Books by scott magelssen
Enveloping Worlds: Toward a Discourse of Immersive Performance, 2025
From University of Michigan Press:
Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes th... more From University of Michigan Press:
Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.
Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms at Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.
E.B. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis.
Scott Magelssen is Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Performing Flight: From The Barnstormers to Space Tourism, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, and co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions.
This book brings performance and flight together in conversation as a means to explore the ways i... more This book brings performance and flight together in conversation as a means to explore the ways in which human heavier-than-air aviation and space travel have been fundamentally connected to images, gestures, narrative tropes, and performative acts. Performance has shaped the enterprise of flight in public perception and consciousness and in many cases has guaranteed its success as modes of entertainment, travel, research, and warfare. From the early professional aerial entertainers known as barnstormers, whose name was drawn from the itinerant theatre troupes of the nineteenth century, to the emerging industry of space tourism, which now uses performative means to cement its importance as both manifest destiny and an escape route from a failed planet, performance and flight have been inextricably linked in ways that have heretofore been underexamined.
“Performing Flight” examines specific moments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that exemplify and nuance the relationships between performance and flight. I begin with early aerial performance in the first decades of the twentieth century, which allowed individuals otherwise disenfranchised from most professional realms, like women and African Americans, who could take advantage of the cheap surplus airplanes produced for World War I. From there I examine the performative history of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay and its pilot Paul Tibbets, who both spectacularly ushered in the atomic age by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, and later reperformed the bombing for enthusiastic air show spectators. I continue to trace the connections between war and flight in the performative speech of commercial airline pilots in the second half the twentieth century and draw connections between the folksy drawl pilots used to shape passenger behavior and the performance of masculinity, authority, and prowess epitomized by test pilot Chuck Yeager, to whom novelist Tom Wolfe famously ascribed “the Right Stuff.” The creation of the American Astronaut comes next. An individual and profession that did not exist before 1959, the astronaut was a dramaturgical creation by collaborations between NASA engineers, Life Magazine, fashion designers, and public relations handlers, on whose performative success the Cold War, the Space Race, and the congressional funding of the Space Program all depended. Finally, I interrogate the emerging industry of space tourism. As the business of space moves from government agencies to companies owned by billionaire entrepreneurs (Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos), who promise space flight to commercial passengers within the decade, how will we perform space tourists? …And should we?
Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
An ecopark in Mexico features an attraction where tourists can pretend to be illegal migrants bra... more An ecopark in Mexico features an attraction where tourists can pretend to be illegal migrants braving inhospitable desert terrain and the Border Patrol as they attempt to sneak across the US/Mexico border. The US Army simulates entire provinces of Iraq and Afghanistan in the Mojave Desert, complete with bustling villages, insurgents, and Arabic-speaking townspeople, in order to train battalions slated for deployment to the actual Iraq and Afghanistan. A living history museum in Indiana invites daytime visitors to return after dark to play fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad on the run from bounty-hunters. And new training programs at nursing homes simulate the effects of old age in their trainees—fogged glasses and earplugs, thick rubber-bands around the finger joints, sandbag harnesses—and subject them to quotidian tasks like ordering from a fast food menu or counting out change from a coin purse, promoting empathy with their clients through embodied experience. In each of these events, a large-scale, simulated immersive performative environment—“simming” for short (a term I am adapting from online gaming)—has used theater and performance practices to stage environments in which participants may play out a scripted or improvised narrative in order to gain or produce understandings of history, culture, and society. “Simming: The Performance of Meaning in Live Immersive Environments” examines this phenomenon, and lays out the ways in which simming promises—and sometimes delivers—a different kind of efficacy and social change than other media—through affective, embodied testimony.
PRAISE FOR SIMMING:
“[M]eticulously researched and wide-ranging…. Simming provides both an essential overview of the wide variety of simulative events now occurring and a trenchant analysis of their efficacy in various situations.… Magelssen leads the reader on a pleasurably dizzying journey through embodied simulations of car crashes, border crossings, growing old, and even being dead.… At a time when more and more people are learning through simmings, Magelssen’s text excellently outlines why these events require attention, and how they might actually be changing the world.” —Lindsay Adamson Livingston, TDR
“Considering topics such as race, genocide, migration, and war, he carefully analyses the ethics and politics of simming, the use and misuse of its various forms…. Magelssen ... interrogates the marketing of tragedy as a tourist experience in a stand-out chapter on the simming of illegal border crossing [chp 5]. He conveys a sense of the thrill generated by the performance, while extending his exploration of issues of agency from earlier chapters…. [T]he chapter is full of drama, spectacle, and transgressions…. His reflections on the aging body [chp 7] brought me back to his performance as a corpse in the riveting embalming demonstration. This invocation of death—which, Magelssen suggests, is like the shaman’s ecstatic trance in that it cannot be simmed—truly exposes the potential and the limits of performed, participatory simming.” —Carran Waterfield, Modern Drama
“Magelssen’ s first-person account of simming a dead body for an educational recreation of historical autopsy procedures provides as deep a sense of corpsing as I am likely to know. He writes vividly about struggling to lie still, to breathe shallowly, and to repress reflex movements even as he takes in the surgeon’s explanations. Feeling my own muscles cramp sympathetically as I read, I could not help but think that I was simming his experience of simming. Magelssen leavens such absorbing recollections with rigorous contextualization and theoretical reflection. He is especially deft at interrogating points where his own body (white, male, U.S. citizen) disrupts the approximation of experience for which simmings strive.… For Magelssen, such dissonance can at least potentially function as a feature rather than a bug of simming’ s meaning-making pedagogy. That simmings stop short of escapist immersion, he suggests, means that they can provoke a more critical reflection of one’s own social positions.… Critical without being closed, Magelssen.... provides an excellent model for how artists, teachers, and critics can make the most of their embodied pedagogy.” —John Fletcher, Theatre Survey
“That Magelssen not only immersed himself as a role-player in these simulated performances but also wrote about them with both scholarly and artistic aplomb makes this book both good research and very good reading. It’s a rare work of scholarship that is also a page turner. I couldn’t wait to see what outlandish situation he would get himself into next and, equally importantly, how he would contextualize these bizarre experiences within the frames of performance studies and U.S. cultural phenomena of the early twenty-first century…. What is most remarkable about this book is not so much its contribution to the growing field of performance studies—and certainly it has a proud place in that literature—but its penetrating study of early twenty-first-century American culture and politics. Magelssen carefully demonstrates how all of the simulations described have blatant or covert political agendas, reified through a remarkable employment of sophisticated theatre techniques.” —Marti LoMonaco, Theatre History Studies
“[T]horoughly enjoyable to read, consistently informative, and thought provoking. Despite Magelssen’s skepticism regarding the politics of tourism, he proves and able and genial guide, taking us on an eye-opening national tour of events and programs of which many of his readers, including myself, are undoubtedly unaware and that certainly have not received the kind of detailed attention from scholars in performance studies they so richly deserve.” —Philip Auslander, Theatre Annual
“[Magelssen] illustrates the efficacy of immersion as a means of connecting with history in a contemporary moment, but also demonstrates how contemporary ideologues make use of this technology.… While risky in its reliance upon the author’s subjective experience to make larger theoretical claims about reception, such work uncovers valuable dimensions of immersive simulations that elude discursive or semiotic readings. Magelssen deftly avoids the pitfalls of his methodology, creating thick descriptions of his objects of study that scaffold into solid arguments about the ability of simulations to powerfully invoke the past, bear witness to the present, and reimagine the future.” —Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt Theatre Journal
“Simming is a terrific book. Scott Magelssen’s case studies are ably contextualized in the relevant scholarly literature, drawing widely from critical theory, theatre and performance studies, history, cultural studies, and elsewhere.” —Susan Bennett, University of Calgary
“An engaging book, gracefully written with a strong first-person narrative that draws the reader in while simultaneously serving as rich ‘data’ for the author's careful and sophisticated theoretical investigations. It persuasively argues that simulation practices or ‘simming’ is both widespread and worthy of scholarly analysis.” —Jane Desmond, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
From the U of Alabama Press website: Enacting History is a collection of new essays exploring the... more From the U of Alabama Press website: Enacting History is a collection of new essays exploring the world of historical performances. The volume focuses on performances outside the traditional sphere of theatre, among them living history museums, battle reenactments, pageants, renaissance festivals, and adventure-tourism destinations.
This volume argues that the recent surge in such performances have raised significant questions about the need for, interest in, and value of such nontraditional theater. Many of these performances claim a greater or lesser degree of historical “accuracy” or “authenticity,” and the authors tease out the representational and historiographic issues related to these arguments. How, for instance, are issues of race, ethnicity, and gender dealt with at museums that purport to be accurate windows into the past? How are politics and labor issues handled in local- or state-funded institutions that rely on volunteer performers? How do tourists’ expectations shape the choices made by would-be purveyors of the past? Where do matters of taste or censorship enter in when reconciling the archival evidence with a family-friendly mission?
Essays in the collection address, among other subjects, reenactments of period cookery and cuisine at a Maryland renaissance festival; the roles of women as represented at Minnesota’s premiere living history museum, Historic Fort Snelling; and the Lewis and Clark bicentennial play as cultural commemoration.
The editors argue that historical performances like these—regardless of their truth-telling claims—are an important means to communicate, document, and even shape history, and allow for a level of participation and accessibility that is unique to performance. Enacting History is an entertaining and informative account of the public’s fascination with acting out and watching history and of the diverse methods of fulfilling this need.
From U of Michigan Press Website: How should theater history be practiced? Some scholars have arg... more From U of Michigan Press Website: How should theater history be practiced? Some scholars have argued that the emerging discipline of performance studies should replace theater history altogether, while traditional theater historians have sometimes rejected performance studies analyses as unsatisfactorily diffuse and less than rigorous. Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions draws freely on the methods and terminologies of both disciplines, showing that the critical intersection between theater history and performance studies is both desirable and inevitable. The book's original essays, based on innovative and compelling research by 23 contributors, probe key methodological questions about interdisciplinarity, postcolonialism, the archive, and digital technology.
Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as ... more Terms such as race, ethnicity, otherness, and pluralism are becoming increasingly problematic as we grapple with issues of identity in the "post-multicultural" discursive landscape of the twenty-first century. Querying Difference in Theatre History comprises sixteen scholarly case studies in which authors tease out the limitations of contemporary discourse concerning ideas of difference in theatre history today. The essays then incorporate new approaches, theories, and critical vocabulary for dealing with such issues. Unlike other works that address similar subjects, this volume arranges essays by mode of inquiry rather than by "kind of difference." It offers essays that are complex and rigorous, yet accessible and pleasurable'ideal for use in graduate- and upper-division undergraduate theatre and performance classrooms.While "difference" may immediately conjure issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality, this volume also includes essays that examine differences more broadly construed: nationalisms, economic gradations, and so forth. Particular topics in this volume range from intersections of class-based and sex-based politics in theatrical performances during the French Revolution, constructions of blackness and whiteness in turn-of-the-century American brothel dramas, "fantasy heritage," examinations of immigrant, exile, and refugee dramatic characters vis-ã-vis notions of diasporic space, to the political and methodological dilemmas raised when dealing with an individual or event that is "repugnant" or "despicable" to the historian (e.g., anti-gay funeral protests).
Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance offers a new genealogy of living muse... more Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance offers a new genealogy of living museum performance in the U.S. and Europe and examines the performance practices these institutions use in their programming. It departs from most existing scholarship on living museums, which addresses the subject from a museum-studies or anthropology perspective. I approach my material from a background in theatre history and theory, and analyze living museums using postmodern methodology. Living History Museums are unique and vitally important among American cultural institutions in that they merge historical exhibits with live costumed performance. They are also deeply problematic: Promising visitors historical accuracy and authenticity, living museums have fundamentally compromised their programs through a long allegiance with the tourism-entertainment industry and by pursuing methods of performance and historiography that are becoming increasingly outmoded. The book looks to emergent performance practices that depart from a traditional trajectory of living museum development (“second-person interpretation,” non-realism, and Boalian “Forum Theatre” techniques, for instance) in order to offer new suggestions for living museum performance in an increasingly post-modern, post-9/11 tourist landscape.
Papers by scott magelssen
Theatre/Performance Historiography, 2015
This essay concerns the historiographic constructions of time, space, and matter as produced and ... more This essay concerns the historiographic constructions of time, space, and matter as produced and performed by Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit Christian apologetics ministry, in its Creation Museum, "[a] state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum" in Petersburg, Kentucky. The museum "brings the pages of the Bible to life" 1 by steering its visitors through slick displays and interactive exhibits, effectively mobilizing visitors' bodies to "bring to life" the story of young-earth creationism, a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian scriptures that maintains the earth is only a little over six thousand years old. Creation Museum visitors find not only biblical simulations with animatronic dinosaurs sharing the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, they also encounter a reconstruction of "Lucy," the hominid fossil scientists identify as an early ancestor of contemporary humans (figure 1.1). Rather than standing upright like an early human, however, the Creation Museum's figure hunches in a simian pose, knuckles dragging, spine parallel to the ground. Through exhibits like Lucy, the museum, while recognizing the existence of fossils as evidence of life forms that no longer inhabit the earth, positions itself against science's view of the earth as billions of years old, and of the earth's life formsespecially human beings-as the current state of millions of years of evolutionary change. The Lucy exhibit is an example of the Creation Museum's view of a divinely ordained separation between humans and animals, both a cause and a symptom of an entrenched discursive divide between nature and R. K. Bank et al. (eds.), Theatre/Performance Historiography © Rosemarie K. Bank and Michal Kobialka 2015
Performance Research, 2002
Pamiętnik Teatralny, 2021
This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dino... more This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined h...
Plimoth Plantation, a Massachusetts living history museum depicting the year 1627 in Plymouth Col... more Plimoth Plantation, a Massachusetts living history museum depicting the year 1627 in Plymouth Colony, advertises itself as a place where "history comes alive." The site uses costumed Pilgrims, who speak to visitors in a first-personpresentvoice, in order to create a total living environment. Reenactment practices like this offer possibilities to teach history in a dynamic manner by immersing visitors in a space that allows them to suspend disbelief and encounter museum exhibits on an affective level. However, whether or not history actually "comes alive"at Plimoth Plantation needs to be addressed, especially in the face of new or postmodem historiography. No longer is it so simple to say the past can "come alive," given that in the last thirty years it has been shown that the "past" is contestable. A case in point, I argue, is the portrayal of Wampanoag Natives at Plimoth Plantation's "Hobbamock's Homesite." Here , the Native...
Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education
Pamietnik Teatralny, 2001
This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dino... more This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. In short, dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other.
In this essay I examine early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.
Theatre Survey, 2016
That's right, sicker. At least insofar as sick is a social construct (more on that later). I&... more That's right, sicker. At least insofar as sick is a social construct (more on that later). I'm speaking specifically about declining mental health, and for this short essay I focus on our most emergent of theatre and performance-studies scholars: our graduate students. Few of us would disagree that there has always been a significant amount of depression and anxiety among our masters and doctoral students. Recent studies, however, find that more grad students are reporting significant mental health issues today than in any past generation. Perhaps these higher numbers are simply a matter of different and better diagnosing. More likely, those entering graduate programs today have more stressors outside academia: family responsibilities, financial concerns, and culture-related anxiety (more minorities and other historically disenfranchised groups and international students are entering graduate programs than ever before). Moreover, the increase in treatments in the past decade...
Tdr the Drama Review a Journal of Performance Studies, 2003
The shift to “living interpretation” in the second half of the 20th century redirected the trajec... more The shift to “living interpretation” in the second half of the 20th century redirected the trajectory of museum work. Living bodies were said to give a more real experience of the past than could historic objects. But what about those pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep found at every major living history museum? Nowadays museums seek rare breeds or they breed contemporary animals to bring them closer to descriptions found in historic documents. What are the ethical and political implications of “backbreeding”? Will museums determine that some backbreeding is legitimate, while others are the stuff of mad-scientist films?
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Books by scott magelssen
Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.
Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms at Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.
E.B. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis.
Scott Magelssen is Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Performing Flight: From The Barnstormers to Space Tourism, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, and co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions.
“Performing Flight” examines specific moments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that exemplify and nuance the relationships between performance and flight. I begin with early aerial performance in the first decades of the twentieth century, which allowed individuals otherwise disenfranchised from most professional realms, like women and African Americans, who could take advantage of the cheap surplus airplanes produced for World War I. From there I examine the performative history of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay and its pilot Paul Tibbets, who both spectacularly ushered in the atomic age by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, and later reperformed the bombing for enthusiastic air show spectators. I continue to trace the connections between war and flight in the performative speech of commercial airline pilots in the second half the twentieth century and draw connections between the folksy drawl pilots used to shape passenger behavior and the performance of masculinity, authority, and prowess epitomized by test pilot Chuck Yeager, to whom novelist Tom Wolfe famously ascribed “the Right Stuff.” The creation of the American Astronaut comes next. An individual and profession that did not exist before 1959, the astronaut was a dramaturgical creation by collaborations between NASA engineers, Life Magazine, fashion designers, and public relations handlers, on whose performative success the Cold War, the Space Race, and the congressional funding of the Space Program all depended. Finally, I interrogate the emerging industry of space tourism. As the business of space moves from government agencies to companies owned by billionaire entrepreneurs (Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos), who promise space flight to commercial passengers within the decade, how will we perform space tourists? …And should we?
Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
PRAISE FOR SIMMING:
“[M]eticulously researched and wide-ranging…. Simming provides both an essential overview of the wide variety of simulative events now occurring and a trenchant analysis of their efficacy in various situations.… Magelssen leads the reader on a pleasurably dizzying journey through embodied simulations of car crashes, border crossings, growing old, and even being dead.… At a time when more and more people are learning through simmings, Magelssen’s text excellently outlines why these events require attention, and how they might actually be changing the world.” —Lindsay Adamson Livingston, TDR
“Considering topics such as race, genocide, migration, and war, he carefully analyses the ethics and politics of simming, the use and misuse of its various forms…. Magelssen ... interrogates the marketing of tragedy as a tourist experience in a stand-out chapter on the simming of illegal border crossing [chp 5]. He conveys a sense of the thrill generated by the performance, while extending his exploration of issues of agency from earlier chapters…. [T]he chapter is full of drama, spectacle, and transgressions…. His reflections on the aging body [chp 7] brought me back to his performance as a corpse in the riveting embalming demonstration. This invocation of death—which, Magelssen suggests, is like the shaman’s ecstatic trance in that it cannot be simmed—truly exposes the potential and the limits of performed, participatory simming.” —Carran Waterfield, Modern Drama
“Magelssen’ s first-person account of simming a dead body for an educational recreation of historical autopsy procedures provides as deep a sense of corpsing as I am likely to know. He writes vividly about struggling to lie still, to breathe shallowly, and to repress reflex movements even as he takes in the surgeon’s explanations. Feeling my own muscles cramp sympathetically as I read, I could not help but think that I was simming his experience of simming. Magelssen leavens such absorbing recollections with rigorous contextualization and theoretical reflection. He is especially deft at interrogating points where his own body (white, male, U.S. citizen) disrupts the approximation of experience for which simmings strive.… For Magelssen, such dissonance can at least potentially function as a feature rather than a bug of simming’ s meaning-making pedagogy. That simmings stop short of escapist immersion, he suggests, means that they can provoke a more critical reflection of one’s own social positions.… Critical without being closed, Magelssen.... provides an excellent model for how artists, teachers, and critics can make the most of their embodied pedagogy.” —John Fletcher, Theatre Survey
“That Magelssen not only immersed himself as a role-player in these simulated performances but also wrote about them with both scholarly and artistic aplomb makes this book both good research and very good reading. It’s a rare work of scholarship that is also a page turner. I couldn’t wait to see what outlandish situation he would get himself into next and, equally importantly, how he would contextualize these bizarre experiences within the frames of performance studies and U.S. cultural phenomena of the early twenty-first century…. What is most remarkable about this book is not so much its contribution to the growing field of performance studies—and certainly it has a proud place in that literature—but its penetrating study of early twenty-first-century American culture and politics. Magelssen carefully demonstrates how all of the simulations described have blatant or covert political agendas, reified through a remarkable employment of sophisticated theatre techniques.” —Marti LoMonaco, Theatre History Studies
“[T]horoughly enjoyable to read, consistently informative, and thought provoking. Despite Magelssen’s skepticism regarding the politics of tourism, he proves and able and genial guide, taking us on an eye-opening national tour of events and programs of which many of his readers, including myself, are undoubtedly unaware and that certainly have not received the kind of detailed attention from scholars in performance studies they so richly deserve.” —Philip Auslander, Theatre Annual
“[Magelssen] illustrates the efficacy of immersion as a means of connecting with history in a contemporary moment, but also demonstrates how contemporary ideologues make use of this technology.… While risky in its reliance upon the author’s subjective experience to make larger theoretical claims about reception, such work uncovers valuable dimensions of immersive simulations that elude discursive or semiotic readings. Magelssen deftly avoids the pitfalls of his methodology, creating thick descriptions of his objects of study that scaffold into solid arguments about the ability of simulations to powerfully invoke the past, bear witness to the present, and reimagine the future.” —Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt Theatre Journal
“Simming is a terrific book. Scott Magelssen’s case studies are ably contextualized in the relevant scholarly literature, drawing widely from critical theory, theatre and performance studies, history, cultural studies, and elsewhere.” —Susan Bennett, University of Calgary
“An engaging book, gracefully written with a strong first-person narrative that draws the reader in while simultaneously serving as rich ‘data’ for the author's careful and sophisticated theoretical investigations. It persuasively argues that simulation practices or ‘simming’ is both widespread and worthy of scholarly analysis.” —Jane Desmond, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This volume argues that the recent surge in such performances have raised significant questions about the need for, interest in, and value of such nontraditional theater. Many of these performances claim a greater or lesser degree of historical “accuracy” or “authenticity,” and the authors tease out the representational and historiographic issues related to these arguments. How, for instance, are issues of race, ethnicity, and gender dealt with at museums that purport to be accurate windows into the past? How are politics and labor issues handled in local- or state-funded institutions that rely on volunteer performers? How do tourists’ expectations shape the choices made by would-be purveyors of the past? Where do matters of taste or censorship enter in when reconciling the archival evidence with a family-friendly mission?
Essays in the collection address, among other subjects, reenactments of period cookery and cuisine at a Maryland renaissance festival; the roles of women as represented at Minnesota’s premiere living history museum, Historic Fort Snelling; and the Lewis and Clark bicentennial play as cultural commemoration.
The editors argue that historical performances like these—regardless of their truth-telling claims—are an important means to communicate, document, and even shape history, and allow for a level of participation and accessibility that is unique to performance. Enacting History is an entertaining and informative account of the public’s fascination with acting out and watching history and of the diverse methods of fulfilling this need.
Papers by scott magelssen
In this essay I examine early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.
Enveloping Worlds is a collection of essays that analyzes the phenomenon of immersive, participatory performance as it has developed in the US. As this collection demonstrates, immersive performance offers three-dimensional multisensory experiences, inviting audience members to be participants in the unfolding of the story, and challenging pre-existing ideas about the function of performance and entertainment. Enveloping Worlds questions audience agency and choice, the space and boundaries of performance, modes of immersion, empathy and engagement, and ethical considerations through fifteen essays.
Case studies in the volume include the Choctaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma and Choctaw sovereignty; a Black artist’s autoethnographic performance challenging White audiences’ entitlement to full inclusion; Immersive Van Gogh experiences and their scenographers; telephone performance during the COVID-19 lockdowns; Diane Paulus’s The Donkey Show; the Battle of Atlanta panorama; an antebellum-themed department store display from the 1920s; escape rooms at Disney Parks; remotely staged plays about aging and dementia; tiki bars; anachronistic costuming at Renaissance Festivals; the technologies that shape the boundaries of immersive worlds; and tabletop role-playing games. Taken together, these essays contribute a rich discussion of immersive performance across radically different contexts, offering analytical models and terminology with which to clarify and advance this emergent discourse.
E.B. Hunter is Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington University in St. Louis.
Scott Magelssen is Professor of Theatre History and Performance Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of Performing Flight: From The Barnstormers to Space Tourism, Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, and co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions.
“Performing Flight” examines specific moments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that exemplify and nuance the relationships between performance and flight. I begin with early aerial performance in the first decades of the twentieth century, which allowed individuals otherwise disenfranchised from most professional realms, like women and African Americans, who could take advantage of the cheap surplus airplanes produced for World War I. From there I examine the performative history of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay and its pilot Paul Tibbets, who both spectacularly ushered in the atomic age by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, and later reperformed the bombing for enthusiastic air show spectators. I continue to trace the connections between war and flight in the performative speech of commercial airline pilots in the second half the twentieth century and draw connections between the folksy drawl pilots used to shape passenger behavior and the performance of masculinity, authority, and prowess epitomized by test pilot Chuck Yeager, to whom novelist Tom Wolfe famously ascribed “the Right Stuff.” The creation of the American Astronaut comes next. An individual and profession that did not exist before 1959, the astronaut was a dramaturgical creation by collaborations between NASA engineers, Life Magazine, fashion designers, and public relations handlers, on whose performative success the Cold War, the Space Race, and the congressional funding of the Space Program all depended. Finally, I interrogate the emerging industry of space tourism. As the business of space moves from government agencies to companies owned by billionaire entrepreneurs (Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos), who promise space flight to commercial passengers within the decade, how will we perform space tourists? …And should we?
Forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.
PRAISE FOR SIMMING:
“[M]eticulously researched and wide-ranging…. Simming provides both an essential overview of the wide variety of simulative events now occurring and a trenchant analysis of their efficacy in various situations.… Magelssen leads the reader on a pleasurably dizzying journey through embodied simulations of car crashes, border crossings, growing old, and even being dead.… At a time when more and more people are learning through simmings, Magelssen’s text excellently outlines why these events require attention, and how they might actually be changing the world.” —Lindsay Adamson Livingston, TDR
“Considering topics such as race, genocide, migration, and war, he carefully analyses the ethics and politics of simming, the use and misuse of its various forms…. Magelssen ... interrogates the marketing of tragedy as a tourist experience in a stand-out chapter on the simming of illegal border crossing [chp 5]. He conveys a sense of the thrill generated by the performance, while extending his exploration of issues of agency from earlier chapters…. [T]he chapter is full of drama, spectacle, and transgressions…. His reflections on the aging body [chp 7] brought me back to his performance as a corpse in the riveting embalming demonstration. This invocation of death—which, Magelssen suggests, is like the shaman’s ecstatic trance in that it cannot be simmed—truly exposes the potential and the limits of performed, participatory simming.” —Carran Waterfield, Modern Drama
“Magelssen’ s first-person account of simming a dead body for an educational recreation of historical autopsy procedures provides as deep a sense of corpsing as I am likely to know. He writes vividly about struggling to lie still, to breathe shallowly, and to repress reflex movements even as he takes in the surgeon’s explanations. Feeling my own muscles cramp sympathetically as I read, I could not help but think that I was simming his experience of simming. Magelssen leavens such absorbing recollections with rigorous contextualization and theoretical reflection. He is especially deft at interrogating points where his own body (white, male, U.S. citizen) disrupts the approximation of experience for which simmings strive.… For Magelssen, such dissonance can at least potentially function as a feature rather than a bug of simming’ s meaning-making pedagogy. That simmings stop short of escapist immersion, he suggests, means that they can provoke a more critical reflection of one’s own social positions.… Critical without being closed, Magelssen.... provides an excellent model for how artists, teachers, and critics can make the most of their embodied pedagogy.” —John Fletcher, Theatre Survey
“That Magelssen not only immersed himself as a role-player in these simulated performances but also wrote about them with both scholarly and artistic aplomb makes this book both good research and very good reading. It’s a rare work of scholarship that is also a page turner. I couldn’t wait to see what outlandish situation he would get himself into next and, equally importantly, how he would contextualize these bizarre experiences within the frames of performance studies and U.S. cultural phenomena of the early twenty-first century…. What is most remarkable about this book is not so much its contribution to the growing field of performance studies—and certainly it has a proud place in that literature—but its penetrating study of early twenty-first-century American culture and politics. Magelssen carefully demonstrates how all of the simulations described have blatant or covert political agendas, reified through a remarkable employment of sophisticated theatre techniques.” —Marti LoMonaco, Theatre History Studies
“[T]horoughly enjoyable to read, consistently informative, and thought provoking. Despite Magelssen’s skepticism regarding the politics of tourism, he proves and able and genial guide, taking us on an eye-opening national tour of events and programs of which many of his readers, including myself, are undoubtedly unaware and that certainly have not received the kind of detailed attention from scholars in performance studies they so richly deserve.” —Philip Auslander, Theatre Annual
“[Magelssen] illustrates the efficacy of immersion as a means of connecting with history in a contemporary moment, but also demonstrates how contemporary ideologues make use of this technology.… While risky in its reliance upon the author’s subjective experience to make larger theoretical claims about reception, such work uncovers valuable dimensions of immersive simulations that elude discursive or semiotic readings. Magelssen deftly avoids the pitfalls of his methodology, creating thick descriptions of his objects of study that scaffold into solid arguments about the ability of simulations to powerfully invoke the past, bear witness to the present, and reimagine the future.” —Margaret Werry and Bryan Schmidt Theatre Journal
“Simming is a terrific book. Scott Magelssen’s case studies are ably contextualized in the relevant scholarly literature, drawing widely from critical theory, theatre and performance studies, history, cultural studies, and elsewhere.” —Susan Bennett, University of Calgary
“An engaging book, gracefully written with a strong first-person narrative that draws the reader in while simultaneously serving as rich ‘data’ for the author's careful and sophisticated theoretical investigations. It persuasively argues that simulation practices or ‘simming’ is both widespread and worthy of scholarly analysis.” —Jane Desmond, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This volume argues that the recent surge in such performances have raised significant questions about the need for, interest in, and value of such nontraditional theater. Many of these performances claim a greater or lesser degree of historical “accuracy” or “authenticity,” and the authors tease out the representational and historiographic issues related to these arguments. How, for instance, are issues of race, ethnicity, and gender dealt with at museums that purport to be accurate windows into the past? How are politics and labor issues handled in local- or state-funded institutions that rely on volunteer performers? How do tourists’ expectations shape the choices made by would-be purveyors of the past? Where do matters of taste or censorship enter in when reconciling the archival evidence with a family-friendly mission?
Essays in the collection address, among other subjects, reenactments of period cookery and cuisine at a Maryland renaissance festival; the roles of women as represented at Minnesota’s premiere living history museum, Historic Fort Snelling; and the Lewis and Clark bicentennial play as cultural commemoration.
The editors argue that historical performances like these—regardless of their truth-telling claims—are an important means to communicate, document, and even shape history, and allow for a level of participation and accessibility that is unique to performance. Enacting History is an entertaining and informative account of the public’s fascination with acting out and watching history and of the diverse methods of fulfilling this need.
In this essay I examine early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.