Reframing Immersive Theatre

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.

Auteur
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.

Contenu
Introduction. Immersion Reconsidered; James Frieze.- Part I. Participant as Co-Designer.- Chapter 1. On Being Immersed; Josephine Machon.- Chapter 2. Insider Dynamics Transform Dance Spectatorship in Sleep No More; Julia M. Ritter.- Chapter 3. Troubling Bodies in Follow the North Star; Ruth Bowman.- Chapter 4. Experiencing Michael Mayhew's Away in a Manger; Roberta Mock.- Chapter 5. Integrating Realities through Immersive Gaming; Lindsay Brandon Hunter.- Chapter 6. Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Make Better Please; Elizabeth Swift.- Chapter 7. Outdoors; Esther Belvis Pons.- Chapter 8. Immersed in Sound; Kristian Derek Ball.- Part II. Facilitating Immersive Performance.- Chapter 9. reflections on immersion and interaction; non zero one.- Chapter 10. Caravania!; Adam J. Ledger.- Chapter 11. A Dramaturgy of Participation; Jorge Lopes Ramos and Persis Jade Maravala.- Chapter 12. She Wants You To Kiss Her; Richard Talbot.- Chapter 13. The Fourth Wall and Other Ruins; Rachel Blyth.- Chapter 14. Immersive Performance and the Marketplace; Sherrill Gow and Merryn Owen.- Part III. Where Material meets Magic.- Chapter 15. Spectral Illusions; Nele Wynants.- Chapter 16. Playing a Punchdrunk Game; Rosemary Klich.- Chapter 17. Proximity to Violence; James R. Ball III.- Chapter 18. The Promise of Experience; Adam Alston.- Chapter 19. Differences in Degree or Kind?; Geraldine Harris.- Chapter 20. Coriolan/us and the limits of 'immersive'; Andrew Filmer.- Chapter 21. Participation, Ecology, Cosmos; Carl Lavery.- Bibliography.