Cryptic Nights: Joshua Payne presents Out of Body

Joshua Payne is currently preparing for us an experience he intends on making so rich in sensory stimulation that the press release alone would likely fry the minds of any synesthetes among us. Out of Body is an open-ended piece of immersive theatre that will challenge its audiences to navigate a maze of live music, interactive electronics, and kinaesthetic imagery built to elicit responses from all five senses.

The images themselves will be ‘activated’ by a pair of periscopic visors given out to those who enter, which as Payne gleefully informs us will force participants to "relearn the size of their own body in space. It's sort of like being a baby and working out that the things waving in front of you all the time are actually your own arms." But how will this work exactly? "Essentially the visor introduces noise to the visual-spatial signal chain in the participant's brain," he explains. "The result of this noise is that your environment exists a few inches below where it has done the rest of your life, and the sensation is that you are floating just above your own body."

The periscopic visors are Payne’s twist on a regular convention in immersive theatre, i.e. masks, "but with added functionality." He suggests that without them, audience members merely "play themselves," thus enforcing the very distinction between audience and performer that immersive theatre attempts to tamper with. Without masks, we risk stepping into an intensely personal realm, possibly one of painful self-realisation, and while nobody’s suggesting that’s a bad thing, Payne’s got different ideas, with an aim to creating something far more in the way of escapism – "I don't want anyone to be reminded that they have a life, a job, or any responsibilities while they're inside the show. If they start relating the material to their real life then I hope we can put it down to emotional resonance. I'd like to think that in some way we are kind of hypnotising them… it should feel like a slightly different universe that we're sending them into." In other words, this is no Theatre of Cruelty.

All this begs the question, what might the ambitions behind something as grand in scope as this be? On that front, it’s great news – Payne just wants you to have fun. In fact, the success of the whole thing kind of depends on it – "My real ambition for this show is that people have a big party, and when I say party, I do mean dancing and drinking and hanging out to live music. There's sort of a reliance on the audience playing with us, the cast, in order for the magic to happen." Payne will be working in collaboration with fellow creatives Vanessa Coffey, Michael Butcher, Alexander Horowitz, and Ed Crawley of All Eyes Wide, "but," he adds, "there's this whole unknown collaboration that we're trying to accommodate, which is the audience, and they outnumber us considerably, so they will impact on the show a lot. There's a lot that could change from hour to hour within the space. I’m excited about that."

Out of Body will be the latest installment of the Cryptic Nights programme, with further events planned for November courtesy of artist Josh Armstrong. Payne’s show will hopefully demonstrate once again how well the CCA-based collective remember the future. "I think we’re waiting for a breakthrough in immersive theatre," he says, "and that’ll likely come from technology… theatre relies and thrives on human interaction though, so it’ll need to be an incorporation of that with high tech."