The "reflective participant," "(remember)ing" and "(remember)ance": a (syn)aesthetic approach to the documentation of audience experience

Experience is central to immersive, interactive and participative dramaturgies; however, it is that central feature of the work which poses a complex challenge to strategies of analysis and approaches to documentation. This is further exacerbated by the context of practice as research, (PaR), particularly in doctoral contexts. Over the last 10 years I have been developing a performative approach to the documentation of immersive, interactive and participatory performance practices that is sympathetic to the experiential nature of those forms. In this paper I draw out the epistemic logic of the PBR strategies that I have developed for documenting and disseminating the nature of the audience’s role and ultimately my approach to capturing the experience of immersive, interactive and participative performance practices from the perspective of the audience participant. I will explicate the two central strategies that inform that approach to documentation and dissemination of the audience’s role and experience: the role of the ‘reflective participant’ and the acts of ‘(remember)ing’ and the production of documents of ‘(remember)ance’.