Audience as Performer

The changing role of theatre audiences in the twenty-first century

Caroline Heim

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317633549
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Theatre

'Actors always talk about what the audience does. I don't understand, we are just sitting here.'

Audience as Performer proposes that in the theatre, there are two troupes of performers: the actors and the audience. Although academics have scrutinised how audiences respond, make meaning and co-create while watching a performance, little research has considered the behaviour of the theatre audience as a performance in and of itself.

This insightful book describes how an audience performs through its myriad gestural, vocal and paralingual actions, and considers the following questions:

• If the audience are performers, who are their audiences?

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• How have audiences' roles changed throughout history?

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• How do talkbacks and technology influence the audience's role as critics?

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• What influence does the audience have on the creation of community in theatre?

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• How can the audience function as both consumer and co-creator?

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Drawing from over 140 interviews with audience members, actors and ushers in the UK, USA and Austrialia, Heim reveals the lived experience of audience members at the theatrical event. It is a fresh reading of mainstream audiences' activities, bringing their voices to the fore and exploring their emerging new roles in the theatre of the Twenty-First Century.

PART I Audience Performance

1 AUDIENCE AS PERFORMER

DOI: 10.4324/9781315757568-2

They were really, really good.

(Rachel 2013, Audience member, PI)

They’re catching everything.

(Steven Hauck 2013, Actor, PI)

They are trying to be funny.

(Maree 2014, Audience member, PI)

They’re comatose. They’re dead.

(Paul Schoeffler 2013, Actor, PI)

They just knocked me sideways.

(Lindsay 2014, Audience member, PI)

They are laughing in the wrong places.

(Janet Fullerlove 2014, Actor, PI)

In the theatre, individuals come together as strangers from diverse backgrounds to form two troupes: actors and audience members. This concept stems from Grotowski’s imperative that in his theatre laboratory the producer has two ensembles to direct, the actors and the spectators (1980: 157). Meeting across the footlights, the two troupes watch, listen to, perform for and appraise each other. They are co-dependent. The actors “feed off the audience” (Hauck 2013, PI); the audience sometimes “get very full” (Judith 2014, PI). That theatre audience members “perform” as well as watch others perform onstage at first seems a stretch of the imagination. Some audience members consider it absurd: “[A]t talkbacks, actors always talk about what the audience does. I don’t understand, we are just sitting here” (Heim 2013). Others find that their “best audience experience is when people are laughing or clapping and seem excited by it; when the audience are engaged and alive” (Francesca 2014, PI). In theatre studies there is a plethora of research about actors’ performance but little consideration of the gregarious and capricious performance of the audience.

What constructs the theatre audience as performer and what constitutes their performance? Similar to the onstage actors the audience members perform for an audience – other audience members and actors – they play a role and they wear a costume. Drawing from a limited repertoire of actions, the contemporary audience plays their role of audience during the actors’ performance. According to Blau’s requisites, the audience only actualise as a troupe of performers in the presence of their co-troupe, the actors. In my interviews, when asked what it means to “be an audience” the most frequent response was “the interaction between the players and the audience” (Fiona 2014, PI).¹ In the encounter between the two troupes, the audience’s kinetic, paralingual and verbal expressions combine to produce a rich, multiform performance that not only creates new meanings for the live event but can change, enrich and inform the experience of the event for audience members and actors alike. This chapter explores the aspects of the event that construct the audience as performer and describes the responses that make up the audience performance and the subsequent restraints placed on demonstrative expression in the contemporary theatre. I start with a discussion of empathy as it is a crucial part of audience symbiosis. Audience members respond to performances because of their empathic connection with what transpires onstage.

From Empathy to Performance

Empathy in theatre studies usually refers to the audience members identifying with the feeling states of the onstage character and the actor themselves. In actor training studies empathy considers the actor relating to a character or another actor.² Drawing analogies with actor-to-actor empathy, I am interested in the under-explored area of empathy among audience members.³ “Empathy” is a volatile term that, similar to “audience,” bears many different definitions depending on its cognitive, behaviourist, psychological, philosophical or phenomenological reading. It is a term translated into English from the German Einfühlung – meaning “feeling into” – in 1909 by Edward Titchener (21). In its most elementary sense empathy describes the process by which one person is affected by another’s emotional state. In 1920, Theodor Lipps was one of the first theorists to discuss the empathy of the audience member for what he called the aesthetic object: the acrobat or the dancer onstage (1965). His observations initiated a discussion of empathy in an aesthetic and performance context that has been articulated, re-articulated and dis-articulated by a tradition of theatre theorists and practitioners.⁴

In his early writings, Lipps distinguished between aesthetic empathy and natural empathy. Most discussion of Lipps’s work has concentrated on aesthetic empathy or has conflated the two distinct forms. Aesthetic empathy is the “feeling into” the aesthetic artwork, or the acrobat onstage; in theatre this is empathy for the character onstage. Natureinfühlung, natural empathy, occurs in everyday life when we “glimpse a laughing face [and] cannot grasp the laughing face without the evocation of the same kind of inner activity” (1965: 409). Lipps asserts that this kind of inner activity is highly pleasurable and induces a “feeling of freedom and unconstricted ease in the activity” (1965: 407). Positive natural empathy is synonymous with pleasure. Negative empathy, discussed later in the chapter, is its antithesis. Lipps goes on to argue that “empathising is experiencing” (1965: 411) not just knowing.

As the concept of empathy has evolved over time, numerous types of empathy have been proposed. Most fall under the rubrics of “cognitive” or “affective” empathy. Affective empathy, which “involves the capacity to enter into or join the experiences and feelings of another person” (Hojat et al. 2002: 1563), is the most consonant with Lipps’s natural empathy. The experiences of the other touch my emotions to the point that there is a drive to respond with a similar and appropriate emotion or behaviour.⁵ This drive is a need to – what is called in psychoanalysis – “equalise,” to match or adjust to the expressions or emotional responses of another. Empathy is shown when individuals respond to each other. To see how this is played out in the theatre, let us return to our two performing troupes of actors and audience members.

The actors, who are often initially strangers, meet at the first read-through of the play. Right from the first reading and over the course of the rehearsal period actors empathise with each other; that is, the individual actors – consciously or otherwise – relate and adjust to the emotional states of others, an essential process in creating a collaborative environment for coordinated activity to occur. They become a cast. Similarly, strangers enter the theatre auditorium and – consciously or otherwise – during the course of the theatrical event, adjust their emotional and behavioural repertoire of actions to produce a fertile climate for social interactions and collaboration. They become an audience. The cast and the audience do not form homogeneous masses, but rather emerge as colourful troupes of performers made up of very different individual personalities.

In the entity called “audience” an interesting phenomenon occurs: the individual audience members “catch” each other’s emotions and mimic each other’s responses to the onstage performance. Backstage, actors often comment that the audience are “catching everything.” Audience members do not only catch what the actors throw them – and throw it back in a laugh or a sigh – they catch each other’s emotions and behaviours through empathising or feeling with them. This intriguing mimicry is known as emotional contagion; a process during which “as a consequence of mimicry and feedback, people tend, from moment to moment, to ‘catch’ other’s emotions” (Hatfield et al. 2009: 24). Interestingly, many psychologists and counsellors appropriate an acting idiom “moment to moment” to describe the spontaneous and performative nature of this experience.⁶ Once caught, audience members perform these emotions by “automatically mimick[ing] and synchronis[ing] facial expressions, vocalisations, postures and movements” (Hatfield et al. 2009: 20). A laugh will ripple through an auditorium as audience members catch the contagion. An individual will start applauding and soon the slapping of hands creates a pervasive soundscape. As described by actor Nicholas Bell, at these times the audience are living “in the moment” (2013, PI) of the fictional world of the play. Audience members are sensitive to this contagion. Mary, a teacher from Toronto, states that “when people laugh it’s infectious” (2013, PI). Audience members catch or are infected by the contagion of laughter, crying and even applause. Emotional contagion is an empathic response.

It is often through emotional contagion that the individual audience member becomes part of the audience collective. Just as Joseph Chaikin has argued, the actors in an ensemble share a language and are receptive to one another’s rhythms (Blumenthal 1984: 57), so too the audience members respond to each other’s rhythms. This is empathy in action. The empathic, intersubjective and synchronised response to the other in the shared world of the auditorium becomes the lived experience of the audience performance. Empathy is an integral part of the audience’s expressive, shared performance.

The Audience's Audience

A little-discussed dynamic that occurs during performances is the actors’ empathy for the audience. Sensitive to the rhythms of the audience ensemble, they too enter into and “feed off” the audience members’ emotions and behaviours. Actors have a lucid understanding of what an audience “does”: the audience’s performance. At interval, during or after the show, actors backstage frequently comment on audience performance. As demonstrated above, these comments often replicate audience discussion of actors’ performance. The familiar buzzing of comments that illuminates a large foyer of maybe hundreds of audience members during interval is mirrored in the cramped, glittering dressing rooms of actors. This delightful yet unconscious reproduction is rarely considered. Actors’ backstage comments can give latent insights into what characterises an audience’s performance; the actors are the audience’s audience.

For Goffman, “the individual offers [her]his performance and puts on [her]his show ‘for the benefit of other people’” (1959: 28). For the audience, Goffman’s “other people” are the actors who regularly discuss, scrutinise and critique audience performance. If actors were given the opportunity to write reviews of audiences it would be fascinating reading. In the safe, liminal space of the dressing rooms actors share their most caustic or complimentary thoughts on audiences with other actors, to the innocent walls or to their own empathic mirrored reflection. Backstage conversation is dominated by comments on audience performance: “They didn’t laugh at my line! They always laugh. What’s wrong with this audience?”, “Did you hear the sighs of utter disgust toward me during that scene?” and “Did you see that guy in the third row walk out? I don’t think he came back” (Heim 2006). These comments reflect how vital audience performance is to actors and how it affects them. It helps shape, invigorate, deflate, impede and support their own performance. Steven Hauck, who has worked on and off-Broadway in plays for 23 years, sees the audience as the “third actor” and argues that when an audience is performing well,

you feel like you are being lifted on this wave of energy. You are riding their energy. The energy you expend feels less because there is this momentum that is carrying you forward. Whereas on a night when it’s not, you feel like you are picking up a ten pound weight and moving it.

(Hauck 2013, PI)

In a form of emotional contagion the actors catch what Hauck calls the energy of the audience and use this momentum to carry their performance forward.

Performance is defined by Goffman as “all the activity [of the performer] that has some influence on the observers” (1959: 32). The actors’ very success is dependent on a strong audience performance and is often called by actors “giving good audience” (Sullivan 2013, PI). Actors often playfully challenge the audience to “come on, show me” (Schoeffler 2013, PI). A lively, corporeal audien...