Playing with intimacy & intensity: an interdisciplinary network for participatory performance practice.

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Performance culture is changing. There is a turn towards playful invitations to intense and intimate encounters, that is proving popular with both artists and audiences. Audiences are being drawn into rich and sometimes risky experiences in the middle of performance, rather than at a safe spectatorial distance, often through structured games or playful provocations. The diverse work that is going on in theatre, live art, dance, gaming and applied arts can be seen as a dynamic but diffuse project of research and development into interaction, involvement and encounter, and into what play and performance can become in contemporary culture. There is a need to make stronger connections between these disciplines, to enhance shared understanding in the sub-disciplines of participatory performance that are emerging in each case, and thus to stimulate new directions of enquiry in practice and theory. This network brings together those who explicitly and implicitly research playfully intimate and intense participation, involving artists, academics and artist-academics across and between the intersections of art forms and academic disciplines, to stimulate shared insight and highly productive reflection on the artistic potential and ethical complexities of this work. The network proposed is international, with expertise in creating and theorising performance practices across this range of art forms and academic disciplines, with proven ability to achieve high quality and high impact outcomes in writing and performance. These changes to performance culture are happening now, and the growth of participatory performance across international cultural industries shows no sign of abating. The urgency of this research is that interdisciplinary practice-oriented research, involving practitioners and theorists from across intersecting art forms and disciplines with the deeper understanding it will bring, is needed to enhance and drive innovative practical responses to the complex ethical and aesthetic challenges of intimate and intense participation.