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Author Jacobson, Kelsey, author.

Title Real-ish : audiences, feeling, and the production of realness in contemporary performance / Kelsey Jacobson
Published Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, [2023]
©2023

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Description 1 online resource (xviii, 278 pages) : illustrations
Contents Feeling Real: Realness, Affect, Audiences -- "Everything is True. Some Things are Scripted": Documentary Practice and the Presentation of Multiple Truths -- Talking to, at, and with Audiences: The Politics of Participation -- "You Will Long Remember": Performing the Historical Real -- Constructing Immersive Experiences for "Real" Engagement -- Immersion and Exertion: Audiences, Affect, and Feeling Labour
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?"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on April 06, 2023)
Subject Theater audiences -- Psychology.
Theater audiences -- Interviews
Acting.
Theater.
Emotions.
Reality.
theater (discipline)
acting.
LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama.
Emotions
Reality
Theater
Theater audiences -- Psychology
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780228016427
0228016428
9780228016410
022801641X