If you are academically inclined and are interested in theatre audiences, then please do take a look at the website for the up-and-coming conference on the audience through time, organised by myself and fellow PhD researcher Anna Kretschmer at Queen Mary, University of London.
We aim to create for scholars to discuss how have audiences changed through time. Can contemporary theatre spectatorship inform how we understand audiences throughout history? How does historiographic research on audiences relate to present cultures of spectatorship? Using theatre as the core, but not only, focus of discussion, this conference will consider spectatorship across history.
“It is better to provoke a reaction than none at all” – or so goes the old adage. But is this really the case? During the last week there has been a bit of a furore about Dave St-Pierre’s new offering at Sadler’s Wells. Un peu de tendresse bordel de merde! or A Little Bit of Tenderness For Fuck’s Sake (although some reviewers have given translated this as something a little more benign) has been causing controversy throughout the dance world.
The first I heard about this was a tweet from the Dance Critic Luke Jennings, who described his evening as ‘Vulgar, witless, repellent.’ Blogging for The Guardian, he explained further:
Further down my row a guy parts his arse cheeks to expose his anus to a visibly alarmed woman. Then he fixes on me, and tries to grab my pen and notebook. I hold on and he pulls my glasses from my face. Then deliberately, clearing his throat, he gobs phlegm all over the lenses, and with a sneer, hands them back to me.
I myself was not at any of last week’s performances, but by the sounds of other reviews (the Indie, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph) poor old Luke’s experience was, despite being the most grotesque, not the only bad one. There were a few who felt more positively (as here), but the fact remains that at one point during this performance one of the audience members was assaulted, which in the context of the street could be classed as a criminal offense, or at least something worthy of an ASBO.
Does the fact that this behaviour took place in a theatre auditorium, in front of an audience who paid up-front for the experience, mean that the performances can play havoc in such a way? A sort of theatrical diplomatic immunity to any offence caused? How far will this wild card take you?
Actively trying to provoke your audience is not new phenomenon of course. This piece is one in a long line of productions who have caused varying degrees of notoriety over the past century. It was the Naturalist theatre of the late nineteenth century (think Ibsen, Chekhov et al) which incited a variety of new-wave theatre experimentalists to use their audiences in a different way. Naturalist theatre, it was argues, did not need any input from the audience at all: audience members could snooze off in the stalls and this would not be to the detriment of the production. It reaffirmed the dominant ideology of the state, reproducing it in the theatre. If the stage was reproducing, as closely as it could, ‘real life’ outside, what was the point of it at all?
The Futurists are one of the many groups who decided to make a difference. Filippo Marinetti’s ‘The Variety Theatre’ manifesto of 1913 advocated the ‘the use of itching and sneezing powders, coating some of the auditorium seats with glue, provoking fights and disturbances by selling the same seat to two or more people’. They wanted to take the spirit of variety and cabaret theatre into the more conservative upper-class theatre spaces. The painting to the left is a fellow Futurist Severini’s work which literally puts the audience at the centre of the picture: here he paints a Parisian cabaret act. Audience members are virtually indistinguishable from the performers themselves, everyone is involved with the flurry and movement of the scene. The Futurist’s artistic aspirations did, however, have explicit political motivations behind them. Staunch Fascists, their manifestos celebrated the new-found brute force of Italy, its masculine strength and modern technical prowess at the expense of anyone lesser-equipped to match it. Attacking their audience meant to some degree politicising them, aggravating them into a state of powerful momentum and force.
But what could St-Pierre want from this close encounter with his audience? Spectators at the theatre are no longer expected to sit through endless productions which conform ideologically to the present governments view of what should occur: productions can openly question, undermine, rethink through the way we live our lives and positions in society. As Michael Billington highlights in his book ‘The State of the Nation’, the Blairite government actually subsidised theatre through the Arts Council that often critiqued the Blair government, and questioned its morals and decisions.
St-Pierre may be wanting to break the taboo of nudity and physical proximity by the onslaught of naked bodies into the audience but surely there is a more ethical and intelligent way of doing this than subjecting your audience to abuse? I suspect that to a number of the audience members this kind of social critique was not new – did he take into account he may be preaching to the converted?
The experience of Luke Jennings and the rest of the audience seems worlds away from my other recent experience of nudity and physical proximity, Adrian Howell’s The Pleasure of Being: Washing, Feeding, Holding, which I blogged about a while ago. I was asked to read through a short document about the exprience I was to go through before I went into the room, and at all times Adrian make clear that I could say it was all too much if I needed to.
If we are to respect the performance, the audience needs to be likewise respected. There is a level of trust which performer and audience member enter in at the beginning of the performance: play with this as you wish, willingly humiliating or hurting someone will break this trust and ruin any ‘point’ which the performance is trying to make.
Mobile Phones are usually seen as a taboo object at the theatre. Increasingly theatre auditoriums have come up with ways to warn us about the disruption they cause. At the moment just echoing a ring-tone around the auditorium, as they do in the cinema, generally gets the message across. One of the most ingenious examples of this recently was at the Coliseum, where the first percussionist politely played his xylophone to the tune of a well-known and unbelievably annoying ring-tone. Everyone gets the point: don’t let your phone disrupt the production.
But increasingly as modern technology develops, and more and more of the population are welded to the latest must-have handset, mobile phones and live media devices are hard to escape. Front line avant-garde theatre troupes have found brilliantly creative ways to interweave modern networking into their practice. Coney is the obvious example: they build their moving and quirky productions through texts, phone calls and emails with their ‘audience’. Famously shrouded in mystery, they use the anonymity of cyber space to subversively create real-life connections. To say anymore about this would undermine their craft: check them out, they are fantastic.
But what of the more traditional theatre companies, which primarily rely on a quiet and seated audience to experience their work? The clever people at Theatre Royal Stratford East have become the first of such companies to develop a strategy to embrace fast paced modern communication: unveiling a ‘tweetzone‘. Basically, audience members who are seated in their upper circle of the auditorium will have access to free WiFi so they can tweet away their thoughts and feelings in real-time. I’m intrigued.
Stratford East has a long and prestigious history of reaching out to its surrounding communities and audience. Their artistic director from 1953 Joan Littlewood, and her left-wing troupe the Theatre Workshop, is the stuff of theatre legend; they lived commune-style due to the lack of funding in order to create ground breaking new work. It was Joan who first directed Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children in Britain in 1955, and helped develop and champion what is now termed ‘Theatre in Education’ with the Stratford local community. Stratford East, in the unveiling of their new twitter scheme, directly reference Joan Littlewood: this scheme aims to give a power and a voice to the community watching the action on stage that usually sits in silence.
But how far can an audience have a useful discussion about the work on stage using just 140 letters per tweet, and doing this all whilst the stage action itself is happening? My most recent experience of tweeting and theatre came last week, when the BBC televised The Royal Ballet’s recent production Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I took part in a ‘live-tweet’ along to get a feel for the experience, using the hash-tag #aliceintwitterland.
Despite having seen this ballet in rehearsal and on the stage I still found it difficult to balance my gaze between the television and my computer screen. Theatre on TV does give you an added advantage in this respect: the camera directs you to the action rather than having to decide yourself what to concentrate on, yet still it was difficult to follow. Some of the best parts of the ballet, including most of Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, were lost to me as I was tap-tapping away at my tweets. The unadulterated gaze of the spectator, usually taken as a given, was not present in those who were tweeting along to the performance.
Much of the tweeting between people descended into general cooing over the prettiness of the piece. Criticism or questions were rarer, but when raised did promote some conversations between certain people. But tweeting does capture fleeting thoughts which can be lost in analysis of after-show talk. I found it hard to articulate a lot of my thoughts in the small space required, and really felt like wanting a longer chat in person with the people I was tweeting with at the end of the show. And critiquing work during the show can lead to some other tricky questions: surely you must see the piece as a whole to respond to it effectively? Does this time pressure encourage snappy articulate thinking or limit thought-out response? Usually I do not try to articulate a response to a production until hours, sometimes days or weeks, after I have seen it. It asks you to think about the production, react and articulate, which can be immensely empowering but also can completely undermine the concentrated emotional effect during the piece.
What worked best for Alice was when the choreography referenced other ballets: there was a flutter of tweets which remarked on the parallels with The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet and The Sleeping Beauty. Some of the referencing I hadn’t spotted and it was really interesting pick up on this during the performance itself rather than in retrospect.
Useful to producers will be the overarching trends which the twitter feeds may reveal. ‘Worm-polling’ has recently become popular in politics to chart the ups and downs of audience reactions in real-time throughout a speech or debate, and in many ways this is theatre replicating the system. Tweeting exposes exactly what parts of the production are best-received or worst-received. But the fact that all tweeters can see the reactions of others in real-time too could inevitably skew reactions.
Tweeting live in the auditorium at Stratford will no doubt be a different experience to tweeting in front of the TV screen. I wonder if the dramaturgical decisions in the up-coming productions will take into account this potential change of concentration in their audience. This brings into play some fascinating questions: can a production be ‘understood’ if your nose is buried elsewhere at key moments? Does this matter? Is there inherent meaning in a production anyway, or is meaning necessarily constructed by the onlooker? Will real-time interaction between audience members add depth to the experience? More worryingly, if the tweeting is resolutely negative, the on-stage team would be able to see in real-time this information. But unlike printed reviews tweeting is fleeting: gone in a moment, unlikely to have a very long life expectancy unless it is particularly pertinent to the wider tweeting population.
I can’t wait to see how this system is received , how it informs the productions produced, and the wider policy of Stratford East. Thinking back to Joan Littlewood’s legacy, there is something slightly Brechtian about the new scheme. Could Twitter help move the audience towards a state like that termed the alienation effect / Verfremdungseffekt by Brecht? The effect ”which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.” (Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964) 91.) Of course, a consciously critical observer for Brecht was a specifically socialist critical observer, whereas I suspect that Twitter feeds, like the blog-o-sphere in general, will be flooded with an array of observant reactions with a plethora of political leanings and interpretations. Whatever, Stratford East should be proud of their new scheme. It allows experimentation without disruption to the majority of the auditorium, and will create some fascinating insights into contemporary theatre spectatorship. See you at the tweetdeck!
