Kate Adams

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This paper starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. It draws a parallel between associated practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, and uses Fuerzabruta as an illustrative example.

The definition of experience in this analysis is key as the experiential as a term can potentially incorporate experience as it passes moment by moment, Erlebnis, and experience as something that is cumulatively built up over time, Erfahrung. While politically charged experiential or participatory performance seeks to register experience as Erfahrung with the spectator, thus generating a process of learning and the potential for transformation, it is experience as Erlebnis which defines experiential theatre in the context of the experience economy. Using this as a starting point for analysis, the paper explores the aesthetics of the experiential in relation to spectator agency and the participatory body and draws attention to some of the contrast between the approach of Fuerzabruta and that of Blast Theory.

The session proposed is a workshop/presentation focusing on the idea of self and social transformation, which will explore with the participants the experience of potentiality for transformation held inside the intentional engagement of the body and the intentional heightening of the process of choosing words.

Dr. Kate Adams (lecturer in Drama at the University of Salford), Christina Christofi (theatre director) and Medie Megas (choreographer) began a collaborative research process in March 2012, stemming from each of our current practices and focusing on the idea of ‘Transformation’. The three of us came together in the context of the current situation in Greece, responding to a widespread debate on issues of social change and the role of the arts in a changing society. During the process we worked with movement and text, continually exchanging roles as task setters and doers.

What interested us most was the difference between closed systems of transformation, which move between two well defined points, and open systems of transformation, where one begins from a fixed point and works outwards from it. Accepting this openness and uncertainty seems to us to be the key element of effective transformation.

Through our practice it became obvious that this idea of potentiality links to the notion of latency in that the seed of a future state is latent in the former state. Also out of this process arises the idea of waste, as certain latent elements of a situation evolve into something, whereas others inevitably fall out of existence.

With an awareness of the significance of the processual for the experience of the transformative in radical performance set against the a projection of completeness and full satisfaction generated by the discourses of consumer-driven transformation, this paper begins by placing in collision two contrasting perspectives. The first is Zizek’s discussion of identification with the sinthome and the second, Griselda Pollock’s discussion of the encounter and transsubjective futurity of trauma. By placing these analytical frames in collision with each other, a discussion is generated about how performance draws into question the habitual relations with the Other. The value of drawing on Zizek’s analysis of the identification with the sinthome as a theoretical frame for the transformative in performance is examined in relation to The Real 9/11, a performance led by Paul Burwell on November 9th 2004. This provocative performance reconfigured the ritual of the Guy Fawkes Night celebration as a ritual re-burning of the two towers, reversing the point of identification for the spectators and participants, and problematising their responses to the event.
The potential transformative moment is then reconsidered in relation to Griselda Pollock’s discussion of the encounter and the transsubjective futurity of trauma. Here the transformative potential of a work lies in its capacity to allow traces and remnants of the encounter to pass into the everyday, but also in its refusal of a narrative of trauma which structures, represents or appropriates that event.

This paper begins from a consideration of two overlapping perspectives on the transformative: Pine and Gilmore’s proposed fifth economic offering, the experience as transformation and Erika Fischer- Lichte’s discussion of the transformative in performance. The former raises questions about the consequences of framing the experience of transformation within the discourses of economics and marketing and the latter raises questions about our expectations of performance and what constitutes transformation within contemporary performance experience.
In this context the implications are considered of tying together the process of individual, political, embodied or moral/spiritual transformation with the dynamics of consumption: in particular the relationship between brand and identity; the shaping of consumer demand; the construction of perceptions of authenticity; and the appropriation of subcultural forms. At the same time there is an appealing ease with which the Arts and Business research report on the transformation economy constructs the arts as ‘leading the market’ in relation to generating transformative experience. The capacity for the transformative is presented as inherent in the encounter with the work of art. Simply by virtue of association with the artistic experience a company renders itself apparently “authentic” and through artistic engagement is encouraged to perceive its relationship with the consumer as transformative.
In contrast to this, the construction of the transformative in relation to the performative experience is explored asking in what ways we might need to draw into question the way we define transformation and how far can we learn from this confidence in the transformative power of art from the discourses of marketing and business? How do we engage the transformative in performance as a part of the practices of everyday life, not simply as an exceptional experience constructed within a nebulous set of potentialities, but as something we are able to co-construct out of the shared moment? Within this, the experience of vulnerability is considered as a way of opening up distinctions between what we hope for as artists and what the brand demands in an interaction and where the lines become blurred.

In the context of the increasing significance of experiential theatre performance, adaptation to stage in the 21st century is no longer solely defined by the dramatisation of text. Its associated spectatorship is similarly undergoing such shifts: away from passive character

identification as necessarily the primary spectator engagement and opening up, instead, a shared experience or event, in which the spectator becomes an active participant and spectatorship, is intermedial in nature.
This paper examines the aesthetics and spectator experience of an adaptation of a classic drama Medea to an intermedial and multisensory performance event, Hotel Medea. Hotel Medea is advertised as  ̳an overnight experience‘ and adapts Medea into an event which incorporates live performance and music, installation and multimedia technology. It is a collaboration between Brazilian collective Zecora Ura Theatre and the Urban Dolls Project based in London and is therefore performed in both English and Portuguese. The choice of this performance is based not only on its intermedial, participatory form but also on the multilingual performance as it enables a primarily monolingual audience to experience full engagement and participation in a bilingual performance.
The main focus of the paper however, is upon the impact of intermedial and interactive spectator engagement to the experience of adaptation. The concept of intermediality draws on Meike Wagner‘s description of mediality in Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (2006) as  ̳transformed corporeal perception‘ (Wagner, 2006: 126) suggesting that mediality is not just made up of the attributes of the technological form, but also the associated mode of spectator interaction. Intermediality is thus an interweaving of medialities which combine technological form and modes of perception.
The paper suggests that the colliding medialities and participation engage the spectator more actively in the process of reconstructing and manipulating their knowledge of the Medea narrative and generating the pleasures of intertextuality. In addition the familiarity of a well known text like Medea not only enables this pleasure of intertextuality associated with adaptation, but facilitates the pleasures of multisensory active spectatorship particular to experiential theatre performance. The familiarity of the adaptation prevents the uncertainties of participation, exploration and an unfamiliar language from becoming overwhelming.

Μα Ποια Πάπια (or I’m not a Pheasant Plucker) is a struggle to speak in a foreign language. It is a game of vulnerability and foolishness, an attempt just to say what I want, clearly, and without any mistakes. It is a search for home and a search for a voice.

Μα Ποια Πάπια is a short solo performance written for a curated festival of performance, Love Letters to a (Post)-Europe on 2nd and 3rd November 2015 in Athens, Greece.

In 2014/15 I was dramaturg for Medie Megas' solo work Transforming Me: A Bilingual Solo. This is an interdisciplinary dance performance which explores the experience of transformation and of moving away from pain or trauma, combining Medie’s improvisational dance form ‘The Transformation/ Μετασχηματισμός’, with spoken and written text. The piece interweaves personal and shared cultural trauma and explores how personal transformation relates to social one and how the rapid, rampant change in the world around us affects us.

I co-directed a new play Λάσσυ (Lassie) by Andreas Flourakis in 2013 with director Christina Christofi. This was premiered in Athens at Epi Kolono black box space, running from March - June 2013.
This new work combined humour, 1980s pop song and moments of violence in an exploration of power, coercion and what it means to surrender. Performers: Ilias Valasis and Christina Christofi.