Fandom and Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Audience Ethnography of Immersive Dance

Fan blogs devoted to Punchdrunk’s long-running immersive production of Sleep No More reveal the impact of dance and immersion on spectatorship. Positioned as participant observers within the SNM world — with its own rules, codes of behavior, values, social dynamics, and environments — fans channel their postperformance perceptions into visual ethnographies that include poetry, digital painting, illustration, collage, sculpture, and other forms of fan art.