Accessing the Interiors of Late Medieval Poetry through Immersive Performance Creation

Abstract

My graduate thesis considers both how textual immersion functions in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and how adapting sections of the poem to immersive performances can transform the audience’s perception, understanding, and experience of the text. Examining textually immersive environments—which are characterized by literary works' provocation of the senses—in late medieval literature offers insight into how mentally immersive scenes endeavour to realize various objectives, such as promoting ideals of toxic masculinity. Utilizing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a case study, my research then examines how audience engagement can be maximized through a variety of immersive strategies. I implement Practice as Research (PaR) methodologies to undergo a series of four performance experiments that place a small audience within textually immersive sections of the poem. These performative applications deploy visual, aural, and tactile immersive techniques to involve the audience more deeply and viscerally in the work, thereby evoking individualized affective responses and interpretations. Audience surveys and focus groups are used to gauge the effects of the performances, and the analysis of these post-performance responses determine how each immersive experiment impacted the audience members’ engagement with the poem.