Academia – Page 10 – Hannah Nicklin

Twitter strikes again! This time one of the postgrad organisers at the Theatre and Performance Research Association spotted me on Twitter, found my blog and invited me to submit a paper to their Dealing with the Digital symposium. They’ve kindly agreed to let me post my proposal here. I’ll be writing the paper over the next 2 weeks, and no doubt will blog some of my thoughts/conclusions along the way. Enjoy:

Proposal for a 10 minute paper at

DEALING WITH THE DIGITAL

TaPRA Postgraduate Symposium

10 – 5.30, 20th March 2010, Bedford Square, London

The Player as Political.

The video game ethic of player-as-protagonist is beginning to influence mainstream non-digital approaches to narrative. In theatre this is seen in the emerging popularity of interactive forms pioneered by companies such as Blast Theory, and current being popularised by Pervasive Gaming companies such as Hide and Seek and the mp3 or locative technology driven soundwalks of Duncan Speakman and Subtlemob. This paper examines the root of the current drive towards total and pervasive performative immersion, and how we can tackle the traditional problems of immersion that are suffered by video games and other escapist narratives – a loss of political power, objectivity and community experience – within a theatrical context. This paper investigates the ethical implications of suspending the weight of disbelief in one person, and suggests that in hyperlocal performance, and a new world of fractured, multi-facet identities, gentler tactics are necessary, and locative and site-responsive aspects are the best way of preserving the political power of theatre within an individualist context.

Hannah Nicklin

Hannah Nicklin is a first year PhD student at Loughborough University. Her research interests include questions of theatre and digital technology, with a particular focus on selfhood and storytelling in a digital age. She has spoken at Nottingham Trent and Leeds Met universities on new narrative forms and social media for theatre companies, drawing on her work with Foursight Theatre and Theatre Writing Partnership. She maintains a blog at hannahnicklin.com, pieces of which have been reproduced by the Telegraph, Subtext Magazine, and the Arts Council, and she will be speaking at the Shift Happens UK arts, learning and tech conference in Summer 2010. Hannah is also a playwright, her most recent work Awake – the story of a gamer meeting her avatar – will be performed at Theatre503 this March.

This piece of writing represents the spaces, ideas and places I’ve been thinking on throughout the first 3 months of my PhD. The next 6 months will be made of thinking deeper into the ideas covered in this piece, and working on a creative project exploring the same aspects. Please respect the IP of this content. It’s protected by a CC license.

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In scattered and barely noticed ways, the desire to construct one’s own life was shaping the twentieth century (McDonough 2004, 10)

Another key ’09 [theatre] trend was the removal of performers from performances altogether. Whether directed by headphones or left to negotiate for themselves in shows like Coney’s Small Town Anywhere, increasingly the spectator was becoming the spectacle. (Haydon 2009)

From 1957-69 a new radical reading of the commodification of western capitalist society emerged. The situationists, born out of the fiery nihilism of the Dadaists and the irreverent playfulness of the Surrealists cast their gaze over society and saw:

That the alienation which in the nineteenth century was rooted in production had, in the twentieth century, become rooted in consumption. Consumption had come to define happiness and to suppress all other possibilities of freedom and selfhood. […] Everyone was first and foremost a member of an economy based on commodities” (McDonough 2004, 3)

The situationists identified a transition from the Marxist state of alienation, to a once-removed state of spectacular illusion. This ‘spectacle’ transformed every inch of our lives into an empty capitalist dream, maintained through the mutation of desires into needs. However the situationists believed that the image of society as it is was still intact behind the spectacle, and so they set about attempting to break the illusion.

“Just as the nineteenth century revolutionary theory arose out of philosophy” –out of Marx’s dictum that philosophy, having interpreted the world, must set about changing it – now one had to look to the demands of art (McDonough 2004, 11)

The situationists saw art as the solution – an art practised by every member of society, an art that ceased to be art and became a continually revised way of seeing. The situationists (though they didn’t credit it) were summoning the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ aspect of art:

Phenomenologists like to pick objects up with their minds, so to speak, and turn them around, examining them from all sides. This cannot be accomplished by viewing them frontally as they are embedded in the rest of the experiential world – hence bracketing (Roach 1992, 354)

This bracketing aspect – or epoché – that art provides is at the root of its ability to reveal the spectacle.

Continue reading The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies.

Tag: Academia

My First Paper

The Situationists, Phenomenology and Pervasive Gaming: New Narrative Strategies.