Insecurity : perils and products of theatres of the real /
The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a proliferation of non-fiction, reality-based performance genres, including documentary and verbatim theater, site-specific theater, autobiographical theater and immersive theater. Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real begi...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Toronto ; Buffalo :
University of Toronto Press,
[2019]
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| Summary: | The early years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a proliferation of non-fiction, reality-based performance genres, including documentary and verbatim theater, site-specific theater, autobiographical theater and immersive theater. Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real begins with the premise that although the inclusion of real objects and real words on the stage would ostensibly seem to increase the epistemological security and documentary truth-value of the presentation, in fact the opposite is the case. Contemporary audiences are caught between a desire for authenticity and immediacy of connection to a person, place or experience, and the conditions of our postmodern world that render our lives insecure. The same conditions that underpin our yearning for authenticity thwart access to an impossible real. As a result of the instability of social reality, the audience, Jenn Stephenson explains, is unable to trust the mechanisms of theatricality. The by-product of theaters of the real in the age of post-reality is insecurity. |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 286 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 1487501854 9781487501853 |