Hierarchy of Needs in Immersive Theatre [DURING THE EXPERIENCE] 3/3
Throughout the experience, there are needs to satisfy for your audience that allow them to thrive within the narrative and achieve the deepest sense of transcendence upon completion. These needs are closer to the core of storytelling in that they relate directly to the narrative, and are a direct manifestation of the story you have designed for your audience to experience.
- Cognitive Needs: knowledge and understanding, curiosity, exploration, need for meaning and predictability.
Curiosity: As the story progresses, being specific about how the audience is perceiving the experience is what keeps the audience engaged. Satisfying a human’s curiosities and imagination are what make any experience a thrilling and engaging one. At the core of any story, storytellers are asking the audience to imagine the world around them, and through the audience’s own exploration through the story do they interpret meaning and breathe life into it. Without an audience, the story is lifeless, and is simply words on a page, or a historical document. Thus, if a story is to survive and indeed thrive, there is a need to encourage the audience to feel driven to learn and know the story, even if the event is not fully interpretable just yet.
A part of curiosity is wanting to explore something that is strange and unusual. But being curious for curious’ sake is short-lived. Giving the audience opportunities to dig deeper into the narrative and world encourage them to tap into their active, curious selves. This is why humans go to the theater at all. How can you leave little breadcrumbs of curiosity for the audience to discover? But curiosity must be rooted in the eagerness for knowledge and meaning.
Knowledge and Meaning: The audience is desperate to find meaning and make sense of what is nonsensical, and while it does not have to be spelled out every step of the way, it should always be supported by the story. If it is arbitrary and fleeting, the audience will start to lose interest in the experience because they don’t have something tangible to grasp on to. This can be accomplished by giving the audience nuggets of information or clues that further the narrative in some way. Through scenes, interactions, private moments, or games, it must all be to progress or deepen the knowledge of the story and relationships between characters. If we do something just for the sake of doing it, we have lost meaning and are not gaining further knowledge into the experience.
Predictability: Another important cognitive need is a sense of predictability. While surprise is a wonderful device in theater, having some sense of what to expect or an idea of how to engage with something is key to maintaining trust and immersion within the experience. Without a sense of predictability through established “social cues”, the audience can become doubtful and fearful because they don’t know what to expect. And while there should always be a sense of mystery to invite curiosity, the audience will disengage if they cannot follow any sense of predictability within the experience.
2. Aesthetic needs: appreciation and search for beauty, balance, form, etc.
Beauty: While every story has its own needs for what aesthetic it offers, there should always be some form of beauty that is supported by the narrative. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, but giving the audience a rich, specific world and narrative to get immersed in is vital for the satisfaction of an experience. One definition of aesthetic is “relating to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.” Thus, aesthetic can be correlated with human emotion and physical senses that trigger these conscious feelings.
When exploring the aesthetic beauty within the world of the story, the audience craves simplicity and form, and when it is too complicated or noisy, it is harder to appreciate. Focus in on the main elements of the storyline and the world in which it is set instead of creating something beautiful for the sake of making something beautiful (unless, of course, that is the story you want to tell).
A vital part of aesthetic beauty is building ways to engage your audience’s senses within the story. The advantage to having your audience within your world is that you can activate their deeper conscious selves by supporting the experience with smells, tastes, touches, visuals, and sounds. How multi-sensory can your experience be? Theater for the Senses is a company that taps into the curiosity of human senses to tell a story. Stimulate the audience’s senses, and challenge the story to be supported through all five senses, not just the visual and audial. BitterSuite is another project that removes the audience’s visual sense to explore music and movement in a multi-sensory and visceral way. Listening to Debussy’s string quartet while given curated tastes and touches throughout the journey of the music allowed the audience to trust their curious self, and even though no linear narrative was visually established because the audience was blindfolded, each audience member created their own narrative.
Balance: Balance is the core of universal law. The farther you tip the scale in one direction, the more you affect the other side. Balancing experiences with both light and dark aspects support each part of the experience and make them more impactful. Diversifying your experience with different types of expression throughout the narrative will satisfy the audiences aesthetic needs. When you have a chaotic, nightmare-like event within the story, juxtapose this with a different aesthetic experience. If the entire experience lives only in one aesthetic, it becomes less impactful and it exhausts the audience. By offering multiple forms of aesthetic expression and style under one unifying design, each element holds more weight on each side of the constantly tipping scale. If it is all the same wash, the level of immersion fades and the audience will disengage more easily from the experience.
This all culminates in the final two needs, which is the reason why storytelling exists.
Self-actualization needs: fulfilling the desire to become the most that one can be. If all of Maslow’s needs are met in support of the story, you have the audience right where you want them. Then they are much more susceptible to realizing personal potential, self-fulfillment, and a newfound sense of personal growth. The culmination of your experience is what Maslow calls a peak experience, which is described as “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experimenter." Self-actualization is a internalization of the story, and is found through the exploration of how it translates personally to each audience member. Immersive theater is a wonderful opportunity to deepen this need beyond a proscenium performance, and can have an exponentially impactful effect on satisfying self-actualization needs.
Transcendence needs: motivated by values which transcend beyond the personal self (e.g., mystical experiences and certain experiences with nature, aesthetic experiences, sexual experiences, service to others, the pursuit of science, religious faith, etc.). Transcendence is the ultimate need to satisfy human existence. Storytelling has the opportunity to allow each audience member to transcend themselves, and while a successful story has allowed the audience to actualize their own self and existence, storytellers wield the magic to unify a human’s intellect and spirit.
In this way, artists and storytellers shape the world and culture in which humans exist, and through the reinvention of stories, humans are affected on a global scale. While it is by no means an easy task, it begins with the story that is begging to be told. Whether you are able to engage one person or thousands through a transcendent experience, it is a step in creating a more conscious world. And while spectacle, money, material, and ego are all products of human existence, stories, meaning, empathy, and transcendence are the process to human transcendence.
