Damocles and the Plucked: Audience Participation and Risk in Half Cut

This article looks to identify a political mode of audience engagement in the ‘one-on-one’ performance, Half Cut. In response to recent economic turbulence in the UK and abroad, I draw on Hans-Thies Lehmann’s appeal for an ‘aesthetics of risk’ in the theatre: an aesthetics which I suggest might begin at the level of audience reception. This marks a turn away from the more prevalent application of risk to artistic production. Couched in the sociological context of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’, I compare risk-taking in contemporary financial markets with the apparently trivial and seemingly ‘risky’ act of paying to pluck a single hair from another’s body as a participant in Half Cut. I consider how affective responses such as embarrassment and awkwardness in one-on-one theatre (which might be felt as ‘risks’) function either as something masochistically consumed within the experience industry, or as positive values subversively premised on loss – such as loss of dignity and self-assuredness – provided that risk is not something passively submitted to, but actively committed to. The argument centres on an economically defined power dynamic operating between performer and participant, paying close attention to how the successful operation of this dynamic within the aesthetic space of Half Cut might lift an otherwise fetishised relationship into something felt through affectation. I suggest that a triadic relationship between risk, agency and responsibility – which is perhaps broken in financial markets – is forged through a ‘dialogic intimacy’ between performer and participant, opening space for a radical engagement with risk beginning at the level of an existential queasiness

Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, agency and responsibility in immersive theatre

This article identifies a value set shared between the neoliberal ethos and modes of audience participation frequently promoted in immersive theatre: values such as risk-taking, individual freedoms and personal responsibility. The promotion of self-made opportunity, premised either on opportunistic risk-taking, or the savvy attitude that comes with experience and familiarity with immersive theatre participation, will be addressed as valorising another shared value: entrepreneurialism. A participatory mode will be introduced that I call ‘entrepreneurial participation’: a kind of audience participation privileged in much immersive theatre performance identifying the enactment of neoliberal value. While entrepreneurial participation may be deliberately deployed by audiences as a participatory tactic, it will be argued that this particular participatory mode is frequently expected of audiences, or at least privileged as a means of engaging with performance. Work by the British immersive theatre company Punchdrunk will be taken as a means of illustrating this suggestion, particularly The Masque of the Red Death (2007). The article begins with a definition of immersive theatre that focuses on the figuring of participating audiences, paying particular attention to the relativity of participatory freedoms and the centrality of experience production. Hedonistic and narcissistic experiences will pull focus and will be approached as a possible reason behind immersive theatre's susceptibility to absorption within the experience industry and co-optation by innovative marketers. The article then establishes a set of shared values between the neoliberal ethos and audience participation in The Masque of the Red Death. Risk perception research, especially that arising from the Oregon Group and Stephen Lyng, will be touched on as a means of introducing some political considerations arising from the notion of entrepreneurial participation. A more optimistic, but ultimately sobering set of responses will be offered in conclusion

‘Burn the witch’: Decadence and the occult in contemporary feminist performance

This article introduces and theorises ‘decadence’ as a key feature of Lauren Barri Holstein’s performance Notorious (2017). The decadence of Holstein’s work is approached in light of two main considerations: the spectacular presentation of witchcraft as an occult practice, and what Holstein ‘does’ with the staging of witches and witchcraft. Situated in light of performances associated with the neo-occult revival (Ivy Monteiro and Jex Blackmore), and a recent strand of feminist performance that revels in an aesthetics of trash, mess and excess (Ann Liv Young and Lucy McCormick), the article offers a close critical analysis of Notorious as a work that addresses and seeks to subvert gendered inequalities and exclusions in twenty-first century capitalism. I argue that Holstein’s over-identification with exertion and exhaustion as much as the subversive potentialities of witchcraft result in a decadent aesthetic, that her staging of the witch as a persecuted but powerful emblem of the occult sheds valuable light on the aesthetics and politics of decadence in performance, and that the subversive qualities of decadence emerge particularly strongly in its ‘doing’ as an embodied and enacted practice

Review: Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 31 August 2018 – 6 January 2019

‘Could you stab the image of a loved one?’ This is one of six questions posed by Sophie Page and Marina Wallace, the two lead curators of Spellbound: Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, intended to prompt visitors to ‘explore the place of magical thinking in our lives, and to connect this to magical thinking in the past’. In drawing an emotive correspondence between a person and a surrogate, it is a question that strikes at the heart of one of the exhibition’s key aims, an aim shared with the Leverhulme-funded project that enabled it: to historicize identity and subjectivity in light of emotional experience and supernatural belief.

Funding, Product Placement and Drunkenness in Punchdrunk's The Black Diamond.

This article responds to Stella Artois Black’s recent hiring of Punchdrunk members for their ‘immersive’ theatre marketing venture The Black Diamond (Scene 1). What happens to immersive theatre when product placement enters its world? And what happens to the product having entered the world of immersive theatre? These questions are addressed in relation to Arts Council England funding policy and Punchdrunk’s award of a significant rise in ACE funding. Balancing ACE’s framework for ‘sustainable’ art against the threat of ‘selling out’ to commercial interests, a critical approach is proposed that addresses how audiences might assume partial responsibility for recognising and responding to the control of art production at the institutional level. With tongue only half in cheek, drunkenness is explored in relation to product placement as a means to this end

Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion

Immersive theatre makers often go to great lengths to configure and control each aspect and detail of an immersive theatre environment; but what happens when an audience member breaches its borders, while remaining unaware of their transgression? This article explores how the coherence of an immersive theatre aesthetic is not necessarily threatened by acts of ‘errant immersion’, in which the audience strays off an immersive map designed and intended for them. The errantly immersed spectator accepts but accidentally takes too far an invitation to explore, perceiving and folding a range of aesthetic stimuli that are unintended by a designer into their immersive experience of a theatre event. Drawing on studies of immersion, failure and urban dramaturgy in recent theatre and performance discourse, and reflecting on anecdotal experiences of errant immersion in work by dreamthinkspeak and Coney, the article reflects on the creative and constitutive role played by audiences in immersive theatre aesthetics, and assesses the currency of the immersive theatre neologism through an address of its core subject: the audience

Funding, Product Placement and Drunkenness in Punchdrunk's The Black Diamond

This article responds to Stella Artois Black's recent hiring of Punchdrunk members for their 'immersive' theatre-marketing venture The Black Diamond (Scene 1). What happens to immersive theatre when product placement enters its world? And what happens to the product, having entered the world of immersive theatre? These questions are addressed in relation to Arts Council England funding policy and Punchdrunk's award of a significant rise in ACE funding. Balancing ACE's framework for 'sustainable' art against the threat of 'selling out' to commercial interests, a critical approach is proposed that addresses how audiences might assume partial responsibility for recognizing and responding to the control of art production at the institutional level. With tongue only half in cheek, drunkenness is explored in relation to product placement as a means to this end

Decadent scenography: Angel Rose Denman, Hollywood Goth

This article considers how decadence manifests and takes on meaning and significance in artistic practice today by focusing on the scenographic work of the Anglo-American artist Angel Rose Denman. Denman’s scenographies are informed by decadent style as it emerged in Europe during the fin de siècle, when decadence was associated with decay, obsolescence, and the refinement of that which others might find distasteful. However, she also draws inspiration from a broader range of genres and personalities from the twentieth century including disco, divas, goth subculture, and kitsch. Where decadence at the dawn of modernity was a reaction to instrumentalism in capitalist industry and the bourgeois tastes that emerged from its ascendancy, it is stagnating economic growth and productivity in postindustrial societies that contextualize decadence today, alongside changing attitudes toward gender and sexuality and the progress that these attitudes are understood to represent. This demands a shift in how we identify decadence if it is to be at all legible in a twenty-first-century context. The politics of Denman’s “decadent scenography” in two of her films – The Green Carnation (2012) and The Rose (2014) – is rooted not in the unconventional bodies and things found in the environments she crafts, but their arrangement. Her practice disturbs binaries that underpin hierarchies of taste and value including function and filigree, productivity and lethargy, essence and pose, and newness and antiquation. Ultimately, I find value in its lack of fit in a twenty-first century context, both “of” its time and a time long past, and in how Denman’s decadent scenographies disorient the regulation of gender, sexuality, and taste