Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed: Dramatic Encounters between Classic and Adaptation, Life and Art, Freedom and Imprisonment

This paper examines Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016) as a metatextual adaptation of Shakespeare’s literary classic The Tempest. The terms “adaptation” and “classic” are employed to explain the relation of Atwood’s work to its source material. The performance of The Tempest prepared by the characters of the novel that engages convicts is a form of multi-media interactive theater, and the classical text of the Shakespearean play is considered a form of “sacra” (Turner), which has educational and utilitarian purposes. Michel Foucault’s analysis of prison, his concept of “heterotopia”, and Victor Turner’s concept of “liminality” are introduced to discuss the convicts participating in a theatrical workshop as liminal individuals during the ritual of transition while in the heterotopian space of a prison.

Interactive Performance and Simulation Learning

Over the course of 2018 - 2019, interactive experience design company, (ix)plore Lab, created three simulation-based learning programs for the Travis County Reentry Employment Services (RES) training in Austin, Texas. Participants, most of whom were from organizations that assist formerly incarcerated individuals during the reentry process, attended workshops focused on client-based practices. Specifically, they learned techniques for better conducting informal assessments and motivational interviewing methods they could utilize in their work. Each workshop culminated in an interview with a fictional client, played by an actor. The team wished to improve upon existing live simulation models in several ways. First, by creating a method to provide immediate feedback to learners. Second, by increasing the simulations adaptability so it could adjust to each individual learner. Lastly, the simulation needed to have a high degree of emotional fidelity. To achieve these, (ix)plore Lab designed the programs by integrating techniques from interactive theater performance with existing simulation practices to effectively target specific skills for development. This article provides an overview of the techniques involved and adjustments made to focus on soft skill development, and documents three simulation-based learning programs that took place over the course of 2018 - 2019, highlighting developments made with each iteration. The training program documented in this paper was created without monetary compensation. In lieu of payment, the organizers of RES allowed (ix)plore Lab to collect feedback from learners and to use the training as a laboratory for workshopping this simulation-based learning model.

ODO: Design of Multimodal Chatbot for an Experiential Media System

This paper presents the design of a multimodal chatbot for use in an interactive theater performance. This chatbot has an architecture consisting of vision and natural language processing capabilities, as well as embodiment in a non-anthropomorphic movable LED array set in a stage. Designed for interaction with up to five users at a time, the system can perform tasks including face detection and emotion classification, tracking of crowd movement through mobile phones, and real-time conversation to guide users through a nonlinear story and interactive games. The final prototype, named ODO, is a tangible embodiment of a distributed multimedia system that solves several technical challenges to provide users with a unique experience through novel interaction.

Undercurrents

Coastal communities, including those surrounding the Gulf of Maine, are facing considerable challenges in adapting to increased flood resulting from sea-level rise, and these challenges will remain well past 2050. Over the longer term (decades to centuries), many coastal communities will have to retreat inland away from the coast and toward something new. To date, there appears to be little consideration of how arts and humanities could be leveraged to encourage learning and experimentation to help communities adapt to our changing climate. In this article, we describe an interactive theater model that seeks to address the challenge of bridging scientific knowledge and community conversations on managed retreat and serve as an innovative tool to encourage more productive community conversations about adapting to rising sea levels. The interactive theater workshop consists of two components. The first is a set of short intertwining monologues by three characters (a municipal leader, a climate scientist, and a coastal property owner) who share their thoughts regarding the prospect of managed retreat. Each character provides a glimpse into the attitudes, values, motivations, and fears related to distinct and authentic perspectives on managed retreat. The monologues are followed by a professionally facilitated interactive session during which audience-participants are invited to probe characters’ perspectives and even redirect and replay scenes in new ways to seek more constructive outcomes. The workshop is designed for all session participants to examine their own strengths and weaknesses when engaging others on this subject, to be more prepared to accommodate a range of emotional connections to the subject matter, and to anticipate social dynamics at play. The workshop has now been piloted at four different events. Initial feedback from post-workshop voluntary surveys suggest that the workshop is useful for improving the capacity of resilience professionals to encourage more productive conversations about difficult climate adaptation actions.

Interactive theater: an effective tool to reduce gender bias in faculty searches

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the development, implementation and impact evaluation of an interactive theater-based workshop by the ADVANCE program at the University of New Hampshire (UNH). The workshop is part of a larger institutional transformation program funded by the National Science Foundation. Design/methodology/approach This institutional transformation program relied upon a systems approach to diagnose potential causes for the underrepresentation of women faculty in certain disciplines. This revealed that increasing awareness of, and reducing, implicit gender bias among members of faculty search committees could, in time, contribute to increasing the representation of women faculty at UNH. A committee charged with developing a faculty workshop to achieve this change identified interactive theater as an effective faculty training approach. The committee oversaw the development of customized scripts, and the hiring of professional actors and a facilitator to implement the workshop. Findings The workshop’s effectiveness in fulfilling its goals was assessed using faculty hiring and composition data, program evaluations, participant interviews and questions in an annual faculty climate survey. Findings indicate that the representation of women faculty increased significantly at UNH since the implementation of the interactive theater workshop. Analysis of the multiple sources of data provides corroborating evidence that a significant portion of the increase is directly attributable to the workshop. Originality/value This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of interactive theater-based workshops in an academic environment and of the systems approach in diagnosing and solving organizational problems.