Overview
- 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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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.
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Keywords
- immersive theatre
- intermedial theatre
- contemporary theatre
- site-specific theatre
- experimental performance
- audience interaction
- audience participation
- audience experience
- experience economy
- immersive engagement
- commodified experience
- Punchdrunk
- The Drowned Man
- Sleep No More
- Ockham's Razor
- phantasmagoria
- possible worlds theory
- somatic practices
- fourth wall
- ethics
- participation
- performance
- philosophy
- politics
- theatre
Table of contents (22 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Participant as Co-designer: Critical Reflections
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Front Matter
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Facilitating Immersive Performance: Ethics and Practicalities
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Front Matter
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Where Material Meets Magic: Theories, Histories, and Myths of Immersive Participation
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Front Matter
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Editors and Affiliations
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