Visceral Dramaturgies: Curating Sensation in Immersive Art

This article examines audience engagement in immersive, headphone and headset enabled performances looking specifically at the audience member’s experience of their own interoceptive processing. Interoception, the appraisal of one’s internal systems, is a key modality through which such artworks perform. Interoception includes two forms of perception: proprioception (involving signals from the skin and musculoskeletal system) and visceroception (involving signals from the internal organs such as heart rate, breath and digestions) (Pollatos et al, 2016), and interoception has been has been identified as critical in one’s sense of embodiment and wellbeing (Farb and Daubenmier, 2015). Through the use of binaural recording, headphones, and three-dimensional film, as well as a visceral dramaturgy of sound, text, image and narration techniques, artists are able to target an audience member’s awareness of interoceptive sensation. The article addresses three key examples: headphone theatre production Séance (2017) by Glen Neith and David Rosenberg; Whist (2017), an AR/VR and dance work by company AØE, and; Daphne in Three Movements (2017), an ongoing practice-as-research project combining videography, sound design and physical theatre. Following the consideration of how these productions stimulate interoceptive awareness, conclusions will be drawn about the reliance of these works on a visceral dramaturgy that targets the audience’s somatosensory system. Giving consideration to the cultural context of ‘hyperaesthesia’ and offering comparison between headphone theatre and practices such as ASMR, the article will examine how the director/designer of such performances functions as a curator of sensation, building a performance text that triggers sensory effects as a means of developing texture, theme and affect

Fleshing Out: Intermedial Bodies and Dancers-in-Code

Drawing on new media theory, particularly on Mark Hansen’s understanding of the ‘body-in-code’, this article explores the nature of the performing body as unfixed, in process and intrinsically intermedial. Both Wayne McGregor/Random Dance’s Undance and Klaus Obermaier’s Rites explore the very ontology of dance, the material body, in its relationship to the media technologies through which it is remediated, and affirm its rematerialisation. When viewed through a lens of new media theory, applications of new technologies onstage can be recognized as utilizing intermedial strategies to showcase the interconnection of human embodiment and media technology. The concept of intermediality and an understanding of the ‘intermedial body’ avoid reinforcing the opposition of disembodied information and material corporeality. Rather than suggesting the disappearance or undoing of the body, these works reposition the human body as active in the framing and function of new media technologies

Freelancers in the Dark: The Economic, Cultural, and Social Impact of Covid-19 on UK Theatre Workers Final Report

This report captures an extraordinary moment in time for the UK theatre industry. However, as we discovered, it also reveals the pre-existing issues found within the industry that left the UK theatre sector vulnerable to devastating consequences for theatre workers lives and livelihoods during Covid-19. As we have shown, those consequences greatly impacted all areas of the UK theatre industry and its freelance theatre workforce. When this project was conceived in the Spring of 2020, we had no idea that by March 2022, we would still be suffering sector uncertainty caused by wave after wave of Covid-19 variants. This report is an archive of sorts, mapping out the evolution of UK freelance theatre workers’ experiences over a 2-year period beginning in February 2020. Experiences of volatility, struggle, opportunity, resilience, community, activism, and creativity are all to be found in the lived realities of the freelance theatre workforce documented in these pages. In the end, this is not solely a research study, but a co-created testament of how the pandemic shone a light on the hopes and fears of the theatre workforce (both freelance and organisations) at a moment in time where radical change was seen as possible in the midst of, arguably, the most long-term crisis to hit the UK theatre industry since the English Civil War in the 17th century. Through the honesty and generosity of our research participants, we were able to offer a reflection and analysis of all that makes the UK theatre industry to me, and the freelancers who occupy 88% of its workforce, endless sources of resilience, creative thinking, and collective support

Editorial introduction

This article frames the journal special issue by offering a broad reflection on the historical development of ideas that have informed debates concerning intermediality and its pedagogical contexts. It opens with a brief articulation of media and intermedial theory to inform the debate. The challenges of contemporary media hybridity are then set within an historical context by tracing the origins of current (perceived) knowledge dichotomies and hierarchies into the philosophical canons of western antiquity. In examining distinctions between the different types of knowledge and expression that form the constituent parts of contemporary intermedial theatres, the article considers philosophical debates, traces historical trajectories and probes social dynamics from Aristotle to the present. Moving on to the current historical and social context of intermedial practice and pedagogy, the article examines specific challenges and opportunities that emerge from our own intermedial age. This multifaceted and trans-historical approach leads the authors to suggest that old hierarchical and divisional structures impact upon contemporary practices, affecting how those are perceived, received and valued

Performing Poetry and the Postnarrative Text in the Theatre of New Media

This article presents a narratological study of interactive multimedia performance, arguing that the text in such works reflects a postnarrative perspective. In Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007-present) and David Pledger and Jeffrey Shaw’s Eavesdrop (2004 -5) the audience’s co-creation of the text reveals a transition away from the binary of narrative and non-narrative, of narrative and database, and into the field of postnarrativity. When the grand design of an overarching narrative has been rejected, and focus placed on the small intricacies, relations and nuances of different elements, meaning is not given but is developed, and performed, through the accumulation of layered effects. Using theories of non-traditional narrative and new media studies and referring to theorists such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Lev Manovich, this exploration maps the characteristics of the postnarrative encounter within interactive multimedia performance and argues that the postnarrative text can be best accessed and examined through the analytical tools of poetry that look to understand the effects of rhythm and resonance. Narrative construction reflects the cultural paradigm in which it is created, and connections are made here between the dynamism of postnarrative environments in new media performance, and contemporary cultural perceptions as influenced by the ubiquity of computational technologies