Enlivening Tactics: Collectively Produced Liveness in Theatre with Mobile and Locative Media
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2026
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This thesis introduces the concept of enlivening to describe a collectively generated sense of liveness that emerged through practice-led research in theatre with mobile and locative media (TwMLM). Enlivening describes a dynamic state of liveness that is continuously and collectively produced between performance and participant within mediated assemblages. Here it is examined through a series of tactics used to organise dimensions of time, space and action in the process of theatre making. This work contributes further understanding regarding how TwMLM enlivens an audience’s relationship to self, others and environment.
The approach has been to use practice-led research to produce a body of TwMLM events and then investigate them through the experience of audience and practitioners. Five TwMLM events were produced and are documented through this thesis. The use of mobile and locative technologies varies from custom-made locative media applications through to commercially available applications. These technologies were formative in the development of each performance, affording the staging of scavenger hunts, secret missions, walking tours and games of hide and go seek as performance modes. These performances and their corresponding cycles of prototyping, production, reflection and iteration serve as research outputs and as process.
Alongside the practice component are practitioner reflections, analysis of scene studies, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with collaborating artists. This data informs the identification of key spatiotemporal tactics used in the performance works, a renewed taxonomy of descriptive dimensions for TwMLM and three experiential themes tied to two specific performances produced through a reflexive thematic analysis.
The results of the study are focused in three higher level enlivening tactics. They include enlivening as shaping contingency, enlivening as locations per second and enlivening as audience sync. These explore defamiliarizing place to resensitize audiences to their environment, organizing movement and interaction sensitivity with respect to narrative progression, and designing for ambient connection among asynchronous audiences. They reflect both making strategies embedded in the works and recurring patterns identified in audience and practitioner experience.
The contributions of this thesis are threefold. They include:
• a renewed time and space matrix for analyzing and designing TwMLM as well as six tactics that emerge from shifts in spatiotemporal relations,
• three experiential themes to further understand perceptual and relational shifts in TwMLM, developed through interactions with audiences and practitioners,
• and a dramaturgical framework that emerged from the research, offering enlivening as a structuring principle to organize spatiotemporal relations in TwMLM.
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