Wild stories: Stalking story design principles that move participative audiences through animate worlds

Poebright, Rosanna

Abstract

An experiential framework for participative stories that animate interrelated audiences through playful worlds.

Wild stories, as a form, are an experiential framework designed from an ontological foundation of aliveness. They take into account our corporeal experience and movement, our inter-relational connection with others (including characters) and our cacophonous material world in the way in which they are designed. This praxis results in impactful moments fundamentally different in nature from mainstream story forms because they entangle aspects of the audience’s corporeal, social and situated experience. This thesis will describe existing hybrid andanimating story-forms from ritual to playable stories, interactive theatre, and new practice works developed to elucidate the key elements of Body, Others, World and Wild Story. It will argue that demoting technologies to their rightful place as tools, rather than raisons d’etre, gives us a chance to harness them to create truly wild stories that seep off the screen and tumble out of the page to dance, jump and sing in the worlds around us.

This thesis seeks to understand the threads of experience that tie these different new kinds of story together and make them resonate in unusual ways and become something people tell their friends about. Using practice as research, qualitative interviews with audience and literature review to create a critical theoretical context, core evaluation comes from the participants of the summative piece of practice, enactive audio work Play Inside. This thesis seeks to identify design principles that will enable future wild storytellers to shape stories that speak to our wild nature, based around core elements of experience: the animated body, its intercorporeal relation to others and the animate world. The wild framing is transferable to all forms of experiential design, starting with the body and its wild, kinetic, relational nature, to inform moments that, rather than dampen, enhance our sense of aliveness.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Aug 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: May 23, 2025
• Keywords: Animism, story, embodiment, body, embodied cognition, audience, interactive, participative, participation, pervasive, world, storyworld, practice as research, games, intersubjectivity, empathy, perspective, kinetic, agency, interaction
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11060574
• Award Date: May 23, 2025