Reassembled, Slightly Askew, la promesse de vivre une expérience incarnée
Résumé
A week before the production of his first play, Baal, on February 14, 1926, in Berlin, Brecht wrote that "a theatre which makes no contact with the public is a nonsense" (Willett, 1978, p.7). For the playwright, drama had to be entertaining and didactic, educational. Moreover, all the societal, family, political, religious conflicts had to be put on stage according to several processes (fall of the 4th wall, distancing effect, fragmentation) to make the audience think. Then, with Boal, spectators were allowed to participate, with their bodies and with their souls, in the theatrical representations, initially through the emotions felt when they attend a representation, as Boal writes: "empathy is an emotional relationship between character and spectator" (Boal, 1993, p. 35). Then, through their physical solicitation within the play: "the spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness. He too must be a subject on an equal plane with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be spectators" (Boal, 1993, p. 155). Immersive theatre (Mézergues et al., 2021) leans on this double artistic and aesthetic anchoring and, thanks to modern technology, promises spectators to live an incarnated experience to engage them better in the action. Thus, Northern Irish playwright Shannon Yee allows her audience to perceive, with her, blindfolded, the stages of a neurosurgical operation through an auditory experience facilitated using a binaural microphone in her autobiographical play Reassembled, Slightly Askew (2015). This paper proposes to investigate the didactic dimension of the piece allowing for the social engagement of the viewer during this journey into the heart of an embodied, empathetic, and poly-sensory experience. This study will be conducted considering embodied cognition theories (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Aden, 2021) and recent findings in cognitive, social, and affective neuroscience (Varela, 1996; Damasio, 1994; Immordino-Yang, 2016).
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