Join us on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at 1pm for the CWAH Dance and Philosophy Annual Lecture featuring Dr. Natalia Esling, author of Experiments in Immersive, One-to-One Performance: Understanding Audience Experience through Sensory Engagement (forthcoming, Routledge).
Dr. Natalia Esling: Sensory Manipulation in One-to-One (Immersive) Performance: Experiments in Audience Research
This presentation will explore a subset of immersive performance known as ‘one-to-one’ or ‘one-on-one’ performance, considering the impacts of sensory engagement on audience experience and how we might approach researching those impacts. How might sense-specific manipulations such as durational touch shape a performance experience? How might a sensory-focused dramaturgy help us think through engaging audiences when creating new works? What are the ethical and access considerations of inviting audiences to participate in these types of immersive, intimate encounters?
Natalia Esling, PhD is an editor, copy-editor, teacher, research dramaturg, and mum based in Vancouver, Canada, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples. Informed by her background in dance and theatre, her academic work focuses on artistic research, participatory performance, and empirical audience research, which are the foundations of her current book project entitled Experiments in Immersive, One-to-One Performance: Understanding Audience Experience through Sensory Engagement (Routledge). Her research involves collaborating with survivors of traumatic brain injury to experiment with ways of communicating embodied experience, perceptual difference, and autobiographical memory through immersive performance. This work is guided by cross-disciplinary questions about how sense-specific dramaturgies can impact concepts and practices of care and compassion in medical education and professional healthcare contexts.
This virtual lecture is sponsored by the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts and the Rutgers Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities. Dr. Esling’s lecture is also supported by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Rutgers University. Free and open to the public.
Learn more about the CWAH Dance Lecture Series HERE