Abstract
This chapter reflects on the close relationships between affect and risk in the aesthetics and politics of immersive theatre. The participatory demands of immersive theatre are such that audiences are more than just receivers of theatre, but producers as well. As producing receivers, participants are required to contribute to the creative trajectory of a theatre event without necessarily knowing how to participate or even what it is that they are meant to be participating in. Immersive theatre requires audiences to invest in uncertainty and this investment is what characterises participation as risky. But risk emerges in another sense as well, for this engagement with uncertainty tends towards the production of affects such as exhilaration, anxiety, embarrassment, or, on rare occasions, fear. Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the chapter approaches the relationship between risk and affect in two ways: firstly, by looking at how risk might be experienced as an affective presence; secondly, by asking how committing to a theatre event which might produce a variety of affects is itself a risk for participating audiences. Given risk's relationship to uncertain futures, the implication of feeling risk as an affective presence collapses that future into a material present, material because of affect's functioning through and impact on the embodied mind. The implication of committing to the risky production of affect is a political one, for it brings into play the distribution of power dynamics within performance: who affects and who is affected? This chapter, then, will approach the relationship between risk and affect in immersive theatre as one imbued with political resonance, raising the stakes of what it means to engage with immersive theatre as a participating audience.