Part 1 – What is immersive theatre?
Part 2 – MITE Festival – Why micro-immersive?
Micro-immersive is just immersive theatre on a small scale.
Many people have heard about or experienced large-scale immersive like Sleep No More (which is a multi-million-dollar mostly-wordless dance-driven Hitchcock-influenced adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth taking place across 6 floors of a converted warehouse–it is a multi-track agency-based passive-spectator work) or Then She Fell (which is also dance-driven; an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland taking place in an asylum–it is a multi-track, guided, semi-passive/semi-interactive work). Creating works on this scale is well-beyond the means of most individual artists, and even beyond the scope of what most regional or institutional theatres in America are able to take risks on. It’s a fairly new field (Sleep No More opened in New York less than 10 years ago) and most theatre artists still have little or no experience with the form.
Sleep No More performance on July 25, 2011. Lucas Jackson / Reuters 
Then She Fell by Third Rail Projects. Photograph: Chad Heird
Large-scale immersive is, at this point in time, mostly beyond the means of local artists and audiences.
In addition, because it’s so new, it’s often lumped-in with other forms of new-ish interactive entertainments like escape-rooms, virtual-reality, or live-action-role-playing (or old-ish forms like haunted houses)–so there’s a lot of confusion surrounding what immersive theatre actually is. (For the record, we think it’s fundamentally different from all of those things)
We hope the Micro-Immersive Theatre/Experience Festival will be a way for artists and audiences to explore creating and experiencing immersive theatre on an accessible scale, and will open up our local community as a place for continued innovation and development.
