Book Talk with Elizabeth Hunter: Acting the Part, 4/1
48 Professors Row
CHAT invites the Tufts Community to join us on April 1 at noon for a special event. We will be joined by Elizabeth Hunter from Washington University in St. Louis, who will share her new book, Acting the Part: Audience Participation in Performance. This event will be co-sponsored with the department of TDPS.
Acting the Part offers a paradigm for understanding how audiences participate in immersive theater, from physical spaces like the Globe in London to digital spaces like social virtual reality. Reading across twenty-first century productions of ancient Greek tragedies and William Shakespeare’s plays, E. B. Hunter proposes the concept of “enactivity” to describe the positionality audiences inhabit when their participation is critical to the narrative but cannot alter its intended course. This positionality is that of the archetype, the enactment of which is shaped by four production conditions: a historically resonant site, a canonical source, an immersive space, and a production-specific economy that incentivizes some behaviors and discourages others.
All are welcome. For questions, contact humanities@tufts.edu.
