Noda Manabu    Department   Undergraduate School  , School of Arts and Letters    Position   Professor
Date	2017/05/11
Presentation Theme	Immersion as the Inscription of Theatre-Maker's Reading: Complicite, The Encounter (2015)
Conference	IATC/AICT Conference (as a part of NOVÁ DRÁMA/NEW DRAMA 2017, Bratislava) "Contemporary Drama and Performative Space: From Playwriting to Immersive Theatre," 11-12 May 2017
Promoters	Slovak Centre of AICT/IATC
Conference Type	International
Presentation Type	Speech (Invitation/Special)
Contribution Type	Individual
Invited	Invited
Venue	Lecture Hall, University Library, Bratislava, Slovakia
Details	Immersive theatre today aims to bring the audience into the show by invading and disrupting the audience's subjective closure. Often using innovative technology, it radically reconstructs the interface between theatre and audience. In some cases, however, the audience's immersion into the piece is not the sole objective. For instance, it is possible that immersion is being called for so that the audience can share in the artist's problematic interface with the original text. In such a case, the artist's relationship with the original text -- and the narrative it contains -- will be inscribed in the way the show is made immersive. The question, therefore, concerns not the text/performance opposition; it concerns how theatre can weave its own mode of textuality. My presentation attempts to answer this question by examining Complicite's The Encounter (premiered 2015 at Edinburgh International Festival, directed and performed by Simon McBurney). Using binaural technology and headsets for the audience, the show is designed to develop inside the mind of each spectator. The text the show is based on -- Petru Popescu's Amazon Beaming (1991) -- recounts a National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre's encounter with an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. In the show, however, what is also foregrounded is McBurney's struggle with the text, overlapping with the problematic nature of the two interfaces in the original text: the one between the author and McIntyre, and the other between McIntyre and the uncontacted people, especially their chieftain who invades the photographer's subjectivity by "beaming," or telepathic communication.