Reflective Affective Dramaturgies of Participatory Theatre: Larping Audiences Into Performance

As the popularity and diversity of participatory theatre productions increase, scholarly and artistic attention toward the audience as agentive contributors and interpreters must keep pace. Simultaneously, the COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to the collective artistic encounter and its value to individual and community health. This book proposes "reflective affective" dramaturgies of participatory theatre aimed toward incorporating participants' reflections and affective responses as material in an emergent exploration of represented systems of power. The volume's interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks stem from performance studies discourses including feminist materialism, phenomenology and affect theory, bringing them together with larp scholarship on character/self performance, agency and emergence. Through its integration of the practical and theoretical, this work serves as an essential study for scholars, students and artists in theatre studies, performance studies, visual art studies, role-play studies, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Sarah Hoover is a Postdoctoral Researcher with the University of Galway, Ireland, on the EU Horizon 2020 funded project Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA). Her research centres on the creation and digitisation of interactive and other audience-centred performance dramaturgies, considered through new materialist theory. As a lecturer, Hoover convenes and delivers postgraduate modules from Applied Dramaturgy to Critical Methods, and undergraduate modules including Artistic Research, Performance Studies and Advanced Devising. In addition to research projects and extensive teaching, Hoover dramaturgs new theatre and performance in the UK, US and Ireland.