See-Hear-Feel Conference Paper

The 'Collaborative' Spectator – Conceptualising the Contemporary Theatre Audience

INTRO
My name is Joanna Bucknall; I am a 2nd year, fulltime PhD student in the Faculty of Arts at Winchester University. My thesis is currently entitled: Participatory Theatre: (Re) Conceptualising the Contemporary Theatre Audience. My thesis is an investigation that seeks to explore and understand the nature of specific audiences' experiences of particular contemporary, participatory theatre events. My main research concern is understanding the role and nature of the audience through investigating particular participatory instances by examining both the production and reception of certain theatrical events. Today I want to share with you some of the key research concerns that underpin my thesis.

I want to suggest that the contemporary theatre audience can be understood to occupy the role of 'collaborator' and that it is this role that is fundamental to the very nature of theatre itself. In short, I wish to assert that the collaborative spectator is a crucial principle that underpins our understanding of what designates theatre as such and I hope to demonstrate that accepting the audience in the role of collaborator, has far reaching implications for both production and reception theory within the discipline of theatre.

SECTION ONE: WHAT IS THE COLLABORATIVE SPECTATOR?
In most Western contemporary theatre, the audience is an element that makes up and completes the theatrical event. It is in this sense that the audience's role can be understood to be that of 'collaborator'; as Bert O States suggests: 'I would prefer a less clumsy term than collaborative […] but it suggests the main idea: [to recognise a] break down [in] the distance between actor and audience and to [acknowledge] the spectator [in] more than a passive role in the theatre exchange.' (States 1985: 170) There are of course varying degrees of collaboration and in some cases even participation, and as States also acknowledges, 'the invitation to collaborate varies, of course, from the implicit, [what I term base-level], and from the token to the literal,' which I have designated the creatorly participant. (States 1985: 170) I want to focus on what I term 'base level' collaboration and suggest that the role of the audience is always collaborative. Collaborative in that it is fundamentally embedded into the ontology of each and every kind of theatrical event, from Pantomime, through Drama and even musicals, that can be described as theatre. In fact, the audience is an essential ingredient for theatre to be called such and it is a factor that differentiates theatre from other performance mediums such as Film and Television. As Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner claim, 'Although Brechtian theatre may indeed pack a certain punch, it is not due to the so-called 'alienation effect', because there is not foundational cognitive distinction between "active" and "passive" spectators. (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 20)

An assumption that much of our contemporary reception theory has been built on is that the theatre audience is passive: Brecht worked to transform the spectator into witness using his own 'Epic' techniques, setting up an alternative to the conventions of dramatic theatre to penetrate the fourth wall and liberate the audience. His techniques have been revisited, reworked and re-conceptualised in a plethora of manifestations, throughout the last century through modernism, absurdist and even postmodernism. However, the assumption that the dramatic theatre audience were passive in the first place underpins the majority of our contemporary understandings of the audience's role, even if the theory is looking to change that role: 'The linkage between theatricality and blending also complicates the usual distinctions dividing realistic from overtly theatrical productions and "passive" from "active" spectators.' (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 20) It is only in recent years that through the work of theorists such as Bert O States, Iain Mackintosh and Gay McAuley that we have come to begin to acknowledge, as Mackintosh suggests, that 'the audience's role is an active not passive one' (Mackintosh 1993: 2), in drama as well as the multiplicities and varying manifestations of 'epic' or other non-dramatic theatre forms.

In film and television, the production is complete before the audience become its receivers. The work is finished without the presence of the audience, they are not required to make up or finish the work; although reality shows like Big Brother, How do You Solve a Problem like Maria, X Factor and Dancing on Ice are an obvious exception. The typical film and TV audience's presence does not affect the work itself and their presence at the cinema or in front of the TV set is not required to complete the work itself. The work remains the same and unchanged regardless of the action or inaction of the viewers; 'the cinema goer's communication with that ghostly image on screen is one way: all he or she can do is listen and watch.' (Mackintosh 1993: 2) In theatre, whether it be dramatic, epic, avant-garde, pantomime, puppetry, non-literary or Postdramatic, it requires the audiences presence to complete the event, without an audience in attendance, there is no theatrical event. This is one of the key elements that differentiate theatre from TV and film; it is a question of 'liveness' and 'presence'. Peggy Phelan asserts, 'the interaction between the art object and the spectator, is essentially performative' (Phelan 1993: 147), the 'art object' in this case being theatre, only becomes itself through the dialogue and disappearance that it stages with the spectator: 'Performances being, like the ontology of subjectivity proposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.' (Phelan 1993: 146)

The audience itself is not a complete unit or a whole or even in existence until it is in attendance at the particular theatrical event. The audience is not a fixed concept or fixed body of people that can be pre-conceptualised, instead the audience is made up of individuals and small sub groups who attend any given theatrical event. The audience only comes into being when those individuals and sub groups come together at a theatrical event and are manifest as audience through their interaction with the work and each other under specific theatrical conditions. Time, space and proximity directly construct the audience, bringing it into existence, as Herbert Blau suggests: ' the audience-as I have come to see it from over thirty years in the theatre-is not so much a mere congregation of people as a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play [or theatre event] but is initiated or precipitated by it, it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed.'(Blau 1990: 25)

If we are to acknowledge the audience as constructed in and through the event, then we are acknowledging their role as a collaborator. Even the term audience is not as unambiguous as we might fist suspect. 'The problems surrounding the concept stem mainly from the fact that a single and simple word is being applied to an increasingly diverse and complex reality, open to alternative and competing theoretical formulations.' (McQuail 1997: 1)Therefore, if the theatrical event can be understood as constituting an interaction between performers and audience, together, live, in a particular space and at a particular time under certain creative circumstances, then as McAuley succinctly points out, 'the spectator has to be seen as a crucial and active agent in the creative process.' (McAuley 2000: 238)

SECTION TWO: THE PROBLEMATICS OF EXISTING RECEPTION MODELS
Accepting the audience in this role means that the ways in which we conceptualise and theorise the audience needs to be re-addressed. Much theatrical reception is influenced by and taken from research undertaken within the disciplines of film and literature; 'because we have literalised the reading metaphor-we say that we 'read' television, 'read' fashion, 'read' a situation, or 'read' a mind-we have blurred the line that separates two basically different processes. We do not 'read' [..] theatrical performances: we perceive them. (Mancing: 189, in Hart & McConachie 2006) I want to suggest that acknowledging the audience's role as collaborator problematises much of our contemporary models and theories. In occupying the role of the collaborator, I want to suggest that the audience can no longer be conceptualised as 'reader' or 'receiver'. The audience as 'reader' or 'receiver' implies that they posses a certain level of objectivity, that they are able to stand outside of the event looking in, however, for me this level of objectivity is problematic when the audience, as I have shown, is implicated so fundamentally in the very ontology of the event. Performers enter the performance space and open 'the theatres doors to the world outside, demanding the audience speak, stand and encounter them directly.' (Escolme 2005: 4) If the audience is a live, active collaborator then they are implicated in the events make up and cannot simply stand aside or outside of that which they are irrevocably involved in.

The difficulty with semiotics, deconstruction and other contemporary models of spectatorship is that they, as McAuley notes, 'seem to be largely speculative. (what it was hoped would happen rather than what did in fact happen.)' (McAuley 2000: 238)The conceptualisation and understanding of the audience and their role in contemporary reception theory seems 'to be based not on the experience of actual performances but on either a kind of virtual performance imagined on the basis of reading play texts or on the assumption that theatre functions like some other performance practice.' (McAuley 2000: 239) Very little work has been done which actually takes into account Blau's notion that the audience is constructed in and through each specific theatrical manifestation. In short the actual audience is absent or neglected in our current reception theories. Thus, it would appear that the concept of the collaborating audience requires approaches that take into account the phenomenological aspects of that role. In order to understand the collaborating audience their actual experiences need to be gathered and studied: 'the theatrical space is a phenomenological space, governed by the body and its spatial concerns, a non-Cartesian field of habitation which undermines the stance of objectivity and in which the categories of subject and object give way to a relationship of mutual implication.' (Garner 1994: 3-4)

SECTION THREE: THE PROBLEM OF EXPERIENCE
The concept of the collaborative audience puts emphasis on the phenomenology of the theatrical event; experience and presence become deeply significant. Phenomenological aspects of the event are brought to the fore and the audiences experience becomes a central concern. Due to the ephemeral nature of the theatrical event and thus the experiences of the audience, it makes it difficult to conceptualise and theorise. A Phenomenological approach, as Stanton B Garner states, '-with its twin perspective on the world as it is perceived and inhabited, and the emphasis on embodied subjectivity that has characterised the work of its practitioners (notably Merleau-Ponty and those influenced by his work in philosophy and medical phenomenology)- is uniquely able to illuminate the stage's experiential duality.' (Garner 1994: 3)However, although phenomenological aspects of the theatrical event are the key to understanding the role of the collaborative audience, phenomenology is not in itself a model or methodology of inquiry.

In order to understand the phenomenology of the theatrical event, strategies and devices have to be developed and applied for recording and documenting the actual experiences in order to then theorise and conceptualise them as wider theory. Perception and reception therefore comprises an act of rhythmic construction of work "theatre doesn't happen to someone, they make theatre" happen to them.' (Pavis: 14, in Berghaus 2001) Methods need to be developed and applied that capture the ways in which the audience, see, hear and feel. These strategies and devices need to be developed so that they can be applied in collecting actual material experiences rather than relying on virtual or imagined experiences. If indeed the experience is so central to understanding the nature and role of the collaborative audience, then we need not only find modes of recording and documenting experiences but we also need to understand the ways in which those experiences are constructed and how meaning is made from those encounters. Roth & Frisby suggest that 'The term perception refers to the means by which information acquired from the environment via the sense organs is transformed into experiences of objects, events, sounds and tastes.' (Roth & Frisby 1986: 81) In developing documentational strategies, I want to suggest that there are two core concerns that must be considered: What is the documentational evidence in relation to the vanished event? And How can that evidence be rigorously conceptualised in order to gain understanding without being a reductive activity?

In my own research, I have developed methodologies and strategies that I hope show a rigorous approach to those concerns. I have adopted and developed the roles of reflective participant and reflected practitioner in order to collect and record the experiential aspects of particular theatrical events in their production and subsequent live manifestation. In my research activity to date, I have been adopting the role of reflective participant in order to approach the work of specific and particular contemporary makers, such as Blast Theory, Forced Entertainment, Barbarras and Carlos Cortes. By participating in the events themselves as not only a collaborative member of the audience but also in the critical role of reflective participant, I have generated anecdotal and documentational traces of the events that I have attended. Biggs distinguishes between the different types of artistic practice: '(1) art as therapy (for the individual), (2) art as cultural practice (the production of works of art), and (3) art as research.' (Biggs 2003) In order to approach the work of others, which falls within either category one or two, my approach a researcher must be from a critical perspective: the reflective participant. I want to suggest that the role of the reflective participant is reflexive because in generating personal and localised anecdotal evidence as well as documentational evidence, I am re-enacting the event itself, re-participating in its make up through my research activity. In this context the documentation for research may stand for proof for the live event, but it also becomes something else from it and thus never fully documents it; the nature of live Art is in the liveness of both its delivery and fruition, but also of the continuously shifting contextualisation of its produced supplements. (Cologni 2003)

I am currently in the production stages of the PARiP section of my PhD research activity and throughout this process I am adopting the role of the reflective practitioner. 'Through reflection, he [the practitioner] can surface and criticize the tacit understandings that have grown up around the repetitive experiences of a specialized practice [in this case performance] and can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness, which he may allow himself to experience.' (Schön 1983: 61) By asserting the use of reflection-in-action, the practitioner can lend new insights into their practice as well as other research questions and concerns that may underpin the artistic activity. Therefore, the practitioner who chooses to take up reflection-in-action as an ethic for practical inquiry and as a research strategy is taking up the role of reflective-practitioner. As well as recording and documenting my own participation as maker, researcher and audience during the production and resulting live event, I will also be collecting the experiences of the other collaborators involved in the making process and the final collaborators, the audience. I will be gathering all traces of each performance element in order to re-enact the live event through its various documentations, with the view to gaining an insight into nature and function of the production and reception.

All the evidence that I have and will collect during the course of my PARiP activity will be localised and specific to the circumstances in which it was generated and collected. The localised, anecdotal and documentational evidence that I have and will collect throughout the PARiP activity, is only ever partial; just traces and ghosts, that through their re-enactment of the actual live event, create a changed and different manifestation of that which they were created by. All that is left to offer is simply dust; 'performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representation: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance…[as] it betrays and lessens the promise of it' own ontology.' (Phelan 1993: 149)

The methods of collecting evidence that I am applying will only ever produce a ghostly re-enactment, partial and changed, for the work of others as well as my own and is a factor which needs to be considered in the conceptualisation of the research findings. Although the documentation and anecdotal evidence will provide some insight into the experiences of those involved in the events, they do not stand up as a complete understanding or theory for the nature and role of the audience. The experiences themselves need to be subjected to modes of inquiry that will conceptualise the experiences in order to discover the implications for wider theoretical concerns: aesthetically, socially and culturally. Care and caution has to be exercised in approaching the material, so as not to be reductive or grandly universal with the subjective and localised material. I want to suggest that new and startling developments in the arena of cognitive science and particularly in cognitive materialism, afford the opportunity to conceptualise this type of research material with the care and caution that it demands. 'We define the scope of cognitive science as the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind. [Cognitive materialism is the discipline of applied cognitive science within the realm of cultural activities] Its practices and knowledge derive from those of the primary contributing disciplines, which are computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and philosophy. It seeks to understand how the mind works. (Green 1996: 5)

SECTION FOUR: COGNITIVE MATERIALISM
Cognitive materialism is essentially an empirical methodology that presumes certain biological and material truths about the human body/mind/brain. It is concerned with the way in which the mind/brain perceives on a phenomenological level. The core understanding that informs the discipline is that the mind/brain is embodied. 'The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. These are the three major findings of cognitive science. More than two millennia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy [and in turn our understanding of theatre] can never be the same again.' (Lakoff & Johnson 1999: 3) However, despite the base level claims to certain material truths, cognitive materialism does make room for the concept of the personal and recognises that the processes of making meaning are reliant, to a certain extent, upon our social, cultural, environmental and particular personal circumstances. 'Although the plasticity and creativity of human behaviour are striking, the cognitive processes that underlie this flexibility are bounded by our cognitive make up and by our experiences. Architectural constraints on our behaviour are a result of the way our minds are constructed as distinct from those constraints that arise from habit, learning or features of our individual experience.' (Green 1996: 6) It recognises the locality and subjectivity that is required to fall inline with certain aspects of postmodernist thought. It is empirical but not entirely universal.

The empirical aspect of cognitive materialism is in the assertion that most human mind/brains function at the same basic cognitive and perceptual levels, (with the exception of minds/brains that have sustained damage or malformation). Cognitive science has discovered that the ways in which human mind/brains perceive is the same across race and culture, the biology that drives our computational systems function in an identical manner for all human beings. However, the ways in which we formulate those perceptions into meaning, the way we express ourselves and ultimately respond to sensimor stimuli, is subject to particular personal and localised circumstances. 'We can conceive of human cognition as taking place along a continuum, with perception at one pole and symbolization at the other. Most of what happens in our everyday cognitive processes involves some combination of the two.' (Mancing: 191, in Hart & McConachie 2006)

This device is useful in conceptualising the performer/audience relationship because it lends insight and helps to understand how the experiences of the performers and audiences are formulated. It will generate through this, the opportunity to understand what the implications are for those experiences within the wider context of theatre theory. 'Cognitive studies, offers a more empirically responsible path to knowledge in cultural history [as well as theatre and performance studies] than psychoanalysis, including it Lacanian developments.' (McConachie 2006: 54)

CONCLUSION
Phenomenological approaches to theatre criticism make experience the central concern and through reflective strategies and devices of recording and collecting those experiences, cognitive materialism can be applied in order to gain new, empirically based insights into the ways in which the audience take up their role.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berghaus, Günter. New Approaches to Theatre Studies and Performance Analysis, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001.
Biggs, Michael. 'The role of "the work" in art and design research', PARIP:
http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/bib.htm, 2003. Accessed on 26/11/04.
Blau, Herbert. The Audience, London: Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Elena Cologni. 'Documenting Performative Practice — tracing',
PARIP: http://www.bris.ac.uk/parip/bib.htm, 2003. Accessed on 21/02/07.
Escolme, Bridget. Talking to the Audience: Shakespeare, Performance, Self, London: Routledge, 2004.
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities, New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Garner, Stanton B. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama, London: Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Green ,David W. Cognitive Science: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Mackintosh, Iain. Architecture, Actor and Audience, London: Routledge, 1993.
McAuley, Gay. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
McConachie , Bruce A. and F. Elizabeth Hart, (Eds). Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies After the Cognitive Turn, London: Routledge, 2006.
McQuail, Denis. Audience Analysis, London: SAGE, 1997.
Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993.
Roth, Ilona & John P. Frisby. Perception and Representation: Current Issues, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986.
Schön, Donald, A. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action,
Maurice Temple Smith Ltd: London, 1983.
States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre, London: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.