Themed Experience

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This companion book to The Art of Play offers an insider's advice on how to hold workshops, rehearse and maintain an interactive production. Designed for the actor, director or teacher, this work provides step-by-step guidelines for creating a show - including suggestions on everything from casting to maintenance rehearsals. The book also features a detailed outline of the rehearsal process, with 150 annotated workshop exercises to develop creativity, ensemble improv skills, interactive characterization, and performance elements.

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This is a guide to interactive improvisation comprising a collection of examples, anecdotes and annotated exercises, designed to cover all aspects of this type of theatre, from concept through design and production.

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Theatre as Experience Machine -- Theatre in a Box: Affect & Narcissism in Ray Lee's Cold Storage -- Theatre in the Dark: Spectatorship & Risk in Lundahl & Seitl's Pitch-Black Theatre -- Theatre Through the Fireplace: Punchdrunk & the Neoliberal Ethos -- Frutrating Theatre: Shunt in the Experience Economy -- Theatre in the Marketplace: Immaterlal Production in Theatre Delicatessen's Theatre Souk

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As an actor at any level - whether you are doing theatre studies at school, taking part in youth theatre, preparing for drama-school showcases, or attending professional acting workshops - you will often be required to prepare a duologue with a fellow performer. Your success is often based on locating and selecting a fresh, dynamic scene suited to your specific performing skills, as well as your interplay as a duo. Which is where this book comes in.This collection features twenty-five fantastic duologues for two women, almost all written since the year 2000 by some of our most exciting dramatic voices, offering a wide variety of character types and styles of writing.Playwrights featured include Alexi Kaye Campbell, Helen Edmundson, Vivienne Franzmann, Sam Holcroft, Anna Jordan, Chloë Moss, Rona Munro, Lynn Nottage, Evan Placey and Jessica Swale, and the plays themselves were premiered at the very best theatres across the UK including the National Theatre, Manchester Royal Exchange, Shakespeare's Globe, and the Almeida, Bush, Soho, Royal Court and Tricycle Theatres.Drawing on her experience as an actor, director and teacher at several leading drama schools, Trilby James equips each duologue with a thorough introduction including the vital information you need to place the piece in context (the who, what, when, where and why) and suggestions about how to perform the scene to its maximum effect (including the characters' objectives).The collection also features an introduction on the whole process of selecting and preparing a duologue, and how to present it to the greatest effect. The result is the most comprehensive and useful contemporary duologue book of its kind now available.

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Technical theatre and production arts is growing rapidly. Now, students in lighting, sound, scenography and production support courses can spend their whole career exploring just one genre of theatre. This book explores how technical theatre - both artistic design and technical functionality - can be used within the field of immersive theatre. Specifically, it explores the notions of interactivity and engagement from a purely production point of view: we know that production design and theatrical technologies can add significant value to a piece of immersive theatre, but can they replace actors? Can we immerse audiences into a world not of their own, only or primarily using technology?This book focuses on a research project carried out during 2011 and 2012 in Manchester, UK, set up to answer these questions. The centrepiece was a piece of theatre based around the World Trade Centre attacks in New York City in 2001 - the event was staged in the year of the 10th anniversary of these attacks.This is a must-read for technical theatre academics, students of IB theatre, technical theatre, production arts or a specific technical discipline: methods of lighting design, sound design and set design are all covered here, as is discussion on the use of projection and video. Students will appreciate the rich source of references cited from a wide range of experts. For directors and practitioners of immersive theatre, this book contains a range of discussion and observation of the genre from a non-technical angle: confronting issues surrounding immersion versus interactivity, audience suspension of disbelief, and how to navigate a devising process with inexperienced actors.

Immersive theater calls upon audience members to become participants, actors and "others." It traditionally offers binary roles--that of oppressor or that of victim--and thereby stands the risk of simplifying complex social situations. Challenging such binaries, this book articulates theatrical "grey zones" when addressing juvenile detention, wartime interventions and immigration processes. It presents scripts and strategies for directors and playwrights who want to create theatrical environments that are immersive and pedagogical; aesthetically evocative and politically provocative; simple and complex.

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Immersive Theatre, Immersive Experience -- Interactivity & Immersion: Theoretical Approaches -- Interactivity & Immersion in The Drowned Man -- Fan Interactivity: Communicating Immersive Experience -- Follow the Story: Narrative & Immersion -- Exploring Multistories: Narrative, Immersion & Chronology -- Play the Story: An Approach to Narrative in Immersive Theatre -- Environment & Site-Specificity: Space, Place & Immersion

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Immersive Theatre: Engaging the Audience is a collection of essays that look to catalogue the popularization of "immersive" theatre/performance throughout the world; focusing on reviews of works, investigations into specific companies and practices, and the scholarship behind the "role" an audience plays when they are no longer bystanders but integral participants within production. Given the success of companies like Punchdrunk, Dream Think Speak, and Third Rail Projects, as current examples, immersive theatre plays a vital role in defining the theatrical canon for the twenty-first century. Its relatively "modern" and new status makes a collection like this ripe for conversation, inquiry, and discovery in a variety of ways. These immersive experiences engage the academy of "the community" at large, going beyond showcasing prototypical theatre artists. They embrace the collaborative necessity of society and art--helping to define the "stories" we tell and the WAY in which we tell them.

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This comprehensive text is the first survey to explore the theory, history and practice of immersive theatre. Charting the rise of the immersive theatre phenomenon, Josephine Machon shares her wealth of expertise in the field of contemporary performance, inviting the reader to immerse themselves within this abundantly illustrated text. The first section of the book introduces concepts of immersion, situating them within a historical context and establishing a clear critical vocabulary for discussion. The second section then presents contributions from a wealth of immersive artists. Assuming no prior knowledge with its critical commentary, this is a rich resource for lecturers and students at all levels and internationally, including undergraduates and post-graduates, as well as practitioners and researchers of contemporary performance. This would also be an ideal text for general enthusiasts and readers with an interest in immersive theatre.  

This volume contains scientific papers and case studies presented at Interactive Sto- telling '08: The First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS), held November 26-29, 2008, in Erfurt, Germany. Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) is a cross-disciplinary topic, which explores new uses of interactive technologies for creating and experiencing narratives. IDS is also a huge step forward in games and learning. This can be seen through its ability to enrich virtual characters with intelligent behavior, to allow collaboration of humans and machines in the creative process, and to combine narrative knowledge and user activity in interactive artifacts. IDS involves concepts from many aspects of Computer Science, above all from Artificial Intelligence, with topics such as narrative intelligence, automatic dialogue and drama management, and smart graphics. In order to process stories in real time, traditional storytelling needs to be formalized into computable models by drawing from narratological studies. As it is currently hardly accessible for creators and e- users, there is a need for new authoring concepts and tools supporting the creation of such dynamic stories, allowing for rich and meaningful interaction with the content.

What does Immersive Theatre 'do'? By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme - one an 'immersive' experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production - Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon actors and audiences. An in-depth case study of her work Pinjare(Cages) sets out the 'hows' and 'whys' of her specific aesthetic framework. Memos from a Theatre Labplaces Dinesh's practical work within the context of existing analyses of Immersive Theatre, using this investigation to generate an underpinning theory of how Immersive Theatre works for its participants.

This book addresses Disney parks using performance theory. Few to no scholars have done this to date--an 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 "Imagineers"--the designers and storytellers who construct the park experience--leads 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.

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This book is an exploration and critique of 'playback theatre', a form of improvised theatre in which a company of performers spontaneously enact autobiographical stories told to them by members of the audience. With more than ten years' experience as an actor with Playback Theatre York, the author introduces the reader to the basics of playback theatre within a historical and theoretical context. The history and development of the form is traced, from its conception in the late 1970s to its subsequent growth worldwide, and its relationship to the psychodrama tradition from which it has evolved is discussed. Through an examination of playback performances from the perspectives of performers, `tellers' of their stories and the audience, the author critically explores the nature, implications and ethics of the performers' response to the teller's experience, how notions of the public and personal are constructed, and the risks involved in improvising a response to a member of the audience's story.

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Written from a practice-based perspective, this book focuses on the political character of 'cyberformance': the genre of digital performance that uses the Internet as a performance space. The Etheatre Project comprises a series of experimental cyberformances aiming to reconsider the characteristics of theatre in the Internet age.

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.

At present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular, immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances. Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy.

"How do theatre makers in Britain produce immersive, participatory experiences for audiences? How are productions designed and rehearsed, and how can the experience of different companies inform your own practice and understanding of this burgeoning craft? This collection of original discussions with some of Britain's leading immersive and interactive theatre makers explores their processes, methods and practices, offering a behind-the-scenes tour of how they make their work. It offers substantial new material addressing a range of previously undisclosed topics: including their approaches to casting and rehearsal strategies, through to more concrete concerns such as funding and finance models. They reveal the discrete nuts and bolts of building audience-experience. The makers candidly discuss their own position to the term 'immersive' and how they perceive their place within the wider experience-centric cultural landscape. This collection has been astutely curated to collect perspectives from practitioners across the spectrum of immersions and interactivity in performance to showcase working methods across a variety of forms; from one-on-one, to gamified, playable experiences. The diversity of conversations captured in this volume reflects the glorious polyphony of the immersive and interactive landscape in Britain, introducing readers to the work of Les Enfants Terrible, Parabolic, Colab Theatre, The Lab Collective, Cross Collaborations, and Zu-UK. Makers participate in frank dialogue that reveals the ways in which they employ scenography, design, game and structural mechanics, approaches to stage management tactics, as well as the development of audience relationships, the role of intimacy and agency. The conversations collected here are current, vital and provide much-needed access to the previously undisclosed world of experience making. The collection redirects the immersive canon, adding new voices, practices and approaches to the existing field."