Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice


Autoria(s): Hadley, Bree J.
Data(s)

01/07/2014

Resumo

Pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes are co-creative cultural performance practices that appear across times, contexts and cultures. These practices include everyday play amongst families, friends and coworkers, entertainment programs such as Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, and aesthetic and activist pranks perpetrated by situationist artists, guerrilla artists, and, most recently, culture ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning capitalist systems back on themselves. Although it can, in common usage, describe almost any show off behaviour, a prank in the strictest definition of the term is a performance that deploys a very specific set of strategies. It is an act of trickery, mischief, or deceit, that must be taken as real, and momentarily cause real fear, anger or worry for an unwitting spectator-become-performer, who is meant to play along until the trick is revealed and their response can be represented back to the prankster, other spectators, or society as a whole, either for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of commentary on a cultural phenomenon. A prank, in this sense, deliberately blurs the boundaries between daily and dramatic performance. It creates a moment of uncertainty, in which both the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever, or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to play along, discern the trick, discern the point of the trick, and, in the end, be duped, be a good sport, or even play/pay the prankster back, are both put to the test. In this paper, I consider a number of pranking traditions popular where I am in Australia, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. I use performance, spectatorship and ethical theory to examine the engagement between prankster, pranked spectator, and other spectators, in this most distinctive sort of community-driven performance practice, and the way it builds and breaks status, social and other sorts of relationships within and between specific communities.

Formato

application/pdf

Identificador

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/83555/

Relação

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/83555/1/BHadley_PlayingPranks-TraditionsCommunities%26CoCreativeCulturalPractices.pdf

Hadley, Bree J. (2014) Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice. In Avant Garde, Tradition, Community - Performance Studies international (PSi) Conference 2014, 4-8 July 2014, Shanghai Theatre Academy, Shanghai. (Unpublished)

Direitos

Copyright 2014 Bree Hadley

Fonte

Creative Industries Faculty; Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation; School of Media, Entertainment & Creative Arts

Palavras-Chave #190404 Drama Theatre and Performance Studies #Identity Performance #Pranks #Spectatorship
Tipo

Conference Paper