{"id":26,"date":"2016-03-15T15:46:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T15:46:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/7\/?p=26"},"modified":"2022-05-22T11:14:20","modified_gmt":"2022-05-22T11:14:20","slug":"acts-of-spectating-the-dramaturgy-of-the-audiences-experience-in-contemporary-theatre","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/7\/acts-of-spectating-the-dramaturgy-of-the-audiences-experience-in-contemporary-theatre\/","title":{"rendered":"Acts of Spectating: The Dramaturgy of the Audience\u2019s Experience in Contemporary Theatre"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter M. Boenisch<\/strong>[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

\"1235905783\"<\/p>\n

The emergence of relational dramaturgy<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is a truism to maintain that theatre has always paid particular attention to its audiences and spectators, whether in contemporary performance, the theatre avant-garde from a century ago, or virtually at any other time we may randomly pick from theatre history. The audience is inevitably theatre\u2019s raison d\u2019\u00eatre<\/em>: without spectators, there simply is no theatrical event. More recently, however, this central place of the spectators in theatre has become the focus of new critical interrogations and academic debates. New forms of so-called participatory theatre sought to \u2018liberate\u2019 the spectators from their role as (allegedly) passive consumers, while the very power of the spectatorial gaze has come under theoretical scrutiny in the wake of Laura Mulvey\u2019s seminal 1975 essay on the \u2018male gaze\u2019 and visual pleasure in cinema, which had its repercussions in debates on the performing arts, too, especially in the field of dance. Peggy Phelan went on to dissect, in her 1993 classic study Unmarked<\/em>, the spectator\u2019s gaze and the audience\u2019s desire within the context of her proposed ontology of performance in its irrevocable presence and the present. Phelan\u2019s study influentially tackled some of the inner contradictions of feminist and postmodern critique which at the time dominated academia and certainly the (then) emerging discipline of Performance Studies. Analyzing her selection of primarily physically driven performance work and dance productions along an argument informed by Barthes, Austin and Lacan, she investigated the potential for the spectatorial gaze to get deflected from its habitual voyeuristic consumption of representations, and instead to obtain a different potential as a source of action and site of agency.<\/p>\n

Such issues had become particularly pertinent with the ever growing technical, and in particular the emerging digital reproducibility of images facilitated by mass media. The more recent advent of new types of digital media which stylise themselves as \u2018social\u2019 media has today further pressed issues of spectating, media consumption and agency into the foreground of our interrogations. It may therefore have been no coincidence that recent years have seen a renewed manifest engagement with the audience from new, post-semiotic perspectives. One may here point to publications such as, in particular, Rachel Fensham\u2019s To Watch Theatre: Essays on genre and corporeality<\/em> (2009), Alan Read\u2019s Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement<\/em> (2008), Dennis Kennedy\u2019s historiographic study on The Spectator and the Spectacle<\/em> or Alison Oddey and Christine White\u2019s collection on Modes of Spectating <\/em>that they consider from a scenographic point of view (the latter two also published in 2009). This crucial trajectory in the stance that our discipline has taken towards the role of the audience is probably best mirrored by the passage of German theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte: From her pioneering Semiotics of Theatre<\/em>, published in the early 1980s, she arrived via a sustained engagement with phenomenology throughout the 1990s at her \u2018aesthetics of performativity\u2019 (2004). Maintaining a central focus on the performance as principal object of analysis, her emphasis has now, however, shifted from an analysis of the (semiotic) structure of the work<\/em> to the (largely phenomenal) event<\/em> of the performance itself, or in German terms: from a structural dissection of the Inszenierung <\/em>towards an experiential recording of the individualAuff\u00fchrung<\/em>. The latter became, not only for Fischer-Lichte, the core aspect that signifies theatre as an art form. She firmly locates the characteristic of theatre\u2019s specific mediality in what she describes as the \u2018bodily co-presence of actors and spectators.\u2019 The classic semiotic investigation of the production, communication and reception of meaning is hence transferred to what Fischer-Lichte calls the \u2018emergence\u2019 of a meaning localized directly within spectating considered as active participation in the process of making meaning, stimulated by an \u2018exchange of energies\u2019 and \u2018bodily sensing\u2019 (leibliches Sp\u00fcren<\/em>) (cf Fischer-Lichte 2008, Ch. 5, \u201cThe Emergence of Meaning,\u201d 138-159). In place of the traditional idea of a unidirectional transfer of meaning from a single \u2018sender\u2019 (in our case, the playwright or director) to many receivers, Fischer-Lichte now posits a dynamic \u2018auto-poietic feedback loop\u2019 that connects the stage with the auditorium, and the performers with the spectators. Summarizing the challenge of neo-avantgarde performance art of the 1960s and 1970s (Marina Abramovic, Joseph Beuys and Fluxus), which are her central examples, she argues that it\u00a0redefined two relationships of fundamental importance to hermeneutic as well as semiotic aesthetics: first, the relationship between subject and object, observer and observed, spectator and actor; second, the relationship between the materiality and the semioticity of the performance\u2019s elements, between signifier and signified. (Fischer-Lichte 2008, 17)<\/p>\n

This emphasis on redefined relationships indeed touches the core of contemporary dramaturgic challenges. Where Fischer-Lichte makes an important case for a shift, among others, in the central role of the relation between actor and spectator, we should still note that her list of altered relationships expressed in the quotation still continues to think in dualities and binary oppositions. I propose to further push this thought and to introduce a properly relational<\/em> perspective on dramaturgy. What we witness in contemporary theatre performance is less a mere shift of power between some binary poles, from one point to its other, opposite end. Instead, today\u2019s dramaturgic strategies activate the full interplay between the highlighted borders, as for example between <\/em>materiality and <\/em>semioticity. It is precisely no longer a matter of \u2018from\u2019 one end \u2018to\u2019 the other, of \u2018either \/ or.\u2019 These processes of playful negotiations (in the full Schillerian sense of Spiel<\/em>) are at the heart of what I term relational dramaturgy. I take up prompts both from Nicolas Bourriaud\u2019s influential \u2018relational aesthetics\u2019 and from the lesser known thoughts by Leo Bersani to suggest an understanding of dramaturgy as a relational aesthetic practice (cf. Bourriaud 2002; Bersani 2010). It forges relations, changes relationships, and calibrates a dynamic interplay. Far beyond referring to a production\u2019s specific interpretative reading of a text, to procedures of adapting or translating a text \u2018from page to stage\u2019 (in a more conventional conception of dramaturgy), and equally far beyond \u2018reaching out\u2019 to audiences not traditionally part of art circles (as in Bourriaud\u2019s understanding), relational dramaturgy \u2018acts\u2019 in the full sense alluded to in Eugenio Barba\u2019s seminal definition of dramaturgy as a \u2018weaving of actions.\u2019 For him, too, an \u2018action\u2019 is situated on a level beyond the action of the plot or narrative; explicitly, he includes anything <\/em>that affected and impacted, thus: acts<\/em> on the spectator, in his understanding (cf. Barba 1991). It is this \u2018action\u2019 which engenders theatre\u2019s original \u2018politicity\u2019 (to use a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re) within our present global digital media economy. The relational mode of dramaturgy marks a production\u2019s spectatorial relations, its fluid shifting between materiality and semioticity. Let us turn to three recent theatre productions to further develop these considerations that take us from an \u2018aesthetics of performativity\u2019 towards a concept of \u2018relational (dramaturgic) action.\u2019<\/p>\n

Instance 1: The Roman Tragedies<\/em>, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, dir. Ivo van Hove<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2007, Flemish director Ivo van Hove created for Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the principal theatre in the Dutch capital which van Hove has been leading as Artistic Director since 2001, the Romeinse Tragedies<\/em>: a six-hour long compilation of Shakespeare\u2019s Roman Tragedies Coriolanus<\/em>, Julius Caesar<\/em>, and Antony & Cleopatra<\/em>, which presented the three plays non-stop, without an interval, with the audience free to roam around the theatre \u2013 and the stage. After about half an hour \u2013 we had just witnessed Caius Martius\u2019s return from his successful battle against the Volsci \u2013 neon working lights were switched on for the first scene change. While some stagehands started resetting the scene, we heard some \u2018muzak\u2019 from the loudspeakers, like in a department store, and a female voice welcomed us to today\u2019s performance: \u2018the stage is now open,\u2019 we were told, and we were invited to cross that fourth wall. On stage, we were able to sit on sofas that made the set reminiscent of some hotel lobby or airport waiting lounge. Also on stage, a bar and a food stall waited for us, even a computer corner where we could access the internet, and a table with the latest newspapers and magazines. The action of the plays would simply unfold around us in this setting. During the hours that followed, we were able to move between stage and auditorium and to change our position within the theatre space, or hence also our positioning \u2013 our relation \u2013 to the performance. We were able to follow the action from very close sitting on stage or from the distance in our usual theatre chair in the auditorium. We could watch the live action in front of us, but we could instead also \u2018watch live\u2019 from the auditorium on a huge screen mounted above the proscenium, or on one of the many TV monitors that were scattered not only across the stage space but also outside in the theatre foyer, near the bars and toilets. Additionally, an electronic text display between the stage and the mounted screen above provided to those in the auditorium further information on the historic background of the plays (on the Volsci, Coriolanus, the wars, etc.), as well as details on the production (\u2018three hours to Caesar\u2019s murder\u2019), while also displaying the actual latest news headlines of the very day and even some live football results.<\/p>\n

Instance 2: Money<\/em>, Shunt<\/strong><\/p>\n

With their production Money, <\/em>staged at an abandoned factory in London in October 2009, the British performance collective Shunt presented its version of Emile Zola\u2019s 1891 novel L\u2019Argent<\/em> which of course offers some resonances of the current financial crisis. In the spirit of \u2018devised performance,\u2019 the original plot around the corrupt stock market speculator Aristide Saccard delivered mere prompts and a rough narrative outline for a highly visual and sensory audience experience. Already as we entered the warehouse space, a gigantic machine in the middle of the space roared, clattered, puffed, and rattled. Following a prelude during which we remained seated in front of the machine, we were then asked to climb up the metal staircase and enter the machine and were lead into a pitchblack space, amidst ear-spitting noise and wind. The door was closed behind us. Soon the wind and noise stopped, the lights went up, and we found ourselves standing within a stunning interior space with classy wooden panelling and some benches on either side, where we eventually settled down. After another while, a kind of foreman entered from another door with some paperwork in his hand. He read out a name. We may therefore have wondered whether he had the list of audience members in front of him, as we of course had to phone in and sign up just to find out the exact location of the factory space to attend the performance. For sure, however, no hand went up. It was only on the third attempt that eventually someone identified himself and was lead out of the room. As became obvious very soon, this was of course no \u2018real\u2019 audience member but the play\u2019s main character, that future bankruptcy cheat from the novel.<\/p>\n

The disjointed sequence of scenes and impressions that followed over the next ninety minutes took place within this interior site, including the floors above and beneath the room as the actual floors became semi-transparent in proper lighting. At some point, we were then also directed to the upper floor to join a party at the height of the financial speculation craze in the plot. Not only the characters but also the audience members got their glass of champagne to sip, and we also soon engaged in some silly ballgame across the huge table (the transparent floor to our seating room downstairs), throwing the little plastic balls that had fallen from above at each other and at the performers. Later, we were once again ushered downstairs. Towards the end, of course, there was the big crash, where Zola\u2019s main character reaps his investors\u2019 money and flees abroad. In Shunt\u2019s version, he also took every single golden door handle with him, so that when \u2013 after some turbulent and again noisy final minutes \u2013 the light went off, and on again, we found ourselves locked into the space. There was a key on the floor in the centre of the space. We applauded. No-one entered. No door was opened. We couldn\u2019t get out \u2013 until one audience member finally got up, picked up the key and unlocked the door.<\/p>\n

Instance 3: Hotel Medea<\/em>, Zecora Ura\/ParaActive, dir. Persis-Jada Maravala and Jorge Lopes Ramos<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Brazilian-English co-production of the classical Medea <\/em>tragedy has been performed over the past five years in several site-specific incarnations in Brazil, the UK and elsewhere, most recently in 2012 as part of the London Cultural Olympiad. Hotel Medea<\/em>, which I saw in its 2010 version staged in the London Docklands, starts shortly before midnight and lasts until dawn. The audience gathered at a pier on the Thames. Around midnight, little boats took small groups to the other side of the river. Off the boat, we passed some stations where we got instructions \u2013 on dance moves, some chants, and how to behave in the \u2018Zero Hour Market,\u2019 the first part of the performance. This carnivalesque happening was staged in a warehouse. We interacted with some obscure vendors, card players and jugglers, before Jason\u2019s troupes burst in in (in an actual car) and made an end to this illustrious and illicit going-on. Jason here was a typical British politician of the easily portrayable Camerblair-type. He went out on his \u2018peace mission\u2019 to yet another foreign country where he would meet Medea and her family. They were in this transatlantic co-production played by the Brazilian cast members. During the first part, we as audience took part in Jason\u2019s pursuit and courtship, before we were divided into male and female audience members and assisted the bride or groom\u2019s respective pre-wedding rituals, and eventually performed celebratory dances during the wedding. And Medea gave, right amongst us, the treacherous kiss of death to her family to then follow Jason.<\/p>\n

Later on, in Parts 2 and 3 of this night-long production, we were courted ourselves by Jason as potential electors, were photographed with him, and some of us even got his autograph. In another scene, we were brought to bed by our personal nannies who had a mug of cocoa for us, put us into pyjamas, brought us to bed, and read us a good-night story \u2013 here from a comic book of the Medea<\/em>-myth. Those who did not immediately doze off (some loudly snoring away as the lady in the bunkbed beneath me, of course it must have been around 3 am by then) could bear witness, with our eyes closed, to Jason\u2019s (or is it: our fathers?) betrayal and a first argument of the couple. Later again, with dawn beginning to set in, we were lead out of the building, following in small groups one of the performers, to escape the furious revenge of Medea, hiding across the Dockland area. The performers left us behind, and after a while, per mobile phone, we were directed back to the main warehouse, where \u2013 together with Jason \u2013 we eventually discovered the massacre: we found, indeed, two of the audience members whom we had met and chatted to before in the intervals, lying there in state, surrounded by candles, and we threw flowers onto their \u2018dead\u2019 bodies, before following the eventual witchhunt against Medea, not the least orchestrated here by the media who played a prominent aspect throughout this contemporary take on the old story.<\/p>\n

Sensing the \u2018Mise en Event\u2019: Shaking up the Spectating Relations<\/strong><\/p>\n

These three examples, selected from recent theatre productions, map out a panorama of dramaturgic relations that oscillate between the material performance event and its semiotic meaning. They connect, in different ways, texts, performance (Auff\u00fchrung<\/em>), and spectators. In a way that is in an additional way exemplary for a trend in current theatre practice in Europe, all three productions staged (more or less) canonical texts, by Shakespeare, Zola, and Euripides\/Heiner M\u00fcller. The principal \u2018meaning\u2019 of these productions, however, was no longer primarily located in their interpretation of the text. The relational components of dramaturgy, which we encounter here, instead exploit the interdependence of representation and theatral presentation, the interplay between the performance as actualised texture of a mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em> and the actual event and experience. The mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>, in all three cases, revealed itself as first and foremost a \u2018mise en event.\u2019 The dramatic text and its (dramatic and narrative) textures function as an indispensible dramaturgic mediator that energises these relations. As a result, the focus shifts from the representation of meaning to the \u2018sense\u2019 generated, or in Fischer-Lichte\u2019s term: \u2018emerging\u2019 from the very action of presenting this text in performance. This \u2018sense\u2019 \u2013 to be perceived by all of the spectators\u2019 senses \u2013 reveals the dramaturgic relations as its very trigger. It frames the audience\u2019s encounter with the dramatic text and establishes co-ordinates for our experience of the situation of watching theatre.<\/p>\n

Relational forms of dramaturgy are, as our examples have also shown, not at all confined to new, experimental genres of so-called \u2018devised performance.\u2019 In fact, the conventional opposition that pitches the drama of staged text against<\/em> an alternative mode of performance no longer suffices. The dramaturgic strategy of putting relations in play marries, as all three productions demonstrate rather effortlessly, forms and strategies of contemporary theatre-making attributed to \u2018performance theatre\u2019 with the staging of a literary text. We have seen here strategies of site-specific theatre, of physical theatre, or collective improvisation as creative rehearsal strategy applied in the context of staging dramatic texts. As a result, the above instances remind us not to simply assume that the core aesthetic innovations and analytic challenges arise at the very obvious surface, for example through the \u2018fall of the fourth wall,\u2019 the suspension of conventional spatial separations or the outright escape from traditional theatre spaces, nor even per se <\/em>in the \u2018active involvement\u2019 of the spectators. Ivo van Hove\u2019s production, like all of his works created for a traditional proscenium space at the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg with one of the leading Dutch ensemble companies, is a particularly apt reminder. The actual, true shift in the relational arrangement does not happen on the very surface, by abandoning one end of the assumed opposition (the \u2018consuming\u2019 spectators gazing from the distance; the dramatic semioticity) and accommodating us, as spectators, on the other (the \u2018active\u2019 spectator participating on his feet; the event of the material performance conditions). Such a crude shift achieves nothing but to reaffirm the spectating relations and underlying ideological hierarchies ex negativo. <\/em>Jacques Ranci\u00e8re challenged, in his essay \u2018The Emancipated Spectator,\u2019 very rightly the fetish of \u2018audience participation.\u2019 In many cases, such productions only create even more \u2018stultifying\u2019 theatre experiences, as he terms it: they may blur boundaries and confuse roles, yet without challenging the underlying (ideological) principles of the hegemonic \u2018partition of the sensible,\u2019 as Ranci\u00e8re calls the dominant ways of perceiving, sensing, and making sense of the world (cf. Ranci\u00e8re 2009a).<\/p>\n

Consequently, he determinedly argues against idolizing \u2018interactive\u2019 performances where the audience may no longer be seated in conventional arrangements but where still, in effect, \u2018what the spectator must see <\/em>is what the director makes her see.<\/em>\u2019 (Ranci\u00e8re 2009b, 14, orig. emphasis). True emancipation of the spectator for him necessitates shaking up the underlying spectating relations and its implicit hierarchies: it is, we may add, an essentially dramaturgic operation, indeed. It is achieved where the individual intelligence of the spectator as spectator<\/em> in their irreducible distance as thinking interpreters is affirmed without any reservations:<\/p>\n

[In] a theatre, in front of a performance, just as in a museum, school or street, there are only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts, and signs that confront or surround them. The collective power shared by spectators does not stem from the fact that they are members of a collective body or from some specific form of interactivity. It is the power each of them has to translate what she perceives in her own way, to link it to the unique intellectual adventure that makes her similar to all the rest in as much as this adventure is not like any other. (Ranci\u00e8re 2009b, 17)<\/p>\n

Van Hove appeals to this very intelligence of the individual \u2018interpreter\u2019 where he employs \u2013 in the Roman Tragedies <\/em>and elsewhere \u2013 a range of minute realignments and refractions of the theatre space and of conventional viewing arrangements. In their very subtlety, they disclose a relational dramaturgy at work that even in the architectural setting of the traditional late-19th<\/sup> century building of the Amsterdam Stadsschouwburg achieves to position the spectators no longer outside and opposite of the theatral situation, but that instead aims for a spectating situation which reaffirms the spectator as spectators<\/em> instead of patronising them as somewhat interactivated pseudo-participants. The director\u2019s insistence on the conventional proscenium setting discloses how we on the one hand continue, in his productions, to take our position as spectators opposite<\/em> the production \u2013 but on the other hand, we are at the very same time placed right in the middle of a relational dramaturgic framework.<\/p>\n

We may be at times directly addressed as friends, Romans, and countrymen, and elsewhere, in the Hotel Medea<\/em>-performance, as electorate, wedding guests, or Medea\u2019s children. Above all, however, these productions acknowledge in their very dramaturgic structure our own very real, \u2018individual\u2019 needs: In the Roman Tragedies<\/em>, we are allowed to come and go, to take a spectating position we choose<\/em>, to zoom in and out again, as it were, to eat and drink. We may browse the newspaper, update our Facebook-profile, or check our emails even while Caesar gets slaughtered right next to us. Or, we can make the choice of remaining in the auditorium: yet, even if we decide never to enter the stage during these six hours, we still participate in the changed relational dramaturgy. The very presence of the other spectators on stage is a constant reminder; they become the vicarious spectators that we spectate, a reminder that reaffirms our own \u2018real\u2019 position, too. Similarly careful and caring is the dramaturgic relation that shapes Hotel Medea<\/em>: We are taken seriously in our needs as an audience, including the acknowledgement of our tiredness in the middle of the night. We have the opportunity to really <\/em>take a nap, and the opportunity to share the concluding communal breakfast. The production of course also engages our enjoyment of participating in play, in playing roles, and above all in participating in ways that are precisely different from the clich\u00e9d \u2018participatory performances\u2019 where no-one wanted to sit in the front row.<\/p>\n

Here, we were instead invited to enter protected environments of a Schillerian play <\/em>of sense and senses, which I consider as an important factor contributing to the genuine audience emancipation that Ranci\u00e8re himself does not sufficiently take into account, as he privileges rational processes of \u2018translation\u2019 and interpreting. Let us remember that we had received some guidelines and instructions on a leaflet as we entered Hotel Medea<\/em>\u2019s \u2018Zero Hour Market\u2019 around midnight, as well as being instructed in the dance steps \u2013 a group dance which allowed us to participate while not being oddly and never carelessly exposed. This contrasts notably with another \u2018participatory\u2019 performance I recently attended (and which shall remain unnamed here) where the audience was invited, not to say coerced into joining a waltz that mixed performers and spectators. This situation not only uncomfortably, and entirely unnecessarily and in disservice of the production\u2019s dramaturgic aim, exposed those who had not brushed up their ballroom skills recently, it was also forgotten to make sure there was an equal number of sexes and participants. Of all people it was me who uncomfortably remained excluded, not finding any partner, not being able to participate, and hence left to have my engagement with the production taken over by anger about an unconsidered relationing that remained utterly stultifying, superficially spectacular, and nothing but an empty gesture. In contrast, the relational dramaturgies we exemplarily encountered with Ivo van Hove and in Hotel Medea<\/em>, acknowledged us fully as spectating subjects \u2013 in our needs, but also in our fears and anxieties. They took care of us, and in that sense the \u2018Hotel\u2019-metaphor in the very title of Hotel Medea<\/em> confirms the site of meaning in the relational dramaturgy: the \u2018Hotel\u2019 had nothing to do with the interpretation and representation of the Medea-myth here, yet everything to do with our own engagement as spectators staying overnight.<\/p>\n

Double Exposure: The \u2018I\u2019 of the spectator<\/strong><\/p>\n

In each of the three performances, our \u2018gaze\u2019 and our \u2018spectating\u2019 was in different ways always already inscribed within the field of the production. They require from the spectator a relation to the (re)presented drama that is different from the standard mode of engagement i.e. one based on identification with whom and what we see. We are no longer the \u2018recipients\u2019 of the classic dramatic dramaturgic paradigm, or in psychoanalytic terms: no longer \u2018the other\u2019 who necessarily complements the stage and gains a position and role (and hence identity) as spectating subject on precisely this ground of being the receiver, of being on \u2018the other\u2019 side of theatre. An explicitly relational dramaturgy hence, at its very core, opens up and prominently highlights a certain \u2018gap\u2019 within the spectator which puts us in an ambiguous distance towards our own \u2018acting\u2019 as spectators. We find here interesting echoes of Lacan\u2019s account of the logic of signification. Famously, he insisted on the ever gaping hole, the distance between the subject of the enounced and the subject of enunciation: between the \u2018speaking I\u2019 and the \u2018I being spoken.\u2019 The symbolic order requires us to ignore, erase, and disavow this gap. In a most interesting way, the medium of theatre makes this fundamental structure of signification palpable in an even more highlighted manner. There always <\/em>remains an irreducible, necessary distance between the \u2018spectating I\u2019 and the \u2018I of the spectator.\u2019 We are offered ways of relating, modes of sensing, spectating and engaging. It is this double experience of spectating that blurs the clear separation between representation, presentation, and the very presence and present, between materiality and semioticity. This is exactly where we find the seeds of the (political) \u2018act\u2019 of spectating, and\/or of spectating as an act.<\/p>\n

The interesting question to be asked is now how any specific theatre production negotiates this rift. To enable, or even assert spectating as an \u2018act\u2019 in the Lacanian sense, or \u2018emancipation\u2019 in the Ranci\u00e8rian terminology, this peculiar \u2018double experience\u2019 needs to be acknowledged in its ultimate incompatibility. Whether in Van Hove\u2019s leather sofas or in the chequered comfy cushions and blankets in which our maids wrapped us up in Hotel Medea<\/em>: while we were \u2018participating actively\u2019 in the performance, as the usual description and reading goes, our very individual subjectivity as spectators remained acknowledged precisely because the production never suggested that this fundamental experiential gap could be bridged or synchronized. In fact, in some of the cases discussed here, the opposite was true. Then, as an effect, the very process and activity of spectating loses its usual transparency \u2013 and the activity<\/em> of spectating gains the momentum of an act. <\/em>Activity as act means not only any response or intervention in the performance, but it is a direct assertion, even provocation of our individual \u2018response-ability,\u2019 as Hans-Thies Lehmann famously termed it (Lehmann 2006, 185): we are at once enabled to respond, yet also cannot get away from this response \u2013 we need to take the responsibility for our act and our actions as spectators. This responsibility of the spectator is the very moment that makes us abandon the (also relational) attitude of consumption which is so characteristic for our global digital economy of goods and services, including the performative service spectacles provided by our entertainment industries.<\/p>\n

But there is also another, and equally political option. The gap in our subjective position may just as well be covered over in performance, and we as spectators are reassured (Ranci\u00e8re would say: stultified) by being allowed to perform an action in accordance to a script. We should here once more revisit Shunt\u2019s Money<\/em>, since it discloses a significant difference in its relational structure compared to the other two performances referred to in this essay. The spectators in Money<\/em> have, precisely, not<\/em> been asked nor been allowed to take responsibility for their action beyond some token gestures of \u2018interactivity.\u2019 The distinction becomes very clear: If someone raised their hand in the early moment of the play, thus acting playfully, they already disturbed the play\u2019s carefully plotted machinery. At the end, one of the spectators simply has got to<\/em> pick up the key and unlock the door. Our actions of spectating remain organised throughout; they have at all times been administered or carefully managed for us<\/em>: We become \u2018subjects supposed to watch,\u2019 to paraphrase Lacan once more: locked into a dramaturgy of audience relationing whose machinery would just as well function without our physical presence. This could not be said about either of the other productions alluded to. As spectators we had been in the midst of things and even literally locked in, yet we remained, as far as our own spectatorial agency and \u2018response-ability\u2019 was concerned, still opposite and excluded: literally locked in yet thereby at the same time left out. Shunt, hence, despite their surface appearance as devised performance company, at the dramaturgic core of their production confine themselves to the parameters of the \u2018well made spectacle.\u2019<\/p>\n

Action as (scripted) re-action, and in opposition to an \u2018act,\u2019 is perfectly exemplified in the forced gesture in the (in a very literal sense) \u2018key scene\u2019 from Shunt\u2019s Money<\/em>, where the choice for the spectators is merely illusory and from the start only one predetermined \u2018choice\u2019 can be made \u2013 it is thereby that this relational arrangement exactly replicates the dominant dramaturgy of our global liberal society, with its reassuring illusory foundation of a subject position that makes safe the gap of subjectivity and prevents us from falling into the open hole that is the subject. Of course, taking such a more conservative dramaturgic option should not be outright discredited. It remains, above all, another option of relational dramaturgy. Artists as well as audiences have the space to navigate. They can (but also: must<\/em>) take a decision whether, and to what degree, we participate, \u2018act,\u2019 and \u2013 again in a Ranci\u00e8rian term: \u2018par(t)-take\u2019 in the world, or allow such part-taking and participation. The curious double-bind of a simultaneous, yet incongruent, even contradictory perspective is at the heart of these spectating relations: relational dramaturgies revolve around the very gap between the spectating \u2018I\u2019 which the performance addresses and the perceiving I (or maybe better: \u2018eye\u2019) of the spectator. This gap may be opened or it may be glanced over. Relational dramaturgies stage theatre situations that \u2018put in play\u2019 this very relation: they inescapably expose us to, and hence also gamble with and put on the very line, our ultimately \u2018real\u2019 role as spectators, our own experience of subjective agency. Here, a relational understanding of dramaturgy makes clear that true acts of spectating are not just a matter of explicitly \u2018political\u2019 performances. All the time we find the singular viewing perspective threatened by the blurred sense of being at the same time opposite and still within, even right in the middle of the performance. Whether the dramaturgic relations offer moments of contingent action where spectators are prompted to \u2018actually act,\u2019 as in Roman Tragedies<\/em> or Hotel Medea<\/em>, or whether \u2018superfluous\u2019 gestures of action effectively make a perfectly economic framework of a cause-effect logic transparent, as in Money, <\/em>we find acts of spectating emerging where the contingent, incongruous and inconsistent gap between the \u2018I\u2019 as spectator and the spectating \u2018I\u2019 forces us to confront ourselves as spectators. <\/em>Dramaturgic relations prompt us, in fact throw us back onto our own actions: they force us, the audience, to take ultimate responsibility as \u2018acting agents,\u2019 for our own agency, for our actions as spectators<\/em> in this world.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n

Barba, Eugenio, \u2018Dramaturgy\u2019 (1991), in Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, eds, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer<\/em>, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 68-73<\/p>\n

Bersani, Leo (2010), Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. <\/em>Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.<\/p>\n

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002), Relational Aesthetics. <\/em>Trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du R\u00e9el.<\/p>\n

Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008), The Transformative Power of Performance: A new aesthetics. <\/em>Trans. Saskya Iris Jain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Lehmann, Hans-Thies (2006), Postdramatic Theatre<\/em>. Trans. Karen J\u00fcrs-Munby. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Ranci\u00e8re, Jacques (2009a), Aesthetics and its Discontents<\/em>. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity.<\/p>\n

Ranci\u00e8re, Jacques (2009b), The Emancipated Spectator. <\/em>Trans. Gregory Elliott London and New York: Verso.<\/p>\n

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\"1235905783\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>[1] Peter M. Boenisch <\/strong>is Professor of European Theatre at the University of Kent, where he was founding director of the European Theatre Research Network (ETRN). His primary interest is in the aesthetics and politicity of theatre performance, especially in the context of theatre directing and dramaturgy, dance and corporeality, and theatre and intermediality. He currently writes on a monograph Regie: Directing Scenes and Senses in European Theatre, <\/em>and he prepares a book on German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2012 Peter M. Boenisch
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
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