i am obsessed with this sort of thing after seeing Sleep No More. (which has elements of both styles of interaction, though sounds closer to Tamara in overall experience.)
i don't know about Tamara, but Sleep No More pulls an interesting psychological trick -- since the audience is all masked, and cannot interact with the actors (well, you can, but basically as much as a ghost can -- you can't influence events) -- you begin to feel that you have a very important role to play, that of the observer, a witness to the events as they unfold. you feel very intimately connected to the characters and the story, because it IS so immersive, and especially if you choose to follow a single character, you begin to feel very close to them -- and yet you cannot help them, cannot save them, cannot even communicate with them. at least for me, this was a powerful and intensely emotionally affecting experience (i still have vivid dreams about Sleep No More).
the style of storytelling, incidentally, reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books more than anything else -- not because you can affect anything, but because of the thing that happens where you can see the same event from different perspectives by making different choices. you can, with multiple readings/shows, witness concurrent events and gain a deeper, more nuanced knowledge of the full story than you can by reading a single narrative all the way through. getting to do that, and getting to choose how you relate to the story each time, is incredibly rewarding.
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Date: 2014-08-22 06:18 pm (UTC)From:i don't know about Tamara, but Sleep No More pulls an interesting psychological trick -- since the audience is all masked, and cannot interact with the actors (well, you can, but basically as much as a ghost can -- you can't influence events) -- you begin to feel that you have a very important role to play, that of the observer, a witness to the events as they unfold. you feel very intimately connected to the characters and the story, because it IS so immersive, and especially if you choose to follow a single character, you begin to feel very close to them -- and yet you cannot help them, cannot save them, cannot even communicate with them. at least for me, this was a powerful and intensely emotionally affecting experience (i still have vivid dreams about Sleep No More).
the style of storytelling, incidentally, reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books more than anything else -- not because you can affect anything, but because of the thing that happens where you can see the same event from different perspectives by making different choices. you can, with multiple readings/shows, witness concurrent events and gain a deeper, more nuanced knowledge of the full story than you can by reading a single narrative all the way through. getting to do that, and getting to choose how you relate to the story each time, is incredibly rewarding.