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Publicly Available Published by De Gruyter May 12, 2016

Introduction: Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust

  • Mireia Aragay EMAIL logo and Enric Monforte

An indispensable reference point in the field of theatre spectatorship, Helen Freshwater’s Theatre & Audience (2009) sees absence of trust as having distorted the relationship between practitioners, industry and theatre scholars and audiences until very recent times – “a deep-seated suspicion of, and frustration with, audiences” (4) that may go a long way towards explaining the belated development of academic discussions of spectatorship in particular, a situation her own book decisively contributed to begin to remedy. Interestingly, trust in the audience is a key component of Andy Smith’s theatre. As part of the 24th German Society for Contemporary Theatre and Drama in English (CDE) conference, “Theatre and Spectatorship”, held in Barcelona, 4–7 June 2015, Smith performed his piece for one actor, commonwealth (2012).[1] His short summary of the play seems a fitting overture for this special issue of Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, which includes a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference:

[A performer] steps out of the audience and walks onto the stage. They take a position in front of a music stand that holds a scrapbook, open it, and proceed to read the text it contains. For the next forty-five minutes or so they read a simple story about a group of people who have gathered together in a room somewhere – a room that looks a bit like the one the performer and audience are in – to listen to a story. The story tells stories about what it might be that has brought these people there, about what the potential of the situation is, about what they might all do when the story ends. (“What Can We Do?”)

Reflecting on both commonwealth and all that is solid melts into air (2011), Smith describes his practice as “a dematerialised theatre”, that is “resistant to the construction of places and things” and tries, in a minimalistic way, to “[r]emove all excess until [it is] left with something very basic, and in many ways very traditional” (“What Can We Do?”; emphasis original).[1] Such theatre, Smith notes, emerges out of a social context where collective action – or, we might add, any concept of community – seems difficult to envisage; it also appears in a theatrical moment when participatory, interactive and immersive practices are increasingly challenging the boundaries between performer and spectator in ground-breaking, stimulating ways (see “What Can We Do?”). In contrast, a dematerialised theatre “chooses to see the act of sitting and listening in a room not as one of passive consumption, but also a form of participation” (“What Can We Do?”). That is why Smith describes theatre at large as a social act – “a place that I think and hope still has the potential to be a social environment, a place where we can describe who we are to each other, and where we can take some time to think [...] about matters and think about what matters. And to ask the question: what can we do?” (“What Can We Do?”; emphasis original) – and both commonwealth and all that is solid melts into air in particular as collaborations with an audience – “I hope the words that I choose to use and the conditions they can help me to create can somehow allow an act of dialogue or thinking together” (“What Can We Do?”; emphasis original).

As we write this and recall our experience as spectators watching Smith perform commonwealth and listening to his chosen words, we realise that those conditions for thinking together certainly came into being for us, and they did so primarily through the combination of two qualities in Smith’s performance that he has described as gentleness (“Gentle Acts of Removal”) and, following Italo Calvino, “a thoughtful lightness [...]: a capacity to take things seriously without losing a sense of being playful” (“What Can We Do?”; emphasis original). A “low-key removal of obstacles [...] between performance and audience” (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 414) was in evidence, firstly, in the all but bare mise-en-scène – literally a performer reading the text from an open scrapbook that sits on a music stand – and the texture of the language, devoid of “anything that might seem excessive” (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 413). To this was added, from the outset, a method of “gentle interrogation” (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 410) that was not only about recognising the audience’s presence, but crucially about inviting their imaginative and affective engagement with the ideas being explored. Questions like “Are you following this?”, “You can imagine it, can’t you?”, “Do you know the kinds of things I mean?”, “Do you understand?”, which were repeated at regular intervals across the performance, seek to “[m]ake space for the audience” (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 413) and establish a relationship of “trust” between them and the performer by both asking “for their investment” and “invest[ing] in them” (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 414). Crucial to this was Smith’s mode of delivery – the pause he left after each of these questions was a space to be inhabited by each spectator; his observations after each pause (“Good. Great”, “I’m sure you can imagine them”, “Good”) quietly underlined his trust in his audience; and his slow, deliberate, soothing articulation, relaxed body and playful yet caring gaze, they all combined in a muted yet potent way to conjure the “act of faith” (“What Can We Do?”) Smith believes needs to take place between an artist and an audience to enable “the acts of transformation [...] the theatre can offer us” (“What Can We Do?”) – a formulation that is reminiscent of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s views on the transformative power of performance.

Simultaneously referencing and transforming Jill Dolan’s concept of utopian performatives, Smith has noted that he is looking for a kind of theatre that will “lift us not above but into the present” (“What Can We Do?”) – and as spectators to commonwealth in Barcelona in June 2015, we certainly felt ‘lifted’, in the here and now of the performance, into a space and a time where we could reflect (imaginatively, affectively, rationally and, perhaps above all, peacefully) on the seemingly intractable ugliness and complexity of our world, the opportunities for individual and, especially, collective action that might begin to change it, and the significance of theatre as a place where people may gather to do precisely this. The end of commonwealth goes back to the beginning – a performer stands up before an audience and begins to read a story, “something like this”. The piece’s self-reflexive, circular structure does not seek to trap us in some self-contained, postmodern hall of mirrors but rather, we suggest, to prolong the potential for transformation so that we might “consider how we can apply some of its ideas to the worlds beyond its doors” (“What Can We Do?”).

As Smith has noted (“Gentle Acts of Removal” 414), his view of a sitting and listening audience not as a passive but as a participating group of spectators is informed by Jacques Rancière’s notion of the emancipated spectator, among other scholarly reflections on readership / spectatorship.[2] Not surprisingly, a number of the articles in this volume engage with this Rancièrian concept to a greater or lesser extent, in an attempt to tease out its potential as well as its limitations. Among them, Gareth White’s “Theatre in the ‘Forest of Things and Signs’” pays most sustained attention to Rancière’s model of spectatorial emancipation, which he sees both as “a bracing reminder of the potential of performance conceived in its simplest form: as an encounter between a reflective and independent spectator and a work of art that is itself autonomous of its creator”, and as problematically implicated in a “stringent critique of proposals for participatory theatre”. After noting that, according to Rancière, “the manipulation of aesthetic distance” between performer and spectator is based on the same principles as “a traditional stultifying education”, namely, “the mastery of the teacher and the ignorance of a learner”, he goes on to probe Rancière’s ideas further on the basis of his own unsettling experience of participatory spectatorship in Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation) (2014), with a view to elucidating the extent to which they might be used to discuss the value of participation in immersive / interactive theatre. Starting off from the assumption that spectating and meaning-making are based on “the bodily interconnections to the situation that make us intersubjective contributors”, White finds more promising terms in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991), when Rancière discusses intelligence as secondary to the will: “The subject who exercises his or her will on other bodies and thus becomes aware of him or herself has the potential for subjectivation”. Similarly, “if we think of the encounter with participatory performance as the action of the will on an object [...] then we can see its emancipatory aspect in the attention it brings to the subject as possessing an active will” and the extent to which, therefore, it “provokes the experience of subjectivation”. As a spectator-participant in Early Days (of a better nation), White concludes that the performance “demanded that [he] attempt to exercise [his] will, and apprehend [himself] as a subject with a will, rather than experience the performance as a lesson through which [he] was guided by the performance makers” – i.e. that he remain ‘unreformed’ as a spectator.

Like White’s, several other contributions to the present volume are indicative of the palpable increase, since the start of the new millennium, in the production of, and academic research into, participatory, interactive and immersive forms of theatre-making – in fact, a substantial number of the proposals received in response to the conference’s call for papers addressed this kind of practice.[3] Mostly, scholarly engagements with immersive work find their place within the rapidly developing field of Spectator-Participation-as-Research (SPaR) (Heddon, Iball, and Zerihan 2012), where, as Kelly Jordan notes in her contribution to the present volume, academics use “a combination of first-person accounts alongside conventional scholarly writing” that replicates their multifarious role within, and in relation to, the performance – as participants inside the work, spectators to their own experience, and analysts reflecting on it in the ‘aftermath’ of participation. Thus, drawing on her important study Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (2013), Josephine Machon’s “Watching, Attending, Sense-making: Spectatorship in Immersive Theatres” takes as a starting point her own aesthetic, corporeal, affective and intellectual experience of spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2013) in order to explore the significance of watching in immersive theatre. On the basis of a binary distinction between ‘conventional’ theatre production, ostensibly ruled by the hierarchical dichotomies of “auditorium / stage and spectator / performance”, and immersive practice, which radically “reposition[s] the performance / spectator relationship”, the article defines ‘watching’ in immersive performance as an active, embodied, haptic experience that enables the ‘immersive interactor’ – the decision-making “watcher-observer-improviser-adventurer-collaborator” in immersive work – to become “sentiently engaged with the world” of the performance as s/he interacts physically with it. This, Machon suggests, brings about a Deleuzian experience of immanence or pure presence that is as intensely felt by the interactor as it is fleeting. And yet, paradoxically, and precisely because it exploits the “live(d)ness of the performance moment”, immersive theatre “can actuate a lasting ephemerality” that manifests itself in the “embodied memory” of the work in any subsequent process of analysis. In the case of The Drowned Man, Machon suggests that the interactor’s multisensory immersion into the sensual scenographic and choreographic design of the performance grants him / her “visceral access” to the narrative and thematic universe of its source material (Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1837/1879) and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939)), and interpretation will ultimately rely on a (syn)aesthetic response that blends cerebral (semantic) and corporeal (somatic) cognition – a process whereby ‘making sense’ and ‘making sense’ of the work become indistinguishable.

Some of the claims that are sometimes made in relation to immersive theatre reveal strains that are examined in other articles in this volume, with a particular focus on questions of spectatorial empowerment, agency and intimacy.[4] Thus, a frequently-made point is that, unlike conventional theatre, immersive performance fosters the experience of community and human connectedness. Kurt Lancaster, for one, sees participatory theatre as one particular instance of what he calls “performance-entertainments” (77), which also encompass movie theme parks, karaoke and role-playing games, and which he argues provide “for many a sense of group (or tribal) social interaction or catharsis” (77) and “communal mutuality” (85). However, this might be perceived to stand in tension with a recurrent emphasis in scholarly reflections on immersive, participatory work on the individual journey undertaken by each spectator-participant. Indeed, the first-person accounts that buttress a number of discussions of immersive / participatory work in this volume – by Jordan, Machon and White as well as Adam Alston, Anne Étienne, Holly Maples, Karen Quigley and Elizabeth Swift – collectively testify, perhaps, to the isolated individuality of the immersive experience for the spectator-participant, even as some of them query its potential to deliver the promise of intimacy and connectedness it makes.

Similarly, the claim that the immersive interactor, because s/he inhabits the physical, sensual world of the performance and pays embodied, haptic attention to it, can experience Deleuzian immanence in a way that is out of bounds in more traditional theatrical configurations – where the dominance of only two senses, eye and ear, allegedly produces spectatorial detachment and separateness – is offset by David Pattie’s moving description, in this volume, of his personal experience as a spectator of David Greig’s The Events (2013). Opening, as immersive scholars often do, with a first-person account of his synaesthetic – in Machon’s terms, i.e. both emotional / affective and analytical; ((Syn)aesthetics 13–14) – response to the closing moments of the 2014 Actor’s Touring Company’s production of The Events, when the audience are asked to join a choir, Pattie’s “The Events: Immanence and the Audience” implicitly troubles the apparent stability of the traditional theatre / immersive performance polarity as regards spectatorship. Pattie describes his reaction as a moment of spectatorial witnessing that was “fundamentally ethical” in the sense that it expressed “a deeply felt truth about the relation between Self and Other” – a truth that is, nonetheless, thoroughly destabilised in the play as Levinasian ethics are “revealed as doubly insufficient – they can be reversed, turned into a negative version of themselves; and they can be effaced, if the essential nature of the Other is denied or ignored”. This being the case, Pattie wonders how one can “account for the strongly emotional and ethical charge of the final moments of the performance?”. In his view, the powerful affect generated by the play in performance stems mainly from the positioning of the choir as “both part of the fictional universe” and also “part of the world occupied by the audience”, “a surrogate for the participation both of the fictional choir (whose members we never see) and the audience themselves”. Pattie reads this, firstly, as an “irruption of the real” (Lehmann 100) into the fictional universe that “changes the relation between the spectators and the performed world” and produces an experience that is as unsettling and ambivalent from the ethical point of view as it is productive (see Grehan 34–35).

Secondly, by reference to Cull’s Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (2012), he addresses the spectatorial engagement at the end of The Events in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of immanence – as bearer of the individual / collective human voice that triggers an inherently affective / corporeal reaction in the listener, the choir becomes “the incarnation of the immanence” in the play, “the site of the participation, multiplication, and extension of the human body” that reasserts “community [and] empathy”. As such, it demands “a response that is both affective and ethical”, yet remains “inflected by [...] the representation of absence and trauma”, of “human loss”, thus denying the audience “a simple moment of emotional catharsis”. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Greig, in his conversation with Clare Wallace in the present volume, reflects on the ambivalence of the choir along similar lines. A choir, he notes, “is both a wonderful thing because it’s oneness out of diversity and yet, at the same time, [...] [i]t makes you worried about what’s being suppressed”. And yet, the only possible way Greig felt he could write about “the darkness” that is at the heart of The Events was if he could “give the audience something to hang on to [...] this simple human warmth that the choir bring”, and that seems to have been central to Pattie’s affective and ethical response to the play. Seen from the perspective of Deleuzian immanence, Pattie concludes, “participation stops being a performance category, and reveals itself as a fundamental part of the mechanisms of performance”. In other words, if immersive theatre has become increasingly popular because it enables spectators to experience an embodied presentness and aliveness, Pattie’s reflection on being a spectator at The Events reveals processes whereby non-immersive theatre can do this too. Alternatively, adding to and complicating rather than negating the above, perhaps the rise of immersive performance has “evolved the idea and the practice of the spectator”, in Machon’s terms, both for immersive practitioners and interactors themselves and also beyond – for playwrights, spectators and academics of more ‘conventional’ theatre too.

Adam Alston’s “Making Mistakes in Immersive Theatre: Spectatorship and Errant Immersion” sets out to interrogate the ‘immersive theatre’ neologism by taking audience rather than site (pace Machon) as the core element – indeed, as the subject – in immersive theatre practice. The ‘mis-takes’ he made as a participating spectator as he strayed from the intended immersive path in dreamthinkspeak’s In the Beginning Was the End (2013) and Coney’s headphone urban dramaturgy Adventure 1 (2015 and ongoing) prompt his observations on ‘errant immersion’, a mode of spectatorship that depends on the emancipated spectator proposed by Rancière investing in immersion beyond the space intended for it. Thus, for Aston, errant immersion – to be distinguished from the kind of ‘errant spectator’ discussed by Quigley in this volume, who deliberately disengages from, or otherwise antagonises, an immersive environment – identifies “the constitutive role played by audiences in the formation of an immersive theatre aesthetic”, which makes it problematic to designate a theatre maker’s intention and expertise as defining features of immersive theatre practice. Aston concludes, somewhat provocatively, that “[w]hile errant immersion implies an accidentally insubordinate audience, in another sense it implies an ideal audience who subscribes to a framework for audience engagement not just well, but too well”.

Like Coney’s Adventure 1, ANU’s Vardo (2014) – examined in Anne Étienne’s “Challenging the Auditorium: Spectatorship(s) in ‘Off-site’ Performances” alongside Corcadorca’s How These Desperate Men Talk (2014; based on Enda Walsh’s 2004 play) – is (partly) an urban dramaturgy, a mode of theatre-making that, as Aston notes in the present volume, complicates the argument that an immersive event “should always establish an ‘in-its-own-world’-ness where space, scenography, sound and duration are palpable forces that comprise this world”. Drawing on her own experience as a spectator in both productions and on the immediate and delayed accounts of other audience members, Étienne sets out to both reflect on the role, status and limits of spectatorship in so-called ‘site-specific’ performance, and trouble the very notion of ‘site-specificity’, a term sometimes “indiscriminately used to define practices ranging from site-generic to site-exclusive, via site-responsive”. Corcadorca’s How These Desperate Men Talk, a promenade performance where the audience journeys, as a relatively large group, through the nocturnal grounds of a metal factory, functions as a piece “at the limits of traditional theatre and site-responsive performance” that “invites spectators to reflect on their spectating strategies – by showing them how theatre is made”, thus reinforcing Walsh’s play’s metatheatrical dimension. And yet, the production’s relationship to its large audience as it takes them through the performance site points to the essentially political nature of Corcadorca, a company that views theatre as a civic event. Conversely, ANU’s Vardo is an immersive, interactive, site-exclusive production where a small group of three or four people, who promptly become separated, is taken on a journey through the sordid (performative) realities of Dublin’s Monto district. Noting that the performance “engaged [her] as an audience member, a researcher, a woman, and a foreigner (albeit legal)” in painfully contradictory ways that ultimately “paralysed [her] as a spectator”, Étienne reflects on what she sees as the problematic politics of Vardo, and of ANU’s work at large, where “[b]eing a privileged witness of the spectacle of social injustice and crime succeeds in raising awareness”, but spectators often end up torn between admiration for the aesthetic and artistic accomplishment of the piece, and “feeling helpless and battered rather than empowered” through their individual, isolated exposure to the immersive event. In broader terms, this is a timely reminder of the frequently overlooked fact that different, even discordant responses take place not only between audience members, but also within each spectator (Freshwater 6; see also Rayner).

In “Letting the Truth Get in the Way of a ‘Good’ Story: Spectating Solo and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke”, Karen Quigley reflects on her own experience of Blast Theory’s piece, “the world’s first interactive game on a bike”, in which the “solo ‘spectator-performer’” is given open directions via a computer attached to the handlebars as she cycles through the city (Brighton, in Quigley’s case), stopping from time to time “to be alone, and then to speak or to listen”. An “introspective, ghosting, ludic cycle game” which prompts a fluid, “complex network of engagements with the ways in which the spectator-performer might approach her spectatorship and / or performance, and, further, how this might be affected by the play of other anonymous, solo spectator-performers”, Rider Spoke could be described as a site-responsive urban dramaturgy. Explicitly framing her article within the Spectator-Participation-as-Research (SPaR) mode, Quigley focuses on her playfully antagonistic decision to cope with the anxiety associated with audience participation (White 181) by “perform[ing] spectatorship-performance in the form of a character”, and her subsequent abandonment of it. This takes place when the performance forces her to a metaphorical “ethical encounter” with “the voice of the Other”, whose ‘grain’ – “the body in the voice as it sings”, according to Barthes – reaches her through her earbuds, a point that resonates with Pattie’s emphasis on the affective and ethical force of the human voice. This prompts a rupture in her spectatorship-performance that “engenders an awareness of some of the ethical concerns of participatory performance”. As she moves from obfuscation and storytelling to a dialogue based on openness, honesty and trust, Quigley reflects that “what matters in this context, ethically speaking, are the relationships the piece establishes” and how it activates spectatorial ‘response-ability’ (see Lehmann 185). In sum, she finds value in the realisation that “participation is ‘for’ someone or something”; in her awareness, through her “aural spectatorship of the voices of others”, of “the community of the other, hidden, solo spectator-performers”. This not only (partially) collapses the supposedly solo – anonymous, individualistic, even narcissistic – nature of Rider Spoke, but also interrogates the emphasis that is often placed on the value of the individual experience of the spectator in immersive, interactive performance.[5]

Kelly Jordan’s “On the Border of Participation: Spectatorship and the ‘Interactive Rituals’ of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra” continues to scrutinise the limits and potentialities of participatory, immersive practices. Jordan identifies three modes of spectatorship that are in operation during La Pocha Nostra’s ‘interactive rituals’ – performing-spectators; watching-directing-spectators, who are encouraged to offer suggestions while the company’s characteristic ‘human murals’ are being constructed; and spectators who stand back and observe the spectacle. On the basis of her own engagement with La Pocha Nostra’s work as a performing-spectator in Ex-Centris (2003), a watching-spectator in Mapa / Corpo 2: Community Rituals for the New Millenium (2006), and a collaborator with the company in an untitled performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Tucson, Arizona (2007), Jordan offers three important reflections on the value and significance of spectatorship in participatory practice. Firstly, while acknowledging the intensity afforded by occupying the performing-spectator position – analogous to that provided by a one-night stand social encounter, she claims – she suggests that participation not only fails to deliver the promise of intimacy and authenticity it makes – “it is, in the end, a performance” – but it may also entail a loss of critical distance on the performing-spectator’s part, which challenges a widely-held assumption among practitioners and critics of participatory, interactive and / or immersive performance that a spectator-participant is more active or emancipated than a ‘conventional’ spectator. Secondly, she notes that while spectator participation offers a vehicle for dissolving hierarchies between performers and audiences, it also draws up new borders between spectators that engage as performing-spectators and those who choose to remain as watching-spectators – this in spite of the fact that La Pocha Nostra’s ‘interactive rituals’ acknowledge the role of the watching-spectator as a form of participation in a way that, as Jordan points out, suggests that there may be “more than one kind of emancipated spectator”. Drawing on Fischer Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic (2008), the article concludes by highlighting the paradox of participation, that is, the fact that spectator-participants occupy a liminal space between the performance and the audience that is where “the transformative power of performance may be revealed”.

Holly Maples’s “The Erotic Voyeur: Sensorial Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man” is similarly ambivalent as regards the potentiality of spectatorship in immersive theatre. Drawing on theoretical, anecdotal and personal / embodied practice as both ‘interactor’ and performer in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2013), Maples examines the company’s use of what she describes as an artistic and marketing-oriented strategy of seduction. In particular, she focuses on “the seductive landscape” of the production – which includes space, choreography and heightened sensorial experience (especially touch) – and suggests that rather than yielding the communal, shared experience that is often extolled by audience members and critics alike, who see it as indicative of a “desire for intimacy in an increasingly mediated culture”, immersive theatre constructs a sense of purely “performative” intimacy that procures its seductive power from the “ephemerality of the experience” and the way it caters to spectators’ fantasies of self, Other and world. In this context, the company’s much-sought-after one-to-one performances are seen by Maples as “all-too-brief seductive encounter[s]” – reminiscent of Jordan’s one-night stands – that are inherently divisive and even violent, as they nurture both “jealousy and feelings of rejection amongst spectators” whom Punchdrunk choose selectively for the one-on-ones, and “the erotic fantasy of a submissive / dominant relationship” as the spectator is first chosen and subsequently rejected or abandoned by the performer, or may decide to act as “a fickle lover” herself. In sum, not unlike Jordan in relation to La Pocha Nostra, Maples’s contribution argues that Punchdrunk’s immersive theatre fails to provide the intimacy and connectedness it promises. Instead, it seduces the spectator into inhabiting the interactive, erotically / sensually charged world of the production in such a way that she is made to feel isolated (often through violent means) and becomes an ‘erotic voyeur’.

Elizabeth Swift’s “What do Audiences Do? Negotiating the Possible Worlds of Participatory Theatre” and Olivia Turnbull’s “It’s All about You: Immersive Theatre and Social Networking” introduce a fresh perspective on the role played by spectators in contemporary immersive, participatory / interactive and intermedial theatre by framing it in the context of the digital age. Swift notes that these types of theatrical practice require spectators “to become an active partner in the aesthetic process” and thus open up a “liminal zone” where a blurred process of spectatorship situated “between making and receiving art” takes place. To further elucidate the position of the spectator in contemporary immersive and participatory practice, a position entailing both responsibility and vulnerability, Swift draws on Possible Worlds Theory (both its narrative / abstract and modal approaches) and on recent scholarship on the ‘ergodic’, interactive and generative experience of reading hypertext fiction, on the grounds that they offer new concepts and methodologies that can throw light on the shifting dynamics between performance and spectator triggered by the surge in participatory theatre-making since the beginning of the millennium. In the light of this, the article discusses work by Blast Theory, Punchdrunk, Tim Crouch, Void Projects and other contemporary practitioners, before examining Uninvited Guests’ Make Better Please (2012) in detail. On the basis of her personal experience of the piece, Swift notes that, as hypertetxt fiction does through the design of the hyperlinked network, Make Better Please seeks for and depends on the spectators’ participation, yet increasingly limits their agency through “the force of its dramatised rituals”. Thus, Swift concludes by acknowledging the contradictory outcome of such experiences, which present “the pretence of interactivity” while compromising the spectator’s critical distance, so that “[i]t becomes problematic [...] to evaluate a performance as though from a stable external vantage point – all we can elaborate is what it did to us”.

On the basis of recent neuroscientific research, Turnbull discusses the impact of the mind change brought about by social networking and its role vis-à-vis the emergence of immersive theatre by reference to Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd’s You Me Bum Bum Train (2004), Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007 and ongoing) and Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2013). The article sees revealing parallelisms between the growing popularity of social networking – which seems to promise increased connectedness and socialisation while paradoxically intensifying the feeling of loneliness that characterises the digital age, and has also been correlated to an innate drive towards “self-disclosure” and rising levels of narcissism – and one-to-one performances and immersive theatre in general, which create a strong sense of “being all about you” by emphasising “the individualized, interactive, responsive experience” they offer and feeding “[t]he biochemical cycle of self-disclosure and approval”. In addition, Turnbull argues, social networking affects our construction of identity, which is increasingly uncoupled from privacy to become externally shaped as a “socially-desirable version of the self to which individuals aspire” instead. Immersive theatre offers spectators “the chance to temporarily fulfil dreams or become that ideal self in the context of a safe environment”. Finally, Turnbull posits a correlation between the decline in levels of empathy and the “thrill provided by a constant stream of quickly satisfied moments of anticipation” associated with the pervasive use of social networking, and the unsettling of the ‘traditional’ categories of character and narrative in immersive practice.

Erika Fischer-Lichte’s keynote address “The Art of Spectatorship” places the debate on spectatorship in immersive / participatory theatre delineated above in a historical perspective by tracing the development of theories and practices of spectatorship in Europe – primarily in German-speaking cultures – from the 17th century to the present. Starting off from the concepts of transformative aesthetics and of the autopoietic feedback loop as put forward in The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, the article takes Marina Abramović’s Rhythm O (1974) and Claudia Bosse’s / Theatercombinat’s production of Aeschylus’s The Persians (2006) as examples of participatory theatre-making that successfully addresses the relationship between aesthetics, ethics and / or politics by placing spectatorship at its heart, namely, by “transfer[ring] the spectator into a liminal state [... that] enables transformations”, be they temporary or longer lasting. Fischer-Lichte’s key point, in this connection, is that notwithstanding the complaint about the ‘passivity’ of the audience voiced by representatives of European avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and postdramatic theatre and performance art movements since the early 20th century, “there is no such thing as a passive spectator”. In other words, spectating has always been about placing the spectator in an in-between, liminal state – in the Jesuit theatre of the 17th and early-18th centuries and the bourgeois illusionistic theatre that emerged in the second half of the 18th century, as much as in the Weimar theatre led by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller or in contemporary immersive work such as Abramović’s or Theatercombinat’s – while “[i]ts particular mode depends on and is defined by each genre of performance, the surrounding culture/s as well as the historical time in which it takes place”. Accordingly, “the question is not [...] whether spectators restricted to perceiving are less active than those participating in different forms of immersive theatre”. In fact, Fischer-Lichte points to some of the shortcomings of immersive spectatorship that are also mentioned by other contributors to this volume – the isolation of the individual spectator and the fact that immersive theatre “may [...] transfer the spectator into a liminal situation in which s/he will behave quite differently than they normally would”. What is crucial is to keep an open mind about “the art of spectatorship”, which “generally lacks any fixed rules that can be deemed valid once and for all”, is inflected by social, aesthetic and other conditions, and can be most meaningfully discussed “within the parameters of [....] transformative aesthetics”, thus eschewing the ‘active’ / ‘passive’ distinction disputed by Rancière.

As if to illustrate Fischer-Lichte’s argument, Siân Adiseshiah’s “Spectatorship and the New (Critical) Sincerity: The Case of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties” makes a forceful argument for a particular form of “dialogical spectatorship” that hinges on the affective interpellation of spectators in a sincere, albeit precarious, exchange over anticipations of the future. In a trans-disciplinary shift of the concept of ‘new sincerity’ from fiction to theatre studies, and after modifying it to ‘critical sincerity’ as a way to encompass the particularities of (postdramatic) performance, where traces of irony always perturb the truthfulness of the communicative encounter no matter how sincerely that encounter is sought after, Adiseshiah designates Tomorrow’s Parties as “a patchwork of utopian and dystopian texts” that explores manifold visions of the future – fantastic, nightmarish, idyllic, surreal or outright ridiculous – in order to “invoke an unfixed spectatorial agency that is responsive to imaginative possibility”, in keeping with Forced Entertainment’s interest in encoding participatory forms of spectatorship. After tracing the “performance effect of sincerity” in Tomorrow’s Parties across its linguistic, gestural and intertextual semiotics, the article puts forward the notion of a “dialectic of sincerity” to denote its “shifting forms of spectatorial interpellation”, grounded in “the oscillation of sincerity and irony within and between performers and spectators” – an oscillation, we would add, that can only work in the context of a relationship based on trust.

Emma Willis’s “Metatheatre and Dramaturgies of Reception in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present...” continues to examine dramaturgical encodings of the spectator. Her article reflects on the centrality and pitfalls of metatheatre as a means to represent the pervasiveness of violence in contemporary societies. Drury’s We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Afrika, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 (2012) tells the story of a theatre company involved in the staging of a performance about the genocide of the Herero ethnic group from Namibia at the hands of German colonisers at the turn of the 20th century. Using the play as an example of what she terms “a dramaturgy of reception”, Willis suggests that metatheatre, as a self-referential instrument, “allows writers to engage with the political complexities of representation and to explicitly position spectators within such a politics”. This is done by destabilising the instrument and “producing a moment of heightened awareness that is ethically oriented in character” and leads to spectators becoming “self-conscious witnesses” to the atrocities inflicted on the Herero.

Linking up most directly with the articles in this volume that explore audience immersion in the open air – by Alston, Étienne, Quigley and Turnbull – the workshop run by Richard Gregory and Renny O’Shea, artistic directors of Quarantine, at the “Theatre and Spectatorship” conference invited participants to silently walk the streets around the conference venue, Residència Salesiana Martí-Codolar in Barcelona, and allow themselves to blend in and become immersed in the here and now. Although each participant was supposed to take their performative urban walk on their own, they were also asked to make sure that no one got lost or left behind. As Sarah Heinz notes in the conference report, this “resulted in an eerie but also very peaceful experience of a heightened awareness of self and connectedness to others”. On the previous day, in conversation with Cristina Delgado-García, Gregory and O’Shea had discussed the ideas that underpin their work, many of which became manifest in the workshop itself and interact in stimulating ways with the articles collected in this volume. Primary to their work is the attempt to foster conversations between strangers on the basis of a clear-eyed awareness that, no matter how ‘authentic’, ‘sincere’ or ‘intimate’ performative encounters may feel to be, they are produced by “a heavy artistic and editorial hand” that is therefore responsible for finding strategies to make that constructedness “explicit within the work”. With that in mind, and through some detailed discussion of their pieces See-Saw (2000), Eat Eat (2003), The Soldier’s Song (2008 and ongoing), No Such Thing (2012 and ongoing) and Summer (2014 and ongoing), Gregory and O’Shea query the use of the term ‘participant’ to describe the non-professional performers that take part in their work as a way to signal a difference with what is more generally called immersive theatre-making; they identify their ‘ideal audience’ as a mixed one that would include but also, crucially, extend beyond the regular theatregoing public; and they recount the different strategies they use in order to allow performers to “focus on what is happening in this present moment” and enable conversations between people who would not normally come into close proximity.

Perhaps the affective and ethical significance of this becomes most clearly apparent in O’Shea’s account of how and why she created The Soldier’s Song, a show that “took the form of a wooden karaoke booth” containing a TV screen, a microphone, a list of soldiers’ names and a list of songs. The invitation in this case was for spectator-participants to go into the booth, choose a song and decide whether they wanted to sing along with the soldier in question or not. Two aspects of this piece resonate most compellingly with issues raised in some of the articles in this volume. There is, firstly, the invitation to participate (White), which Gregory and O’Shea, not unlike Smith (“Gentle Acts of Removal”), conceive of as a gentle offer to the audience of “potential situations [...] to engage with or not”, rather than as an obligation that “cajoles, or forces, or pushes” them. This is in consonance with their view of the audience as “a group of individuals” that may respond in highly diverse ways to a piece of work. Secondly, and fascinatingly, there is the emphasis on the affective and ethical reaction triggered on spectator-participants by the individual human voice of the singing soldiers, which ties in with a similar focus in the articles by Pattie and Quigley. As O’Shea notes, “no matter where they were on the political spectrum of being pro-war, or anti-war, or wavering in between [...] [people] reacted really strongly” and, as happened to O’Shea herself over the 18-month period she spent researching the show, perhaps they took the time to ponder their preconceptions and “stop and think about their connection to that soldier on-screen”.

Chris Megson and Janelle Reinelt’s “Performance, Experience, Transformation: What do Spectators Value in Theatre?” is a timely contribution – the only one in the volume – to empirical audience research. This is a field that, as Freshwater points out in Theatre & Audience, has been “notably absent from theatre studies” (29), a deficit that is confirmed by Matthew Reason and Kirsty Sedgman, editors of a themed section on theatre audiences in Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies published as recently as May 2015 (117; see also Knowles 17 and Reason) and that Freshwater sees as one more manifestation of the mistrust of audiences that has been traditionally inherent to theatre scholarship (4). Megson and Reinelt’s chapter felicitously analyses part of the outcome of the “Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution” research project carried out in 2013–14 by the British Theatre Consortium, a think-tank of playwrights and theatre academics. The project aimed at assessing “spectators’ processes of experiencing value when they go to the theatre”, concentrating on “the phenomenological and processual experiences of theatre spectators”, the networks that associate “specific performances to the larger sociality of people’s lives”, and the role of memory in the appraisal of the experience. All this was studied through the pragmatic application of “quantitative / empirical” (surveys) and “qualitative / experiential” (interviews and creative workshops) research methods, which in the article are brought to bear on two specific case studies, the productions of David Greig’s The Events and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at the Young Vic, London, in 2013 and 2014 respectively. The findings of the quantitative evidence show that “spectators experience an immediate response which registers the strong affective and sensory stimulus of the event, followed by a refinement and consolidation of feelings and thoughts toward a more conceptual memory and impact”. Significantly, the qualitative evidence reveals “how the personal associational networks connected to family, friends, education, employment, past experiences and so on, contribute to a sense of value, and how sociality affects theatre attendance, leading to value attribution”. The article acknowledges the fact that “the responses of audiences are embedded in different contexts” and that “varying research approaches are able to capture certain kinds of knowledge” (Reason and Sedgman 119), and makes a valuable contribution to the perceived need to integrate empirical research into the subject area of theatre studies (see Reason and Sedgman 118).

The volume closes with “Collaborating with Audiences: David Greig in Conversation with Clare Wallace”, where Greig’s theatre is discussed from the perspective of spectatorship. The conversation opens with a reflection on how the playwright’s relationship to the prototypically bourgeois spectator – one he himself acknowledges to be – has changed over time. Greig talks about moving on from having a “parental” audience in his head, who had “authority” over him, to “just reach[ing] out to them, grab[bing] them and giv[ing] them a jolt”, thus establishing a more “collaborative engagement” which at the same time allows him more freedom “with form and with story”. He emphasises that his work with children and teenagers, a very open type of audience, was crucial in this respect, so that he now “relish[es] the idea of getting in amongst precisely that [bourgeois] audience and actually discovering the inner teenager or [...] inner child in them”. As a playwright, he concludes, what he is ultimately after is “that Grail where you’ve got something that is both wholly your story, but it contains within it these randomised open factors where the audience that night are getting something unlike everybody else” – a Grail that can only be the result of mutual trust.

The conversation reflects on the shift from Damascus (2007), written in the context of Greig’s collaboration with playwrights in the Middle East and “an example of the extent to which an audience is in your head when you write” – he never expected it to be performed in the Middle East itself, where it had a mixed effect on audiences – to the plays that came after that (Midsummer (2008), Dunsinane (2010), Prudencia Hart (2011)), which were more focused on Scotland. This prompts Greig to acknowledge that “I feel that I have an audience” in Scotland, “they do exist for me and I do feel a relationship with them. [...] a sense that they will give me a bit of room, and also I think they like not quite knowing what they’re going to get”, to the extent that “right at this moment any project that I am doing, I always make it pass through the filter where I have to be able to set it in Fife”, where he lives. Interestingly, he adds this was the case with The Events (2013), a play that nevertheless has found resonances with audiences worldwide. Attention is also paid to the Yes / No Plays (2014), Greig’s Twitter project on the referendum on Scottish independence, which he sees as “a kind of engagement with [himself] as audience, giving me something I needed which was a kind of space in which my two sides could exist”, since “only someone actually psychotic can not have a part of them that doesn’t think the thing they think”. At the same time, he points out that the use of Twitter prompted him to become particularly aware of the audience out there – “it was only the knowledge that there was an audience that somehow made me perform the tweet” – an appropriate reminder, as we draw these introductory remarks to a close, that it is the trusting relationship with the audience that “provides the theatre event with its rationale. This relationship is indispensable” (Freshwater 2).

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Published Online: 2016-5-12
Published in Print: 2016-5-1

© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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