Experiential Theatres

William W. Lewis, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History, Literature, and Criticism at Purdue University. His research focuses on spectatorship, politics, digital cultures, and experiential performance. As a scholar-artist he also utilizes practice-based research, where he integrates interactive technologies into live performance to better understand the relationships between contemporary audiences and mediatized culture. He has published in Theatre Topics, Performance research, GPS: Global Performance Studies, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and Theatre Research International. Recent book chapters have appeared in New Directions in Teaching Theatre Arts (Palgrave, eds. Anne Flitosos and Gail S. Medford) and Avatars, Activism and Postdigital Performance (Bloomsbury, eds. Liam Jarvis and Karen Savage). Will is the founding co-editor of PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research. Sean Bartley, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Theatre History at Northwestern State University. His research centers around contemporary site-specific, ambulatory, and immersive theatre practices and sports as performance. His work has been featured in TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Recent book chapters include "You’re Out! Presence and Absence at the Ballpark" in Sporting Performances: Politics in Play (Routledge, ed. Shannon Walsh) and "The President Makes a Play: Putin and Erdogan’s Sporting Diplomacy" with Jared Strange in Performing Statecraft: The Postdiplomatic Theatre of Sovereigns, Citizens, and States (Bloomsbury, ed. James R. Ball III).

Experiential Theatres: An Introduction

William W. Lewis and Sean Bartley

Section 1: Collaborative Experience Making and Interactive Performance Practice

1.Frameworks for Making and Performing in Experiential Performance

William W. Lewis and Valerie Clayman Pye

2. Designing Play: Game Techniques in Experiential and Interactive Performance

Adrienne Mackey

3. Framework Design: A Curatorial Approach to Teaching Participatory Performance

Jamie Harper

4. Intimacy in Play: Training Actors for Agentic Symmetry in Unscripted Interactions

Amanda Rose Villarreal

5. Experiential Theatres and The Value of Rethinking Theatre Education: A Conversation with Performers and Interactive Theatre Makers on Developing Methods for Collaborative Experience Making

William W. Lewis and Valerie Clayman Pye

6. Facilitating Narrative Agency in Experiential Theatre

Astrid Breel

7. Training the Actor for Roleplay and Other Improv-Based Interactive Theatre Forms

David Kaye

8. Standardized Patient Experience: Reframing Pedagogical Approaches to the Acting Studio

Matthew Mastromatteo

9. The Significance of ''Role-Play'' And ''Instruction-Based Performance'' as Modes of Teaching, Collaborating, and Performing with/for Participating Audiences

Kesia Guillery, Persis Jadé Maravala, and Jorge Lopes Ramos

10. Collaborative Development Workshop: Approaching Conceptualization through Audience Affordances and Experiential Trajectories

William W. Lewis

11. A Postdigital Response: User Experience Design, Interactive, Immersive, and Mixed Reality Performance

Lindsay Brandon Hunter and Steve Luber

Section 2: Narrative and Dramaturgy for Experiential Forms

12. Models for Experiential Training in Playwriting And Dramaturgy

Sean Bartley and Marshall Botvinick

13. Mapping Narrative in Pig Iron Theatre Company’s Pay Up and Franklin’s Secret City

Robert Quillen Camp

14. The Dramaturgy of Tabletop Roleplaying Games

Mike Sell

15. Rasa in This Is Not A Theatre Company’s Experiential Productions

Erin B. Mee

16. Reconfiguring Narrative and Experiential Dramaturgy: A Conversation with Professional Educators and Dramaturgs on the Future(s) of Storytelling

Sean Bartley and Marshal Botvinick

17. Wildwind Performance Lab: New Play Development through Abstraction

Sarah Johnson

18. It’s Okay to Not be "Right": Incorporating Creative Thinking into Theatrical Partnerships

Rachel E. Bauer

19. Theatrical Immersion within Alternate Reality Games

Hans Vermy

20. A Postdigital Response: Experiential Dramaturgies of Online Theatre, Cyberformance, and Digital Texts

Christina Papagiannouli

Section 3: Performance Technologies and Design Thinking

21. Pedagogies for Design Thinking and Experiential Technologies

Bruce Bergner and Rich Dionne

22. Storyliving: A Creative Process

Justin Stichter

23. Theatre Majors and Immersive Technology: An Interview with HP’s Joanna Popper

E. B. Hunter

24. Interaction and Extended Somatechnics

Johannes Birringer

25. A Design Roundtable: The Creative Process of Experience

Bruce Bergner, Rich Dionne, and William W. Lewis

26. Playing with the Past: Pirates in the College Classroom

Samantha A. Meigs

27. Unlocking Formal Qualities to Discover the Iconography in Visual Design

Stephen Jones

28. Designing an Interactive Production: A Practical Walkthrough

Liz Fisher

29. A Postdigital Response: Performance Technologies and Design Thinking

Hans Vermy and Eric Hoff

30. Afterword: Experience and Theatre Education

William W. Lewis and Sean Bartley