The \u22Reflective Participant,\u22 \u22(Remember)ing\u22 and \u22(Remember)ance\u22: 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 cognitivist 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 practice-based (PBR) strategies that I have developed for documenting and disseminating the nature of the audience’s role. I explicate the three central strategies which inform that approach: the role of the ‘reflective participant’ and the process of ‘reflective hypermnesis’ as an act of ‘(remember)ing’ and the production of experiential documents of ‘(remember)ance’. The role of the “reflective participant,” and the (syn)aesthetic approach to capturing and disseminating the experiences of the “reflective participant” utilizes the process of hypermnesis as a form of praxis. The methodology of (remember)ing and (remember)ance that I explicate over the course of this article, employs “reflective hypermnesis” as a critical act for capturing and disseminating the experience of immersive dramaturgies