Representation Of Experience Research Articles

Political Theater? The Value of Improvisation and Game-Playing

The father of philosophy had it right: there’s something about play that builds coherence and camaraderie in the classroom and establishes a basis for exploring complex issues in a creative way. Improvisation - which can be described, in a political context at least - as extemporaneous response to and creative variations on established themes, is not only fun, it’s a skill upon which our overly scripted, polarized political actors could improve. Especially when considered in the context of this quote from Viola Spolin, creator of the world-renowned Second City Theater in Chicago, “Through spontaneity we are reformed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handeddown frames of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people’s findings,” the art of improvisation takes on a deeper meaning, one our leaders could do well to heed. By incorporating improvisational and role-play games in classroom and online settings, teachers can free up and harness students’ creativity, often opening doors to and providing new perspectives on serious issues. The forms of communication derived from game-playing and improvisational exercises can shed light for students on real-world scenarios. For example, an exercise devised by the presenter, a game called “Animals at a Cocktail Party,” asks students to assume roles of animals personified in a social setting, with “actors” typically paired with others who represent predators or prey, and/or different classes/strata; the results often simulate real-world power structures, political communication, and relationships that provide students with unique insight into political issues of the day. Another role-play, “The Interrogation Game: Gitmo,” provides a light-hearted approach to a serious issue on the minds of many students. The presenter, an instructor in American Government, Communication/Media Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies at two Chicago-area institutions of higher learning and an Interdisciplinary Studies/Public Policy doctoral student, has extensive experience in theater and improvisation. This paper will provide a perspective on roleplaying/ improvisation and their applications to the classroom - in live and online settings. And, consistent with improvisation’s cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell,” he may facilitate an improvisation/role-play (or two)—for those attendees daring enough to enjoy the process.

Labours of Seduction in Immersive and Interactive Performance

Much theatrical work that calls itself ‘immersive’ uses tropes of the erotic to achieve its intended effects. In this article Rose Biggin identifies structural and performative strategies in the use of the erotic in this genre. What does it mean to identify the process of performed seduction as central to much immersive dramaturgy? Through readings of contemporary productions that draw upon (or appropriate) pre-existing erotically charged environments, the inevitable responsibilities for makers working in this context of immersion are considered, as is the importance of considering the consequences for those working in immersive spaces. Stress is laid on the crucial role that this form of performative labour often plays in immersive performance, and a continued recognition of its influence is emphasized. Rose Biggin is an independent scholar and theatre artist based in London. She received her PhD from the University of Exeter, researching audience immersion and the work of Punchdrunk, and both writes and makes work on gender, history, and language. She is author of Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience (2017).

The Mind on Stage: On the Relation between Theater and Cognition

This paper addresses two central topics that concern the interplay between theatricality and cognition. The first is the intrinsic theatrical nature of human cognition, as it is traceable in human communication. The fundamental schemas that allow us to make sense of the world and of experience are based on human intersubjective exchange. The need to convey contents of the individual cognition, to share them with others generates highly creative conceptual strategies such as conceptual metaphor or blending. In the communication of these contents, humans often engage in scenarios of representation or theatricality, by which they dramatize the contents of mental spaces other than the one of their immediate reality.The second topic this paper addresses comes in the sequence of this first one: if theatricality is a constitutive feature of human cognition and communication, it is further enhanced in the experience of theater as genre, in the encounter with the aesthetic works of drama, both as text and performance. This idea is explored on the basis of a cognitive approach to Peter Weiss’ play Marat/Sade (1963).

Rehearsals of the Weird: Julia Bardsley’s Almost the Same (Feral Rehearsals for Violent Acts of Culture)

This article examines the innovative work of British visual and theatre artist Julia Bardsley and more specifically her performance Almost the same (feral rehearsals for violent acts of cultures). Bardsley’s work operates on the cusp of theatre and the gallery and questions the vocabularies and conceptual frameworks available to us to discuss difficult theatrical experiences. While her work seems to render these frameworks obsolete, it also opens up a space for new vocabularies. Using a re-purposed critical language drawing from literary studies, film and science fiction (Mark Fisher on the weird, Eve Oishi on visual perversity and Jack Halberstam on wildness), this article proposes the weird as a fundamental category for unpacking Bardsley’s work. The weird is understood here as a type of aesthetic experience or affect, a space of critical potential for reading and making theatre work as well as a critical trope for articulating what lies beyond normative understandings of sexuality, identity and desire. This article considers the types of unruly and excessive desires that appear as the driving forces in Bardsley’s work and considers articulating the experience it engenders by reaching beyond the threshold of ordinary experience and into the world of the weird.

Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News by Jonathan Mulrooney

Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News by Jonathan Mulrooney

Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom

Reviewed by: Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater by Gina Bloom Mike Sell GAMING THE STAGE: PLAYABLE MEDIA AND THE RISE OF ENGLISH COMMERCIAL THEATER. By Gina Bloom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018; pp. 304. Theatre historians generally agree that the play's the thing, but what exactly do we mean by "play"—and what do we assume is played? The usual answer is the dramatic script, certainly, or more broadly, the text, whether it be printed, devised, or intertextual. We might think of the playful process of theatre creation, whether the provisional "games for theatre" that enable performers to attune mind and body to the task at hand or the more constitutive forms of play we associate with devised theatre. Those versed in the broader spectrum of performance practices will recall Richard Schechner's abiding interest in the varieties of human play and their integral relationship to performance more generally. But despite our love of play, theatre historians have mostly ignored the kinds of play associated with recreational games: cards, boardgames, tabletop role-playing games, and the like. And they have ignored the skills that players of games bring to the arts. There are signs of change if you know where to look, but unfortunately those are mostly in the present tense and are often framed in digital terms—immersive theatre, augmented reality, new media performance, videogames. In Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theater, Gina Bloom not only corrects these shortcomings, she also describes an innovative and authentically playful transmedia theatre-historical method. It is a tour de force, the [End Page 256] kind of book that could be written only by someone with comprehensive knowledge of their period, an acute sensitivity to the embodied experience of theatre and gaming, a firm critical-theoretical hand, and practical grounding in the design of playful theatrical experiences. Bloom begins in the present tense, noting the unprecedented growth of games as popular pastime and the evidently unstoppable devolution of theatre into an elite entertainment. In response, she asks a pair of questions that implicates both present and past: "What do theatrical plays and games have in common, for their producers and their spectators? And what can we learn about gaming and about theater by uncovering the links between these media forms?" (1–2). The answers Bloom finds shed light on old stages and new media alike and provide useful lessons to both historians and creators of theatrical entertainments. As she notes, "the earliest commercial theaters of Shakespeare's era, known as 'playhouses,' were built right next to gaming establishments; some of these … even doubled as blood sport venues" (1). This geographical coincidence reflected a broader coincidence of ludic cultures and the need for makers of one of them (the theatre) to appeal to consumers of the other (games and sports). "The commercial theater," Bloom writes, "was fashioned as a gaming apparatus for its consumers, whose spectator-ship was participatory, albeit in ways that might be missed at first glance" (3). Thus it follows that one can learn about both by examining the formal and cultural coincidence of playful practice. To this end, Bloom surveys in the first chapter the material record of "sitting pastimes" in Western Europe (cards, boardgames, and the like) and attitudes toward them expressed by cultural authorities. Reflecting her interest in closing the distance between present and past, she emphasizes a characteristic of gameplay of special importance to twenty-first-century game scholars: that games are first and foremost information systems, and that game play is fundamentally an engagement with such systems. It turns out we share that concern with the early moderns. In the next three chapters, she focuses on three popular pastimes—cards, backgammon, and chess—and the plays in which they feature, demonstrating how they engage "a whole set of epistemological concerns about the flow and control of information—a concern of political and religious authorities at the time" (29). Considered together, they show us how early modern audiences perceived and practiced gameplay, as well as how they perceived and practiced a new kind of play: going to the theatre. This is...

Berlin’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So far So Close) by Berlin, Cathy Blisson

Reviewed by: Berlin’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So far So Close) by Berlin, Cathy Blisson Inga Meier BERLIN’S ZVIZDAL (CHERNOBYL—SO FAR SO CLOSE). By BERLIN and Cathy Blisson. DiverseWorks at MATCH, Matchbox 2, Wortham Foundation Theatre, Houston, Texas. February 15–16, 2019. First opened in 2015, the Midtown Arts and Theatre Center Houston (MATCH) was conceived as an alternative to the city’s largest and most well-funded arts organizations. With venues for dance, theatre, film, visual art, music, or any multidisciplinary combination thereof, MATCH is a performative multiplex. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that such a space elected to produce Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), the second-to-last show in BERLIN’s Holocene (the geographical era) Cycle. Billed as an “immersive hybrid of documentary film and theatrical installation,” Zvizdal stakes out a position somewhere between the two forms. That position is more cinematic than theatrical to be sure, but it also one that offers a fresh vantage point from which to approach the relationships between film and theatre, and between liveness and the mediated image. From that perspective, Zvizdal reveals that the membrane separating these modalities is far more permeable than it often appears from either side of the disciplinary divide, suggesting that an analogous hybridity may be formulated when theatre serves as the point of access. Click for larger view View full resolution BERLIN’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), 2016. (Photo: Frederik Buyckx, courtesy of the artists and DiverseWorks.) Like the other parts of the Holocene Cycle, Zvizdal maps out its geography through personal narrative. In this instance, the story is that of Pétro and Nadia, an elderly couple residing in Zvizdal, one of roughly ninety towns and villages evacuated in the aftermath of the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl. In their sixties at the time of the disaster, the couple refused to evacuate and were still living in their home between 2006 and 2011, the period documented in Zvizdal. When my fellow audience members and I were collectively ushered into the Wortham Foundation Theatre (Matchbox 2), we were instructed not to sit in the space’s regular proscenium seating. Instead, we were guided to the area that would, under different circumstances, have been the stage. Within this new configuration, there was an enormous screen running along the middle (from upstage to downstage), with tiered seating facing both sides of the screen. In this regard, the screen served as a focal point for both sides of the audience, who each saw the film projected on their respective side. This configuration provided a reasonable approximation of the intimacy of a shared theatrical experience, but because the screen itself constituted (or was staged as?) a physical barrier between one side of the audience and the other (albeit one that was raised a few feet off the ground—just enough to see the audience’s legs on the other side), that intimacy was never fully achieved. Whether I position that lack of connection as intentional or as a failure however, is less important than the effect of being “so far so close” (as suggested by the title) that that lack of connection evoked. In fact, “so far so close” not only fittingly describes the distance between one side of the audience and the other, but also between Pétro [End Page 88] and Nadia (equal parts Grey Gardens and Waiting for Godot, often talking at, but not to, each other), between the couple and the world, and between their finite lives and their mediated representation. Click for larger view View full resolution BERLIN’s Zvizdal (Chernobyl—So Far So Close), 2016. (Photo: Frederik Buyckx, courtesy of the artists and DiverseWorks.) Directly underneath the screen but raised above the ground were three models of Pétro and Nadia’s farm, each situated within transparent, oversized petri dishes. Because BERLIN’s and dramaturg Cathy Billson’s visits to the couple often occurred months apart, each petri dish marked a time of year: spring/summer, winter, and fall. Running above the models but below the screen was a camera gliding between them, at times transmitting and superimposing images of the models onto the documentary footage being projected...

Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and The Work Of Creativity by Dorinne Kondo

Reviewed by: Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and The Work Of Creativity by Dorinne Kondo Josephine Lee WORLDMAKING: RACE, PERFORMANCE, AND THE WORK OF CREATIVITY. By Dorinne Kondo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018; pp. 376. Dorinne Kondo's About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (1997) split its attention between the fashion industry and the theatre world; her Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity immerses itself much more deeply in the world of dramaturgy, playwriting, and theatrical production. Yet Worldmaking nevertheless provides ample opportunity for Kondo to demonstrate her training as an anthropologist and extensive [End Page 538] knowledge of cultural theory. The book's blend of ethnography, critical reflection, first-person narrative, and dramatic work coalesces around ideas of "reparative creativity," or "the ways artists make, unmake, remake race in their creative processes, in acts of always partial integration and repair" (5). Kondo demonstrates the power of theatre to address the complexities of race in contemporary America not only through what is seen onstage but also in the processes of rehearsal, revision, and reception, as artists question representational authority and negotiate collaboration. Her book also imagines a significant role for the dramaturg/scholar as an integral part of creative development rather than as a disengaged critical commentator, and it models important ways in which intellectual critique and theatre practice might inform each other. The three main sections of the book focus on Kondo's professional theatre experiences: first as one of the dramaturgs for Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 (1993), then as a commentator on David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face (2007), and finally as a playwright. Kondo spotlights her interactions with directors, actors, playwrights, and critics as well as the politics of racial representation that were at play in each of these instances. As she becomes more involved in the practices of play-making, she finds herself increasingly disenchanted even though she remains deeply attached to the theatre, feeling stuck in a state of what Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York's Public Theater, jokingly called "Stockholm syndrome!" (7). Nonetheless, she manages to record in painstaking detail the interplay of creative work, management, and reception that makes American theatre such a fraught terrain for artists of color. Like other parts of Smith's larger project On the Road: A Search for American Character, Twilight drew verbatim from diverse and often-conflicting perspectives on the 1992 LA civil unrest to encourage, according to Smith, a state of "full-body listening" (124). What Kondo adds to the existing body of scholarship on Smith's work is full attention to the collaborative nature of these solo performances. Twilight entailed over 200 interviews done by multiple people, including Kondo, and Worldmaking highlights the backstage tensions inherent in the process of artistic selection. For instance, Kondo relates her dismay at Smith's decision to cut Chicano and Japanese American characters from one performance, thus reducing the work to "largely a black-and-white story" (133). But while Kondo worries about how Twilight might be misread by mainstream critics as "a multicultural smorgasbord in which issues of power and inequality no longer exist" (159), she is fiercely loyal to Smith, crediting her with an exemplary "willingness to listen, every night, even in the face of harsh criticism" (135). Kondo's relationship with Hwang's Yellow Face is less formal but just as actively engaged. Kondo sees intellectuals and artists as having "complementary roles," and aims to mobilize academic criticism "to foster a better play and production, not simply to critique an object as an intellectual exercise" (197). When Tim Dang, the artistic director of East West Players co-producing Yellow Face, asks for feedback during previews, she sends a five-page, single-spaced analysis that details, among other things, the problematic depiction of Chinese ethnic minorities in the play. While she holds fast to this and other criticisms of Hwang's work, she also adheres resolutely to her sense that they are both allied in the same "urgent intellectual/aesthetic/political project" (ibid.). Scholarly reflection and theatre practice are most enmeshed in Kondo's final chapters, which include the complete script for Seamless, an original play about a...

Specificity of embodiment of Shevchenko’s image in Lev Colodub’s opera “Poet”

Specificity of embodiment of Shevchenko’s image in Lev Colodub’s opera “Poet”

The ever-widening contexts of Konstantin Stanislavsky

ABSTRACTAdopting and adapting Giorgio Strehler’s notion of treating a great play as a series of nesting boxes, I intend to examine the contexts of Stanislavsky’s life and work as Matryoshka dolls, ever widening in significance. The first, most compact box is the biographical: the influence of family, education, theatrical experience, and cultural background on his artistic programme. It is set within the second: the historical, tracking his responses to the broader political and socio-economic events that bore in upon him. The third is the ideological: siting his ideas within the intellectual and aesthetic trends of his time. Finally, I hope to demonstrate how, become an institution in modern theatrical thought and practice, he has generated an all-encompassing context of his own.

Jonathan Mulrooney. Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News

Jonathan Mulrooney. Romanticism and Theatrical Experience: Kean, Hazlitt, and Keats in the Age of Theatrical News

The Immersive Theater Experience for Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Despite growing public awareness of ASD, many caregivers of children with ASD struggle to find opportunities for participation in community activities with appropriate accommodations. The current study evaluated the experiences of individuals with ASD who attended immersive theater performances specifically designed for individuals with ASD. Parents and teachers of 256 children and adolescents completed questionnaires regarding their pre-show expectations and post-show satisfaction with the performance. Analyses revealed that, on average, parents' and teachers' levels of satisfaction significantly outweighed their pre-show expectations. Based on researcher observations, audience feedback, and past research, a list of best practices for successful theater programming for individuals with ASD was compiled with the goal of widespread dissemination to increase accessibility of theater performances for neurodiverse audiences.

The interaction between materials technology and theatrical scenography

The ability of modern technology to connect the elements of scenography and materials technology leads to a growing link between theatrical possibilities and theatrical audience through the ability to reshape theatrical elements in the most basic components, and with all the new moves comes a new wave of talk about what the new technology To connect with the audience, by connecting theater experiences and theatrical audience with raw materials and creating scenes capable of movement and interaction between the movement of the audience, lighting, the movement of actors and sound, with the ability to change, form and grow, have the ability to predict the act and Reaction. And by searching beyond the materials and properties that can be converted and adapted to transform the material from materials unable to react to materials that can be transformed and formed on their own technology was able to employ chemical transformations of materials and control their reactions and directed to become specific characteristics to exceed The research and theatrical studies, which conducted two-way research, either theatrical design or the techniques and technological capabilities exploited in the design and neglected the search for the modern materials that have been exploited to implement these designs

Memory of the Voiceless. Verbatim, Cvasi-verbatim, Mockumentary

Abstract This paper examines a series of practices circumscribed to verbatim theatre, which uses interviews or other documentary materials, in order to engage the audience in relation to urgent, controversial topics of general or local interest. Although it has just recently entered theatrical usage, verbatim has proved to be a flexible method, open to expressions from the most diverse. We will follow the approaches of some directors or playwrights, as Anna Deveare Smith, Moisés Kaufman, David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark, Richard Norton-Taylor or Alecky Blythe, who are concerned with reflecting the undistorted reality, but at the same time with providing an intense theatrical experience. In this respect, we analyze how the tensions between objective and subjective, between real and fictional, between content and form are negotiated, as well as the impact that these choices have on the artistic product, respectively to what extent the authenticity of the sources remains unaltered when it comes on stage.

Abstinência de Purpurina: A prática e a investigação

Abstinência de Purpurina é um espetáculo teatral desenvolvido pelo coletivo CASA com o propósito de conjugar a prática cénica com a investigação artística. Desde a sua génese, o projeto visou explorar em palco um pensamento teórico, bem como observar e desenvolver de que maneira é que o mesmo era integrado no corpo da atriz e na sua relação com o público. O espetáculo parte do conceito literário de autoficção (Doubrovsky), como forma de explorar três tipos de relação: atriz versus personagem; personagem versus espectador; espectador versus indivíduo. Através desta experiência teatral, a investigação teórica procurou revelar de que modo a atriz e o público se tornam (ou não) vulneráveis e reflexivos ao participar do evento. Numa perspetiva de multiplicação da fala dos seus interlocutores, Abstinência de Purpurina foi pensado e concretizado com base num processo de criação coletiva. Partindo do desenvolvimento do texto para a conceção do cenário, o coletivo CASA explorou a aplicabilidade da noção de hierarquias flutuantes. Procurando uma adequação à realidade do tecido teatral português, a investigação deslocou-se para o conceito de site specific, explorando espacialmente alternativas que conjugassem a visão estético-plástica do espetáculo.

COMMUNITY BELONGING THROUGH THEATER: CREATIVE ARTS INTERVENTION FOR LOW-INCOME OLDER ADULTS

Creative arts can promote social contact and possibly reduce isolation. A professionally run theater group comprised of low-income older adults met for 12 weeks to learn basic skills and perform a play. Using a pre-post questionnaire, data were gathered from the treatment group (n=14) who participated in the class and a non-participating comparison group (n=5) to identify potential program effects on measures of social isolation, community belonging, and social exclusion. Participants were African American living in low-income housing in an urban area. The average age of the sample was 65 years, 21% were men, 83% had at least high school degree, 71% reported good to excellent health, and 58% reported at least one ADL. Regression analyses showed that a sense of community belonging was significantly greater for the treatment group than the comparison group at time 2.This was not the case when considering social isolation or social exclusion. When controls were added (age, health, and previous theater experience), the significant difference remained with higher age predicting a sense of community belonging. The greater number of class sessions attended was also associated with a greater sense of community belonging for the treatment group. Through the shared experience of theater, participants can gain a sense of community, but this activity does not seem to be related to social isolation or social exclusion. It could be that theater participation fosters a sense of belonging due to group dynamics but is not a significant enough activity to reduce a sense of isolation or exclusion.

Testimony of Corporal Print and Traceable Sediments after El puro lugar

The article focuses on a political site-specific theatre experience in Xalapa, Veracruz, México. El puro lugar (The pure place) is the name of the project of which I share several insights to reflect on the possibilities of art as a mediator in a politically violent context. The main question that led our practice was to ask ourselves to what extent artistic practice can help us, artists and citizens, to relate to our present history in an active way, allowing us to go into forbidden places marked by oblivion and physical aggression. It is written from a testimonial point of view, bringing together active memories of an embodied political statement, a creative act of resilience while looking for freedom in a wrecked place.

Stakeholder Perceptions of the Effects of a Public School-Based Theatre Program for Children with ASD

Arts programs are often credited with helping children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) gain cognitive and social skills. As with all claims of transfer from experience in the arts to abilities in non-arts domains, empirical evidence is mixed, and often criticized for both imprecise methodologies and a lack of connection back to the art form itself. Exact measurement of programs’ mechanisms and effects are rare. To investigate the effect of theatre experiences for children with ASD, we completed a systematic study of adult stakeholders of a large, school-based, successful musical theatre program. We found stakeholders emphasized modeling, routines, and relaxation as useful strategies, endorsing that the program built imitation, motor abilities and turn-taking skills. These observations raise questions for standard theories of the effects of arts that focus and accentuate only higher order social and emotional or academic skills, and emphasize the importance of including stakeholders in theorizing and measuring the effects of arts programs for all populations.

CPC e MST

O artigo tem como objetivo refletir sobre as condições de produção e sobre a evolução das formas a partir da experiência concreta de trabalho teatral, articuladas à demandas de organizações políticas, considerando as experiências dos anos 1960, em particular do Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes, em chave comparativa com a experiência teatral desenvolvida pelo Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra e coletivos de teatro a ele vinculados. O argumento visa articular a narrativa das experiências com o esforço editorial de divulgar o trabalho de teóricos, diretores e de organizações emblemáticas do teatro político brasileiro e internacional, e pretende apontar características semelhantes entre as organizações, a despeito das diferenças de contextos, que sinalizam providências de construção de uma cultura política popular no Brasil.

Social Media Goes to the Movies: Fear of Missing Out, Social Capital, and Social Motivations of Cinema Attendance

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of participation in social media networks on theatrical movie attendance, with particular attention paid to the fear-of-missing-out (FoMO) and social media social capital. Using an online survey (N = 472), it was determined that the direct social utility of the theatrical experience was a better predictor of theatrical attendance than social media FoMO or social capital. However, both bridging social capital and FoMO were predictors of the post-viewing social media sharing of the film experience, with bridging social capital best predicting social media sharing. Furthermore, FoMO did not moderate the relation between bridging social capital and social media sharing, suggesting these traits exert influence on social media behaviors independently. While participation in social networks did not influence theatrical movie attendance, it was an important predictor of social media conversations after viewing, with the opportunity to maintain and build bridging social capital exerting the greatest influence on social media sharing.