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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.
List of contents
Part I: Theorizing, Practising, Framing 1. Setting the Stage 2. Sensitizing Audience Participants (Performance Case Studies) 3. Conceptualizing (the) Dramaturgical Research(er) Part II: Measuring And Evaluating 'Audience Experience' 4. Designing the Performance Research Laboratory 5. Understanding the Impact of Eye Masks 6. Understanding the Impact of Touch 7. Conclusion
About the author
Natalia Esling is an independent scholar who has done postdoctoral research in Theatre Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Summary
This book investigates audience experience through the lens of sensory engagement in immersive, one-to-one performance.
