specific lockers, and giving the piece the theme of 'identity' relating hidden identity being behind closed doors (masks in lockers). The audience would come in, and the groups members (pre-wearing their masks) would walk up to particular people and whisper their locker number to them for example 'you're 118', while leading them to their lockers. This got the audience completely engaged and involved, and rather than being the spectator they became part of the piece- by doing this we attacked the emotions of the group and made them feel as if they were really involved in the theatre.

This type of theatre can be described as like a reality videogame, exploring fictional and worlds of performance and becoming involved in them.