Download or read book Reframing Immersive Theatre written by James Frieze and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Talking about Immersive Theatre written by Joanna Jayne Bucknall and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond Immersive Theatre written by Adam Alston and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Immersive Theater and Activism written by Nandita Dinesh and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience written by Rose Biggin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Memos from a Theatre Lab Spaces Relationships and Immersive Theatre written by Nandita Dinesh and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Performance and Participation written by Anna Harpin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Tandem Dances written by Julia M. Ritter and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In October 2017, four internationally influential practitioners of immersive experiences gathered at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island in New York for a panel discussion on the creation of immersive productions. The panel, entitled "All the World is a Stage," was part of the Future of Storytelling Festival 2017 (FoST FEST), advertised as "the world's leading immersive storytelling event." During this discussion, each of the four panelists described examples of their work. Hector Harkness, Associate Director of Punchdrunk International, explained how the company created productions that "rip up the rules for the audience" so they can "go beyond the boundaries of closed environments." Food technologist, experience designer, and multimedia artist Emilie Baltz described inviting audiences to step up to a microphone and use their tongues, teeth, and lips to play musical popsicles in an installation called PopStars. Jon Sands, founder of Poets in Unexpected Places, revealed how his strategic placement of poets on subway cars across New York City turned commutes into impromptu poetry slams for unsuspecting riders, some of whom joined in by improvising their own poetic works. Justin "JB" Bolognino, CEO (Chief Experience Officer) of META, an experience production company, described his commissioning of Jon Morris, artistic director of the Brooklyn-based Windmill Factory, to design a music-festival queue into an experiential artwork. Entitled Right Passage, the work was a "room-scale sound and light performance installation" involving moving walls that guided festival participants efficiently into the concert venue (Windmill Factory 2017). Through their detailed descriptions of how their productions organized the bodies of performers and spectators in space and time, the panelists hinted at the presence of choreography in their productions"--
Download or read book The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia written by Josephine Machon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-07 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Reasonable Audience written by Kirsty Sedgman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-11-02 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Musical Models of Democracy written by Robert Adlington and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-20 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Music's role in animating democracy--whether through protests and demonstrations, as a vehicle for political identity, or as a means of overcoming social divides--is well understood. Yet musicians have also been drawn to the potential of embodying democracy itself through musical processes and relationships. In this book, author Robert Adlington uses modern democratic theory to explore what he terms the 'musical modelling of democracy' as manifested in modern and experimental music of the global North. Throughout the book, Adlington demonstrates how composers and musicians have taken strikingly different approaches to this kind of musical modelling. For some, democratic principles inform the textural relationships inscribed into musical scores, as in the case of Elliott Carter's 'polyvocal' compositions. Pioneers of musical indeterminacy sought to democratise the relationship between composer and performers by leaving open key decisions about the realisation of a work. Musicians have involved audiences in active participation to liberate them from the passivity of spectatorship. Free improvisation groups have experimented with new kinds of egalitarian relationships between performers to reject old hierarchies. In examining these different approaches, Adlington illuminates the achievements and ambiguities of musical models of democracy. As a result, this book not only offers an important new perspective on modern musicians' engagement with a central political idea of the past century, but it also encourages a deeper and more critical engagement with the idea of democracy within present-day musical life.
Download or read book Punchdrunk on the Classics written by Emma Cole and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book America Under the Influence written by Chloë Rae Edmonson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Chloë Rae Edmonson analyzes performance sites from throughout U.S. history to reveal the material ways that drinking culture is performative, immersive performance is intoxicating, and how alcohol shapes performance space and practice. Combining archival research with firsthand accounts of immersive spaces, this study demonstrates how social drinking and performance in themed spaces often collude to reify power dynamics latent to mainstream American culture, such as patriarchal values, racial and wealth inequality, and labor exploitation. Yet there are also examples of how performers, designers, and consumers creatively subvert such dominant attitudes in pursuit of their own creative expression and fulfillment. Part I examines historic bars and clubs that are immersive by design, while Part II explores immersive theatre productions from the 1980s to today. At the heart of all these American examples, of course, is alcohol, its associated cultures of immersive consumption, and the wide range of influence it can have on the bodies and minds of performers and participants. In addition to its pop cultural appeal, this study will be relevant to scholars and university students interested in immersive theatre and performance, drinking culture, and American studies.
Download or read book Live Literature written by Ellen Wiles and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book explores the phenomenal growth of live literature in the digitalizing 21st century. Wiles asks why literary events appeal and matter to people, and how they can transform the ways in which fiction is received and valued. Readers are immersed in the experience of two contrasting events: a major literary festival and an intimate LGBTQ+ salon. Evocative scenes and observations are interwoven with sharp critical analysis and entertaining conversations with well-known author-performers, reader-audiences, producers, critics, and booksellers. Wiles’s experiential literary ethnography represents an innovative and vital contribution, not just to literary research, but to research into the value of cultural experience across art forms. This book probes intersections between readers and audiences, writers and performers, texts and events, bodies and memories, and curation and reception. It addresses key literary debates from cultural appropriation to diversity in publishing, the effects of social media, and the quest for authenticity. It will engage a broad audience, from academics and producers to writers and audiences.
Download or read book Theatre and Environment written by Vicky Angelaki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-25 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting new title in the Theatre And series explores how theatre and the environment have informed and continue to inform each other, considering both what theatre can do for the environment and what the environment can do for theatre. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies from writers and theatre-makers, Vicky Angelaki encourages a sense of responsibility towards the environment and examines how it is being handled by artists and performers in our time. Timely and topical, this concise introduction is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre and performance studies with an interest in the environment, contemporary theatre-making or site-specific performance.
Download or read book Nomadic Theatre written by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fluid stages, morphing theatre spaces, ambulant spectators, and occasionally disappearing performers: these are some of the key ingredients of nomadic theatre. They are also theatre's response to life in the 21st century, which is increasingly marked by the mobility of people, information, technologies and services. While examining how contemporary theatre exposes and queries this mobile turn in society, Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink introduces the concept of nomadic theatre as a vital tool for analyzing how movement and mobility affect and implicate the theatre, how this makes way for local operations and lived spaces, and how physical movements are stepping stones for theorizing mobility at large. This book focuses on ambulatory performances and performative installations, asking how they stage movement and in turn mobilize the stage. By analyzing the work of leading European artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed, and Signa, Nomadic Theatre demonstrates that mobile performances radically rethink the conditions of the stage and alter our understanding of spectatorship. Nomadic Theatre instigates connections across disciplinary fields and feeds dramaturgical analysis with insights derived from media theory, urban philosophy, cartography, architecture, and game studies. It illustrates how theatre, as a material form of thought, creatively and critically engages with mobile existence both on the stage and in society.
Download or read book American Theatre Ensembles Volume 2 written by Mike Vanden Heuvel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-28 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A companion to American Theatre Ensembles Volume 1, this volume charts the development and achievements of theatre companies working after 1995, bringing together the diffuse generation of ensembles working within a context of media saturation and epistemological and social fragmentation. Ensembles examined include Rude Mechs, The Builders Association, Pig Iron, Radiohole, The Civilians and 600 Highwaymen. Introductory chapters provide a sweeping overview of ensemble-based creation within the general historical and cultural contexts of the period, followed by a detailed study of the evolution of ensemble-based work. Contributors examine matters such as influence, funding, production and legacies, as well as the forms of collective devising and creation, while presenting close readings of the companies' most prominent works. The volume features detailed case studies of the 6 companies from the period and cover: * A history of development and methods * Key productions and projects * Critical reception * A chronology of significant productions US ensemble companies since 1995 have revolutionized the form and content of contemporary performance, influencing experimental as well as mainstream practice. This volume provides the first encompassing study of this vital development in contemporary American theatre by mapping its evolution and key developments.
