Paratext in Contemporary Theatre Practice

This thesis, Paratext in Contemporary Theatre Practice, proposes a ‘paratextual model’ as a new model of analysis for contemporary theatre practice, applying the concept of ‘paratextuality’ established by Gérard Genette. This analytical model enables us to flexibly schematise the central/marginal and the textual/paratextual in the audience’s appreciation of the work, capturing boundary-crossing acts within a performance work, whether this is explicitly aimed at by the practitioners or not. Such slippages and fluidity of focus within the work are observed particularly in contemporary performance practice that demands a more directly immersed, participatory role for the audience members.
Chapter 1 details the concept of paratextuality by Genette, discussing its departure from a solely literary concept to an analytical vehicle with a wider applicability beyond literature. Chapter 2 establishes the paratextual approach offers a new way to understand and examine theatrical experiments with marginality. Case studies in later chapters illustrate the manifestation of the paratextual across contemporary performance works of diverse forms, ranging from devised performance and site-specific performance to immersive theatre. The primarily spatial concept of paratext is tested through the case studies of selected performance examples that take diverse formats and situated in disparate physical spaces.
The thesis as a whole demonstrates that a paratextual approach usefully supplements the existing critical discourses on the contemporary theatre practice by providing the vocabulary to discuss seemingly marginal elements of performance that are actually integral to the meaning-making process for theatre makers and their audiences. Beginning from the originally literary concept of paratext, the thesis reinterprets and adapts Genette’s paratextual model to offer a valuable perspective which enables us to address both text-based theatre and creative experimentation which are often beyond the verbal, potentially bridging the gap between the performance forms.