The word ‘immerse’ is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “to make (yourself) fully involved in some activity or interest”.
“A literary bestiary” was marketed as a site-responsive, immersive show. The curator and founder of the project insisted on using the term ‘show’ and in all prior communications with the media and the general public, the labels ‘immersive’ and ‘site-responsive’ was not only attached, but highlighted as a selling point.
As a co-producer, I found it difficult to defend the choice of the label immersive when the production was, in my opinion, a literary event with small bursts of theatricality that could be argued to have similarities of promenade theatre. To facilitate my argument, I will compare definitions of immersive theatre, give examples of other practitioners that presents immersive works whilst drawing comparisons back to “A literary bestiary”s artistic choices.
The concept of interactive, participatory theatre as immersive theatre experiences, promenade theatre and site-specific performances has had a massive rise in popularity the last decade. PunchDrunk, an immersive and site-sensitive company founded in 2000, is frequently mentioned when immersive theatre is discussed. They are self-proclaimed pioneers of a “game changing form of theatre in which roaming audience experience epic storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds”(PunchDrunk, 2015).
In their production of “The Drowned Man”, a loose adaptation of Georg Buchner’s “Woyzeck”, the company completely transformed an empty four story high old warehouse near Paddington Station, filling it with large set pieces and props. The audience members were in the heart of the promenade production, and were free to wander the site whilst followin...
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...sily changed for another library as the site without it changing the performances. One of the acts, 2 actors performing Pu Songling and Aesop Fables from two spiral staircases, could have been performed on another set of staircases without the performance being altered significantly.
ARK’s intention to invite the audience on a site-responsive journey and to reanimate library spaces
However when not responding to the architecture, the history of the site or the community it has created, it is more of a staged performance in a non-conventional theatre space rather than a site-responsive performance.
The movement artist however had created a piece in the spirit of the theme, using the architecture to influence his moves. His physicality was informed by the shapes of the interior, though the story of his journey was a result of the stimulus given, the theme of bestiary.
When Mary Zimmerman adapts a play from an ancient text her directing process and the way she engages with text are woven together, both dependent on the other. She writes these adaptations from nondramatic text, writing each evening while working through the pre-production rehearsals and improvisations during the day with the cast. The rehearsal process influences the text, and the text enriches the rehearsal process, so that one cannot exist without the other. Every rehearsal is structured the same but each production is unique because as Zimmerman states in “The Archaeology of Performance”, she is always “open to the possibilities”. The piece is open to everything happening in the world and to the people involved, so the possibilities are honest and endless.
The audience is an important factor to determine the success of a spectacle. It is known that there is no spectacle without audience. The musical theater presentations are known for their number of people, which according to the Broadway League (n.d.), the 2013 season reached attendance of 11.57 million. However, the number of spectators has been decreased in comparison with the peak of popularity for musicals in the last century. The first reason for that is that the spectators of musical theater presentations were a more specific group such as wealthy and intellectual people that used to go to this type of presentation, and this pattern has been consistent until now, as it can be seen in the price of a Broadway spectacle that is very expensive. Second, the spectators have to go where the spectacles are set up, which makes the live presenta...
Marijuana, also known as weed, is smoked for the high, as well as for “nausea, glaucoma, appetite simulations, mucous membrane inflammation, leprosy, fever, dandruff, hemorrhoids, obesity, asthma, urinary tract infections, cough, anorexia associated with weight loss in AIDS patients, pain, and multiple sclerosis” (“Marijuana Overview Information”). Medicines to treat some of the listed ailments have not been found as of, yet so patients are suffering from pain and ongoing symptoms from their disease or illness. The only treatment for some of these ongoing symptoms and pain is medical marijuana. This is why medical marijuana is being pushed to be legalized in America. The “high” that users get from smoking marijuana relieves pain for a short period of time. Dr. Mark Ware tested cannabis (mar...
...n Elders, MD "The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS -- or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day."(Editorial, Providence Journal)
Marijuana is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world (7). Since it became illegal in 1967 (5), there have been many questions of whether or not it is good for medical purposes. Debates between people that are for and against the use of marijuana in medicine have been heated and in recent years, referendums have been brought up in several states to make it available for medical treatment. Personally, I think that marijuana has the power to be a significant help with certain aliments, however, I think that more research is needed to prove its' medical potential.
Marijuana has been proven to treat numerous diseases and help cope with the pain from them. There is scientific research behind Medical Marijuana being able to treat these diseases. Research shows that it is effective managing and treating certain symptoms and diseases. It is legal in some states in the U.S. and has been helpful to many patients with their struggles related to their condition. A doctor who supports the use of medical marijuana stated that "The evidence is overwhelming that marijuana can relieve certain types of pain, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms caused by such illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, cancer and AIDS -- or by the harsh drugs sometimes used to treat them. And it can do so with remarkable safety. Indeed, marijuana is less toxic than many of the drugs that physicians prescribe every day." (Joycelyn Elders 1) This quote supports the use of medicinal marijuana for reliving patient’s symptoms in a safe way with lo...
To date, transmedia theory and criticism has focused its analysis on the genres of science fiction and fantasy. This is mainly due to the abundance of opportunity to expand and create narrative paths provided by the types of stories popular to the genre. Geoffrey Long, in his master’s thesis, highlights the importance of a rich world in transmedia narratives (2007, 28). Christy Dena also describes the process of unraveling parts of a larger narrative in each medium of a transmedia story (2010, 18). Jenkins illustrates an example of the Wizard of Oz and author L. Frank Baum declaring himself “the royal geographer of Oz” (2009) We see JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, George Luca...
In The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt you feel unattached and are constantly reminded that you are in fact watching a play, nothing else. Dürrenmatt constructs this play using Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, a twentieth-century theatrical movement that was a reaction against popular forms of theatre, Dürrenmatt uses epic theatre in his work, The Visit, because he wants his audience to analysis what is being said and done instead of what they see and hear. An intellectual audience member will make connections when watching an epic play.
In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray argues that we live in an age of electronic incubabula. Noting that it took fifty years after the invention of the printing press to establish the conventions of the printed book, she writes, "The garish videogames and tangled Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication" (28). Although I disagree in various ways with her vision of where electronic narrative is going, it does seem likely that in twenty years, or fifty, certain things will be obvious about electronic narrative that those of us who are working in the field today simply do not see. Alongside the obvious drawbacks--forget marble and gilded monuments, it would be nice for a work to outlast the average Yugo--are some advantages, not the least of which is what Michael Joyce calls "the momentary advantage of our awkwardness": we have an opportunity to see our interactions with electronic media before they become as transparent as our interactions with print media have become. The particular interaction I want to look at today is the interaction of technology and imagination. If computer media do nothing else, they surely offer the imagination new opportunities; indeed, the past ten years of electronic writing has been an era of extraordinary technical innovation. Yet this is also, again, an age of incubabula, of awkwardness. My question today is, what can we say about this awkwardness, insofar as it pertains to the interaction of technology and the imagination?
Applied Theatre work includes Theatre-in-Education, Community and Team-building, Conflict Resolution, and Political theatre, to name just a few of its uses. However, Christopher Balme states that “Grotowski define acting as a communicative process with spectators and not just as a production problem of the actor” (Balme, 2008: 25). Applied Theatre practices may adopt the following “theatrical transactions that involve participants in different participative relationships” such as Theatre for a community, Theatre with a community and Theatre by a community Prentki & Preston (2009: 10). Whereas, applied theatre one of its most major powers is that it gives voice to the voiceless and it is a theatre for, by, and with the people. However, Applied Theatre practitioners are devising educational and entertaining performances bringing personal stories to life and build
Imagine this following scene: You are sitting in a dark, fairly crowded large room. There are hundreds of other people, in hundreds of other seats surrounding you. In front of you, there is a large stage, with people acting out a play. Lights, music, and different sound effects set the mood of the play for you to understand more clearly what is going on. With these certain conventions, viewer can get a real grasp of a story in which several actors are trying to portray. However, it hasn’t always been this easy to enjoy a play in a theater. Theatre and plays go back as far as “b.c.” times.
Theatre as we know it now was born more than two thousand years ago and has gone through many streams until it reached the current modernity. Among these streams is the avant-garde theatre. This theatre achieved a break in the traditional theatre and became the forefront of a new experimental theatre. Therefore it is necessary to ask how this theatre started, what impact it had on society and if this type of theatre is still common in our modern era.
Theatre will always survive in our changing society. It provides us with a mirror of the society within which we live, and where conflicts we experience are acted out on stage before us. It provides us with characters with which we identify with. The audience observes the emotions and actions as they happen and share the experience with the characters in real time.
Theatre is something that brings people together; it needs and audience to exist unlike movies and television. For a performance to happen, anywhere from a hundred to a thousand or more people need to gather in one place for a few hours, and share together in witnessing a live event that may be beautiful, funny, moving, or thought-provoking. Each type can fade in and out of popularity but it is not foreseeable that live performance will ever really "die out". Even in a world where all narrative performances have migrated to video, some musician at some point may introduce a new element of theatricality into their show, or some standup comic will act out something for their routine, people will respond to it, and suddenly we 'll see Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Rogers and Hammerstein popping up all over the
A mere mention of the term theatre acts as a relief to many people. It is in this place that a m...