As an industry we are pushing boundaries and testing edges in innovating around the audience experience. We sell "danger" in these experiences and there's no point in striving to make them if there is no risk. We need systems to care for people, but we can't anticipate everything that might happen. We also don't yet know all the different consequences of the experiences we are building.

We discussed where the site of danger can sit:
- Physical/Environmental
- Emotional
- Psychological

Danger is relational and relative, and is affected by a number of variables:
- Cultural context
- Previous individual experience/previous social experience
- Recent events/history
- Zeitgeist
- Audience expectation and familiarity with situations/locations
- Levels of licence given to audience members; roles that they have within an experience

Generally we have a responsibility to mitigate and manage real dangers for our audience. We are relatively experienced in mitigating real physical and environmental dangers, and less practiced at managing real emotional or psychological danger that may arise from the sense of (theatrical) danger we are aiming to induce (for example fraught frightened audience interactions with performers leading to physical danger).

Mitigation can include:
- Instilling a sense of collective responsibility for a shared endeavour in fun - system of principles rather than rules (e.g. Burning Man)
- Communicating a rule-set/parameters to the audience
- Induction/introductory information in advance of an experience; establishing a safety net in audience consciousness, and what is and isn't protected (e.g. safe words, freedom to say no, freedom to leave)
- Encouraging personal responsibilities in audience members (a 'contract of engagement')
- Chaos list; anticipating worst case scenarios and planning for them
- Running test/previews of parts of an experience that might be more risky

In developing safety practice and guidelines we make best guesses, but mainly we learn from our past mistakes. Our collective learning around the new areas of danger we play with is really relevant to each other's practice. Being honest about mistakes that have been made, and possible causes and learnings would be really valuable.

** A network for developing and sharing best practice and mistakes to learn from would be a valuable step towards fast-tracking development of best practice. **

We recognise perceived danger as an important device within our creativity, and accept that it needs to go hand-in-hand with a responsibility to continue developing our best practice in real danger mitigation.

Other observations:
- The national(/global?) trend towards 'nanny-state' safety planning
- Immersive audiences becoming more sophisticated and more able of being able to push boundaries
- Theatre industry feeling a moral/ethical obligation to proactively and sensitively manage safety issues
- There can be stakeholder (e.g. brand) requirements that dictate how information is shared in advance
- Reputational risk for organisations related to safety issues