Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience

Jennifer A. Kokai is Associate Professor of Theatre at Weber State University, USA. Her book Swim Pretty: Aquatic Spectacles and the Performance of Race, Gender, and Nature was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2017. Her essay “Shamu the (Killer) Whale and an Ecology of Commodity” which focused on SeaWorld was published in Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power edited by Laurie Frederik, Kim Marra, and Catherine Schuler. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 81-106. She has also published articles in Theatre History Studies, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (with Mary-Beth Willard). Tom Robson is Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance and Coordinator of Academics at Millikin University, USA. Recent publications include work on historical stage technology in both the journal Theatre Design and Technologyand the edited collection Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor. Other major areas of research interest include African American theatre and drama, musical theatre history, and inclusive theatre pedagogy. He has also published in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Ecumenica, and the film journal Jump Cut.

“Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience addresses an impressive range of issues surrounding the tourist experience at Disney parks. In this time of stay-at-home orders and physical distancing, Kokai and Robson’s collection provides useful tools to reconsider the value, importance, and impact of gathering together and playing.” (Shelley Orr, Theatre Annual Review, 2021)“This engaging collection is likely to become required reading for scholars across a number of fields. It intelligently addresses a set of immersive performances that has largely been ignored by performance scholars and, in doing so, provides engaging and original insight.” (Adam Rush, Contemporary Theatre Review, December 22, 2020)

• 1. “Introduction” Co-Authored by Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson Time, Tomorrowland, and Fantasy.- 2. “The Future Is Truly in the Past: The Regressive Nostalgia of Tomorrowland” by Tom Robson.- 3. “What’s Missing in FrontierLand?: American Indian Culture and Indexical Absence at Walt Disney World” by Victoria Lantz.- 4. “Staging Medieval Fantasy Through Tourism” by Christina Gutierrez-Dennehey Environments as Ideologies.- 5. “The Nemofication of Nature: Animals, Artificiality, and Affect at Disney World” by Jennifer A. Kokai.- 6. “Chinese Lions and Asian Beauties on Broadway Boulevard: Establishing a Satellite Broadway at Shanghai Disney” by Laura MacDonald.- 7. “Disney-fying Dixie: Queering the Laughing Place at Splash Mountain” by Chase Bringardner Liveness and AudioAnimation.- 8. “Dream Away: Disney’s Robot Dramas Revisited” by Li Cornfeld.- 9. “The Search for a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow: Performing ‘Utopia’ with Non-Human Bodies in the Hall of Presidents” by Joseph D’Ambrosi.- 10. “The Royal Theatre Presents: Echoes of Melodrama and Minstrelsy” by Patrice Amon This Counter Identities.- 11. “Gated Amusement Parks, Disneyland, and the Codification of Colorblind Racism in the American Amusement Industry” by Jill Morris.- 12. “Club Villain: Transgression and Empowerment of Disney Villain Culture in the Happiest Place on Earth” by Christen Mandracchia.- 13. “The Park as Stage: Radical Consumer Performance” by Elizabeth Schiffler “Afterword” by Susan Bennett.