25+ years experience in arts, culture, and immersive performance. Extensive international expertise in delivering multi-sensory, participatory projects for theatres, festivals, museums, and cultural and commercial institutions.
Skilled in audience engagement, cultural infrastructure planning, cross-sector collaboration, and translating creative vision into actionable strategies with measurable social, cultural, and economic impact.
The spectator is already an actor in their story
I work across theatre, design, visual art, music, choreography, and sensory experience, integrating these disciplines into cohesive frameworks. In my practice, these disciplines are not separate languages but interwoven together. A performance might extend into architecture, into taste, into scent; an installation might behave like a living stage. I am interested in how perception shifts when context changes, how intimacy, scale, sound, and proximity can alter narrative and meaning.
My work is positioned at the intersection of performance, installation, and live experience. I do not see art as an object to be observed from a distance, but as a space one enters physically, emotionally, and imaginatively. I create works that invite participation, where the audience is not a passive witness but an active participant within the dramaturgy.
Much of my work explores collective experience. I create structures and choreographed situations where strangers become temporary communities, bound by their shared attention. I am fascinated by the mechanics of ritual, how repetition, symbolism, and embodied action generate meaning beyond language. Whether working in a theatre, a museum, a public square, or an unexpected site, I approach each project as an ecosystem: a choreography of space, time, bodies, and imagination.
Over the past 25 years, the practice has evolved from a primarily performance-centred approach into a fully interdisciplinary and spatial form of world-building.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, my focus was rooted in theatre and choreography, directing bodies in space, shaping rhythm and gesture within defined stage environments. The work centred on presence, physicality, and the tension between performer and audience.
Gradually, the frame expanded.
Performance moved beyond the proscenium into site-specific contexts, public spaces, museums, and unconventional architectures. The audience shifted from observer to participant. Immersion became structural rather than decorative. Sound design, installation, history, visual art, sensory design, technology, and spatial composition became equal dramaturgical forces in the work.
In the last decade, the work has matured into large-scale experiential ecosystems blending performance, ritual, scenography, sensory design and collective encounter.
The emphasis has shifted toward creating total environments choreographing perception itself. Collaboration has deepened across disciplines, and projects increasingly function as social architectures, generating temporary communities rather than passive spectacles.
What has remained constant is an interest in transformation: how space alters behaviour, how proximity alters meaning, how shared attention creates intimacy.
What has changed is the scale, complexity, and confidence from directing performances to composing experiences in which I continue to grow, learn from.
Martin Butler – 2026
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Martin Butler 