Immersive and Pervasive Performance

Across the past decade, ‘immersive performance’ has become an oft-used label for a wide variety of practices, alongside the concept of pervasive work. Both terms point towards experiences that introduce audiences to new worlds, which may or may not be related to our everyday reality. This chapter will briefly introduce definitions of immersive and pervasive performance, and place these alongside examples that borrow from gothic and horror traditions. Ultimately, I aim to show how these modern experiences link back to the earliest days of horror literature, and why the immersive and pervasive provide a particularly fertile expression of the Gothic.