Contemporary Ambulatory Theatre and Audience Agency explores recent productions that encourage individual audience members to move through large, public spaces in new ways, developing a sense of ambulatory agency as they explore their theatrical environments. It focuses on four objects of study: Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth wrapped in the aesthetic of Alfred Hitchcock films and staged for mask-wearing audiences inside three New York warehouse spaces; Blast Theory’s A Machine To See With, which guides audiences through a neighborhood on a supposed bank heist using their mobile phones and has been restaged in nine different cities; Street Corner Society’s Subway Orpheus, a loose adaptation of Ovid’s mythic story in which audience members travel between stations on Boston’s MBTA system; and David Levine’s Private Moment, a series of eight scenes from films shot in Central Park performed by live actors on continuous loops in the exact locations where they were filmed. Contemporary Ambulatory Theatre and Audience Agency uses performance theory, the author’s own experiences of the works, and interviews and statements by practitioners and audience members to determine why artists and audiences are so attracted to new forms of ambulatory agency and how these pieces and others produce them. It argues that, recently, performances like Private Moment have inverted prior understandings of audience agency, treating the individual audience member as the protagonist of their own theatrical event and utilizing performers and other inhabitants of public space to help them exercise this newfound agency. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / April 10, 2018. / Includes bibliographical references. / Mary Karen Dahl, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Daniel Aaron Sack, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Karen L. Laughlin, University Representative; Elizabeth A. Osborne, Committee Member; Patrick Timothy McKelvey, Committee Member.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_654706 |
| Contributors | Bartley, Sean (author), Dahl, Mary Karen, 1945- (professor co-directing dissertation), Sack, Daniel Aaron (professor co-directing dissertation), Laughlin, Karen L (university representative), Osborne, Elizabeth A., 1977- (committee member), McKelvey, Patrick T. (committee member), Florida State University (degree granting institution), College of Fine Arts (degree granting college), School of Theatre (degree granting departmentdgg) |
| Publisher | Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, text, doctoral thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (121 pages), computer, application/pdf |
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