Relative to this self-managed spectatorship, the participants in I Will Tell You were made into objects of artistic attention by Powers, who baldly assessed them though also spun elaborate fictions about who they might be.
The essay discusses how spectators at Punchdrunk were driven by a competitive instinct to accumulate a oneof-a-kind experience for themselves at the site and then compare their experiences on social-media networks. It studies how this experiential reception is constructed in large-scale immersive theatre productions, such as Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, and small-scale one-on-one pieces, such as artist Zeesy Powers’s I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think of You. It proposes that this consumptive engagement produces a narcissistic spectatorship-a mode of reception that fully engrosses a spectator into a performance in a way that highlights her own singular relationship to the event. This essay examines how audiences are pulled to participate in performances that prioritize their self-consumption as a primary mode of engagement. Both visible and dark objects matter in performance, but they matter in ways that demand distinct critical vocabularies. Detecting dark matter-offstage spaces and actions absent characters the narrated past hallucination blindness obscenity godhead and so on-invites a new approach known as spectral reading. Dark matter resists semiotic and materialist analysis because it sheds no visible light. Macbeth's dagger is not there onstage, but it is not not there either. In addition to such elusive material stuff, theatre is made up of dark matter: an invisible dimension that evades detection, even though its effects are palpable in performance.
A diachronic reading of Richard II's crown models how materialist criticism can reconstruct the ways that mobile physical objects set unstable, politicized meanings in motion at different levels of analysis. 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.īy enlisting material objects in the service of ideology critique, materialist criticism tends to dematerialize solid objects whose historical trajectories have been lost to performed memory (kinamnesia). Its discussion of immersion is structured around three themes: interactivity and game story and narrative environment and space. 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. 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?
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. 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.
#Sleep no more length series#
Inscribing literary character in performance space, both invoking and resisting the voyeuristic politics of modern fourth-wall performance, Sleep No More charts the pervasive legacy of largely literary conceptions of theatricality to the making of "new" performance, and—in its dynamic foregrounding of text, character, space, and audience—opens a series of questions about the apparent emancipation of the spectator, and about the character of "cognition," offered by theatrical "immersion." Although it leaves the spoken text of Macbeth almost entirely behind, Punchdrunk Theatre's Sleep No More—first performed in London in 2003, mounted again in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2009, and currently running in New York City—undertakes a complex reflection on Shakespeare performance today, putting a reciprocal pressure on the critical history, situation, and practice of those terms of the art: "Shakespeare," "performance." Asserting an "immersive" epistemology, Sleep No More nonetheless evokes a surprisingly persistent, even New Critical conception of scripted language and performance.
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