Intimate Acts: Inside The 'Fourth Wall' (MUST20011)

The Oxford Dictionary defines the fourth wall as ‘the space which separates a performer…from an audience …a conceptual barrier between any fictional work and its readers or viewers’. In this subject we examine and explore the creation of theatre in which the performer engages in a more intimate relationship with the audience, perhaps through creating a sense of complicity with its audience, through direct address, through theatre moving into intimate physical spaces such as private lounge rooms or through combinations of a number of these elements. In this theatre we challenge the notions of what is real and what is representative. The audience is necessarily invited to take on a more active role than does the observer in fourth wall theatre: to be engaged with being within the performance. Lectures and presentations cover a range of works in areas that may be as diverse as cabaret, burlesque, children’s theatre, site-specific private performance and independent theatre and music theatre. Within practical workshops students will explore elements of performance-making such as space, materials, content and rationale. The major assessment task will give students the choice to critically review theatre within this context, to collaborate on the creation of a concept for an intimate theatre work or to perform a small excerpt of a work in progress. These may incorporate dance, spoken text, music, song, light, sound and physical materials or any combinations of these.