Other Lives and Times in the Palace of Memory:

Storytelling Space and Immersive Performance

Deidre Denise Matthee
Ins de Carvalho

Abstract
In this paper we explore the potential of immersive performance to create space for storytelling and to proffer that space itself can tell stories. In an immersive performance, the
audience is invited to experience the piece from 'within', through a sensual journey
designed by the artists/performers, leading to a sense of intimacy and immediacy: you are
inside the story within the space, and the story enters you as you blend into the space and
its stories. This level of experience of space and story sets the conditions for a complex
(un)self-consciousness that opens to a fertile and permeable liminal. You are actively
listening to the stories told by the space while relating your own. You become an
inhabitant of an-other world that is in-its-own-world, re-membering and connecting like
the mnemonic strategy of the 'memory palace', where place becomes a way of organizing
associated themes, linking ideas to images into a resonating narrative. To illustrate and
ground our discussion, we present 'Other Lives and Times', a project developed and set in
a 19th century palace, in Porto. Inspired by the layered (hi)stories of the space, it takes the
shape of an audio-walk in which the audience becomes active participants in the creation
of a narrative. The audio-walk is an audio-guided journey, profoundly inspired by the
reality of a specific location, where a script suggests where to go and where to look at
each pace. It results from a complex layering process invariably centered on the
audiences crossing of space. The interplay between sound and space (informing and
feeding each other) frames and enriches situations. This immersive dynamic gives way to
a re-imagining of place allowing a re-discovery of past and present, of the extraordinary
in the everyday, and a heightened sense of presence and connection with our lives and
times.
Keywords
story-telling, space-telling, story-living, immersive, performance, audio-walk, audio-see,
memory, intimacy, immediacy

1. Introduction
Imagine walking into a story, as you (would) enter a house. Imagine the (hi)stories within
this space opening up the stor(i)ed spaces within you. Imagine living these stories as they
are being told, so that after a while there is no telling where one ends and an-other begins.
These are some of the possibilities we wish to explore by considering the intimate
connection between immersive performance, space and story-telling.

In immersive performance, the audience is invited to dip into the piece, to experience it
from within through sensorial submersion and engaging encounters with the
performers/artists. This sensation of being-within is crucially established through (the
use of) space: 'The specific location and/or the 'transformation' of that space according to
the aesthetic of the event is vital. The space, and the journey within that space, has to
contain the in-its-own-worldness of the event.' [Machon (2013) p 93] No longer a
distant spectator, the audience member corporeally steps into the space and the narrative,
entering an-other world and becoming an active participant in a process of sense-making
through stories and making stories through (the) sense(s). To illustrate and develop these
ideas, we focus on a particular immersive strategy, the audio-walk, which involves an
audio-guided journey, profoundly inspired by the specific location, where the script
closely directs the audience-participant's movements while also imaginatively layering
her/his experience of the (actual and narrated) space.
We thus present a work-in-progress, 'Other Lives and Times (in the Palace of Memory)',
a site-specific one-to-one immersive event set in a former small palace, built in the
nineteenth century, situated in Porto in Portugal. Neo-classical in style, the "Palacete do

Visconde da Gandara", was the home of the Viscount of Gandara and his family, and is
currently owned by the Jeweller and Watchmaker Association of Portugal. Notes of
history, of another time and place, are written all over the building in the faded splendour
of its ornate walls, gilded doorways and majestic red-carpeted stairway. A further
particularity of the space is that unlike the other Portuguese palacetes in the
neighbourhood, the style and decor have a certain Parisian flair. These details give the
space an air of worldly and weary flamboyance, coupled with a sense of otherworldliness in the whispers of lace (a reflection of the iron-wrought staircase) in the
dance of light and shadow on the walls after dark. It evokes a feeling of fluttering
memories, of hushed intimacies, the rustle beneath the frills. Inspired by the (hi)stories of
the space - the traces of lives going by and of times gone by - the performance will be
staged primarily on the stairwell and inside the antique bathroom on the top floor. The
audio-walk follows this trajectory, suggesting an inner ascent of increasing intimacy
weaving through a curious and haunting feel of remembering and longing.

In this paper we will look at the act of story-telling entailed in this performance from our
respective perspectives of performer/narrator and scenographer: on the one hand, we
observe how the live(d)ness of immersive theatre heightens and informs the narrative
sense-making of lived experience (story-living); and on the other, how space itself offers
a story as well, through its architectural and geographical imaginings (space-telling).
2. Story-living
(story-telling in/through/with immersive performance)
A vital aspect of immersive performance is the experiential effect of intimacy and
immediacy, as extensively elaborated by Josephine Machon (2013). This is brought about

by plunging the audience into a sensual (other-)world, that quickens and enhances their
sensory awareness. This is, however, not a brusque exposure to sensory stimulation (for
the sake of it), but rather incorporates a poetic and intricate fusion of sense and sensation,
of perception and imagination. Machon (2013) thus describes immersive performance as
an excellent example of (syn)aesthetics, playing with the medical term synaesthesia, a
neurological state that leads to a mingling of sensations when one sense is stimulated so
that a person might taste a colour or perceive a word as a smell, and by bracketing the
(syn) also relating it to aesthetics, or artistic practice and analysis:
This appropriation... is intended to emphasize the human capacity for
perception, which shifts between realms: between the sensual and intellectual;
between the literal and lateral. These realms are defined by their outcomes for
each individual, distinguishable by a felt appreciation of 'making sense' in a
semantic and cerebral fashion and 'sense-making', understanding through somatic,
embodied perception via feeling (both sensory and emotional) created in
performance. In (syn)aesthetic practice the process is often fused as a makingsense/sense-making experience. (p 104)
In immersive theatre the audience member is consequently positioned as a viveur, living
(within) the performance instead of regarding it as a voyeur from an obscured distance.
In the proposed audio-walk, the audience member actively becomes a performer in the
act of walking and encountering (the artist/performer/sense-whisperer) and a co-creator
of the piece in sense-ing together the various strands of narrative told inside his/her ears
and around her/him by the space. An intimate and integral connection between the
audience member, the space and their stories is established, that compels embodied
presence:
Immersive theatre makes one's physical presence inescapable. With no distance
between oneself and the work, the edge of one's body is the beginning of the
work's sphere. An awareness of the work, involves an awareness of one's body.
We perceive it not just through the eyes and ears, but through our whole body,
whether by touch or movement, smell or taste... [I]mmersive work makes us
bristle in a way that traditional theatre, watched from afar, does not.
[Trueman, qtd in Machon (2013), p 83]
The event is therefore live(d) in more ways than one: it involves a coming alive, an
enlivening of our senses, a sensation of living (in) (the) stories and irrevocably being
there. Machon (2013) uses the term praesence (of being before [the senses], 'being at
hand') to capture the particular live(d)ness of immersive performance.
By employing parenthesis with 'live(d)' I intend to draw attention to the way in
which, in immersive performance experiences, the performing bodies and
perceiving bodies that undergo the experience within the duration of that event
are charged by the sensual aesthetic and the specific energies of the piece in a
live and ongoing present, as much as the performance itself communicates lived
histories and shared experiences. (p 44)

The stories (told through the audio-script and by the space) thus lived, as a result of
praesence, also stir the lived personal narratives of the audience-participant. It entails a
re-membering of the senses, potentially arousing corporeal memories, the dormant
(hi)stories imprinted in the skin. In this specific performance, the presence of other lives
and times is clearly salient in the factual and fictional history related by the narrator and
the building itself, by the tracing of the (imagined) recollections and reminiscences of
past inhabitants, the lingering husks of other('s) stories. Yet the idea is that this will also
create a certain resonance with the stories that inhabit the individual audience member
in a sense, there is the actual audio-walk, but also another walk down an interior haptic
memory lane.
The audience-participant hence simultaneously finds her/himself in his/her own world(s)
and in an-other world that is out of this world! The transporting effect of narrative
(inspired by the suspension of disbelief) is amplified in an immersive event as it affects
and sustains this feeling of 'otherworldliness'. It is also at this merging point that space
for stories and the stories of the space open up: 'in immersive theatre a central feature of
the experience is that this otherwordly-world is both a conceptual, imaginative space and
an inhabited, physical space.' [Machon (2013) p 63]

3. Space-telling
(story-telling in/through/with space and walk)
The audio-walks structure proposes a set of spatial conditions for the audiences
engagement with story and space. It relies on the potential of the subtle guidance of a predefined path across space (spacescape) synchronized with a pre-recorded/edited
soundtrack (soundscape). The tangible spatial structure of the parcours places the act of
story-telling in the intersections of real physical (walked) space, fused to the act of real
physical (lived) story-listening. In our projects audio-walk, the proposed path unfolds
though the interior space of a house.

A walk through a house is already an experience of confined space determinant of a

precise scaled relation with architecture, from an interior perspective, as opposed to the
experience of outdoor space. When this house is (used to be) the home of a family, the
idea of space and place (spatial intimacy and privacy) acquires a certain depth and
predominance of detail. A movement-led event, the audio-walk designs a trajectory that
provokes space, disposition and circumstance in the hope of spacing-out clearings for
encounters, as (h)openings where space can tell intimate stories, laced within rooms,
through corridors, walls and openings, exciting air and objects displayed for immersive
experience. It thus situates the intersection between the house and the audiences thread
of memories and expectations.

To (audio)walk and (audio)see are challenged (and challenging) as acts that reconfigure
as transformative events when overlapped through immersive strategy. Soundscape
invites us to walk in-within space and to see in-within space through the eyes of sound,
voice and music, therefore setting newer terms for spatial context, in the way that where
one is and what one sees is transformed through what one hears, therefore creating a
multi-layered non-palpable architecture for immersion. Space and sound seem
predisposed to generate a kind of third space that, more than flourishing in-between real
and fictional space, add to the first two, potentially exploding in all directions into another world.
Reacting to the generalized awareness of a contemporary spatial turn, Soja proposes
an idea of thirding associated with the emergence of a Thirdspace perspective and an
expansion in the scope and critical sensibility of the geographical imagination. [Soja
(1996) in Architecturally Speaking, p 14] The concept of thirdspace is addressed as lived
space, as a different way of thinking space, beyond Firstspace (perceived space:
materialism/objectivity) and Secondspace (conceived space: idealism/subjectivity)
dualism. [Soja (1996) in Architecturally Speaking, p 19]

Thirding thus settles as a concept associated with a cumulative idea of space, where other
is more. (Hi)stories overlay and overlap. There is a sense of more as opposed to
instead of or in the place of. As divergent synthesis, the audio-walk, seen through the lens
of thirding and othering, becomes a practice of space to make more space, to add more
space for emergent architectural and geographical imaginations. Taking further the 60s
radical break between this dualism, promoted by Focault and Lefebvre, Soja chooses to
describe their method of criticizing the Firstspace-Secondspace dualism as a critical
thirding-as-Othering and attributes to their challenging geographical imaginations the
origins of Thirdspace as a radical way of looking at, interpreting, and acting to change the
embracing spatiality of human life. [Soja (1996) in Architecturally Speaking, 19]
Our practice notices an hybridization of space(s), history and story(ies). The architecture
of the house is no longer just itself, to accumulate the architecture of the stories there
told, of the characters that lived there, and of the space as the spaced out lived experience
of each audience member. The expression spaced out is commonly associated with
being dreamily or eerily out of touch with reality, with being in a state of lost conscience
of what is happening around. However, here it applies to a different state of
consciousness, of hyper-creative-other-consciousness that is only in terms of becoming
because of an increased sense of presence and immediacy in the lived experience of
reality. Of real space and time. The audio-walk viveur will be spaced out: becoming
eerily in-touch with reality (real space) and simultaneously in-imagination with fiction
(imagined space).

4. Conclusion
To tell intimate stories is to whisper in the ear, to reach for the hand, to enter the palace
of memory and with wonder and longing recall feelings placed in its halls as you listen to
its murmurings. To tell intimate stories is to wander spaced-out and at-home through the
intricate architecture of the heart, made of walls and openings just as a house is. To tell

intimate stories is to sink deeply into other lives and times, and to be unforgettably
present.

Bibliography
Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary
Performance. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Read, Alan. Architecturally Speaking Practices of Art, Architecture and The Everyday.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Autobiographical notes
Ins de Carvalho is a scenographer and visual artist trained at the Lisbon School of
Theatre and Film (BA Theatre Design, 1998) and at the Slade School Of Fine Art, UCL
(Master of Fine Art Theatre Design, 2000). She collaborates with Vises teis since
2009 as a Designer for Performance and Landscape Art such as Audio-Walks; teaches
scenography, costume and make-up. Currently residing in Porto, she practices
scenography beyond definitions and boundaries, often overflowing the conventional
stage, and develops projects that cross research, practice, production and pedagogy in the
visual and performing arts.
Deidre Denise Matthee is a South African psychologist, performer and storyteller
residing in Portugal. She specializes in narrative and performative methods within the
fields of community arts, research and social development, as illustrated by her on-going
projects, including GATA (Group for Activism and Transformation through Art),
Picara* (creative workshops) and Intimate Migrations (an exploration of women's
migration stories, histories and experiences). Her current interests focus on exploring
immersive performance, particularly how it creates a sense of living presence and the
sensation of memory, through sensory imagination and participation.