The area of study spans the last two centuries. It will reflect upon how music theatre art can become a catalyst for opening accessibility to work previously viewed as ‘high art’. This dissertation will argue that there is significance for an immersive music theatre synthesis which is reflected through ticket sales and performances produced in Britain. The dissertation will reference the work of Living Structures, Smoosh & Smoosh and Heiner Goebbels with a heavy emphasis on exploring the music used within selected pieces of work. It will address the issues of intermediality and immersive performance art and how soundscapes can be created to fully involve audiences in work which is relevant to the political and cultural climate of the twenty-first century. It aims to discover how many people attend performances such as those known as ‘immersive’ (to completely surround or fully involve an audience) or ‘site-specific’ (performance work created specifically for a space or place). This dissertation questions how contemporary theatre companies create dynamic and stimulating performance works for today’s audiences. The results from these studies are discussed and summarised. Primary research came from an online survey held from July to August of 2017 to discover the attitudes towards the art form.
Secondary research is in the form of a comprehensive literature review which analyses previous writing and journals published on intermediality and immersive theatre. The research for this dissertation is twofold. Immersive theatre is an exciting and dynamic art form which emerged as a popular new theatre practice in 1980s, stemming from the combination of installation art, physical and visual theatre practices (Machon, 2013: xv).
Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, the article proposes that a sleep cultures approach to theatrical performance might challenge the dichotomy between active and sleepy spectatorship, advocating for a ‘sleeping’ spectator, reclaiming sleep from passivity and framing it as political action performed over a long duration. The article also looks beyond the performance itself to trace neoliberal discourses in the production’s online fan communities and potential labor law violations.
#Broadway show sleep no more free#
Sleep No More encourages its spectators to have embodied experiences of the sleeplessness brought about by defining characteristics of neoliberal life, including the deregulation of human biological patterns, the interweaving of ‘real’ life with virtual technology and the experience of intimate relationships as frustrated by a free market logic of scarcity. The article conceives of Sleep No More’s version of neoliberal spectatorship as sleepless spectatorship, modeled on Macbeth’s own insomniac characters, reading Sleep No More’s form of spectatorship in conversation with what Simon Williams terms ‘sleep cultures’ research, including Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. This promotion of spectatorial choice has drawn critiques from scholars such as Adam Alston, Jen Harvie and Keren Zaiontz for its enthusiastic complicity in neoliberal modes of consumption and labor. Sleep No More’s immersive adaptation of Macbeth has attracted scholarly attention for its insight into spectatorial desires for mobility and interaction.
As such, an interactive performance like SLEEP NO MORE points to the need for us to reconsider the boundaries between “game playing” and “play going” in the digital age. SLEEP NO MORE finds its success with audiences searching for new and innovative ways to engage with Shakespeare, live performance, and one another. The commercial and critical success of Punchdrunk’s Macbeth adaptation tells us contemporary audiences, steeped in digital technology, desire a participatory play-going experience as well. In so doing, the audience becomes invested in the game/play by physically participating in the act of storytelling and meaning making. Only through experiencing and interacting with the “in-game” environment does the audience come to create meaning and construct the play (or game’s) narrative. Like e a video game, the success of SLEEP NO MORE is contingent upon the interaction between the playgoer and the multi-layered playing space. Punchdrunk's work appeals to a generation of audiences raised on interactive, immersive, story-based video games in which the choices one makes affect the attributes of one’s character and the outcome of the story itself. In this chapter, I argue the popularity of Punchdrunk's SLEEP NO MORE stems from the success of a similar phenomenon: dynamic story-based video games.
0 kommentar(er)
