ABSTRACT
ZU-UK distilled strategies developed for their all-night participatory performance, Hotel Medea (2006–12), into a “dramaturgy of participation” (Lopes Ramos and Maravala 2016): a training and performance-making approach drawing on combined non-Western, non-commercial praxes from which the company has emerged (including Brazilian, Eastern European, Persian and Indian body-based and spiritual traditions). Subsequently, ZU-UK's work has moved further beyond the confines of theatre and performer-training but continues to focus on participation and working with emerging artists towards generating post-immersive collaborative models that reject neo-liberal pressures for scale, reproducibility, and escape, in favor of intimacy, specificity, and awareness. We examine “role-play” and “instruction-based performance” as modes of teaching and performing that, in conjunction with social role theory after Goffman (1959), become strategies for political activation. Examples used to demonstrate the analog of positioning audiences and students as makers of their own experiences and compelling them to think about who work is by, with, and for.
