Reflective Practitioner: Performer/Audience Dynamics-some thoughts

I spent all day and evening in the library, reading and researching; trying to understand the audiences response to Siren Song in 3 Parts and trying to think about the ways in which I could develop and shift that relationship into a ‘creatorly’ and collaborative one.

The devising section that was based in Playback techniques was simply too free and open. It created a new situation that broke with the conventions of theatre and the contract of the space. This meant that it had no social or cultural context or precedent; which according to Cognitive Science creates difficulties in processing such a situation:

A Schema, acting as a central executive, coordinates information. It indicates when information can be ignored, which information is significant, and how the elements of significant information relate to each other. A well-established, automated schema acts exactly as we would expect an effective central executive to act. Both incoming information and the responses to that information can be governed and coordinated by schemas. Provided schemas are available, no other central executive function is required for humans to process information, of course, schemas must be learned and activated and so are not always available.

(Ross 2004:227)


Musical Share seems to be successful for 3 reasons: it engages the audience in an activity that is recognisable and this activity free’s them up to be able to play within a scenario that is familiar and recognisable but without any real risk involved in terms of life praxis. The rules of the game give the audience something familiar to grasp onto but still allows the room for new and exciting thing to happen.

Turner describes ludus as ‘shallow play’. ‘Deep play’, according to Geertz has ‘real’ consequences or weighty implications that affect the participants future life praxis profoundly; such as initiation rituals and rights of passage; however, ‘shallow play’, according to Turner and Kapferer presents the condition for reflection because it is less likely to have lasting implications in life praxis beyond the ‘ludic’ reflection because it is less likely to have lasting implications in life praxis beyond the ‘ludic’ experience. As Carlson discusses in his introduction:

Clifford Geertz has suggested a distinction between “deep play” and “shallow play” in performance, a distinction recalling Turner’s liminal and liminoid, but seemingly reversing Turner’s speculation about which sort of activity was radical and which conservative. According to Geertz, only those performances involving the participants in “deep play” are likely to raise real concerns about fundamental ideas and codes of the culture. Bruce Kapferer, on the other hand, seems closer to Turner, arguing that in “deep play” both performers and audience may be so involved in the activity that reflection does not occur and that paradoxically, it may be in the more “distanced” experience of “shallow play” that cultural self-reflection is most likely to occur.

(Carlson 1996:20)


Secondly, the game of Musical share matters because it is a real act; the audience are using up the scenario and playing with the possibilities of that familiar scenario, as themselves. They are not being asked to pretend but instead to commit an act. The performers and the audience are made present through the strategy of tasks, as themselves:

The performatised self is then as illusory as the dramatised other, but its illusion is countered by the irrefutable fact of the self in performance: of presence. As the self is less overtly illusory, so too, increasingly, is the performance space, with issues of site-specificity confusing and collapsing any easy divisions between art, installation and performance.

(Freeman 2004:61)
This is something that The Living Theatre pioneered in the late 1950’s & early 1960’s. The Living Theatre, developed performance strategies to engage their audiences in ritualistic acts, and attempted to implicate them fundamentally in the construction of the performance. They sought a communal approach to the making of theatre and often lived in the same space that they created and performed in. The Living Theatre, at certain moments in its history operated more like a creative commune than a theatre company; ‘it was the most famous of all theatre communes and became a symbol of an alternative social model and different way of life’(Junker 2004:470).This commitment to communal living and artistic production demonstrates the deeply rooted aspirations of Malina and Beck to democratise both the production and reception of theatre; a core device in its re-functioning as a social tool. The blurring of life, making and performing is something that Brook suggests is unique to the Living Theatre:

In The Living Theatre three needs become one: it exists for the sake of performing: it earns its living through performing; and its performances contain the most intense and intimate moments of its collective life.

(Roose-Evans 1989:104)

Lastly, the recognisable structure of play that the game represents creates a liminal space that has the radical potential for liminoid act to be committed. The audience engage in the task and it is through this real activity that they become ‘creatorly’; they become responsible for the creation and performance of the event within the game structure. The invitation to play is liminoid rather than liminal: ‘[t]he activities of the non-working, leisure periods, play activities, are precisely those that Turner characterises as liminoid’ (Carlson 2004:21).

For me, the first experiment has highlighted two key aspects that need to be addressed in order to create a ‘creatorly’ role for the audience: social space and culturally recognisable tasks, games and rules-rather than performative devices. The Playback approach has not been successful, so I am going to look at Fluxus and Happenings in order to understand the ways in which life praxis and the everyday can be employed as a dramaturgical approach to participation.