What Everyone Knows About Stories

During the 1st Global Conference for Transmedia Narratives and Immersive Worlds in Salzburg, Austria, Judith E. Johnson performed her immersive story ‘Paula, Queen of the Gypsies.'1 The performance aimed to destabilize the normally passive experience of the audience by employing strategies suggested by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Berthold Brecht’s ‘alienation effect.' Inspired by the social anxieties underlying current events, stories in popular culture and folk tales from her own childhood, Judith’s performance often broke the so-called ‘fourth wall’ to ask her audience, ‘Am I telling the right story?' In this way, audience members were invited to identify with the characters, and occasionally forced to engage with the narrative on an uncomfortably personal level. The authors of this volume were later asked to recall their experience of Judith’s performance, and to reflect on what it suggested about interactivity, immersion, and narrative. This chapter collects those responses and allows Judith to respond to them in turn, examining more closely some of the theoretical implications of her performance piece and the nature of narrative in a transmedial world