Tandem Dances by Julia M. Ritter, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Tandem Dances: Choreographing Immersive Performance proposes dance and choreography as frames through which to examine immersive theater. The idea of tandemness - suggesting motion that is achieved by two bodies working together and acting in conjunction with one another - is criticalthroughout the book. Choreography is positioned as essential to the creation and reception of immersive productions for two distinct yet entwined reasons. First, in the creation of these productions, immersive practitioners devise and structure performance content intended to immerse audiences, often by prioritizing dance over other communicative media due to its potential for kinesthetic dynamism, the different kinds of perception it invites, and the varieties of interpretive analyses it affords. Second, choreography is critical to immersive productions in that it serves as a crucialmechanism by which the spectator's role is transformed into that of an active participant within the production, namely, a subject of choreography enacting an improvisational score. In articulating these two applications of choreography in immersive productions, it is fruitful to understandimmersive productions as tandem dances, meaning they function as choreographic events requiring the bodies of both performers and spectators to enact parallel movement scores. Tandem Dances foregrounds the choreographic, giving voice to prominent choreographers, directors and performers as well as spectators of immersive works in order to examine its specific impact on the evolution of immersive theater while presenting choreography as a discursive problem that isfundamentally related to creative practice, to agendas of power and control, and to concomitant issues of freedom and agency. | Tandem Dances by Julia M. Ritter, Paperback | Indigo Chapters