Week 2 Discussion: Immersive Tourism and Creative Drama

In reading Magelssen's acount of "Caminata Noctura," the underground railroad simulation, and other immersive tourism projects, my mind was immediately drawn to the work being done with elementary and middle school students in the creative drama classroom. To quickly summarize, creative drama is a non-performative, process-based way of teaching and learning drama, and is basically a smaller-scale, educationally-focused version of the tourist attractions Magelssen describes.

For example, I observed a 4th grade class last year that was playing out a drama of immigration to the United States in the 19th century, and the students all got down on their bellies and sneaked under fences and into corners, and huddled up in hiding spaces on an imaginary boat, holding hands and shivering for fear of the guard (played by their drama teacher), who was on the lookout for fugitives. While all this plays out in a standard classroom, with mostly imaginary props etc., the reality of it for students can be as intense as the reality Magelssen describes in his first experience with the underground railroad simulation.

In a speech he gave at the 2009 Conference of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, Harvard Professor Howard Gardner pointed to research that showed that middle school students who took drama classes improved on tests of empathy between 6th and 8th grade, while students' scores during these years, on average, decreased. I think this research can, in a sense, be considered in terms of the immersion tourism industry, and that we can assume that simulations of poverty and hardship also do good for a person's sense of empathy.

But I also think that many of us (especially those of us that were weirded out by the idea of the Caminata Nocturna) would instinctively feel that there's a difference between simulating hardship with a group of fourth graders as an educational exercise and doing the same thing with a group of paying adult vacationers as a tourist attraction.

So my questions, then, are:

1. How do the demographics (race, age, class, nationality, etc.) of the participatory audience of an immersive performance piece like the Caminata Nocturna affect the meaning and effect of the piece?

2. Do the intention and purpose of this kind of work change its meaning and effect?

3. Do we feel like the potential for projects like the Caminata Nocturna to raise empathy for oppressed people is enough to override the uneasiness some of us feel (see Tracey and Amanda's posts, especially) about the authenticity (or lack of authenticity) of the experience of the participatory audience?