“Upsurges of the Real” for a general audience
This month I’ve had two (and a half) opportunities to write and speak about theatres of the real for general audience. In early January, I had a piece published in […]
Imagining a crowdsourced theatre
I started reading The World is Flat 3.0 by Thomas Friedman because I was looking for a popular non-fiction big ideas book. I’m a geek and I love that kind of […]
Partici…(“Say it!”)…pation
Throwing toast, snapping rubber gloves, shouting “Borrr-ing!” and doing the Time Warp. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic of audience participation. First produced as a live stage […]
Audience as citizen? (Part 1)
In a chapter in The Politics of Decentralisation, called “Citizen Participation: Theory and Practice,” the authors make the point that not only should local authorities be concerned with improving the […]
Play as audience-led performance
A seminal theory of participation that persists in its influence is Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation. From an article of the same name published in 1969 in the Journal […]
Looking at theatre through the lens of theatre (?!)
In the Introduction to Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship¹, author Claire Bishop is working through defining the terms of her landmark study of interactive, relational, socially-turned […]
Where is real?
As part of an opening exercise in a recent dramatic theory class, my students were asked to respond with coloured Sharpies to a variety of prompts scattered on chart paper […]
Radio silence and news about Insecurity
I am astonished to see that the last post here is from January 2017. Fair enough I suppose given what has been happening with this “new” research project since then. […]
Theatre of the Real in the age of post-reality
Since the middle of November I have been working through my reading list for this project with a funny feeling in my middle. Here’s the thing: The central premise of […]
The Thing that Doesn’t Fit
During my PhD studies at the University of Toronto, I had the great privilege of having for my supervisor Shakespearean scholar par excellence Alexander (Sandy) Leggatt. This was back when […]
Upsurges of the Real: a performance research blog 