Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance

(Hardback)

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Scholarly work on the impact of an active audience on theatrical and dance performance is a relatively new phenomenon, one that until now has manifested itself largely in the form of scattered dialogue on the subject. Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance serves as a corrective to this. While the passive audience has long been acknowledged in works on response theory and audience studies for its contribution to the performance event, performance styles that use the audience as an active contributing creative force have been appended to the studies as merely variations on a theme. This anthology brings together essays on direct audience participation in the work of fourteen widely varied theatrical and dance artists, covering performance genres of the past and present, popular entertainment and high art. Its comprehensiveness and uniqueness make it an important contribution to the literature on theater and its many forms and facets.

Reviews

Bringing together a range of diverse essays on a comparatively new field of study, Kattwinkel explores the phenomenon of the active (not passive) spectator and those styles of drama and dance aimed at engaging the audience directly in the theatrical event.Uniformly well written, the essays focus on various periods and concepts including kinespeak, practices of looking, feminist performance, the audience in cyberspace, English pantomime, 18th-century British theater, Rasa, and artists and groups like Cie Felix Ruckert, Penn and Teller, The Living Theatre, the Living Stage Theatre, and the Crimson Players. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, scholars, and performance professionals. * Choice *
[V]aluable addition to our knowledge and understanding of theatre audiences. * Participation *
storytellers in need of material specifically related to holidays should find sufficient fodder here to warrant purchase. * School Library Journal *

Author Bio

SUSAN KATTWINKEL is an Assistant Professor of Theater at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. She is active in several national theatrical organizations, most notably the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and the Southeastern Theatre Conference. She is the author of Tony Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage (Greenwood, 1998).