Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama
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Jamie Harper
is a UK-based theatre director, performance researcher, and game designer. He trained on the Directors’ Course at LAMDA and went on to win the JMK Directors’ Award, the National Theatre Cohen Bursary, and a Churchill Trust Fellowship to research the merger of drama and game design at the University of Miami. He has designed live action role-play works for a range of arts organisations including Serpentine Galleries, Camden People’s Theatre, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. As an active member of the Nordic larp community, he has presented works at festivals including Grenselandet in Oslo, Blackbox Cph in Copenhagen, and Minsk Larp Festival. He recently completed a practice-led PhD in participatory performance at Newcastle University and currently works as Lecturer in Drama at University of Plymouth.
Abstract
The concept of resilience is frequently described within neoliberal discourses as the ability of individuals to bounce back from shocks and reflexively adapt to changing circumstances. In ecological sciences, however, resilience is more commonly understood as the capacity of systems to radically transform themselves, when their usual mode of operation is challenged, rather than simply reverting to their original state. This article considers how live action role-play, as a form of participatory performance, might support ecological resilience by enabling players to actively reflect on their cultural practices in constructing the systems of their play and develop new capacities in the process through intersubjective exchanges with diverse others.The notion of performing resilience is concretised through discussion of artistic research residencies at Trumpington Community Orchard in Cambridge in 2017 and the Peartree Bridge estate in Milton Keynes in 2018. These projects explored how encounters with unfamiliar spaces and beings might enable participants to play with their resilient changeability. Specifically, the article addresses the value of spatial reflexivity in building resilience, proposing spatial defamiliarization as an aesthetic strategy for transcending the immediate familiarity of habitual practices, expanding participants’ horizons of perception and imagination. These arguments yield a theoretical model for cultivating resilience through participatory performance termed anchorage-leverage. This model suggests that habit can provide the foundation for potential transformations of cultural practices as existing capacities are reconfigured by new relational connections, conferring new affordances that enable participants to radically reconfigure the ecologies in which they play and live.
About the author
is a UK-based theatre director, performance researcher, and game designer. He trained on the Directors’ Course at LAMDA and went on to win the JMK Directors’ Award, the National Theatre Cohen Bursary, and a Churchill Trust Fellowship to research the merger of drama and game design at the University of Miami. He has designed live action role-play works for a range of arts organisations including Serpentine Galleries, Camden People’s Theatre, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. As an active member of the Nordic larp community, he has presented works at festivals including Grenselandet in Oslo, Blackbox Cph in Copenhagen, and Minsk Larp Festival. He recently completed a practice-led PhD in participatory performance at Newcastle University and currently works as Lecturer in Drama at University of Plymouth.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Co-Mutability, Nodes, and the Mesh: Critical Theatre Ecologies – An Introduction
- Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon
- Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation
- An Art Like Nature: Theatre Environment as Territory in Tim Spooner Performances
- Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama
- Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost
- To Be Like Water: Material Dramaturgies in Posthumanist Performance
- “A Missile to the Future”: The Theatre Ecologies of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away on Spike Island
- Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene
- Kinship and Community in Climate-Change Theatre: Ecodramaturgy in Practice
- Eco-Drama, Multinational Corporations, and Climate Change in Nigeria
- Playing the Petrocene: Toxicity and Intoxication in Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill and Ella Hickson’s Oil
- An Ecology of Plants: The Post-Manufacturing Age in Philip Ridley’s Shivered and David Eldridge’s In Basildon
- Alienation, Abjection, and Disgust: Encountering the Capitalocene in Contemporary Eco-Drama
- Elaine Aston. Restaging Feminisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, viii + 132 pp., £44.99 (hardback), £44.99 (paperback), £35.99 (PDF/EPUB ebook).
- Maria Chatzichristodoulou, ed. Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, x + 212 pp., £65 (hardback), £19.79 (paperback), £15.83 (PDF ebook).
- Yana Meerzon, David Dean, and Daniel McNeil, ed. Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 298 pp., €124.99 (hardback), €85.59 (PDF ebook).
- Mark Brown. Modernism and Scottish Theatre since 1969: A Revolution on Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvii + 254 pp., € 80.24 (hardback), € 24.99 (softcover).
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Preliminary Note
- Co-Mutability, Nodes, and the Mesh: Critical Theatre Ecologies – An Introduction
- Writing in the Green: Imperatives towards an Eco-n-temporary Theatre Canon
- Bec(h)oming with Simon Whitehead: Practising a Logic of Sensation
- An Art Like Nature: Theatre Environment as Territory in Tim Spooner Performances
- Performing Resilience: Anchorage and Leverage in Live Action Role-Play Drama
- Encounters in the Chthulucene: Simon McBurney’s Theatre of Compost
- To Be Like Water: Material Dramaturgies in Posthumanist Performance
- “A Missile to the Future”: The Theatre Ecologies of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away on Spike Island
- Symptomatic Spaces: Adam Rapp and American Eco-Drama in the Anthropocene
- Kinship and Community in Climate-Change Theatre: Ecodramaturgy in Practice
- Eco-Drama, Multinational Corporations, and Climate Change in Nigeria
- Playing the Petrocene: Toxicity and Intoxication in Leigh Fondakowski’s Spill and Ella Hickson’s Oil
- An Ecology of Plants: The Post-Manufacturing Age in Philip Ridley’s Shivered and David Eldridge’s In Basildon
- Alienation, Abjection, and Disgust: Encountering the Capitalocene in Contemporary Eco-Drama
- Elaine Aston. Restaging Feminisms. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, viii + 132 pp., £44.99 (hardback), £44.99 (paperback), £35.99 (PDF/EPUB ebook).
- Maria Chatzichristodoulou, ed. Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity. London: Methuen Drama, 2020, x + 212 pp., £65 (hardback), £19.79 (paperback), £15.83 (PDF ebook).
- Yana Meerzon, David Dean, and Daniel McNeil, ed. Migration and Stereotypes in Performance and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xvi + 298 pp., €124.99 (hardback), €85.59 (PDF ebook).
- Mark Brown. Modernism and Scottish Theatre since 1969: A Revolution on Stage. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, xvii + 254 pp., € 80.24 (hardback), € 24.99 (softcover).
