Charles Isherwood in the New York Times has mixed feelings about emerging theater works with an emphasis on active audiences, where the viewer plays a significant role in the way the event unfolds. It may be event-worthy and alluring to new audiences, he thinks, but it lacks many of the essential qualities of complex narrative and ”serious theater.”
Part of the problem with such interaction, he suggests, is that while we’re wandering through the interactive setting, we are too aware of ourselves to get lost in the experience:
If we are too conscious of our own presence in the presence of art, it can be a distraction to engagement. Think of how hard it is to connect with a beloved painting if you come upon it after too many hours in the museum, your feet sore and sticking to the floor. The mind is most receptive when our sense of ourselves as physical entities impinging on the world can be forgotten, and we are free to open up to a new experience.
It’s a subtlety worth exploring, as all roads in the lively arts seem to be moving toward more visibly active audiences, less traditional audience chambers, and less sitting quiet in the dark. Isherwood even wonders if our common definition of ”active” is starting to skew toward visible and physical action rather than more invisible, internal forms.
…it is worth reiterating that to be an active participant in a theatrical experience, you don’t have to put on a mask or have your feet fondled; you just have to be spiritually present.
Isherwood isn’t examining his own preconceptions. Why is “getting lost in the experience” more complex than actively participating? Historically, such passivity is a recent development: Goethe is the one who shushed his audience and lectured them on how an audience should behave — quiet like mice. But when theatre was healthier, active audiences were expected.
As a working storyteller, the concepts of “me” vs. “them” instead of just “us” are pretty odd to me. I struggle with static art. Is this “be quiet now” just more of an extension of the inability of the audience to find relevance in “legitimate” theater? Why the silence in a museum- isn’t silence another form of contribution or is it just passivity?
Excellent post.
Thank you for including Isherwood’s article this week. My company actually included it in an e-blast that we sent out yesterday, as we currently have a promenade performance up in Chicago. This performance style is one that we have experimented with multiple times and each time we receive wildly different reviews from critics and audience members. Consistently though, avid arts participants find this a new, exciting way to experience live performance in a shared environment. Perhaps it is a passing fad and will be replaced in the next few years, but promenade performances quick upward trend in popularity speaks to the need for theater to step out of the Naturalism/American Realism box and respond to our modern culture.
I used to work in a vaudeville theatre. We liked boos, hisses, and huzzahs. That’s an active, engaged audience.
Isherwood seems to be getting at the idea of context. There’s a great article about audience and context by Gene Weingarten published in April 2007 in the Washington Post – “Pearls before breakfast.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
“In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” writes Weingarten, “Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.
‘Optimal,’ Guyer said, ‘doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.'”
In Isherwood’s case, he’s talking about internal and external states as they relate to the ostensible degradation of optimal context by audience participation. Participation as an end in itself is a distraction; participation to aggrandize the ego is destructive; what manner of participation lends itself to the optimal context, and what is the intended outcome?