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Reframing Immersive Theatre

The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

  • Book
  • © 2016

Overview

Editors:
  1. James Frieze

    1. Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

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  • Takes an accessible, interdisciplinary approach to reconsidering immersive theatre

  • Provides an insight into the world of immersive theatre through interviews with practitioners and theatre companies

  • Offers a comprehensive analysis of the origins and direction of this growing theatrical genre

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Table of contents (22 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
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  2. Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

    • James Frieze
    Pages 1-25

  3. Participant as Co-designer: Critical Reflections

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-28
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    2. On Being Immersed: The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding

      • Josephine Machon
      Pages 29-42

    3. In the Body of the Beholder: Insider Dynamics and Extended Audiencing Transform Dance Spectatorship in Sleep No More

      • Julia M. Ritter
      Pages 43-62

    4. Troubling Bodies in Follow the North Star

      • Ruth Laurion Bowman
      Pages 63-76

    5. Experiencing Michael Mayhew’s Away in a Manger: Spectatorial Immersion in Durational Performance

      • Roberta Mock
      Pages 77-91

    6. Integrating Realities Through Immersive Gaming

      • Lindsay Brandon Hunter
      Pages 93-102

    7. Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Uninvited Guests’ Make Better Please: A Hypertextual Experience

      • Elizabeth Swift
      Pages 103-118

    8. Outdoors: A Rimini Protokoll Theatre-Maze

      • Esther Belvis Pons
      Pages 119-127

    9. Immersed in Sound: Kursk and the Phenomenology of Aural Experience

      • George Home-Cook, Kristian Derek Ball
      Pages 129-134

  4. Facilitating Immersive Performance: Ethics and Practicalities

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 135-136
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    2. Reflections on Immersion and Interaction

      • non zero one
      Pages 137-144

    3. Caravania!: Intimacy and Immersion for Family Audiences

      • Adam J. Ledger
      Pages 145-150

    4. A Dramaturgy of Participation: Participatory Rituals, Immersive Environments, and Interactive Gameplay in Hotel Medea

      • Jorge Lopes Ramos, Persis Jade Maravala
      Pages 151-169

    5. She Wants You to Kiss Her: Negotiating Risk in the Immersive Theatre Contract

      • Richard Talbot
      Pages 171-191

    6. The Fourth Wall and Other Ruins: Immersive Theatre as a Brand

      • Rachael Blyth
      Pages 193-198

    7. Immersive Performance and the Marketplace: The Hit

      • Sherrill Gow, Merryn Owen
      Pages 199-202

  5. Where Material Meets Magic: Theories, Histories, and Myths of Immersive Participation

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 203-205
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    2. Spectral Illusions: Ghostly Presence in Phantasmagoria Shows

      • Nele Wynants
      Pages 207-220
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    James Frieze

About the editor

James Frieze is the author of Naming Theatre: Demonstrative Diagnosis in Performance (2009) and essays on contemporary performance in various journals and collections. Senior Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, his teaching and production work focusses on devising, improvisation, and contemporary performance. He is currently working on a monograph on theatre and the forensic turn.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Reframing Immersive Theatre

  • Book Subtitle: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance

  • Editors: James Frieze

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36604-7

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-36603-0Published: 10 April 2017

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-67626-2Published: 17 March 2021

  • eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-36604-7Published: 30 March 2017

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XVII, 345

  • Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations, 15 illustrations in colour

  • Topics: Performing Arts, Media and Communication, Cultural Theory

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