Audience Participation

Essays on Inclusion in Performance

Susan Kattwinkel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780313057977
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Scholarly work on the impact of an active audience on theatrical and dance performance is a relatively new phenomenon, one that until now has manifested itself largely in the form of scattered dialogue on the subject. Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance serves as a corrective to this. While the passive audience has long been acknowledged in works on response theory and audience studies for its contribution to the performance event, performance styles that use the audience as an active contributing creative force have been appended to the studies as merely variations on a theme. This anthology brings together essays on direct audience participation in the work of fourteen widely varied theatrical and dance artists, covering performance genres of the past and present, popular entertainment and high art. Its comprehensiveness and uniqueness make it an important contribution to the literature on theater and its many forms and facets.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Ethics of the Witness: The Participatory Dances of Cie Felix Ruckert Joshua Abrams
• 2 Reaction Tactics: Redefining Postmodern Spectator Response and Expectations Katherine Adamenko
• 3 Still Signaling through the Flames: The Living Theatre’s Use of Audience Participation in the 1990s David Callaghan
• 4 It Matters for whom You Dance: Audience Participation in Rasa Theory Uttara Asha Coorlawala
• 5 Audience Participation in the Eighteenth-Century London Theatre Judith W. Fisher
• 6 The Challenge of Participation: Audiences at Living Stage Theatre Company Susan C. Haedicke
• 7 Manipulation of the Mind: Fiction in the Performances of Penn and Teller Susan Kattwinkel
• 8 Looking at Looking (at Looking): Experiments in the Interrogation of Spectating Joanne Klein
• 9 The Audience in Cyberspace: Audience-Performer Interactivity in Online Performances Nina LeNoir
• 10 Once upon a Time: The Story of the Pantomime Audience Dawn Lewcock
• 11 Audience at Risk: Space and Spectators at Feminist Performance Judith Sebesta
• 12 “Walking in the Steps of Your Forefathers”: Locating the Actor and the Audience in Derry’s Siege Pageant Patrick Tuite
• 13 Community-Based Theatre: A Participatory Model for Social Transformation Mark S. Weinberg
• 14 The (Oc)cult of Personality: Initiating the Audience into The Edwardian Mysteries J. Lawton Winslade
• Index
• About the Authors