Memos From A Theatre Lab Spaces Relationships And Immersive Theatre

Drawing from Dinesh’s findings in Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does”, this practice-based-research project – second in an envisioned series of Immersive Theatre experiments in Dinesh’s theatre laboratory -- considers the potential impact of pre-existing relationships between actors, spectators, and performance spaces when using immersive theatrical aesthetics toward educational and/or socio-political objectives. Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships and Immersive Theatre explores the following questions: When audience members do not know the actors outside the milieu of a theatrical performance, does an immersive form hold different implications than if performers and spectators know each other in ‘real life’? When actors and spectators are strangers to each other, are performers more or less likely to judge the responses that are given to them within an immersive scenario? What kinds of immersive situations, especially in Applied Theatre interventions, might benefit from the presence or absence of a pre-existing relationship between performers, audience members, and the spaces in which these experiences occur? In describing the processes involved in: designing such an experiment, crafting the relevant immersive performances, and gathering/ analysing data from actors and spectators, this book puts forward strategies for students, researchers, and practitioners who seek to better understand the form of Immersive Theatre.

Drawing from Dinesh’s findings in Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does” and Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships, & Immersive Theatre, this practice-based-research project, the third in a series of Immersive Theatre experiments in Dinesh’s theatre laboratory, considers the impact of duration when using immersive theatrical aesthetics toward educational and/or socio-political objectives. Dinesh frames the third experiment in her New Mexican theatre laboratory by placing its data and analyses in conversation with Information for/from Outsiders: Chronicles from Kashmir: a twenty-four hour long immersive, theatrical experience that Dinesh has been developing with Kashmiri theatre artists since 2013. In doing so, Dinesh seeks to create ‘conceptual bridges': between practice and theory; between her experiments in New Mexico and the work that she does in Kashmir; between the generation of frameworks to develop Dinesh’s own repertoire as a practitioner-researcher, and the creation of shareable strategies that might be used by other Immersive Theatre scholars, artists, and students.

What does Immersive Theatre ‘do’? By contrasting two specific performances on the same theme – one an ‘immersive’ experience and the other a more conventional theatrical production – Nandita Dinesh explores the ways in which theatrical form impacts upon actors and audiences. An in-depth case study of her work Pinjare (Cages) sets out the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of her specific aesthetic framework. Memos from a Theatre Lab places Dinesh’s practical work within the context of existing analyses of Immersive Theatre, using this investigation to generate an underpinning theory of how Immersive Theatre works for its participants.

Drawing from Dinesh’s findings in Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does”, this practice-based-research project – second in an envisioned series of Immersive Theatre experiments in Dinesh’s theatre laboratory -- considers the potential impact of pre-existing relationships between actors, spectators, and performance spaces when using immersive theatrical aesthetics toward educational and/or socio-political objectives. Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships and Immersive Theatre explores the following questions: When audience members do not know the actors outside the milieu of a theatrical performance, does an immersive form hold different implications than if performers and spectators know each other in ‘real life’? When actors and spectators are strangers to each other, are performers more or less likely to judge the responses that are given to them within an immersive scenario? What kinds of immersive situations, especially in Applied Theatre interventions, might benefit from the presence or absence of a pre-existing relationship between performers, audience members, and the spaces in which these experiences occur? In describing the processes involved in: designing such an experiment, crafting the relevant immersive performances, and gathering/ analysing data from actors and spectators, this book puts forward strategies for students, researchers, and practitioners who seek to better understand the form of Immersive Theatre.

Aleph-naught is a performative text that creatively harnesses Dinesh's findings from three of her previous works: Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre "Does", Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships, & Immersive Theatre, and Memos from a Theatre Lab: Immersive Theatre & Time. As the latest endeavour in Dinesh's ongoing commitment to creating socially relevant, immersive, theatrical works, this book contains "A Play" and "A Plan" a script that can be staged; a plan for how to work with participants (performers and spectators) in the realisation of that script. By using one specific play to address larger questions around staging Immersive Theatre, Aleph-naught is a unique resource for practitioners and researchers who are committed to immersive forms of socially relevant theatre praxis.

 Immersive theater calls upon audience members to become participants, actors and “others.” It traditionally offers binary roles—that of oppressor or that of victim—and thereby stands the risk of simplifying complex social situations. Challenging such binaries, this book articulates theatrical “grey zones” when addressing juvenile detention, wartime interventions and immigration processes. It presents scripts and strategies for directors and playwrights who want to create theatrical environments that are immersive and pedagogical; aesthetically evocative and politically provocative; simple and complex.

This book investigates audience experience through the lens of sensory engagement in immersive, one-to-one performance. It presents a distinct, practice-based research (PBR) framework – a performance research ‘laboratory’ – designed to evaluate the effects on diverse audience experiences of two ‘sense-specific manipulations’: eye masks and touch. Through a qualitative analysis of responses from seventy-four individual audience participants, this book offers insight into how these popular ‘immersing’ strategies might be experienced. What do these strategies achieve? How do audience participants make sense of them? Do audience responses align with artistic intentions? And how does the PBR framework designed to address these questions influence the outcomes? Through an analysis of three sets of one-to-one performance experiments generating comparative data about the experience of sense-specific manipulation, this book proposes the utility of merging methodologies in artistic research with empirical audience research in theatre and performance studies. This study offers a new perspective on the value of sensory-focused, immersive, one-to-one experience as a means of resensitizing audience participants through performance.

Aleph-naught is a performative text that creatively harnesses Dinesh’s findings from three of her previous works: Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does”, Memos from a Theatre Lab: Spaces, Relationships, & Immersive Theatre, and Memos from a Theatre Lab: Immersive Theatre & Time. As the latest endeavour in Dinesh’s ongoing commitment to creating socially relevant, immersive, theatrical works, this book contains “A Play” and “A Plan”: a script that can be staged; a plan for how to work with participants (performers and spectators) in the realisation of that script. By using one specific play to address larger questions around staging Immersive Theatre, Aleph-naught is a unique resource for practitioners and researchers who are committed to immersive forms of socially relevant theatre praxis.