Element contents
Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2024
Summary
This Element focuses on Sleep No More, the iconic immersive theatre production of Macbeth produced by the British company Punchdrunk. Sleep No More and the Discourses of Shakespeare Performance frames this Shakespeare adaptation as part of a system of ghostly citationality through which audiences understand the significance of the past in performance today. Moreover, despite its seemingly analog format, Sleep No More is discussed as a valuable site for media research. And the concept of 'uncanny spectatorship' is introduced to describe audience practice in Sleep No More and other performance contexts. Ultimately, this Element offers readers the opportunity to explore a set of concepts that are significant to the study of Shakespeare in performance and to consider the ways in which audiences interact with bodies, spaces, text, and media in Sleep No More and other immersive experiences.
- Type
- Element
- Information
- Online ISBN: 9781009436908Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication: 22 February 2024
Bibliography
Allfree, Claire. “Punchdrunk Interview: ‘Audiences Are Human – They Sometimes Misbehave.” Telegraph (March 22, 2022).Google Scholar
Aronson, Arnold. The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Barrett, Brian. “Pokemon Go and Sleep No More Creators Are Teaming Up on AR.” Wired (June 30, 2020).Google Scholar
Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Theater Is Media: Some Principles for a Digital Historiography of Performance.” Theater, 42.2 (2012), 27–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarah, Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, and Saltz, David Z. (eds.). Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).Google Scholar
Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar
Biggin, Rose. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience: Space, Game, and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012).Google Scholar
Blau, Herbert. Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Bleeker, Maaike. “What If This Were an Archive? Abstraction, Enactment and Human Implicatedness.” In Bleeker, Maaike (ed.), Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 199–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloom, Gina. Gaming the Stage: Playable Media and the Rise of English Commercial Theatre (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Gina, Bloom, Bosman, Anston, and West, William N.. “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality, or How Performance Is History.” Theatre Journal, 65.2 (2013), pp. 165–82.Google Scholar
Bolter, Jay David, and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Brantley, Ben. “Shakespeare Slept Here, Albeit Fitfully,” review of Sleep No More. New York Times (April 13, 2011).Google Scholar
Brantley, Ben “Why I’ll Never Stop Being a Theater Critic.” New York Times (October 13, 2020).Google Scholar
Bulman, James C. “Introduction: Cross-Currents in Performance Criticism.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. (2017), pp. 1–9.Google Scholar
Burt, Richard (ed.). Shakespeare After Mass Media (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000).Google Scholar
Calbi, Maurizio. Spectral Shakespeares: Media Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cartmell, Deborah. “Film as the New Shakespeare and Film on Shakespeare: Reversing the Shakespeare/Film Trajectory.” Literature Compass 3.5 (August 25, 2006): pp. 1150–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chansky, Dorothy. “A Concise Introduction to Audience.” Digital Theatre+ (2021), www.digitaltheatreplus.comGoogle Scholar
Cook, Amy. Building Character: The Art and Science of Casting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Davis, Tracy C. and Postlewait, Thomas. Theatricality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Davis, Tracy C. and Marx, Peter W.. “Introduction: On Critical Media History.” In Davis, Tracy C. and Marx, Peter W. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography. (Routledge, 2021), pp. 1–39.Google Scholar
Jacques., Derrida Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Kamuf, Peggy (Routledge, 1994).Google Scholar
DesRochers, Rick. “Immersive Performance and Sensory Stimulation: The Intimacy of Participation in Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell.” Coup de Théâtre [journal] 35 (2021). Special Issue: Anglophone and Francophone Approaches to Immersive Theatre (Le théâtre immersif sur les scenes contemporaines anglophones et francophones), pp. 173–90.Google Scholar
Dinesh, Nandita. Memos from a Theatre Lab: Exploring What Immersive Theatre “Does.” (New York: Routledge, 2017).Google Scholar
Dixon, Steve. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).Google Scholar
Eglinton, Andrew. “Reflections on a Decade of Punchdrunk Theatre.” TheatreForum 37 (2010), pp. 46–55.Google Scholar
Elliott, Kamilla. “The Theory of BADaptation.” In Cutchins, Dennis, Krebs, Katja, and Voigts, Eckart (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 18–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferdman, Bertie. Off Sites: Contemporary Performance Beyond Site-Specific (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Galey, Alan. The Shakespearean Archive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gardner, Lyn. “Immersive Theatre & Performance.” Digital Theatre+ (n.d.), www.digitaltheatreplus.comGoogle Scholar
Gardner, Lyn “Welcome to Fallow Cross: Inside the Secret Village Built by Punchdrunk.” Guardian (April 25, 2017).Google Scholar
Giesekam, Greg. Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillinson, Miriam. “Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More: Is This a Sell-Out Which I See before Me?” Guardian (February 6, 2012).Google Scholar
Grant, Adam. “There’s a Specific Kind of Joy We’ve Been Missing.” New York Times (July 10, 2021).Google Scholar
Guneratne, Anthony R. “‘Thou Dost Usurp Authority’: Beerbohm Tree, Reinhardt, Olivier, Welles, and the Politics of Adapting Shakespeare.” In Henderson, Diana (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 31–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvie, Jen. “Agency and Complicity in ‘A Special Civic Room’: London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall.” In Hopkins, D. J., Orr, Shelley, Solga, Kim (eds.), Performance and the City (New York: Palgrave, 2009).Google Scholar
Henderson, Diana. Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Hodgdon, Barbara. “Re-Incarnations.” In Pascale, Aebischer, Edward, J. Esche, and Nigel, Wheale (eds.), Remaking Shakespeare: Performance across Media, Genres and Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 190–209.Google Scholar
Hodgdon, Barbara “Scholar Spotlight: Barbara Hodgdon.” (Interview) By D. J. Hopkins. ATHENews 22.8 (June 16, 2008).Google Scholar
Holland, Peter. “Haunting Shakespeare, or King Lear Meets Alice.” In Luckhurst, Mary and Morin, Emilie (eds.), Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance, and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 197–216.Google Scholar
Hopkins, D. J. “A Concise Introduction to Immersive Theatre.” Digital Theatre+ (2022), www.digitaltheatreplus.com.Google Scholar
Hopkins, D. J. “Hamlet’s Mirror Image: Theatre, Film, and the Shakespearean Imaginary.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 29.1 (2014), pp. 7–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D. J. “Reconsidering the Boredom of King James: Performance and Premodern Histories.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 51.3 (September 2021), pp. 477–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D. J. “Research, Counter-Text, Performance: Reconsidering the (Textual) Authority of the Dramaturg.” Theatre Topics, 13.1 (2003), pp. 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D. J. Review of Sleep No More. Theatre Journal, 64.2 (2012), pp. 269–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D. J., Orr, Shelley, and Solga, Kim (eds.). Performance and the City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hopkins, D. J., and Solga, Kim (eds.). Performance and the Global City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, E. B. “Enactive Spectatorship, Critical Making, and Dramaturgical Analysis: Building Something Wicked, the Macbeth Video Game.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 16.1 (2020), pp. 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, E. B. Presentation, Digital Shakespeares lecture series, San Diego State University (virtual), October 1, 2020.Google Scholar
Jamieson, Amber. “Performers and Staffers at Sleep No More Say Audience Members Have Sexually Assulted Them.” Buzzfeed (February 6, 2018).Google Scholar
Judge, Alysia. “‘Playable Shows Are the Future’: What Punchdrunk Theatre Learned from Games.” Guardian (February 8, 2019).Google Scholar
Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London: Routledge, 2000).Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dennis. “The Spectator, the Text, and Ezekiel.” In Schalkwyk, David (ed.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 10, Special Section: The Achievement of Robert Weimann (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 39–46.Google Scholar
Kidnie, Margaret Jane. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2009).Google Scholar
Knowles, Ric. “The Death of a Chief: Watching for Adaptation; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bard.” In Hodgdon, Barbara (ed.), “Watching Ourselves Watching Shakespeare I,” special issue, Shakespeare Bulletin, 25.3 (2007), pp. 53–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, Laura. Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lin, T. Erika. Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).Google Scholar
Luckhurst, Mary, and Emilie, Morin. “Introduction: Theatre and Spectrality.” In Luckhurst, Mary and Morin, Emilie (eds.), Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance, and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 1–23.Google Scholar
Emilie, Morin (eds.). Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance, and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).Google Scholar
Lukowski, Andrzej. “Punchdrunk Comes Home with ‘The Burnt City.’” Time Out London (March 29, 2022).Google Scholar
Mâchon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mâchon, Josephine “Watching, Attending, Sense-Making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4.1 (2016), pp. 34–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masters, Paul. “Site and Seduction: Space, Sensuality, and Use-Value in the Immersive Theater.” In Machamer, Josh (ed.), Immersive Theatre: Engaging the Audience (Champaign, IL: Common Ground Research Networks, 2017), pp. 17–44.Google Scholar
Nakamura, Jessica. “Against the Flows of Theory: Expanding the Ghost with Japanese Noh.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 35.2 (2021), pp. 151–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage (London: Routledge, 2002).Google Scholar
paisleysweets. “All There Is: The Music of the McKittrick Hotel.” Back to Manderley, blog (January 26, 2013), https://paisleysweets.tumblr.com/post/41572547344/.Google Scholar
paisleysweets “Once upon a Time, There Was a Little Boy. He Was the Happiest Little Boy in the Whole World … ” Back to Manderley, blog (June 13, 2013), https://paisleysweets.tumblr.com/post/52892400078/.Google Scholar
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer. “Cyborg Returns: Always-Already Subject Technologies.” In Bay-Cheng, Sarah, Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer, and Saltz, David Z. (eds.), Performance and Media: Taxonomies for a Changing Field (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), pp. 65–92.Google Scholar
Parker-Starbuck, Jennifer Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paryzer, Drew. “Playable Plays: Toward a New Interactivity.” Howlround Theatre Commons (July 18, 2022), https://howlround.com/playable-plays-toward-new-interactivity.Google Scholar
Postlewait, Thomas. “Historiography and the Theatrical Event: A Primer with Twelve Cruxes.” Theatre Journal 43.2 (1991), pp. 157–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pressman, Jessica. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prince, Kathryn. “Intimate and Epic Macbeths in Contemporary Performance.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, (2017), pp. 250–63.Google Scholar
Rayner, Alice. Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Reilly, Megan. “Learning from the Gamification of Theater.” Howlround Theatre Commons (June 18, 2014), https://howlround.com/learning-gamification-theater.Google Scholar
Riordan, Kevin. “Ghosts—in Theory—in Theater.” Intertexts, 18.2 (2014), pp. 165–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Rouse, John. “Textuality and Authority in Theater and Drama: Some Contemporary Possibilities.” In Reinelt, Janelle G. and Roach, Joseph R. (eds.), Critical Theory and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), pp. 146–58.Google Scholar
Salvato, Nick. “Uncloseting Drama: Gertrude Stein and the Wooster Group.” Modern Drama, 50.1 (2007), pp. 36–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schalkwyk, David. “Text and Performance, Reiterated: A Reproof Valiant or Lie Direct?” In Schalkwyk, David (ed.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 10, Special Section: The Achievement of Robert Weimann (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 47–75.Google Scholar
Schechner, Richard. “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre.” The Drama Review 12 (1968), pp. 41–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (London: Routledge, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaughnessy, Robert. “Stage, Screen, and Nation: Hamlet and the Space of History.” In Henderson, Diana (ed.), A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 54–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Helen. “The Wild Invention of Fefu and Her Friends.” New York Magazine (November 25, 2019).Google Scholar
Shendruk, Amanda. “An Industry Built on the Suspension of Disbelief Reveals Its Secrets to World Building.” Quartz (January 15, 2020).Google Scholar
Sleep No More. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. Choreographed by Maxine Doyle (New York City: Punchdrunk and Emursive, 2011; Shanghai: Punchdrunk International and SMG Live, 2016). Performance and program notes (citations in the text are to the New York program notes).Google Scholar
Sofer, Andrew. Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theatre, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soloski, Alexis. “The Problem with Immersive Theatre: Why Actors Need Extra Protection from Sexual Assault.” Guardian (February 12, 2018).Google Scholar
Soloski, Alexis “Sleep No More: From Avant Garde Theatre to Commercial Blockbuster.” Guardian (March 31, 2015).Google Scholar
Soloski, Alexis “Sleep No More Awakens After a Long Hibernation.” New York Times (February 9, 2022).Google Scholar
Spatz, Ben. What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (New York: Routledge, 2015).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spatz, Ben “Mad Lab – or Why We Can’t Do Practice as Research.” In Arlander, Annette, Barton, Bruce, Dreyer-Lude, Melanie, and Spatz, Ben (eds.), Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 209–23.Google Scholar
Stiegler, Christian. The 360° Gaze: Immersions in Media, Society, and Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strauss, Claudia. “The Imaginary.” Anthropological Theory, 6.3 (2006), pp. 322–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
“Streb / Ringside: Little Ease.” Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival digital archive. Accessed December 15, 2022. https://danceinteractive.jacobspillow.org/streb-ringside/little-ease/.Google Scholar
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm. King John. Directed by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson (London: British Mutoscope and Biograph, 1899). Silent film.Google Scholar
Vries, Imar O. de. Tantalisingly Close: An Archaeology of Communication Desires in Discourses of Mobile Wireless Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weimann, Robert. Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weimann, Robert “Performance in Shakespeare’s Theatre: Ministerial and/or Magisterial?” In Schalkwyk, David (ed.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 10, Special Section: The Achievement of Robert Weimann (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 3–29.Google Scholar
Weimann, Robert, and Bruster, Douglas. Shakespeare and the Power of Performance: Stage and Page in the Elizabethan Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westling, Carina E. I. Immersion and Participation in Punchdrunk’s Theatrical Worlds (London: Methuen Drama, 2020).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Harry Robert. “New Ways of Seeing, Feeling, Being: Intimate Encounters in Virtual Reality Performance.” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 16.2 (2020), pp. 114–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matt., Wolf “The Carnage of War, in Punchdrunk’s New London Show.” New York Times (April 29, 2022).Google Scholar
Worthen, W. B. “Antigone’s Bones.” TDR: The Drama Review 52.3 (Fall 2008), pp. 10–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Worthen, W. B. “Interactive, Immersive, Original Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Bulletin, 35.3 (2017), pp. 407–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Worthen, W. B. “Shakespeare Performance Studies.” In Schalkwyk, David (ed.), The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 10, Special Section: The Achievement of Robert Weimann (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 77–92.Google Scholar
Worthen, W. B. Shakespeare Performance Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zaiontz, Keren. “Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance.” Theatre Journal, 66.3 (October 2014), pp. 405–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar