Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor

Description

This book addresses Disney parks using performance theory. Few to no scholars have done this to date—an enormous oversight given the Disney parks’ similarities to immersive theatre, interpolation of guests, and dramaturgical construction of attractions. Most scholars and critics deny agency to the tourist in their engagement with the Disney theme park experience. The vast body of research and journalism on the Disney “Imagineers”—the designers and storytellers who construct the park experience—leads to the misconception that these exceptional artists puppeteer every aspect of the guest’s experience. Contrary to this assumption, Disney park guests find a range of possible reading strategies when they enter the space. Certainly Disney presents a primary reading, but generations of critical theory have established the variety of reading strategies that interpreters can employ to read against the text. This volume of twelve essays re-centers the park experience around its protagonist: the tourist. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 You’re in the Parade! Disney as Immersive Theatre and the Tourist as Actor (Jennifer A. Kokai, Tom Robson)....Pages 3-20 Front Matter ....Pages 21-21 ‘The Future Is Truly in the Past’: The Regressive Nostalgia of Tomorrowland (Tom Robson)....Pages 23-42 What’s Missing in Frontierland? American Indian Culture and Indexical Absence at Walt Disney World (Victoria Pettersen Lantz)....Pages 43-63 Taming the Fairy Tale: Performing Affective Medievalism in Fantasyland (Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy)....Pages 65-83 Front Matter ....Pages 85-85 The Nemofication of Nature: Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World (Jennifer A. Kokai)....Pages 87-106 Disney-Fying Dixie: Queering the ‘Laughing Place’ at Splash Mountain (Chase A. Bringardner)....Pages 107-125 Rising in the East: Disney Rehearses Chinese Consumers at a Glocalized Shanghai Disneyland (Laura MacDonald)....Pages 127-148 Front Matter ....Pages 149-149 ‘Have to See It, Yet Boring’: Disney’s Robot Dramas Revisited (Li Cornfeld)....Pages 151-170 The Search for a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow: Performing Utopia with Non-Human Bodies in the Hall of Presidents (Joseph R. D’Ambrosi)....Pages 171-192 The Royal Theatre Presents: Echoes of Melodrama in the Magic Kingdom (Maria Patrice Amon)....Pages 193-210 Front Matter ....Pages 211-211 Disney’s Influence on the Modern Theme Park and the Codification of Colorblind Racism in the American Amusement Industry (Jill Anne Morris)....Pages 213-227 It’s Good to Be Bad: Resistance, Rebellion, and Disney Villain Merchandise (Christen Mandracchia)....Pages 229-246 The Park as Stage: Radical Re-Casting in Disneyland’s Social Clubs (Elizabeth Schiffler)....Pages 247-264 Front Matter ....Pages 265-265 Exemplary Disney: An Afterword (Susan Bennett)....Pages 267-276 Back Matter ....Pages 277-292