Real-ish : audiences, feeling, and the production of realness in contemporary performance / Kelsey Jacobson.
"Amidst Oxford Dictionaries declaring 'post-truth' the word of the year in 2016, and the fast propagation of terms like 'fake news,' the central question of this book is pressingly important at this contemporary critical juncture: What feels real to contemporary audiences? U...
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| Online Access: |
Full Text (via ProQuest) |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago :
McGill-Queen's University Press,
[2023]
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| Summary: | "Amidst Oxford Dictionaries declaring 'post-truth' the word of the year in 2016, and the fast propagation of terms like 'fake news,' the central question of this book is pressingly important at this contemporary critical juncture: What feels real to contemporary audiences? Using seventy interviews with audience members about the perceived realness of their experiences attending documentary, participatory, historical, or immersive theatre pieces, this book investigates the use, production, and perception of realness in current performance practices. Audience data from four performance pieces-Downstage Theatre's documentary play Good Fences, The Schaubühne/Tarragon Theatre's An Enemy of the People, Rising Tide Theatre's historical pageant in Newfoundland, and Outside the March's immersive play TomorrowLove-highlight a sense of "real-ish-ness" that results not from the real material used in the performances, but from the experience of attending the performance itself. The book thus makes the case for studying the real not as ontologically fixed but as relational and contingent, and argues that affect, emotion, and feeling can come to assign perceived realness. Though it begins with a consideration of theatre of the real, this monograph expands beyond this genre to suggest how how we might move forward with both a confidence in fact and a simultaneous awareness of reality's construction through emotion. In a post-truth, post-fact, perhaps even post-real world, how might theatre help us understand how realness is constructed, evaluated, and perhaps most importantly, felt?"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780228016427 0228016428 9780228016410 022801641X |
| Source of Description, Etc. Note: | Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 06, 2023). |