Research Posters

Alongside our packed programme of paper & performance presentations, we also featured a selection of research posters.  Follow the links below to view posters in full:

Welcome

This conference emerged from a shared interest in the role that performance can play both in reflecting aspects of its historical and cultural moment, and in interrogating that same moment. We were fascinated by the developments in interactive and participatory modes of performance over the past decade or so, and in the ways that these theatrical approaches have overflowed into a broader set of entertainment industries, centred on the commodification of ‘immersive experiences’. As Mauyra Wickstrom observes, “it seems that moving on a spectrum between the made up and the real is an important source of pleasure in postmodern culture” (2006: 2), and we note the array of artists and companies responding to audiences’ desires for live ‘experiences’, on this spectrum between the made up and the real.

Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) – a case study in networked participation, consumption and value formation

Paula Crutchlow (independent artist and University of Exeter)

New paradigms of political activism involve the ‘creative appropriation, creation, and enactment of culture, along with large doses of humor and creativity’ to create a form of political poetics (Sandlin and Milam, 2008, p. 338). Using porous activities based around participation, dialogue and interaction, these activisms take full advantage of digital cultures to intervene and resist at points of potential, assumption and consumption creating actions that condense across shifting and mutating spaces of encounter (Verson, 2007, p. 173). Often employing artistic processes and methods, these social works are resistant to closure through their siting, time-based nature and emotional and affective relations (Jackson, 2011), and as such are ‘site(s) where ‘new multi- dimensional knowledge and identities are constantly in the process of being formed’ (Rogoff, 2000, p. 20).

Participating Across Borders: The agency and labour of the transnational musical theatre fan

Dr Laura MacDonald & Dr Jonathan Evans (University of Portsmouth)

Musical theatre producers may facilitate and profit from the formal, global circulation of musicals as commodities, but more informal circulation by active musical consumers takes place as fans claim performers and productions as their own. In this paper we focus on how fans negotiate linguistic and cultural difference in their dealings with musicals produced in a language or culture not their own.

PERFORMAPEDIA: Audience-as-performer: identities, roles and experience as archive

Amitesh Grover (National School of Drama, Delhi).

With contributions from Shaunak Sen and Frank Oberhausser.

Immersive Theatre is no longer an inviting term; it cannot continue to describe the phenomenon of contemporary performance today. In addition to creating realms of experience not available in other kinds of work, immersion does little to ‘unconceal’ the strife in the open centre of (Heideggerian) truth. How do we rescue the registers of experience and reflection emerging from works that employ ‘participation’, ‘play’, and/or ‘action’, from the operative vocabulary of Immersive Theatre?

Hard Labour and Punitive Welfare: Re-presenting the Unemployed Body at Work

Sarah Elizabeth Bartley (Queen Mary University London)

This paper aims to address the performance of labour in participatory arts projects and consider the curious implications for such activity in framing perceptions of the unemployed participant. In the current Conservative context of austerity and welfare cuts, which increasingly demands that claimants ‘work for their benefits’, I propose the participatory arts project’s potential as an aesthetic apparatus to sate public desire to bear witness to the unemployed citizen’s labour. What does this mean for participatory practice, is it complicit in demanding the labour of the unemployed?

Politics and Participation in Massive Owl’s We Used To Wait

Jennifer Duffy (Northumbria University)

The performance, We Used To Wait (2013) by theatre company, Massive Owl is an attempt to create a space, through live performance, for audiences to think about the value of live, human interaction in an increasingly digital world. The performance was collaboratively devised by the company and funded by Arts Council England (ACE). This paper, written by company member, Jenny, will examine the use of participation as a performance strategy within the work and its relationship to its politics. The paper will highlight two moments of participation from audience members during two different performances of We Used To Wait, a moment of unexpected physical participation and a refusal to participate. Through critically analysing these moments, the potentials and limitations of using participation as a performance strategy and the implications of this on understanding the broader politics of the work, both in and outside of the performance space, will be discussed. The paper will also highlight and discuss the tension between understandings and uses of the term participation from within ACE and cultural policy discourses and those from within the company. The paper is based on Jenny’s practice-led PhD research into notions of participation and collaboration within contemporary performance practice.

An examination of interactivity and participation in Street Arts in relation to current strategies of public Arts funding

James Macpherson (Edgehill University)

This paper aims to give a critically and professionally informed view of the place of participatory practices in street arts within public funding ecologies in the UK. The installation Bees: the Colony is offered as a practical embodiment of the tensions at work in the creation of publically funded contemporary interactive work.

Interactivity and participation have historically been integral to street arts but in recent years have been monetised through an increasingly instrumentalist cultural policy. Whilst the sector has clearly profited from the investment, De Roeper states “Government funding bodies…often have a cultural and social agenda that is politically mediated” (2008: 53). The current effect of this in the subsidised sector is to value the forms that supply any arts experiences to audiences in areas of low engagement “precisely for their capacity to deliver on this non-aesthetic, non-artistic level” (Belfiore, 2010: 350).

The paper uses published literature, interview material and documentation of the case study, an interactive installation/performance: Bees: the Colony. This professional project, which was funded by ACE and toured extensively to outdoor festivals in 2014/15 to audiences in excess of 50,000, is available for delegates to experience. The paper considers the pressures exerted on artists through funding structures and how these might be reframing relationships between artists and participants/audiences to prioritize ‘tick box’ statistical contact with creativity through engagement.  How might both artists and funding bodies mitigate the effects of this “extrinsic motivation” to avoid it “crowding out” (Frey, 2012: 27- 34) artistic integrity in these precarious times?

Sighted (2009) a dance performance installation: discussion of audience behaviour and reflections

Angela Woodhouse & Caroline Broadhead (Middlesex University & Central St Martins)

How do we know what an audience feels about a performance? How does that information feed back into the work?

This paper will examine these questions drawing upon 80 performances of Sighted, a 16-minute performance installation. It was first performed at The Place, London and most recently in 2015 for Collect Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery. Other venues have included Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Royal Opera House. It is a collaborative, innovative work bringing together movement and design, and highlighting the relationship between performer and audience in a direct and fresh way.

Sighted is an intimate performance concerned with looking and seeing. The solo dancer moves around a carpet of mirror strips occupied by a standing audience of 15 to 18 people. The audience’s attention is drawn to an acute awareness of place and the present moment, a feeling of uncertainty, participation, duality and wonder. There is a balance between a sense of isolation and a sense of community, sound and silence, movement and stillness. Sighted invites sensitivity to temperature, touch, breath, physical adjustments, shifting focus, and the texture of materials.

An important part of the project has been the comments books, where we have collected immediate and intuitive reactions of individuals. These, together with documentation of the dancers’ responses to different settings and audiences form the basis of this research into the impact of place and context on the actions of and in turn experience for viewers.

Encounter Becoming: Using the Performing Object to Challenge Identity

Josiah Pearsall (University of Exeter)

This presentation, which comprises a paper and a performance, challenges the very notion of interaction by troubling the traditional ontological model of pre-existing subjects which interact. Through theatrical exploration in physical performance and puppetry, and through simultaneous philosophical questioning, I propose an alternative model where interaction happens to and engenders subjects. I initially seek, following Bruno Latour’s multiplication of agents, to encounter the ‘life’ of everyday objects without imposing anthropomorphic ideas of character, mind, or subject on them. The resulting piece, in which dramatic episodes arise out of the interaction between human and non-human object, resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of community and ex-position, as well as Deleuze’s understanding of immanence. The performance piece explores the possibility of immanent agency that does not reside in a pre-formed subject. The paper expands on this way of working and the discoveries made through practice. What implications might this method of engaging with partners have for communities and identity?

While not specifically in the tradition of interactive theatre as it is commonly viewed, this work challenges essentialist notions of identity and existence. The practical side of this presentation both stems from and embodies a new understanding of the very nature of interaction. The paper makes more explicit the ontological shift from beings or ‘things’ towards the space between or the movement between. In seeking to preserve and even amplify the ‘other-ness’ of the Other, this work advocates, along with Nancy, the necessity of difference and recognizing difference. Interaction is vital for existence, not only because it heightens our qualities but because interaction is what allows existence to emerge.