1. Introduction

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Immersive and site-specific performance has reshaped contemporary theatre by positioning audiences as active explorers instead of passive observers, through the organisation of time, space, and narrative structure (Machon, 2013). Works such as Sleep No More and Manos Tsangaris’ Arnold Elevators and Love & Diversity, model how temporal, spatial design, and shifting audience perspectives can create highly individualised performance experiences. These works function as influential case studies that suggest possibilities for composing and staging music-theatre.

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In 2025, I initiated and led the curation of White/out, an interdisciplinary music-theatre production presented in a nontraditional concert space that differs from the fixed frontal stage and seated-audience model to create a fluid environment in which performers and audiences share the same space. The production combined music, drama, video installation arts, interactive software, and paintings, structured around the theme of memory loss and retrieval. Rather than delivering a singular, authored experience to a stationary audience, White/out invited each visitor to explore the space at their own pace, constructing a personal encounter with the materials.

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This Practice‑as‑Research project investigates how my compositional and staging decisions shape audience experience, guided by the question: In White/out, how do the temporal structure of the performance and the spatial staging of performers in different locations construct an immersive experience for audiences in nontraditional concert spaces? In addition, the project uses Sleep No More and Manos Tsangaris’ Arnold Elevators and Love & Diversity as comparative case studies, allowing me to situate White/out within contemporary immersive music‑theatre practice and to draw reflective insights for improving my future work.

 

2. Literature & Context

Questioning the traditional concert hall model and its implicit social contract that the audience sits motionlessly in darkness, while the performer occupies an illuminated stage, and meaning flows in one direction, Bühler (2021) recorded in a survey that the audience find it annoying that they are forced to sit motionless during the entire concert, creating a stiff, tense atmosphere, it was the top 3 most frequently named disturbances in classical concert.

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Scholars such as Salzman and Dezsy (2008) have documented the shift from traditional operatic staging to "New Music Theater," which integrates visual, physical, and acoustic elements into a cohesive performative body rather than subordinating them to a text. This evolution parallels the rise of immersive theatre, which, as Webb (2023) notes, employs sensory-rich environments to create inclusive, participatory experiences that demand active audience navigation. Within this paradigm, the curation of non-traditional spaces becomes a compositional act. Farnsworth (2020) highlights how contemporary music festivals and independent curators mediate listening experiences by abandoning standard concert halls in favor of fluid, site-responsive architectures.

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In terms of audience agency, it is highly constructed through spatial constraints, temporal loops, and sensory cues. The degree to which an audience member can "co-create" meaning depends entirely on how the artist engineers the environment. According to Herburg (2023), Audience agency is supplemented by the actor-driven narrative, prop-driven narrative and narratively-charged objects. Actor-driven narrative constitutes any narrative communicated through the performance of the actors. Prop-driven narrative is more consistent across a wider variety of immersive theatre performances. In Prop-driven narrative, the audience are free to interact with props in the scenographic environment, creating an immersive fictional world, and to communicate narrative to the audience through narratively-charged objects. 

 

3. Case Studies

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The three case studies examined in this project represent various models of how immersive performance can deploy spatial, temporal design, and audience agency to construct audience experience. Although there are other immersive performances, these three present most different temporal and spatial structure and audience agency, together they form a spectrum from large-scale cinematic entertainment to intimate relational experience that suggests the range of possibilities available to the music-theatre practitioner and directly impacts the design thinking behind White/out.

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3.1.    Punchdrunk : Sleep No More
Sleep No More is one of the most widely discussed and critically acclaimed works in the history of immersive theatre, first developed by Punchdrunk in the United Kingdom and brought to New York, Shanghai and Seoul. The work retells Shakespeare's Macbeth with dance, music, theatrical elements, and even the sets itself. Audiences enter the McKittrick wearing white masks, which signify that they cannot be seen or interacted with in the same way that characters interact with one another. 

Spatial Design
The McKittrick Hotel is a converted warehouse. The building contains dozens of individually designed spaces, a psychiatric ward, a candlelit forest, a detective's office, a ballroom, each filled with thousands of props, documents, and objects that audience members are free to handle and examine. Every drawer, every shelf, every corner contributes additional fragments of narrative, character history, and atmosphere. The accumulation of detail transforms the building into a vast, three-dimensional text that can be "read" in any number of sequences and depths.

Temporal Design
Temporally, Sleep No More operates on a looping structure: the performers repeat the entire narrative arc of the piece three times over the course of each approximately three-hour performance. This means that scenes, choreographic sequences, and key narrative events recur at regular intervals, and audience members who miss a moment in one loop may encounter it in the next. The loop creates a world with its own internal time, a perpetual present in which the same events keep happening regardless of the audience's position within them. This temporal circularity reinforces the work's fatalistic, noir atmosphere: like all great tragedies, the outcome is always already determined, and no amount of witnessing can change what must come. Although the timeline itself is linear, the experience audience is different as it would refresh and it progresses.  As audience decide their own perspective to follow, their understanding of the story is always fragmented and pointillistic. 

3.2.     Manos Tsangaris: Arnold Elevators
Arnold Elevators is a trilogy of music-theatre works commissioned by Wien Modern on the occasion of Arnold Schönberg's 150th anniversary in 2024, developed across four distinct locations clustered around Vienna's Karlsplatz, staged across the Secession gallery, the Musikverein's Brahms-Saal, the Wiener Konzerthaus, and the Arnold Schönberg Center across a period of nine days in November 2024. The thematic content draws on letters, essays, and private notes by Arnold and Mathilde Schönberg, as well as poetry by Konrad Bayer and writings by early musicologist Elsa Bienenfeld. The work is explicitly concerned with Arnold the private, using intimate textual fragments to construct a portrait.

Spatial Design
The first and most purely immersive component of the trilogy, Blicke, is premiered at the Secession, Vienna's Art Nouveau exhibition building. Tsangaris treats the building's architecture as a compositional parameter. Within this single building, the ensemble of actors, singers, and musicians is distributed across six stations: the freight elevator in the exterior, a small hidden chamber in the basement, the foyer, the main exhibition hall on the ground floor, above the glass roof of the exhibition hall, and the library on the upper floor. Audiences are invited to wander freely between the continuously performed stations, constructing their own individual journey through the building.

Temporal Design
Temporally, Blicke is designed to be flexible and self-paced. With a total duration of approximately three hours, performed by 35 performers. The audience's dwell-time at each station, how long they linger beside the basement chamber, how many times they ride the freight elevator, directly shapes the rhythmic experience of the whole. Time, in Arnold Elevators, is not a frame of the entire experience but a thin line that connects each station, shaped by movement and curiosity. The only exception is the library, where a defined admission, beginning, and end to the musical scene is enforced, creating a single moment of structured, bounded experience within an otherwise open exploration.

3.3.    Manos Tsangaris: Love & Diversity
In contrast to architectural scale, Love & Diversity is an intimate piece concluded as a "sonic speed-dating" experience in a bar setting. The work was commissioned by the dissonArt ensemble and premiered in November 2012 at the Avgo Music Village in Thessaloniki, Greece. Since then it has been performed internationally in Hong Kong, Barcelona, Hanoi, and New York.

Spatial Design
In Love & Diversity, the seven musicians sit in separate tables, allowing 3 audience to each table at once. The audience would rotate from one table to another, then eventually watching the room as a whole with an actress in the end. This is a confined and delicate piece performing to 24 audiences at a time, as the audience goes in and out, it created a fluid It creates an intimate experience for the audience with the performers. The shifts from one performer to another alters the focus of the audience each time, creating different experience each time.

Temporal Design
Temporally, Love & Diversity enforces a strictly linear sequence. Once an encounter ends, it cannot be repeated or revisited. This irreversibility is the work's most provocative temporal strategy: it mirrors the transience of real social encounters and produces in the audience a heightened awareness of the present moment, knowing that this brief connection will not come again. However, as per the music, audience will listen to the same piece for 8 times in total, but the listening is different as the positioning is different each time. As such, the focus and performance are different every time, even though the musicians are looping the same performance.

The format is strictly organised. Very small groups of audience members, typically three at a time, escorted by guides, rotate through a series of stations, each staffed by a different musician or performer. At each station, the encounter lasts only a few minutes before a signal indicates that it is time to move on to the next "date." Each station features a different instrument, persona, and performance style, functioning as a miniature scene that blends live music, character, and a conversational quality of direct address. The effect is one of accumulating micro-narratives: by the end of the event, the audience has encountered a sequence of fleeting, irreversible moments of musical intimacy, each coloured by the specific combination of instrument, performer, and proximity.
 

3.4.    Kallie Ching-wai HO: White/out

White/out functioned as an exhibition with occasional performances incorporating music and movement, designed around the theme of memory loss and retrieval. The environment integrated music, video arts, installation, interactive software, and paintings. 

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Spatial Design

The site chosen for White/out was Oil Street Art Space in Hong Kong, a heritage venue originally constructed in 1908 for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. The building already carried the weight of collective and community memory. Within this heritage warehouse, the venue was divided into two distinct areas: the white space and the storage rooms, each representing a different dimension of the memory experience.

 

The white space represents the fading memory, thus it is bright, spacious and empty. A series of paintings covered with white cotton were displayed, concealing their imagery. Audiences were invited to interact directly with these works by sensing, grabbing, and pulling at the cotton to reveal the painted surface beneath. With white walls and floors partially covered with cotton, the entire space functioned as a dimensional, architectural echo of the paintings.

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The storage rooms offered a contrasting nostalgic style. Storage Room 1 contained a set of old-fashioned television sets showing the ordinary and repetitive footages of days and nights existing, alongside archived historic free-use footage edited and randomly assembled in real time, presenting a chaotic, non-linear stream of images. Storage Room 2 contained a reversed typewriter website displayed via projector, where every keystroke caused the text to be cancelled and erased rather than recorded, directly enacting the experience of fading memory through the audience's own attempt.

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Exploring from the white space to the storage rooms was a meaningful act of participation. Moving from the open, bright area into the partially hidden storage rooms enacted the psychological movement from blankness into archive, from forgetting into the attempt to remember. In the live performance, this spatial division further marked the progression of the dramatic narrative: two performers began in separate zones, gradually exchanged places, and ultimately one performer left the warehouse entirely for the grass field outside, extending the story's journey beyond the architectural boundary of the building to the real world.

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Temporal Design

The temporal structure of White/out was deliberately hybrid, operating across two manners that coexisted and periodically interrupted one another. For the majority of the event, the work existed in exhibition mode, a condition of suspended and undirected time in which visitors moved at their own pace and engaged with interactive elements according to their own curiosity. Within this open temporal frame, a continuous electronic music composition played on loop. Although the music had no formal beginning or ending as experienced within the exhibition, it contained within itself a gradual arc of memory changing, fading, and regaining the memory by rearranging the theme from Edelweiss from the Sound of Music.

 

This stillness was broken at scheduled intervals when the live performances began. Two performers, positioned in separate zones, enacted a journey of remembering through a complete and continuous narrative arc. The narrative is both actor-drive and prop-drive, as audience could choose to follow the performers closely, attend to the installations, or move freely between the two modes of engagement as the performance unfolded around them. The performance arc was set, but the experience of it remained individually determined, reflecting that memory is always personal even when it is a shared community experience.

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3.5.    Comparison: Time and Space as Storytelling Tools

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Looping, Fragmented, and Non-linear Storytelling
Unlike traditional concerts with a clear beginning and end, Sleep No More uses looping time to create a world that exists independently of the viewer. In White/out, the division between the white space and storage rooms created a fragmented narrative. Due to the hybrid of exhibition and occasional performances, the linear storytelling is interrupted by static moments, resulting as a non-linear narrative. It suggests the audience to engage in different perspectives. 

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Pacing and Spatial Progression
Arnold Elevators demonstrates how moving through a building provides a physical pacing for the audience. In White/out, the contrast between the open, static white space and the dense, enclosed storage rooms manipulated audience pace. Spectators naturally slowed down in the storage rooms to examine the interactive elements and the videos, whereas the white space encouraged audience to walk across the space to examine the paintings hung on the walls. Since the storage rooms are relatively small, it creates a more intimate and personal contact for the audience, it is even more cramped during the performances. 

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Open and Guided Narrative
Love & Diversity utilizes strict time limits and extreme proximity to force intimacy, guiding the narrative through close interactions. White/out balanced open exploration with moments of guided focus. While the audience had the agency to explore the installations freely, the scheduled onset of performances drew their collective attention, momentarily collapsing the open narrative into a shared, intimate focal point before releasing them back into individual exploration.

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4. Discussion

Developing White/out profoundly impacted my artistic identity, expanding my understanding of what it means to be a creator in contemporary music-theatre.

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Exploring New Music Experiences Creatively
This project forced me to reconsider the concert format. By abandoning the frontal stage, I realized that the physical environment is an instrument in itself. Designing the sonic and visual transitions between the "white space" and the "storage rooms" taught me that audience discomfort or disorientation can be a powerful creative tool if harnessed correctly. I learned to compose not just for sound, but for the architectural constraints and the unpredictable pacing of a roaming audience.

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Storyteller Through Spatial Displacement of Sound
Previously, I viewed my composition as the primary vehicle for storytelling. White/out taught me that music in an immersive setting often acts as an atmospheric anchor rather than a linear narrator. The theme of memory loss was communicated not just through melodic motifs, but through the spatial displacement of sound. When the sounds in daily life played from a hidden storage room while the audience stood in the white space, the sound became a distant echo, a literal manifestation of a fading memory.

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Collaborator with Other Performing Arts
Integrating video arts, interactive software, and paintings fundamentally shifted my collaborative process. I had to learn the vocabulary of visual artists and media artists to ensure the music did not overpower the installations but engaged in a dialogue with them. For instance, the pacing of the visual is similar to the pacing of composition, the rhythm of video editing is significant. This interdisciplinary approach has reshaped my identity from an composer to a interdisciplinary collaborator, capable of combining multiple art forms into a singular art experience.​

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6. Conclusion

This Practice-as-Research project set out to investigate how temporal structures and spatial staging in non-traditional spaces construct immersive experiences, using my curation of White/out as the primary subject of inquiry. By comparing my work against the large-scale voyeurism of Sleep No More, the architectural parcours of Arnold Elevators, and the forced intimacy of Love & Diversity, several key insights emerged regarding the mechanics of immersive music-theatre.

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Firstly, space must be treated as a co-author of the narrative. In White/out, the dichotomy between the "white space" and the "storage rooms" physically embodied the theme of memory loss and retrieval, proving that architectural division can replace traditional plot structures. Moving through these spaces provided the audience with a fragmented, non-linear experience that mirrored the psychological state the piece aimed to explore.

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Secondly, the manipulation of time and pacing directly dictates the level of intimacy and audience agency. While works like Love & Diversity use strict, guided temporal constraints to force connection, White/out utilized an open-ended exhibition format punctuated by occasional live performances. This hybrid approach allowed audiences the freedom of self-paced exploration.

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Ultimately, this research has fundamentally evolved my artistic practice. I no longer view myself strictly as a composer for acoustic instruments, but as a storyteller and interdisciplinary collaborator. Designing White/out demonstrated that composing for immersive environments requires total control and vision, allowing the audience's navigation, the interactive technology, and the physical architecture to complete the performance. Moving forward, these insights will serve as the foundation for my future curatorial and compositional work, as I continue to explore how the dissolution of the traditional concert boundary can foster deeper, more vulnerable connections between the art, the performer, and the spectator.

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7. References

Everett, Y. U. (2024). Contemporary opera in flux (Y. U. Everett, Ed.). University of Michigan Press.

https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11925107

Farnsworth, B., & Zürcher Hochschule der Künste funder. (2020). Curating Contemporary Music Festivals A New

Perspective on Music’s Mediation (1st ed.) [transcript Verlag]. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839452431

Herburg, M. (2023). Inter-Audience Interaction in Immersive Theatre.

https://doi.org/10.5204/thesis.eprints.240347

Machon, J. (2013). Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Palgrave

Macmillan.

Salzman, E., & Dezsy, T. (2008). The new music theater seeing the voice, hearing the body (1st ed.). Oxford

University Press.

Webb, T. (2023). Sensory theatre : how to make interactive, inclusive, immersive theatre for diverse audiences by

a founder of Oily Cart. Routledge.

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