Moderator: Shannon Holmes
Location: Room 0030 – – Pavilion de la Faculté de l’aménagement – 2940 ch. de la Côte Ste-Catherine – Université de Montréal
(Building 36 on the UdM Map)
In-Person Session
Team Play: Communal Care in asses.masses and New Societies
Emerging discourses of care amidst the schisms of the pandemic have revealed how self-care continues to be co-opted by neoliberalism, alleviating communal and institutional obligation (Hobart and Kneese; Jarvis and Savage). In this paper, I explore how participatory theatre advances reciprocal and communally driven radical care by engaging with dramaturgical structures of audience teamwork. Traditionally, care in participatory performances involves the sharing of “healing gifts” from artist to audience (Stephenson 93). I offer a framework that extends this dynamic, seeing the artist not as healer or gift-giver, but as the coach of a team. This “aesthetic of care” (Thompson 46) foregrounds the action of the audience, allowing participants to negotiate their responsibilities to each other and how they might both support and be supported in a theatrical game.
Teams materialize clearly in Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim’s durational video game epic asses.masses, and Re:Current Theatre’s board game nation-building simulation New Societies. By placing these works in conversation, I demonstrate how communal efforts towards an actionable goal – such as beating a video game or creating an ideal world- invite intimate displays of empathy and solidarity. While theatre teams are not immune to power struggles engendered by competition (Leo et al.), these performances reveal how navigating the obstacles erected by this thorny network of relationality can foster deeper cohesion when they are overcome. An effective team requires attentiveness and sensitivity, affording team dramaturgy a crucial platform for challenging a culture currently prioritizing care from and for the self.
Works Cited
Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, and Tamara Kneese. “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times.” Social Text, vol. 38, no. 1 (142), Mar. 2020, pp. 1–16.
Jarvis, Liam, and Karen Savage. Postdigital Performances of Care: Technology and Pandemic. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, (In press).
Leo, F. M., et al. “Role Ambiguity, Role Conflict, Team Conflict, Cohesion and Collective Efficacy in Sport Teams: A Multilevel Analysis.” Psychology of Sport and Exercise, vol. 20, Sept. 2015, pp. 60–66.
Stephenson, Jenn. “‘Who Cares?’: The Neoliberal Problem of Performing Care in Immersive and Participatory Play.” Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Jan. 2022, pp. 91–100.
Thompson, James. “Towards an Aesthetics of Care.” Performing Care: New Perspectives on Socially Engaged Performance, edited by Amanda Stuart Fisher and James Thompson, Manchester University Press, 2020.
Derek Manderson, York University
Derek Manderson is an interdisciplinary scholar, performer, and PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at York University. His research imbricates game studies and participatory theatre, revealing the affordances, boundaries, and dramaturgical structures of collaborative play. He has been published in Canadian Theatre Review and smART Magazine.
“Wheeeee!”: Emergent Social Relations in Marathon Durational Audience Participation
By hour six of the participatory video-game theatre experience asses.masses, our community of audience-players is absolutely rapt, but we are getting silly. Some people are lying on the floor with empty bags of snacks; many of us have taken off our shoes. Each time the current leader-player jumps our donkey avatar over an obstacle, we all call out “Wheeeee!” And we still have two episodes left to play.
This paper considers how long duration affects the relational aesthetics of socially turned theatrical art works (Bourriaud, Bishop). In asses.masses, which runs typically seven-and-a-half hours, the typical focus of durational experience of marathon theatre shifts from the endurance of the actors (Kalb, Switzky) to the audience. In the absence of live actors, the audience-participants of asses.masses play the digital characters and represent the asses, but, more importantly, we are the masses.
With very little direction about how to (make a) play, the audience must grapple with tensions between the individual and the collective, between freedom and rules to make effective decisions. Using theories of game design (Salen and Zimmerman) and political philosophy (Rousseau), I will explore how different elements of interactive play-based dramaturgy in asses.masses test us and teach us to become a herd. Through analysis of actual observed behaviours of several different herds in action, I will consider how groups of strangers are progressively, in the crucible of time, formed into a functioning society with its own set of emergent operational protocols, social mores, and even a culture.
WORKS CITED
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012)
Blenkarn, Patrick and Milton Lim. asses.masses. Dramaturgy by Laurel Green. Composition and sound design by David Mesiha. Performed at Festival of Live Digital Art (Kingston, Ontario) June 2023 and Theatre Centre (Toronto, Ontario) September 2023.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, (Presses du réel, 2002)
Kalb, Jonathan. Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater, (U Michigan P, 2013)
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch, (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, (MIT Press, 2005)
Stephenson, Jenn and Mariah Horner. PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation (Playwrights Canada, 2024).
Switzky, Lawrence. “Marathon Theatre as Affective Labour: Productive Exhaustion in The Godot Cycle and Life and Times.” Canadian Theatre Review 162 (Spring 2015): 26-30.
Jenn Stephenson, Queen’s University
Jenn Stephenson is Professor in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. She is the author of three books: Performing Autobiography: Contemporary Canadian Theatre (UTP, 2013), Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real (UTP, 2019) and PLAY: Dramaturgies of Participation co-authored with Mariah Horner (Playwrights Canada, 2024).