Book Reviews James Frieze, ed. Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, xv + 345 pp., € 96.29 (hardback), € 74.96 (PDF ebook). Reviewed by Joanna Jayne Bucknall, E-Mail: J.J.Bucknall@bham.ac.uk https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2018-0041 Reframing Immersive Theatre: The Politics and Pragmatics of Participatory Perfor- mance is an ambitious, eclectic and hefty volume boasting over 20 different con- tributors from a variety of disciplines beyond theatre, including dance, gaming, the memory institution sector and digital technologies. The scope of the collection is, as the title suggests, a broadening of the discourse and critical framing surrounding immersive theatre to encompass a far more interdisciplinary perspective. There are contributions from practitioners and scholars from the disciplines of dance, gam- ing and the creative cultural economy from across a multitude of geographical contexts. In this volume, James Frieze, the editor, explicitly seeks to explode the disciplinary boundary of immersive theatre and with his selection of contributions proposes a more transdisciplinary and inclusive approach that he categorises as ‘participatory performance.’ In doing so, the collection of essays presented in this book generates a critical site where the discourse of related and parallel perspec- tives, approaches and methodologies of immersion from dance and gaming rub up against those from theatre. The friction that this generates unfolds and exposes the challenges, concerns and tensions that both unite and separate them. The disciplinary jostle that Frieze stages in his collection produces some stark but fresh insights and perspectives by locating immersive theatre as only one of the relational aspects of a much broader concern with immersion, inclusion and participation in performance. Frieze suggests that participatory performance, as it is invoked in this book, is a field rather than a set of forms or formulae, a field in which form is intensely dynamic-evolving through dialogue about the effects of form, dialogue within which feedback from participants contends with projections and assumptions cast by the makers of the work. As such, participatory performance poses acute, and acutely political, challenges to critical framing. (3) In the opening chapter, Frieze suggests that participatory performance might be understood as part of what Lindsay Steenberg refers to as the ‘forensic turn’ and as a manifestation of “a cultural turn towards the construction of truth as a participatory game of evidence-gathering” (25). JCDE 2018; 6(2): 446–450 Brought to you by | National University of Singapore - NUS Libraries Authenticated Download Date | 3/18/20 4:48 PM