Author: James Frieze
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137366044
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
This diverse collection of essays and testimonies challenges critical orthodoxies about the twenty-first century boom in immersive theatre and performance. A culturally and institutionally eclectic range of producers and critics comprehensively reconsider the term ‘immersive’ and the practices it has been used to describe. Applying ecological, phenomenological and political ideas to both renowned and lesser-known performances, contributing scholars and artists offers fresh ideas on the ethics and practicalities of participatory performance. These ideas interrogate claims that have frequently been made by producers and by critics that participatory performance extends engagement. These claims are interrogated across nine dimensions of engagement: bodily, technological, spatial, temporal, spiritual, performative, pedagogical, textual, social. Enquiry is focussed along the following seams of analysis: the participant as co-designer; the challenges facing the facilitator of immersive/participatory performance; the challenges facing the critic of immersive/participatory performance; how and why immersion troubles boundaries between the material and the magical.
Author: Joanna Jayne Bucknall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350269344
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
How do theatre makers in Britain produce immersive, participatory experiences for audiences? How are productions designed and rehearsed, and how can the experience of different companies inform your own practice and understanding of this burgeoning craft? This collection of original discussions with some of Britain's leading immersive and interactive theatre makers explores their processes, methods and practices, offering a behind-the-scenes tour of how they make their work. It provides new material addressing a range of previously undisclosed topics including approaches to casting and rehearsal strategies, through to more concrete concerns such as funding and finance models. They reveal the discrete nuts and bolts of building audience-experience, and candidly discuss their own position to the term 'immersive' and how they perceive their place within the wider experience-centric cultural landscape. This collection combines perspectives from practitioners across the spectrum of immersions and interactivity in performance to showcase working methods across a variety of forms; from one-on-one, to gamified, playable experiences. The diversity of conversations captured in this volume reflects the polyphony of the immersive and interactive landscape in Britain, introducing readers to the work of Les Enfants Terrible, Parabolic, COLAB Theatre, The Lab Collective, Cross Collaborations, and ZU-UK. Makers participate in frank dialogue that reveals the ways in which they employ scenography, design, game and structural mechanics, approaches to stage management tactics, as well as the development of audience relationships, the role of intimacy and agency.
Author: Adam Alston
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137480440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250
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Book Description
Immersive theatre currently enjoys ubiquity, popularity and recognition in theatre journalism and scholarship. However, the politics of immersive theatre aesthetics still lacks a substantial critique. Does immersive theatre model a particular kind of politics, or a particular kind of audience? What’s involved in the production and consumption of immersive theatre aesthetics? Is a productive audience always an empowered audience? And do the terms of an audience’s empowerment stand up to political scrutiny? Beyond Immersive Theatre contextualises these questions by tracing the evolution of neoliberal politics and the experience economy over the past four decades. Through detailed critical analyses of work by Ray Lee, Lundahl & Seitl, Punchdrunk, shunt, Theatre Delicatessen and Half Cut, Adam Alston argues that there is a tacit politics to immersive theatre aesthetics – a tacit politics that is illuminated by neoliberalism, and that is ripe to be challenged by the evolution and diversification of immersive theatre.
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476634114
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
Immersive theater calls upon audience members to become participants, actors and "others." It traditionally offers binary roles--that of oppressor or that of victim--and thereby stands the risk of simplifying complex social situations. Challenging such binaries, this book articulates theatrical "grey zones" when addressing juvenile detention, wartime interventions and immigration processes. It presents scripts and strategies for directors and playwrights who want to create theatrical environments that are immersive and pedagogical; aesthetically evocative and politically provocative; simple and complex.
Author: Rose Biggin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319620398
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
This book is the first full-length monograph to focus on Punchdrunk, the internationally-renowned theatre company known for its pioneering approach to immersive theatre. With its promises of empowerment, freedom and experiential joy, immersive theatre continues to gain popularity - this study brings necessary critical analysis to this rapidly developing field. What exactly do we mean by audience “immersion”? How might immersion in a Punchdrunk production be described, theorised, situated or politicised? What is valued in immersive experience - and are these values explicit or implied? Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience draws on rehearsals, performances and archival access to Punchdrunk, providing new critical perspectives from cognitive studies, philosophical aesthetics, narrative theory and computer games. Its discussion of immersion is structured around three themes: interactivity and game; story and narrative; environment and space. Providing a rigorous theoretical toolkit to think further about the form’s capabilities, and offering a unique set of approaches, this book will be of significance to scholars, students, artists and spectators.
Author: Nandita Dinesh
Publisher: Vernon Press
ISBN: 1622734262
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
Drawing from Dinesh’s findings in Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does”, this practice-based-research project – second in an envisioned series of Immersive Theatre experiments in Dinesh’s theatre laboratory -- considers the potential impact of pre-existing relationships between actors, spectators, and performance spaces when using immersive theatrical aesthetics toward educational and/or socio-political objectives. Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships and Immersive Theatre explores the following questions: When audience members do not know the actors outside the milieu of a theatrical performance, does an immersive form hold different implications than if performers and spectators know each other in ‘real life’? When actors and spectators are strangers to each other, are performers more or less likely to judge the responses that are given to them within an immersive scenario? What kinds of immersive situations, especially in Applied Theatre interventions, might benefit from the presence or absence of a pre-existing relationship between performers, audience members, and the spaces in which these experiences occur? In describing the processes involved in: designing such an experiment, crafting the relevant immersive performances, and gathering/ analysing data from actors and spectators, this book puts forward strategies for students, researchers, and practitioners who seek to better understand the form of Immersive Theatre.
Author: Anna Harpin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1137393181
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
This edited collection gathers together leading voices in theatre and performance studies to debate the politics of participation and find points of connection across a range of performative forms – including community theatre, live art, applied theatre, one-to-one performance and marathon running. Arranged in three sections, 'Recognising Participation', 'Labours of Participation', and 'Authoring Participation', the book raises productive questions about how and why audiences are encouraged to participate in creating the artistic work. This intersection, the authors suggest, blurs the boundaries between producer and consumer, promising modes of engagement that are at once political, social and aesthetic. Applying theoretical ideas to concrete discussions of practice, this is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of applied theatre, political and socially-engaged theatre, participatory theatre making and performance studies.
Author: Julia M. Ritter
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190051302
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance is the first book to propose dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theatre, more broadly known as immersive performance. Indicative of a larger renaissance in storytelling during the digital age, immersive performance is influenced by emerging computer technologies, such as virtual reality and advances in video-gaming, as well as increased interest in new forms of experiential entertainment. The idea of tandemness -- suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another -- is critical throughout the book. Author Julia M. Ritter persuasively argues that practitioners of immersive productions deploy choreography as a structural mechanism to mobilize the bodies of cast and audience members to perform together. Furthermore, choreography is contextualized as an effective tool for facilitating audience participation towards immersion as an affect. Through a focus on Western dance histories, theories, and practices, Ritter's close choreographic analysis of immersive productions, along with unique insights from choreographers, directors, performers, and spectators, enlivens discourse across dramaturgy, kinesthesia, affect, and co-authorship. By foregrounding the choreographic in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater, Tandem Dances explores choreography as a discursive domain that is fundamentally related to creative practice, agendas of power and control, and concomitant issues of freedom and agency.
Author: Josephine Machon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351367781
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 522
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Book Description
The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia is the definitive book on the company’s work to date, marking eighteen years of Punchdrunk’s existence. It provides the first full-scale, historical account of one of the world’s foremost immersive theatre companies, drawn from unrivalled access to the collective memory and archives of their core creative team. The playful encyclopaedic format, much like a Punchdrunk masked show, invites readers to create their own journey through the ideas, aesthetics, contexts, and practices that underpin Punchdrunk’s work. Interjections from Felix Barrett, Stephen Dobbie, Maxine Doyle, Peter Higgin, Beatrice Minns, Colin Nightingale and Livi Vaughan, among others, fill out the picture with in-depth reflections. Charting Punchdrunk’s rise from the fringe to the mainstream, this encyclopaedia records the founding principles and mission of the company, documenting its evolving creative process and operational structures. It has been compiled to be useful to scholars and students from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, from secondary level through to doctoral research, and is intended for those with a fascination for theatre in general and immersive work in particular. Ultimately it is written for those who have dared to come play with Punchdrunk across the years. It is also offered to the curious; those adventurers ready and waiting to be immersed in Punchdrunk worlds.
Author: Kirsty Sedgman
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319991663
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
Audiences are not what they used to be. Munching crisps or snapping selfies, chatting loudly or charging phones onstage – bad behaviour in theatre is apparently on the rise. And lately some spectators have begun to fight back... The Reasonable Audience explores the recent trend of ‘theatre etiquette’: an audience-led crusade to bring ‘manners and respect’ back to the auditorium. This comes at a time when, around the world, arts institutions are working to balance the traditional pleasures of receptive quietness with the need to foster more inclusive experiences. Through investigating the rhetorics of morality underpinning both sides of the argument, this book examines how models of 'good' and 'bad' spectatorship are constructed and legitimised. Is theatre etiquette actually snobbish? Are audiences really more selfish? Who gets to decide what counts as ‘reasonable’ within public space?Using theatre etiquette to explore wider issues of social participation, cultural exclusion, and the politics of identity, Kirsty Sedgman asks what it means to police the behaviour of others.
