Getting Together and Falling Apart Applauding audiences +
Black. [Applause.] applauding? Are we rehearsing applause? Are we You do not hear anything, but you see six to rehearse applause? performers bowing, showing facial expressions of happy relief, moving one after the other Applause, you could say, is a negotiation of towards the apron in slow motion, bowing again acknowledging and estimating a performance (in and retreating into the line of six. Then, one of the sense of its success), and it is being produced them says: ‘We were doing it for you’. by and authenticated through gestures which sum up that effect we come to call applause. Ivana Müller’s Playing Ensemble Again and It is aimed at an object, an accomplishment, a 1 Premiere Leuven, Again (2008)1 enlarges and prolongs that very performance, and at the same time at all the Belgium/Playground moment of the performance when – at first others who constitute an audience in that very Festival, STUK, October 31, 2008. Concept, glance – the performance comes to an end and moment of acclamation or disapproval. choreography and the audience is asked to react to it, be it with Applause is a collective gesture. Try to direction: Ivana Müller; Performers: Katja Dreyer, acclamation or with objection. The fringe or applaud as an individual; it might feel rather Karen Røise Kielland, margin of the performance which still belongs to as if you quote applause, and you will not be Bojana Mladenovic, Pedro Inês, Daniel the performative setting but adheres to different able to sustain it for a very long time. Applause Almgren-Recén, Rodrigo rules, has come to be the most important functions in a collective, and it produces Sobarzo; Text: Ivana Müller, Bill Aitchison occasion for audiences to participate, if in a very collectives. It is an action which at the same time and the performers; specific and arguably limited way: by applauding, already is a re-action calling for other reactions. Lighting design and technique: Martin booing or refusing to do any of these. At the Gestures of applause are not only visible Kaffarnik; Sound design: beginning of Müller’s piece, we are deprived of bodily movements, but produce audible effects Viljam Nybacka; Artistic advise: the very sound and action of applause, and I do as well. They use the hand like an instrument Bill Aitchison. A video not feel myself in the position nor in the mood for producing sound, and can be accompanied trailer of the performance can be to fill in. Thus I am put in a strange position by other actions, visible or audible, like booing, accessed at http://www. of asymmetry between the unambiguous encores, crying, laughter etc. Clapping functions ivanamuller.com/videos/. All quotes from the situation I see and the insecure role I face as as transmission of information and affect performance according an audience member. Am I implicated in this through space, and its temporal horizon is to my notes during the performance from scene of conventional curtain calls and expected essentially rhythmical, has a certain duration October 23, 2009. applause? What kind of participation am I and requires repetition in order to be readable allocated in (not) applauding? Can I synchronize as applause. The gestures of clapping can be myself to an imaginary applause and become differentiated and reinforced through temporal ‘audience’ – at the same time part of an imagined means; amplification, multiplication and audience and of the one which inevitably duration produce intensity. comes into being during that evening and while Proposing to investigate a historically
12 Performance Research 16(3), pp.12-18 © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2011 DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2011.606021 established, rather non emphatic concept of sense of the ‘emancipated spectator’, (Rancière, participation – theatrical applause – allows to put 2008) but also all kinds of bodily actions, kinetic under scrutiny the ways in which participation and verbal interventions (applause, booing, is informed by synchronization and rhythmic cheering, shouting, not to speak of wandering differentiation. The idea of action (within around, eating, bringing your MP3-player to the audience) at the intersection of moving the performance) make it impossible to speak and being moved is of central interest for my about spectators as either passive or active. argument which examines the possibilities of Our understanding of the ‘passivity’ of the participation within the framework of theatre audience has been ideologically impregnated and the conventions of audience behaviour. by Wagnerian and, later on, naturalist theories Such a concept of action cannot be of spectatorship which cannot be claimed as a developed without taking into account the performative reality at any time. Taking a closer intrinsic interrelatedness of ‘performers’ look at the dynamics of (historical) audiences 2 and ‘spectators’/’listeners’. There is no such reveals the manifold options beyond passivity 2 This resonates the way in thing as an achievement of the performers or activity which turns this odd singular into which processes between stage and auditorium are when separated from its counterpart, that of some sort of plurality, a collective divided being addressed through Getting Together & Falling Apart the audience members, and it is the specific many times in itself, constituting engagement the model of a ‘feedback loop’ by Erika Fischer- achievement of those who perceive which I am with a performance between affirmation and Lichte. According to especially interested in. I would like to show difference, pleasure and critique. Thus, it Fischer-Lichte, the ‘opposition between acting in how far the work spectators and listeners becomes increasingly difficult to decide whether and observing collapses’ do is being subjected to a similar process of ‘progressive’, participatory performances are in (Fischer-Lichte, 2008: 59). As ‘perceiving subjects’, differentiation and refinement as the one the fact enabling, while ‘traditional’ performances spectators act by doing performers go through. have the effect of something like a sedative. certains things and by what is happening to them. When arguing that applause turns a spectator/ Participating through applause, one could add, (This latter aspect – central listener into an audience member, I am referring makes an excellent case for the need and the to me – is not explicit in the to a concept of collective not to be misunderstood difficulty to differentiate between immersion and English translation of this passage (cf. Fischer-Lichte, as a unity or an institution, but rather a temporal participation: participation requires decision- 2004: 100).) gathering of individuals, experiencing the making, while immersion does not allow such a effect of synchronization and proximity to distance and liberty. others for a limited time. Participation, in this sense, comes into being by moving and being HISTORIES OF CLAPPING AND CLAPPERS moved and exceeds the active – passive binary. This latter operation implies a much too easy During the 19th century, clapping advanced to judgment about theatre audiences associated the preferred gesture of affirmative participation with quietly sitting in their seats, being in the performing arts. Besides that, common completely concentrated and absorbed by the utterances of acclamation or rejection were spectacle unfolding before their eyes (‘passive’) calling actors by their names, calling for encores, as opposed to a notion of the audience related to hissing, coughing, knocking, stamping one’s feet, performative practices beyond institutionalized, or heckling (cf. Primavesi, 2008: 363). fourth-wall theatre which would imply mobile The history of being an audience is quite a spectators, more loosely engaged with the action recent one, if it is understood as the history (or more directly, i.e. bodily involved by that: of attentive listening and watching, at least ‘active’). Already historically, it would not have if you restrict perceptive attention to actions been possible to address a theatre audience as performed on the stage or on the music podium. passive in the sense mentioned above. Not only What we know as the perceptive mode of silence interpretation and translation in Rancière’s and stillness, may be called an invention of
13 Brandl-Risi
Afl]jagjg^YfGh]jY:gp Yll`]HYjakGh jY 9[Y\ ea]jgqYd]\] emkaim]$Jm]D]H]d]la]j!$ lithograph after Eugène Lami, 1842. the nineteenth century (or, more precisely, of in a decidedly economy-driven environment, late eighteenth century Vienna). For quite a not only regarding the attention economies long time though, this new mode of attending of listeners/spectators, but very specifically performances competed with what could be the professionalization of performers and called a multifaceted attention to partners in a the subjection of appearing on a stage to the conversation, interesting guests and actions on mechanisms of the market. And it seems to the stage or the podium which was rather usual be no coincidence that clapping became the until far into the nineteenth century. In Peter predominant mode of acclamation at the high Szendy’s description, the new bourgeouis ritual time of the virtuoso performer. of attending concerts allows an experience of Vladimir Jankélévitch, the philosopher and listening and watching in a bifold way: listening Liszt scholar, identifies the transmission as listening to what is being performed, but between performer and listener/spectator by also as watching how others (and oneself) pointing to their fundamental reciprocity: listen. This new cultural disposition of listening during a successful performance, the audience comes along with the establishment of public is virtuosic together with the virtuoso, it shares concerts, professional concert reviews and a his omnipotence. This is the effect of the specialized music press. Attentive listening, says virtuoso’s charisma: the audience celebrates its Szendy, results from a process of interiorization own triumph. In the same way, failure makes of critical voices (that of the composer, of the audience doubt itself. All this irrational. The enthusiasts, of critics, of claqueurs): listeners more suspect the victory, the blinder and less experience competing voices (polémologie) which justified the ovations. In a circle of enthusiasm take hold of our inner ear (Szendy, 2000: 100; and disappointment, the admirers first celebrate cf. Szendy, 2008). the admired performance and then celebrate This shift in modes of attention happens their admiration, applaud their own applause.
14 Enthusiasm becomes inflationary; success gives performance within the performance. birth to success, booing gives birth to booing The esteem of their performance may be (Jankélévitch, 1979: 104ff.). deduced by the fact that in the 1830s, the In this scenario, ‘the audience’ reacts to a chef de claque of the Paris Opéra, Auguste sense of audience which had gained reality Levasseur, received a higher salary from the even before the entrance of the performer in artistic direction of the opera house than the its specific economy of expectation, attention prominent singers. Claques were usual in the and enthusiasm. This audience is built by a concert business, but never as successful and conglomeration of individuals, but through persistent as in the Paris Opéra where the claque enthusiasm, participation in an event seems became a permanent institution in between possible as a temporary synchronization between audience and staff (cf. Walter, 1997: 332 ff.), pleasure and profit.3 covered by contracts with the singers and the 3 I would like to thank Kai Before this backdrop, a then newly established artistic direction. The Paris claque constisted of van Eikels for pointing me to that. kind of professional audience or audience of up to 100 actors for a premiere who were placed professionals plays a crucial role: the notorious in the auditorium strategically and directed by 4 This is not a closed chapter of theatre history. 4 ‘claque’ especially in nineteenth century Paris. Levasseur. The chef de claque decided upon his Besides from evidence that Getting Together & Falling Apart The claque can be understood as a symptom strategy after studying the libretto, attending theatrical claques still existed way into the of a culture of performative negotiation of rehearsals, engaging in conversations with the twentieth century (or still performances, be it triumph or fiasco.5 At least as artistic director, with singers and assistants. operate today, see the documentary on today’s ambivalently received as the virtuosos, the claque The claque he then had to orchestrate to the Italian opera houses is the symptom of a turning point in the first desired overall effect had quite differentiated Opernfieber; written and directed by Katharina half of the nineteenth century in which a) new roles for the individual actors. Besides the Rupp, D/CH 2004), the (broader, more heterogeneous) publics develop tapageurs (the vehement clappers) there were claque has a still vital afterlife most notably in which cannot (or not any more) dispose of e.g. the connaisseurs (who were supposed the pre-recorded applause necessary criteria to measure accomplishments; to utter murmurs of approval from the more of the television laugh track. There are more b) we see new kinds of performers (the virtuosos) expensive seats and were asked to recite verses recent phenomena though which operate at the threshold of ravishing and make commentaries), the rieurs (those who like the professionally organized trading of ‘likes’ excellence and charlatanry; and c) the economic laughed), the chatouilleurs (who were supposed on Facebook. set up of concerts and performances changes to entertain their neighbours through snuff and to private businesses in which unreliable and treats or cheerful conversation), the pleureuses 5 Until now, there has not been written any instable measurement of achievements became (those who had to weep, mostly women), the substantial study of the an economic risk and had to be avoided by chauffeurs (who had to go into raptures in front claque, only shorter essays and passages in histories insurances against failure (insurance being the of the posters and extol the performance), and of of theatre, opera or music. concept with which the claqueurs advertised course the bisseurs (calling for encores). Nineteenth century literary texts e.g. by Berlioz, their services). Balzac, Villiers de Claqueurs as strategically operating L’Isle-Adam as well as ‘ TONIGHT’ S SHOW WAS ABOUT GETTING treatises or actors within the audience aim to produce autobiographies by former TOGETHER AND FALLING APART.’. synchronizing effects by which the aesthetic and claqueurs serve as source economic success or failure of a performance The gestures of the applauding claque are not material. can be steered and by which achievements are at all signs of overwhelmed enthusiasm, but 6 Quote from Ivana Müller’s Playing Ensemble Again being acknowledged in a collective process. result of calculation. Nevertheless, by corporeal and Again. For the claqueurs, applause guarantees the (movement-driven or acoustic) transmission, success of a performance to a similar extent they are capable of inducing clapping in other as the performance of the actor/musician. The parts of the audience, in listeners who might claqueurs’ performance is measured by the have been undecided in their judgement very criteria of artistic success, it becomes a so far. In this process of synchronizing
15 7 This information was different ‘oscillators’, to use Pikovsky’s term, to an unmediated expression of the body, a Brandl-Risi accessible at http://www. ctopera.org. After the (Pikovsky, 2003) applause is being generated deliberate decision and that kind of automated closing down of the as an expression of acknowledgement of a behaviour Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam company, the website was shut down. performance, and according to the psycho-physic fantasized about in his ‘machine à gloire’ in interaction, it may even produce a feeling of ‘The Glory Machine’, 1874. (Villiers, 1985) enthusiasm in those formerly undecided. Any Villiers sketches an electro-mechanism which judgement about performances is dependent executes complete control over the (applause) @gfgj
16 dynamics which first of all constitute this still are) other occasions for applause than strange singular ‘audience’ as a manifold the curtain calls; applause which is aimed at divided collective. A collective bound together by the very moment and the single difficulty or synchronizing gestures of applause, not much beauty: after the long expected bravura aria in more. belcanto opera, or during the 32 fouettés of the ballerina in the final pas de deux. Even Richard Wagner, arguably the theatre theorist as well as MARGINALIZING APPLAUSE practitioner associated most with disciplining Since the end of the eighteenth century, the audiences and marginalizing applause, is said custom of applauding performers at the end to have bravoed from his box into his favourite of the performance became more and more moment of the flower maiden scene in Parsifal9 common. During the course of the nineteenth (quoted in Csampai, 1984: 131). But this has come century, actions of the audience members to be the exception. were more and more restricted by theatre laws. But what kind of participation do we speak Historical forms of ‘looking away’, to quote of when addressing audiences which are Irit Rogoff’s term8, had to be abandoned: there restricted (or restrict themselves) to applauding 8 See Rogoff, 2005. Irit
Getting Together & Falling Apart Rogoff’s account of was a ban on walking around, on eating and after the show? The collective attention of, say, participation as ‘looking drinking, on allowing bodily functions to be the audience in the Bayreuth festival house away’ makes an interesting heard like coughing. Excessive movements sanctions even coughing with aggressive looks claim for distraction and distorted or defocused and exuberant actions had to be limited to the or hissing. This form of collectivity implies attention as an important gesture of clapping hands, accompanied by vocal public solitude, in Herbert Blau’s term, (1990: mode of engagement with art. utterances. The aptness of these actions – the 257) which makes the single spectator within right moment – was more and more restricted the darkness of the auditorium even more 9 Weingartner, Felix, ‚Erinnerungen an die to the fringe of the performance, the threshold perceptible in her or his singularity. What ‚Parsifal‘-Aufführungen between performance and non-performance. happens when the single one moves back into 1882’, in Weingartner, Felix (1923) Lebenserinnerungen, But along these lines, applause itself the light at the fringe of the performance, when Wien/Leipzig, (quoted in became suspect. Already in the late nineteenth her or his action and reaction is called upon in Csampai, 1984: 131). century, special orders for applause ban were form of applause? When her or his applauding implemented. These resulted in the domesticated gestures – via the multiplying sound quality and sparingly applied segments of applause of clapping – synchronize themselves to those which – still – characterize the bourgeouis of other single ones and become collective practice of symphonic concerts (no applause action, possibly even in unison? And at the same between movements or for singular highpoints; time, applause implies its other, disapproval applause is aimed more at the work of art than at and rejection. This conflict constitutes the the execution). audience in its odd singular sense as well. At the threshold between ‘performance’ The institutionalized combat between claque and ‘non-performance’, collectively displayed and anti-claque seems to be only the most attention switches into a spectator’s/listener’s obvious incarnation of the confrontations and individual response which – individually negotiations of nineteenth century audiences. uttered – produces collectivity at once. He or In applause, one finds an ambivalence of she applauds the performers who just stopped affirmation and difference, of abandoning performing or did not quite stop doing so, still oneself to pleasure and success and at the same carrying the radiance and the shadow of their time claiming a critical potential. role and their achievement with them. There were (and to some extent, in classical ‘Hey spectator, hey spectator, I am hiding in ballet and in a certain repertory of operas, there the dark, […] I am waiting for your call, […] this is
17 the moment now.’ In one of the later sequences Lan, Jules (1883) Mémoires d’un chef de claque, Paris: Brandl-Risi of Ivana Müller’s choreography, the performers Librairie Nouvelle. sang these lines to us in a chorus. Pikovsky, Arkadi, Michael Rosenblum and Jürgen For me, it was never so weird to applaud than Kurths (2003) Synchronization. A universal concept in after this performance dwelling on curtain calls nonlinear sciences, Cambridge: Cambridge University and the lack of applause. Apparently, it is hard Press to show enthusiasm gesturally after having been Primavesi, Patrick (2008) Das andere Fest. Theater walked through the constructedness of audience und Öffentlichkeit um 1800, Frankfurt/New York: behaviours. To applaud seemed similarly Campus mechanic and somehow inappropriate as in Rancière, Jacques (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, Villiers’s applause machine. But there were some London and New York: Verso ‘bravos’ in the Hebbel am Ufer 2 on October 23, Rogoff, Irit (2005) ‘Looking Away: Participations in 2009. Visual Culture’ in After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance ed. Gavin Butt, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. REFERENCES Szendy, Peter (2000) ‘L’art de la claque ou: S’écouter Berlioz, Hector (1852) Les Soirées de L’Orchestre, Paris. écouter au concert’, in Escal, Françoise (ed.) Le Blau, Herbert (1990) The Audience, Baltimore MD: Concert, Paris: Harmattan. Johns Hopkins University Press Szendy, Peter (2008) Listen: A History of Our Ears, Csampai, Attila & Holland, Dietmar (eds) (1984) New York: Fordham University Press Richard Wagner: Parsifal. Texte, Materialien, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste (1985) ‘The Glory Kommentare, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. Machine’ in Cruel Tales, trans. Robert Boldick, with an Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2008) The Transformative Power introduction and notes by A.W. Raitt, Oxford: Oxford of Performance. A New Aesthetics trans. Saskia Jain, University Press. New York: Routledge Walter, Michael (1997) Die Oper ist ein Irrenhaus. Fischer-Lichte, Erika (2004) Ästhetik des Sozialgeschichte der Oper im 19. Jahrhundert, Performativen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Stuttgart: Metzler. Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1979) Liszt et la Rhapsodie, Vol. 1: Essai sur la virtuosité (= De la musique au silence, Vol. V/1), Paris: Librairie Plon
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