Does immersive theatre model a particular kind of politics, or a particular kind of audience? What’s involved in the production and consumption of immersive theatre aesthetics? Is a productive audience always an empowered audience? And do the terms of an audience’s empowerment stand up to political scrutiny?
Lepecki surveys a decade of experimental choreography to uncover the dual meaning of ‘performance’ in the twenty-first century: not just an aesthetic category, but a mode of political power. He demonstrates the enduring ability of performance to critique and subvert this power, examining this relationship through five ‘singularities’ in contemporary dance: thingness, animality, persistence, darkness, and solidity.
British Library Sound Archive recording and documentation of the “Performance Matters” events, 30 April 2010. A Play For Offstage Voices is a score composed entirely of lines written to be spoken from off stage. Voices authored by well-known writers to call, shout, cry and exclaim from somewhere, above and within have been collected and choreographed into an ‘event score’ in which voices such as Beckett’s V, Lorca’s Voz and Stoppard’s voice (in the darkness) encounter each other in the marked off space they share. Also see ref. D1920; D1922-3 and D1316-D1319.