Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience

This collection of essays explores the Disney theme parks as performance spaces-as immersive theatre spaces-and examines the agency of the tourist within those spaces. In contrast to much previous Disney scholarship, Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience asserts that park guests collaborate with Disney Imagineers more than typically assumed. The book's various sections explore nostalgia, utopia, progress, and fantasy; the ideology of park environments; the presence of human and audio-animatronic performers; and the inclusion of outsider identities within the parks. Jennifer A. Kokai is an Associate Professor and Theatre Program Coordinator at Weber State University. She is the author of Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature (SIU Press, 2017). Tom Robson is Associate Professor and Coordinator of Academic Programs in the Millikin University School of Theatre & Dance. He has published on topics ranging from historical stage technology to African American theatre to baseball movies.

Auteur
Jennifer A. Kokai is Associate Professor of Theatre at Weber State University, USA. Her book Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2017. Her essay Shamu the (Killer) Whale and an Ecology of Commodity which focused on SeaWorld was published in Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power edited by Laurie Frederik, Kim Marra, and Catherine Schuler. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 81-106. She has also published articles in Theatre History Studies, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (with Mary-Beth Willard).
Tom Robson is Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance and Coordinator of Academics at Millikin University, USA. Recent publications include work on historical stage technology in both the journal Theatre Design and Technology and the edited collection Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. Other major areas of research interest include African American theatre and drama, musical theatre history, and inclusive theatre pedagogy. He has also published in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Ecumenica, and the film journal Jump Cut.

Résumé
This book addresses Disney parks using performance theory. Few to no scholars have done this to datean enormous oversight given the Disney parks' similarities to immersive theatre, interpolation of guests, and dramaturgical construction of attractions. Most scholars and critics deny agency to the tourist in their engagement with the Disney theme park experience. The vast body of research and journalism on the Disney Imagineersthe designers and storytellers who construct the park experienceleads to the misconception that these exceptional artists puppeteer every aspect of the guest's experience. Contrary to this assumption, Disney park guests find a range of possible reading strategies when they enter the space. Certainly Disney presents a primary reading, but generations of critical theory have established the variety of reading strategies that interpreters can employ to read against the text. This volume of twelve essays re-centers the park experience around its protagonist: the tourist.

Contenu

1. Introduction Co-Authored by Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy.- 2. The Future Is Truly in the Past: The Regressive Nostalgia of Tomorrowland by Tom Robson.- 3. What's Missing in FrontierLand?: American Indian Culture and Indexical Absence at Walt Disney World by Victoria Lantz.- 4. Staging Medieval Fantasy Through Tourism by Christina Gutierrez-Dennehey Environments as Ideologies.- 5. The Nemofication of Nature: Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World by Jennifer A. Kokai.- 6. Chinese Lions and Asian Beauties on Broadway Boulevard: Establishing a Satellite Broadway at Shanghai Disney by Laura MacDonald.- 7. Disney-fying Dixie: Queering the Laughing Place at Splash Mountain by Chase Bringardner Liveness and AudioAnimation.- 8. Dream Away: Disney's Robot Dramas Revisited by Li Cornfeld.- 9. The Search for a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow: Performing 'Utopia' with Non-Human Bodies in the Hall of Presidents by Joseph D'Ambrosi.- 10. The Royal Theatre Presents: Echoes of Melodrama and Minstrelsy by Patrice Amon This Counter Identities.- 11. Gated Amusement Parks, Disneyland, and the Codification of Colorblind Racism in the American Amusement Industry by Jill Morris.- 12. Club Villain: Transgression and Empowerment of Disney Villain Culture in the Happiest Place on Earth by Christen Mandracchia.- 13. The Park as Stage: Radical Consumer Performance by Elizabeth Schiffler Afterword by Susan Bennett.