Asya Gorovits
Asya Gorovits is a theatre critic, photographer, and filmmaker studying performance both on stage and in everyday life. She graduated with an MA in Performance Studies from NYU. Asya also holds an MA in Arts Criticism from Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Saint Petersburg State University, Russia) and a BA in Performing Arts from Smolny College. Asya writes reviews of immersive theatre and virtual performance on NoProscenium.com and has her own YouTube vlog, in which she shares her experience as an audience member.
Title of Project
Theatre of Care: Moving from Productive Participation to Empathy in Immersive Theatre
Description of Project
Immersive theatre scholarship has, for some time, explored the intersection of aesthetics and politics in this genre/form of entertainment (Machon, Alster) and philosophized audience agency (Papaioannou). Scholars like Satone, Walsh, and Zaintz have looked into the economic contexts in which immersive entertainment exists. The neoliberal values that immersive and participatory work often supports (participation, entrepreneurial spirit, risk-taking) have been equally praised and critiqued. Engaging with the existing scholarship on immersive theatre I argue that besides the mode of “productive participation”, there emerged a separate line of thinking and doing immersive, which I term “theatre of care”. In theorizing it, I draw on the proto-immersive “theatre of cruelty” authored by Artaud, and employ Lobb’s concept of “technologies of the other” (in turn, built upon Foucault’s “technologies of the self”). To elaborate on the goals and mechanics of the theatre of care I focus on such immersive performances as Whisperlodge and In Many Hands. Ultimately, this project aims to theorize theatre of care as a mode of immersive and participatory theatre in search of new forms of engagement of the audience with the artwork, by moving away from spectacle towards empathy and co-creating.
Project Inspiration
Attending numerous immersive theatre experiences, mostly in New York, over the years, I became increasingly drawn to the performances that forefront intimacy, which here refers to both spatial and experiential relationship of closeness. Witnessing and hearing about many examples of safe and dangerous, uplifting and traumatizing ways to approach intimacy in the performative context, I began to notice certain tendencies. The mechanisms of facilitating interactions with the audience members, although numerous in artistic means, commonly have care as an underlying theme. Depending on how care was conceived and executed, I, as an audience member, felt watched over or neglected, cared for, or simply used as a means of production. This project is my attempt to reflect on those experiences and theorize the mode of immersive theatre that I term “theatre of care”.
Areas of Academic Interest
Theatre Studies, Performance Studies