The Audience-Audience Relationship: the Bodies of the Spectators as a Collective Performing Body with Agency and Power (Conference Presentation) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Audience-Oriented Forms of Performance in the 21st Century
Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2015
The use of space in the mainstream performing arts is based on the division of the acting and performing spaces with an imaginary wall. The sharp division of the space by this invisible conventional border, also called the fourth wall, originated from the fundamentally distinct role definitions assigned to the audience and the actors. On the other hand, especially since midtwentieth century, due to the fast improvement in mass media technologies audiencing has widely shifted from the public space to the private space. Because of this shift the staging forms appropriate to the traditional space order became unresponsive to the needs of new acting and audiencing, and caused a search for alternative ways. In this respect, especially since the 1960's there have been many experiments examining both the acting and the audiencing activity from every aspect. These experiments invited the audience again into the public space, in search of new ways in which the audience could take an active role in a dynamic audience field. In these forms of performance, passive audience positions are completely abandoned and the role of the audience is reconstructed as an active element of the work itself. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a new trend in the Western performing arts, which is based on a participatory, interactive and immersive performance approach. Especially in the immersive performance approach, the audience is invited to a multi-sensory experience. To the extent that they actively participate in the experience, they gain the freedom of creating different audiencing forms and even reconstructing the plot. In these kinds of forms, the audience is invited to almost a realistic experience in spaces constructed to create this realistic feeling. Providing a holistic perception and participation, this experience goes beyond the conventional audiencing forms based on the audio and visual senses, by addressing and stimulating the olfactory, gustatory, and tactile senses. It also allows the audience to participate in the movements of the performers as well as follow them in the almost realistically constructed performance spaces. As today's audience is accustomed to being active players on the internet and creating worlds at their fingertips on virtual games, new narratives that bring together the audience and the performing arts are thus constructed.
Audiences, choreography, publics : the politics & practice of spectatorship
2015
The question of how some bodies appear to others, and how those bodies collectively relate with each other, is central to choreography and to concerns of the state. When the role of theatre spectatorship is discussed in political discourse, it typically invokes the binary of the passive versus the active; the passive is dismissed as socially worthless and the active as invigorating community. I would like to explore more expansive experiences of spectatorship, in order to articulate in what ways bodies relate beyond the representational operations that underlie these terms. My approach is to use choreographic practice to create particular conditions of appearance and relation, as discussion and experience of spectatorial exchange. This project occurs in a context of artists' and scholars' interest in the politics of theatre's operations of appearance, and in choreography's relational productivity. It asks why, given the spectatorial relations fundamental to everyday life, we repeatedly go to performances. The original choreographic works Count Two, Practice and Assembly consider how qualities of spectatorial relation are affected by performance strategies that address the potentials of linguistic structures, theatricality, materiality and viewing conventions. Drawing on a Rancièrian notion of emancipated spectatorship, Count Two sought to discover how the content and structure of a piece might acknowledge the spectator's activity of watching. Through its repeated re-categorisation of components, the piece invoked qualities of instability as inherent to logocentric structures. The affective relations investigated through Practice's embrace of the thought, felt and materially endured, provided an opportunity to attend to the ways we might experience spectatorial exchange within unstable systems, as attention to what is present. Finally, Assembly asked what a crowd of bodies can do other than serve representational ideas of public-ness, and suggests that an impulse to gather is also an impulse to be vulnerable. These pieces provided a chance to explore how relations are experienced, as unstable relations, through our many perceptive capacities. Choreography asserts itself as the production of situations of generative relating, through spectatorial experiences of choreography as a 'being-for-others'.
Stage and Audience: Constructing Relations and Opportunities
The Routledge Companion to Scenography, 2018
This chapter, published in The Routledge Companion to Scenography, edited by Arnold Aronson, explores the following questions: How does theatre architecture construct relations through the siting of the audience in space in relation to action and to other audience members? How does this theatre architecture, and its construction of relations, condition the seeing and sensing of the performed event? How do the designed spatial relations of the theatre prescribe, suggest, or perhaps inadvertently offer alternative staging opportunities and, through that, contribute to the experience of the event? The chapter includes several original illustrations including El Lissitzky's set for the Meyerhold Theatre, the Spiral Theatre, Teatro Oficina, and alternative stagings within Barcelona's Liceu and in the Paris Odeon.
Performer/Spectator Relationships: A Dynamic of Equilibrium
QOQQOON, Issue 4, ed. Steven Cottingham and Leigh Tennant, 2020
The relationship between performer and spectator is predicated on physical, temporal, and psychological boundaries—a dynamic of mutual tension, dependency, and consent rooted in the continual flow of power from one to the other. It is this interaction between the spectator’s positioning and the performer’s taking action from which an artwork is born...
Theatre is an art of body and art grounded in body.' 1 'We therefore need a different theatre, a theatre without spectators: not a theatre played out in front of empty seats, but a theatre where the passive optical relationship implied by the very term is subjected to a different relationshipthat implied by another word, one which refers to what is produced on the stage: drama. Drama means action. Theatre is the place where an action is taken to its conclusion by bodies in motion in front of living bodies that are to be mobilized.' 2
Towards Embodied Spectatorship
2015
The article discusses the cognitive approach to spectatorship. There are different aspects that interest theatre scholars in the field of spectating research, for example, how audiences perceive the process of acting, how emotions and empathy work, and how spectators create meanings. The main premise for the cognitive approach to spectating is that the engagement of the audience in the performance is foremost corporeal. The article analyses the roots of this standpoint and poses a question concerning the possibility of measuring the impact of theatre. Further, the statement that for spectators the most significant engagement with a performance is emotional is considered. The concept of empathy and kinaesthetic empathy in particular is discussed. The article suggests that the crucial specification for successful audiences’ embodiment is embodied acting and trained body-mind that in fact means coherence within and between the mental and emotional systems. Proposing that most reliable ...
Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself!
Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself! , 2019
At present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular , immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances. Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy. Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and a co-director of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded Collab
The expansion of theatrical space and the role of the spectator
One of the theatre and performance conventions that has been challenged by the application of technology is that of space. Theatrical space has been “expanded” through the application of technology and its artefacts. However, it is not really clear what is meant by “expansion”, as it means different things according to different authors and these divergent meanings often lead to misunderstandings. In this article, I will demonstrate the need for a more nuanced understanding of what the expansion of theatrical space means and its impact on the concept of spectatorship. The analysis will be based on three distinct forms of digital performance where spatial expansion has been an issue; these are three categories that also mark the heterogeneity and dynamism of the convergence of performance and technology: multimedia performance, telematic performance and pervasive performance. Through an analysis of specific cases across the categories, I aim to show how the expansion of space implies a more participatory stance in the role of the spectator.