Amanda Rose:

Scholar and Artist

Approach

I’m fervently hypothetical.

By using artistic practice and experimentation to fuel inquiry and discovery, my work as a performing artist drives my research.

I create, research, and write about immersive and gamified performance, queer theory, performance pedagogy, and performances of intimacy both onstage and in lived experiences.

As an immersive artist, I invite audiences to become engaged in the storytelling process. As an educator, I provide technical and theoretical foundations, unleashing young artists to change our industry and world. I teach through experimentation, play, and critical reflection. As an intimacy specialist, I provide mediation, choreography, vocabulary, and tools to fuel artistic expression.

I see both arts and education as tools to re-center agency and community activation related to ethical practices and pursuing social justice; for this reason, both my art and my scholarship often revolve around community-engaged work.

Community Engaged Performance Projects

  • "Binary Trappings: an Immersive Experience" (2023), produced in partnership with the CSUF Alumni Association, the Department of Theatre & Dance, and the LGBTQ+ Student Support Center

  • "Performing Arts as Emancipatory Practice" at the first annual Hispanic Theatre Festival (2022), partnership with El Grupo de Teatro en Español and CSU Fullerton's College of the Humanities

  • UndocuAmerica (2019) produced in partnership with the ACLU's National 100 Tour, Colorado Immigration Rights Coalition, and Motus Theater

  • Cinco Decimas (2018), produced in partnership with the Community College of Denver Foundation and Su Teatro

  • Playback: A Critical Conversations Project (2018–20), produced in partnership with the North Folk Valley Creative Coalition

  • Campus Assault: It Happens Here (2017–18), produced in partnership with The Blue Bench, The Phoenix Center at Auraria, the University of Colorado Denver, and the Community College of Denver

  • Our History Shapes Our Future (2018), produced in partnership with playwright Karen Zacarias and Su Teatro

  • The One Voice Project (2013–14), created in partnership with Denver Center for the Performing Arts and the Newman Center for Performing Arts

  • Consent Education: Onstage and in Sex Ed (2019–20), produced in partnership with Denver Public School District's CityWide Program and University of Colorado Boulder's Office of Engagement

  • Rush Hour: RACEing Across Campus (2019), produced in partnership with University of Colorado's Diversity and inclusion Summit

Selected Publications

  • “Intimacy In Play: Training Actors for Agentic Symmetry in Unscripted Interactions” is a chapter in the 2022 edited collection “Experiential Theatres” published by Routledge.

    This essay is rooted in theories of emergent gameplay, intimacy choreography, and the author's experience as an immersive performer training undergraduate actors for immersive performance, conversing with scholars, and practices that center audience agency and immersive performance (see Machon 2009; Harviainen 2007; McGonigal 2011). Proposing a rehearsal process for crafting unscripted interactions within immersive environments, this essay introduces a practice through which actors can reassert themselves as agentic participants while facilitating audience play, re-establishing agentic symmetry within unscripted interactions.

    Read Intimacy in Play or Experiential Theatres

  • Co-authored with Laura Rikard, this note was published in the Journal of Consent-Based Performance volume 2, issue 1 (2023).

    Abstract:

    ‘Safe space’isn’t an actionable tool; it is an aspiration. It is through the execution of actions that aspirations are achieved. Simply stating that a creative process or environment is a ‘safe space’because one hopes or aspires for it to be so, does not actually make safety the reality for all participants in the room. It is impossible to create truly ‘safe’spaces, but that doesn’t mean that artists and arts educators facilitating creative processes should decrease our efforts. Instead, we should shift our focus to creating spaces of acceptable risk.

    Read “Focus on Impact, Not Intention: Moving from ‘Safe’ Space to Spaces of Acceptable Risk”

  • This peer-reviewed article, published in vol. 1 issue 1 of the Journal of Consent-Based Performance, outlines both the publication lineage and the known performance practices that fed the development of intimacy choreography.

    Read “The Evolution of Consent-Based Performance”

  • Valha11a: Agency and Genre in Emergent Virtual Larp, an article co-authored with Bella Poynton and Gaby Martineau, published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

    When COVID-19 created barriers to sharing physical space, Otherworld Theatre and Moonrise Games created Valha11a, an emergent sci-fi larp performed using Zoom as an interactive platform. Three creators of Valha11a apply PAR methodology to interrogate the intended and unintended consequences of relocating larp performance online. We analyze the ways in which Zoom impacts players' agency in the performance; production management and facilitation of play; and genre verisimilitude. In this way, we establish a new nexus of ideas within and around larp performance, namely that mediatized larp can serve as a framework for a potentially more intimate, emotionally rich participant experience.

    Read “Valha11a: Agency and Genre in Emergent Virtual Larp”

  • It Happens Here: Facilitating Campus-Wide Conversations Through Performance, an article published in the Texas Theatre Journal.

    This article analyzes a community-engaged performance project created in partnership between the Community College of Denver Theatre Department and the Aurora Campus Phoenix Center for Interpersonal Violence. The article analyzes the performance as political activism, as well as the performance project’s community impact