In this volume, scholars working in various vocational contexts in countries including UK, US, Brazil, Spain and Belgium challenge key orthodoxies about immersive and participatory performance. It seemed for a while that no performance event in which the audience moved, or in which they were somehow surrounded or emplaced by the performance, failed to capitalise on the value of the term 'immersive'. The cachet of the term reflects a valorisation of cultural forms that offer the chance to do more than "just" observe or study; they offer the chance to interact with, even to become, the object of attention. This offer projects an assumption that there is a cultural problem which the immersive claims to solve. If the problem projected by the immersive is a condition of spiritual and political detachment, the panacea is participatory form that will help us to re-connect, to re-attach with one another and with ourselves. Championing of the immersive as a form of personal and cultural reparation frequently asserts/implies that theatre itself needs to be woken up, to be re-attached to an agenda of embodied, interactive engagement. This assertion is made, for example, in what is—in its generosity of examples and its staking out the territory of the immersive—the closest thing we have to a textbook on the subject: Josephine Machon's Immersive Theatres. Along lines broadly similar to Lehmann's opposition of dramatic/post-dramatic theatre, Machon opposes immersive theatre, positioned as adventurous and dynamic, to "traditional" theatre, positioned as stifling: "With immersive theatre the audience is removed from the "usual" set of rules and conventions expected from "traditional" theatrical performances' (2013, 26).