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Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust

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Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust JCDE 2016; 4(1): 3–20 Mireia Aragay* and Enric Monforte Introduction: Theatre and Spectatorship – Meditations on Participation, Agency and Trust DOI 10.1515/jcde-2016-0002 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 audi- ences until very recent times –“a deep-seated suspicion of, and frustration with, audiences” (4) that may go a long way towards explaining the belated develop- ment of academic discussions of spectatorship in particular, a situation her own book decisively contributed to begin to remedy. Interestingly, trust in the audi- ence 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?”) 1 The conference was organised for CDE by the “Contemporary British Theatre Barcelona (CBTBarcelona)” research group (see www.ub.edu/cbtbarcelona). The group has received official recognition from the Catalan research agency AGAUR (2014 SGR 49), and is funded both by AGAUR and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project ref. FFI2012-31842). Additional support for the conference, financial and otherwise, was provided by the Faculty of Philology and the Department of English and German, University of Barcelona. ˗ *Corresponding author: Mireia Aragay, E Mail: [email protected] ˗ Enric Monforte, E Mail: [email protected] 4 Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte 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 con- struction 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 tradi- tional” (“What Can We Do?”; emphasis original).2 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 2 Smith points out that this kind of theatre is inspired “by the conceptual art practices of the late sixties and early seventies from which it takes its name” (“What Can We Do?”). See Cristina Delgado-García’s “Dematerialised Political and Theatrical Legacies: Rethinking the Roots and Influences of Tim Crouch’s Work” for a critical reassessment of the imprint of conceptual art on Crouch’s practice that may also throw some further light on Smith’s own work and use of the term. Theatre and Spectatorship 5 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 play- ful 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.3 Not surprisingly, a number of 3 In addition to Rancière, Smith mentions Roland Barthes, Susan Bennett, Freshwater and Umberto Eco. As Freshwater points out, in the English-speaking context Bennett’s Theatre Audiences, first published in 1990, “was the first – and at the time of writing only – book-length attempt to apply literary reader response teories [Hans-Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser and Stanley 6 Mireia Aragay and Enric Monforte 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.
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