CKP Panel at Performance Studies International

SHIFT SUMMARY: Value and efficacy in the arts are challenged by an applied theatre model that stresses the aesthetic value of the neuro-divergent autistic imagination and seeks to derive mutual affect between performer and participant.

ABSTRACT: This proposal emerges from the AHRC funded project Imagining Autism led by the Centre for Cognition Kinesthetics and Performance (University of Kent) and addresses value and efficacy in the arts. It asks questions about the ‘value’ of a purely affective, aesthetic experience in relation to the ‘efficacy’ of applied theatre models.

An interdisciplinary team are investigating the autistic imagination via affect where performance creates conditions for constructing and changing experiences.   ‘Intermediality’ becomes the liminal space between realities, where performed experiences create an empathetic encounter both affective and ‘affecting’, a site ‘where felt emotion, memory, desire and understanding come together’ (Denzin 2003:23). 

The shift confronts the ethics, purposes and perceptions of applied theatre practice in health and educational contexts. Recent research by Simon Baron-Cohen (2007) foregrounds the importance of ‘systemising empathy’ in developing ‘interventions’ for autistic children. The Kent project develops affective interventions through the creation of immersive interactive environments, using a range of intermedial methods such as puppetry, light, sound, projection and live feed. A pilot project (Autumn 2009) confounded some of the myths of autism: participants engaged imaginatively and creatively, responding particularly flexibly to dramaturgical structures and developing their own personas within these frameworks. This has led both us and the health and educational professionals we are working with to re-evaluate perceptions of the autistic imagination. Moreover the children demonstrated an embodied and empathetic engagement in this dynamic process. This shift will draw on the Imagining Autism project, which began on October1st 2011, and create an immersive environment, taking delegates through it in small groups, exploring the  neuro-divergent imagination. It links to a panel discussion entitled ‘What Price Participation?: Agency, Ethics, Aesthetics and Impact in Participatory Performance’, with papers/input from Dr Nicola  Shaughnessy, Dr Melissa Trimingham, Prof. Robert Shaughnessy, Dr Rosemary Klich and Dr Pablo Pakula.

The environment holds up to 12 people, spending around 10/15 minutes in it. Documentation of a performance will be projected alongside the original puppets, masked figures and props, and performers will be on hand to guide delegates through the experience. 

REFERENCES

Baron-Cohen, S. (2007) ‘The empathising-systemising theory of autism: implications for education’ Tizard Learning Disability Review, 14 (3) 2009 Pier Professional

Denzin, N. (2003) Performance ethnography: critical pedagogy and the politics of culture Sage

Nicola Shaughnessy and Melissa Trimingham 

SUMMARY: This paper emerges from the AHRC funded project Imagining Autism led by the Centre for Cognition Kinesthetics and Performance (University of Kent) and addresses value and efficacy in the arts. It asks questions about the ‘value’ of a purely affective, aesthetic experience in relation to the ‘efficacy’ of applied theatre models.

ABSTRACT: This paper emerges from the AHRC funded project Imagining Autism and addresses value and  efficacy in the  arts. It questions the ‘value’of a purely affective, aesthetic experience in relation to the ‘efficacy’ of applied theatre models.

An interdisciplinary team are investigating the autistic imagination via ‘affect’ where performance creates conditions for constructing and changing experiences. ‘Intermediality’ becomes the liminal space between realities, where performed experiences create an empathetic encounter both ‘affective’ and ‘affecting’, a  site ‘where felt emotion, memory, desire and understanding  come together’ (Denzin 2003:23). The interactive and participatory experience we set up for the autistic children is one that emerges from its materiality: the cloth walls of the environment, the leaves underfoot, the puppets the children can touch, pick up and work, the masked figures presenting a ‘material’ (and safe?) unchanging face, the wind, the sounds and the smells. One of the key questions emerging from this research is not only how this ‘material’ approach ‘affects’ but why it is  affective. Why should materiality promote ‘affect’?  How does materiality in this performance work? From Brentano’s research in the mid-nineteenth century on intentionality, early phenomenology emerged and later the embodied theory of Merleau-Ponty. The material world and the intentionality of the mind are key to these theories. Attempting to develop and nurture the embodied relationship of these children to the material world brings about the possibility of  change: and the ‘value’ of such  change may not so much be the ability to enter Tesco’s without  fear or participate in the weekly shopping (valuable as these are) but a subtle shift in their  relationship to the material world. By entering a liminal space where we move our experience of the sensory world closer to theirs, they in turn move closer to our experience of the world. The paper speculates on the nature of that subtle shift, gleaned from participation, immersion in sensory stimuli, and removed from fear, anxiety and isolation.

Robert Shaughnessy

SUMMARY: Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of the  ‘emancipated spectator’, this paper identifies some of the key concerns that arise from the conception of interactivity as a mode of political intervention, and interrogates the current preoccupation with Shakespearean immersiveness by focusing on the example of the (reconstructed) Shakespeare’s Globe.

ABSTRACT: Three terms that have enjoyed some currency in performance and performance studies in recent times: the interactive, the participatory, and the immersive.  Although they are not exact synonyms, they have been embraced by, and applied to, a variety of contemporary approaches to theatre-making and to theatre works themselves, which in recent years have increasingly included the plays of Shakespeare. Often at stake in this events are strong convictions about the nature of the theatregoing experience, and about how it differs from – some might say improves upon or even discredits – what is assumed to be the ‘conventional’, or at least dominant, mode of theatrical delivery, which, for the sake of brevity today, is that of the immobile, seated and (it is assumed, though in my view mistakenly) passive spectator, who is positioned as the consumer of a packaged and predetermined spectacle from which she is distanced and detached, and in which he is powerless to intervene. Drawing upon Jacques Rancière’s notion of the  ‘emancipated spectator’, this paper starts by identifying some of the key concerns that arise from the conception of interactivity as a mode of political intervention, and interrogates the current preoccupation with Shakespearean immersiveness by focusing on the example of the (reconstructed) Shakespeare’s Globe. As an instance of radical site-specificity that, however much it has encouraged a rethinking of performer and spectator behaviour, it is implicated within a particularly reductive form of literalism, this project yields some perhaps unexpected connections between reconstructed early modern performance and some current forms of contemporary environmental, site-specific and immersive theatre. Involved in these transactions are ethical as well as aesthetic matters of affect and effect, and the paper concludes by posing the question: what is Shakespeare good for? 

Rosie Klich and Pablo Arenillas-Pakula

SUMMARY: Using as case studies the work of Pablo Pakula’s company Accidental Collective, a Kent-based participatory performance company, and Richard Schechner’s Imagining ‘O’, a this paper explores valences of the term interactivity in relation to our own performance practice and identifies specific modes of interactivity manifesting across the field of participatory theatre.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores various valences of the term interactivity in relation to our own performance practice and identifies specific modes and means of interactivity manifesting across the field of participatory theatre. Interactivity offers the audience the power not only to interpret the artwork but, individually or collectively, to change, navigate, negotiate and shape the work. Using as case studies the work of Pablo Pakula’s company Accidental Collective, a Kent-based participatory performance company, and Richard Schechner’s Imagining ‘O’, a site-specific ‘dispersed’ performance created with staff and students at the University of Kent, we will determine how different manifestations of interactivity, such as navigation, response-based interactivity, and complex interactivity, each set up a different relationship between the ‘user’ and the ‘medium’ and pose different ethical considerations. 

Complex interaction requires the real-time and mutual activity of two or more agents. Within the relationship, both parties have agency and the ability to assert creative intelligence. This connection, between participant, performer and the performance, raises certain ethical and practical complications that require negotiation. Where do the boundaries lie between the performer’s and the audience’s responsibilities for the success of the performance? This paper will draw ideas from game theory and systems theory, and current discourse regarding interactive storytelling and play, to assist in delineating the relationship between participant and performance in interactive work. We will also suggest that such works compose a complex system, a system composed of interconnected parts that, when working together, exhibit properties that are more than the sum of its parts. Pablo will present examples of interactive practice from his work with Accidental Collective and explain the process of facilitating audience participation in his work. Finally, we will discuss the ethical dimensions of structuring audience interaction drawing from current discourse in theatre studies and education, and will reflect on our own experience of negotiating the ethics of audience participation.