An intimate appearance: Black Box Production in the twenty-first century

This article explores how, in an era where e-mail has discharged the letter or where Facebook replaces face-time with friends over a drink, where the lines between virtual reality and reality are colliding, can live performance aid in the creation of an activated citizenship? I believe to create an activated citizenship, we must first involve an activated spectatorship. Wrapped up in spectatorship, itself, are the elements of identity politics, subjectivity, ways of looking/seeing/gazing and cultural conventions. This research explores the relationship between the ways in which spectators look/see/view and the ways in which the production, working with the intimate relationship of performance-spectatorship in a black box theatre, manipulates the visual vocabulary, collapsing the boundaries of culture, performance and the real.