Collaborative Embodied Performance

Ecologies of Skill

Kath Bicknell, John Sutton, Nicola Shaughnessy, John Lutterbie, Kath Bicknell, John Sutton

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350197701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

This book is about joint intelligence in action. It brings together scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, anthropology, psychology, architecture, philosophy and sport science to ask how tightly knit collaboration works. Contributors apply innovative methodologies to detailed case studies of martial arts, social interaction, freediving, site-specific artworks, Body Weather, human-AI music composition, Front-of-House at Shakespeare's Globe, acrobatics and failing at handstands. In each investigation, performance and theory are mutually revealing, informative and captivating. Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring complex ecologies of skill, collaborative learning and the microstructure of embodied coordination, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each contribution highlights unique features of the performance ecology, equipping performance makers, students and researchers with the theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking.

PART ONE

Complex ecologies of embodied collaboration

1

Dropping like flies: Skilled coordination and Front-of-House at Shakespeare’s Globe

Evelyn B. Tribble

This volume asks us to consider the dizzying variety of ways that tightly knit collaboration works in unique places and settings. Most discussions of skilled theatrical performance naturally focus upon the artistic production itself – what are the constraints within which a company works (Tribble 2011)? How does a production get on its feet, and how is meaning co-created during the rehearsal process (McAuley 2008)? Studies of ‘distributed creativity’ (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009) have described creativity not as an individual property but as part of an emergent, collaborative system. This methodology has sparked further research, often taking the form of observing the ‘ecological dynamics’ of the rehearsal process (Clarke et al. 2013, 628; Parolin and Pellegrinelli 2020), including the social and material constraints of such activities.

As valuable as these studies are, they often stop at the rehearsal room door and do not always extend to an entire cognitive ecology of performance: the physical, material, social, affective and mental resources that sustain and maintain it. Cognitive ecologies are dynamic, changing to accommodate new circumstances: some systems will place more or less weight on internal mechanisms, on central control or on particular forms of cognitive scaffolds and social systems. The framework of cognitive ecology is derived from a range of disciplines, including anthropology (Hutchins 1995, 2014), ecological psychology (Gibson 1979); philosophical accounts of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive and extended); the rich literature on distributed cognition, as represented by Edwin Hutchins’s groundbreaking study Cognition in the Wild (1995); and the related field of distributed creativity (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009). A cognitive ecological approach to performance does more than simply confirm the truism that theatre is a collaborative art. Theatrical performance always takes place in real time, requiring adjustments on the fly and the quick assemblage of explicit and implicit knowledge. We are familiar with the way that skilled actors and stage managers handle the unexpected and ensure a smooth flow of performance despite unexpected events, including forgotten lines, misplaced props and unruly or inattentive audiences. Despite being absolutely essential to any performance, audiences are often seen as somehow extraneous, factors to be controlled rather than integral to the ecology of performance. Indeed, modern acting training often urges actors to ‘forget the audience, to act as if they are not even there’ (Paulus 2006, 335). If the audience itself is often relegated to an extraneous factor, even more neglected is way that audiences are managed: the skilled coordination exhibited by Front-of-House (FOH).

Focusing on Front-of-House challenges conventional understandings of what counts as performance, what counts as thinking and how status operates in organizations. Integrating FOH into models of collaborative skilled performance expands the frame of analysis beyond the artistic product to encompass the larger ‘art world’. Howard S. Becker coined this term to describe the nature of the ‘joint activity’ underpinning creative work (Becker 2008). Becker defines ‘art worlds’ broadly, encompassing both contemporary and historical theatre and dance, the relationship of publishing institutions and literature and the visual art market. Provocatively, he begins the first chapter with Anthony Trollope’s coffee, brought to him by a servant every day at 5.30am when he began his daily work. Thinking about Trollope’s coffee, the labour involved in producing it and the work that it enables, Becker argues, produces ‘an understanding of the complexity of the cooperative networks through which art happens’ (Becker 2008, 1). A full study of the ‘joint action’ of an art world requires that the research ‘look for all the people involved … especially the ones conventionally thought not to be very important’ (Becker 2008, ix); Becker mentions stagehands, ticket takers, parking attendants and similar agents, who are often thought of as ‘support’, a ‘residual category, designed to hold whatever the other categories do not make an easy place for’ (Becker 2008, 4).

Becker does not fully explore how such ‘residual’ categories might be integrated into a full account of a given art world, save to suggest that all elements are essential, however taken for granted or in the background they may be. One approach to such an integration is the concept of ‘collaborative emergence’. Keith Sawyer and Stacy DeZutter distinguish this from routine and predictable activity, which may be collaborative, but is not emergent. Collaborative emergence requires not just ‘routines and procedures’, but a ‘moment to moment contingency’, allowing ‘something novel and appropriate to occur’ (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009, 81). As an example, they cite Hutchins’s (1995) account of an emergency aboard a naval vessel, which required a sudden shift from ‘well established group routines’ to a ‘collaboratively creating a novel, improvised response’ (Sawyer and DeZutter 2009, 83).

In this chapter, I argue that when studied within the framework of cognitive ecology, FOH can be seen as integral rather than peripheral to the art world of contemporary theatre. Because of its focus on thought as embodied and extended into its environment, and because of its focus on emergent practices, a cognitive ecological approach allows a view of the often-invisible resources that underpin on-the-fly coordination in real time. Typically neglected in accounts of performance, FOH might be described as the retail of theatre, the least glamorous but absolutely essential element of any theatrical event. Led by the House Manager, FOH manages the audience, times the incoming (the moment when the audience is allowed into the theatre), handles complaints, keeps order, tells the stage manager when to take the show, corrals patrons after intermission, manages expectations, oversees health and safety and responds to catastrophes large and small, routine and unusual, including fainting and illness, inattentive or disruptive school groups, entitled donors, drunken patrons, mishaps and accidents, crying babies, surly patrons, illicit cell phone use, and on and on. FOH must coordinate seamlessly with a range of other systems and entities. Modern theatres are complex entities, comprising education, outreach, box office, concessions and gifts, fundraising, grant writing, publicity, financials and more. Each of these has its own miniature ecosystem reaching out and intersecting with others but with distinct sets of practice, modes of working and relationships to the larger system. Compared to the work of the company and the cultural prestige of the theatre itself, FOH has relatively low status, yet its work demands exquisite coordination in real time, expert knowledge of the theatre, tact, patience, firmness and a tolerance for bodily fluids.

I focus upon a particularly rich and complex case study: FOH at Shakespeare’s Globe, based upon the datasets of show reports written and filed after every performance, from the opening of the theatre in 1997 to 2016.¹ These records document the unfolding and emerging efforts to manage a new kind of audience for a new kind of theatre. The intent of the planners was to recreate as far as possible the original staging conditions in which Shakespeare’s plays were performed, and thereby to explore or rediscover Shakespeare’s stagecraft and dramaturgy. The Globe is constructed as an open-air theatre, with a large Yard for standing audience members, and benches arrayed in gallery structure on three sides. The thrust stage has substantial pillars holding up a roof that protects the actors from rain, but the Yard itself is open to the elements. Audiences and actors share the same ambient lighting, and audiences are fully visible both to the performers and to one another.

The design of the theatre means that the audience can play a much larger role in this environment than in most contemporary theatres. It is often said that the oxygen of the Globe is its audience. Actor/audience engagement has been one of the most distinctive features of the theatre. ‘The actors as well as the audience have had to relearn their roles, and new conventions of communication with the audience have been devised’ (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008, 180). The director Tim Carroll described the Globe audience not as passive, but as ‘the most versatile scene partner in the world’ (Carroll 2008, 40). Globe directors train actors to work with the audience – to address their remarks not just to the groundlings in the Yard but also to spectators across the theatre, including the upper galleries. This approach can create a raucous atmosphere that has often been subject to critique. Indeed, initial responses to the new theatre were sceptical, likening it to ‘a cultural theme park, a cross between Disneyland and a National Trust property’ (Carson 2008, 115). Critics focused upon the often-rambunctious audience members, comparing their loud and boisterous reactions to the atmosphere at pantomimes and suggesting that the audiences are encouraged to engage in acts of spurious ‘simulation’ of Elizabethan audiences (Silverstone 2005, 42).

In contrast, Penelope Woods has argued that these audience members can be considered skilful subjects rather than unwitting pawns in the marketing of the theatre. In this context,

skill may not be simply an isolated or individual capacity, the sole preserve of the performer in the theatre, but might instead be seen as distributed across the ‘system’ of theatre. The audience is essential for the realisation of performance. Where the audience is visible and participatory they are more substantively intrinsic to this ‘system’; their contribution has greater consequence and should be seen as potentially ‘skillful’.

(Woods 2015, 100)

This account of audience skill and agency is a welcome corrective to reception accounts of the audience. However, while the space between actor and audience may be a contested terrain, it is not simply bidirectional. Hidden from this equation are the collaborative embodied skills needed to manage and mediate that relationship. FOH is largely responsible for thinking and responding in real time to the fluid and dynamic elements of the space.

Sometimes FOH is seen simply as a form of managerialism. Silverstone argues that ‘While encouraging audience participation, the Globe seems anxious that its spectators behave in an “appropriate” manner. To this end the Globe works to discipline the spectators. Tellingly, most of this discipline is meted out against the groundlings, perhaps as a late capitalist comment on their cheaper “seats”’ (2005, 43). FOH is here positioned as mere disciplinary functionaries of the larger Globe enterprise. But this account neglects the skill and agency of FOH and its crucial role in the creative collaborative project of the theatre. The actors work to command the attention of the audience; FOH works to manage that attention. Certainly, FOH must work within the framework of top-down decisions, including branding, marketing, artistic direction, casting and so on. We might think of these as vertical systems, represented explicitly by organizational charts and operating manuals and implicitly by status hierarchies. FOH copes with the downstream here-and-now effects of decisions made by these agents. The reception of these vertical decisions occurs horizontally on the ground and in real time through myriad small interactions between FOH and patrons. Thus the work of FOH is, literally, displayed on the ground, and attention to this dimension reveals the interplay between standardized and improvised on-the-fly work, the particular skilled practices elicited by the task demands and the friction that sometimes occurs at the interstices or contact zones between groups.

One moment of such friction sheds light on tensions between top-down status-driven hierarchies and such horizontal on-the-ground systems. Probably the most common problem managed by FOH is illness of various kinds, especially fainting and vomiting. The theatre is often packed, shows are put on in mid-afternoon on hot summer days, standing can be physically demanding and patrons are often unwell. On one warm day in June the show report noted that ‘as expected, audience members were dropping like flies’ (Twelfth Night 16 June 2002). Illness often has a ripple effect: ‘Tonight’s audience is clearly going for the record on how many people can faint and vomit during one performance. We’re up to about 15 at last count. No time to write an amusing report tonight, as I need to go and wash the vomit off my shoes now. Nice’ (Cymbeline 26 July 2001). Very few performances pass without at least one incidence of illness, and the show reports remark on the anomaly of illness-free events. FOH develop protocols to assist patrons, helping them out of the theatre, providing them with a place to recover, even laundering their clothes for them. In serious medical situations, they summon ambulances.

In most situations, these systems work so well that most of the audience is unaware of the disruption. The relatively fluid space of the Globe and the ambient light and noise means that such moments are much less obvious than they would be in a darkened proscenium theatre. When these systems are allowed to work, they are relatively seamless. But one series of incidents reveals that top-down interference can collapse the system. On 7 July 2001, during a production of Cymbeline, ‘a lady fainted in the Middle Gallery. [Artistic director and lead actor] Mark Rylance stopped the show while a steward and front of house brought her out’ (7 July 2001). The next day, this intervention was repeated:

10 minutes before interval a lady in the Middle Gallery fainted and hit her head. FOH and security were there almost immediately. Mr. Rylance once again stopped the show causing unnecessary confusion amongst the people around her. One lady decided to call an ambulance from her mobile but FOH had a situation in hand and asked her to cancel the call. She [the fainter] was brought out of the theatre in into the first aid room by front of house and security, but by that time Mr. Rylance called for a 10-minute break. That meant that the piazza [lobby] was now full, and neither the stewards nor Milburn’s [the caterer] were ready. It also meant we had a full piazza while waiting for an ambulance. The impromptu break was then made into the interval at our request as we felt this would be less disruptive for the rest of the audience. The lady was treated by security and front of house in the first aid room until the paramedic arrived … The audience were slow to go in after the interval and the play resumed. People being taken ill in the theatre is a common occurrence at the Globe which front of house deal with on a regular basis. We have procedures designed to lessen the disruption and embarrassment for the party and to get professional help to the person as quickly as possible in accordance with our health and safety regulations. The decisions today made it difficult to do to this.

(Cymbeline 8 July 2001)

This incident shows that horizontal ecologies can be completely disrupted by vertical interventions. As artistic director and lead actor, Rylance wields enormous authority; stopping the show and directing a 10-minute break threw the system completely out of whack, escalating the incident and creating multiple points of strain, including the disruption of catering and preparations for admission. The audience member’s attempt to ring an ambulance shows the results of ambiguous lines of ...