Магистерский диплом на тему Changing Roles of Participants in Immersive Theatre Experiences. Based on the case study of Burning Man Festival.

Содержание:

Introduction 3
Background History 4
Literature review 9
Methodology: 18
Findings/Analysis 19
Conclusion 27
Limitations 29
List of references 30
Interview transcripts 32

Введение:

The term immersive has been applied to a diverse range of performance and art practices including promenade, site-specific, one-on-one, audio walks, installation artwork and the construction of total theatrical worlds inside found spaces and blackbox studios (Shearing, 2013, p.)
In immersive theatre there is no auditorium in the traditional sense of the word, which means there is no so-called “fourth-wall” separating the actors from the audience. The action of the theatre simultaneously develops in different locations. Directors of such shows/performances offer the public new behavioural scenarios, giving them an active role: viewers can choose their own route, one or another plot line, move from one location to another, and even influence what is happening. Machon (2013, p.66) defines immersive theatre as a “performance form emphasizing the importance of space and design, curating tangible, sensual environment, and focusing on personal, individual, audience experience”.
My choice in examining changing role of the participant in immersive theatres has been inspired by my personal interest within both theatre-based and festival context. As a regular visitor to the theatre performances myself, I am interested how new trends like immersive theatre are transforming passive spectator into active participant. I find it very curious how audiences become encouraged to explore, negotiate and sometimes event change the performance environment. As Lyn Gardner (2010) wrote in the Guardian Theatre Blog, “audience behavior – in particular, the traditional theatre behaviour of sitting politely in rows and not speaking – is a learned behaviour and one that can be quickly unlearned”. I believe it is happening more and more in the 21st century – audience become more active and mobile, hence changing the role they used to play in any kind of theatre.
People go to the theatre to forget about their everyday problems and troubles, to get lost in another world for a couple of hours. In immersive theatres the audience find itself enveloped within the world of the show.
This study aims to outline and evaluate the transforming role of participants in immersive theatre performances. It aims to examine how the boundary between the roles of attendants and participants in immersive theatre performances is becoming blurred by using Burning Man Festival as the supporting case study. Thus, this research project is aiming to answer three questions: How is the role of the audience being transformed in immersive theatre performances, how is the audience’s role in immersive theatre defined in comparison to traditional theatre and to what extent does Burning Man Festival demonstrates a blurring of the boundaries between attendant and participant?
The first chapter of this dissertation will give a background history of the main topics discussed: immersive theatre and Burning Man Festival. It looks at the origins and developments of the 2 concepts and also provide a link that helps to understand the connection between them.
Literature review will set a theoretical frameworks and establish the gaps (continue here). Methodology part will introduce the reader to the methods used and provide justification for each of them, as well as touch on ethical issues and difficulties met during the work.
Discussions and results will provide the profound discussion and analysis of the findings and relate collected information to theoretical aspects mentioned in the literature review.
Finally, conclusion will sum up the answers to the initial research questions, as well as provide limitations and future recommendations for the executed work.

Заключение:

This work is limited to an analysis of the experience of participants in an immersive show in the context of theatrical culture and theory, but in reality this experience also affects sociological and psychological aspects. This is the limitation of this analysis, which only slightly opens up the questions of the social component of the experience of the participant of the BM festival, the psychology of involving a person in this kind of joint activity.
The analysis was also carried out on the basis of an interview that was taken from a group of artists who were at the festival not only as participants, but also engaged in the construction of the installation. In total, they spent 2.5 weeks at the festival and were already quite tired by the time festival actually started, so their experience and perception certainly was influenced by these human factors.
Only 4 participants were interviewed which is not really enough to obtaining the complete understanding of the problem, although the questions are directly related to the immersive component and the role of the participant, as well as the answers are extensive and allowed to compare different types of people in accordance with their reaction to the experience of BM. To make it more reliable and exclude the factor of an individual view of the festival from only one group of people, I also included in the analysis the reviews of other visitors to previous festivals, turned to an explanation of the social concept of BM given by its founder.

Фрагмент текста работы:

Background History

The XXI century – as the century of new information technologies – made us take a fresh look at various types of activities, including the art of theater and redefine the purpose and direction of theatrical activity. The content of the concept of “viewer” has also changed these days. Today, this is not only a spectator visiting the theater in order to calmly and quietly sit in one place, watch and listen to the theatrical production. From a visitor-consumer, he turns into a full member, ally and partner. Today, the work of many innovative theaters is based on the principles of co-authorship and co-creation with the audience.
In this context the key concept is “immersion”, which literally means creating the effect of presence. Immersiveness as a way of perceiving, which determines the factor of changing consciousness, in the modern world is an important and frequent object of study. The history of immersion as a phenomenon begins from the moment of the first attempts to recreate the surrounding reality, through drawing, music, etc. The very fact that a person is immersed in the world of painting, book, film, or theatrical production reflects the essence of immersion, as a phenomenon that has always accompanied art.
Previously, immersiveness depended on the quality of the work of art and on the characteristics of the viewer himself – some people are more prone to deep feelings, while others are difficult to involve and capture their interest. However, today various immersive techniques have become popular, which actively influence the viewer, increasing the level of his involvement. A vivid example is virtual reality in the field of computer games, or 3D, 4D, etc. effects in the film industry.
I consider, that the roots of immersive theater and spectator involvement lie in the Wagnerian concept of the “universal work of art” – Gesamtkunstwerk (Bergande, 2014), in the idea of activating the viewer. Nevertheless, the idea of a universal work of art finds its parallels in the early art forms as well – especially, in the culture of ancient Greece and, in particular, the ancient Greek theater. These ideas were later used by V. E. Meyerhold, as well as in modernist experiments in the Total Theater under the strong influence of Moholy-Nagy and A. Artaud.
The works of Artaud had a huge impact on the theory and practice of performance, resulting in an innovative approach to scenography, the relationship between the actor and the audience, and the emergence of highly physical styles of performance. More recent experiments with immersive technology in performance have developed Artaud’s ideals and influenced artists’ appeal to interactivity, with the goal of enhancing sensual and imaginative engagement.
Also, the Sophie Nield’s theory is worth mentioning, as she believes that the theater adopted the practice of immersiveness from the museum sphere, where it appeared in the 1980-1990s. In Sophie Nield’s opinion, there were museum curators who first came up with the idea of placing visitors not just in the exposition, but inside a holistic “experience”, in a space filled not only with artifacts, but also with invented props, complemented by smells, sounds and even actors playing vikings, servants or aristocracy (Nield, 2008).
Thus, the emergence of immersive theatre goes all the way back to the beginnings of modern theatre in the XIX century, but this type of theatre where viewers were “allowed to be let inside” was widely spread only in recent years (Вилисов, 2018). The principles of creating immersiveness revolve around human feelings and emotions, as well as its visual perception, considering the intellectual perception as the last. The paradox of immersiveness is that immersion takes place in the most literal sense – the atmosphere of the performance envelopes you, but you remain strictly alienated from the performance (ibid).
The concept of “immersive theater” itself, indicating a specific direction in the performance practice, entered the academic and artistic environment around 2004, and archival search shows that it entered the vocabulary of theater critics around 2007. According to J. Machon, who studies the historical background of immersive theater, initially this concept was used in relation to immersive productions in museums and places of cultural and historical heritage (Machon, 2013).
These were interactive events involving artists, including elements of immersive practice: attracting visitors along with the participation of performers and the use of various media was encouraged as part of authentic participation in the expositions. Such theatrical events were practiced in order to revitalize exhibitions and venues. On the basis of this, it can be concluded that the first examples of immersive theater were closer to theatrical performances than the theater itself. These theatrical events can be defined as part of an ongoing process of immersive practice in which viewers are drawn into what is happening as an experiment.
Director of the “The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart” Wills Wilson when describing one of the benefits of immersive theatres stated that it gives “a chance to take an unwitting audience to all sort of places” (year? Reference this). Often, but not always this form of theatre asks the spectator to make choices that guide their experience, to act either with accordance or even instead of the performer, to “connect” with the performance environment. It is an invitation for the spectator to participate in ways that are differently active to that which is typical of the theatre event, hence offering something more intense and intriguing than mere passive participation.
Adam Alston, who draws attention to the problems of immersiveness in the contemporary English drama, states that: