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Audiences An international working group European start-up seminar Zagreb, 10 February 2010 This is an invitation for all who are doing research into audiences, or who is artistically or otherwise practically interested in audience activating techniques and strategies, to join an international working group. The aim of the working group is to establish an international forum for furthering and developing research into the complex and difficult phenomena of performance audiences. A start-up seminar takes place in Zagreb, Croatia, in connection with the international conference “Spaces of Identities” (www.prostoridentiteta.org) February 10th -14th, 2010. At the seminar on February 10th, each participant will be given time to present his/her interest in audience and the working group (10 minutes). A strategy for the working group will be presented: 1) becoming part of the PSi network (a meeting in Toronto in June, 2010; 2) setting up a web site as a platform for the group; 3) publications. Please note that the number of participants is limited to 15. Those first served will be admitted. The deadline for signing up is January 25th, 2010. Participants should submit a 250 word abstract presenting the interest in audience and eventual contribution to the working group. Please find contact information below. Rationale Audiences are the raison d’être of most performances. Without an audience, there is no performance! Thus, performance is understood as an activity done by someone for or before someone else. This is certainly the case with theatre, which is constituted by the very act of spectatorship. As goes for a variety of performances which serves aesthetic, social, and ritual(istic) purposes, the performance is not contained within the confines of a closed circle, a secret society, a private party; organizers invite people to come to witness, watch, listen, interact, in short, participate in it as a public event. The audience is a publicus, a gathering of representatives of society. Different public performances appeal to and attract different interests in a population, and different types of audience are formed defined by the societal function, participants’ social, cultural, political, religious affiliation, art form, genre, and media of the performance in question. Of course, in such categorization of audiences lurks the danger of reductionism. One must always be careful not to reduce an audience to a homogeneous group of people. Collectivity is challenged by the individuality of aesthetic preference, cultural competence, social background, etc., let alone the contingency of assessing the participants’ actual experiences of a performance. One may indeed ask to what extent attempts at audience typology is useful in understanding audiences. Collective response to a performance may provide participants with notions of solidarity, mutual connection, or community, and such experiences has given rise to claims that public performances brings coherence to society. Other claims concerned with what happens on the level of the individual, are that performances have transformative power at least in as far as spectators’ reflection is influenced, and that some performances empower audiences to act politically. These claims are often based on experts’ opinion only. In her recent publication Theatre & Audience (2009) Helen Freshwater is concerned with the lack of investigation into ‘ordinary’ participants’ responses. “[W]hy, when there is so much to suggest that the responses of theatre audiences are rarely unified or stable, do theatre scholars seem to be more comfortable making strong assertions about theatre’s unique influence and impact upon audiences than gathering and assessing the evidence which might support these claims?” And she continues: “Why do they appear to prefer discussing their own responses, or relaying the opinion of reviewers, to asking ‘ordinary’ theatre-goers – with no professional stake in the theatre – what they make of a performance?” Given the contingency of participants’ experiences, the development of research into these matters depends completely on audience survey. After all, the efficacy of performance and audience response can only be truly assessed if one knows how participants really feel, think, and react. Audience survey is the Achilles’ heel of audience research, and there is much to be done in this field. The working group would in particular provide a network for research projects based on surveys, or projects dedicated to the development of methodology in this field. Notwithstanding, there are other recent developments and tendencies in both performance studies and praxis, which also should be mentioned as inspiration for joining this working group. Cognition has been the main trend in Film Studies for the last 20 years. Remarkably, it has not caught on in Theatre Studies and Performance Studies. This could be about to change with such groundbreaking work as Bruce McConachie’s Engaging Audiences (2009). Along with audience surveys cognitive studies may provide new concepts for understanding how audiences engage with performances which could challenge some of our precognitions and firm beliefs. For instance, experimental evidence provided by cognitive neuroscience and psychology abolishes the common distinction between reason and emotion as they cannot be separated. One consequence of this is a reconsideration of the importance Brecht’s Verfremdung and other theatrical devises which are thought to activate critical reflection. The involvement of the senses in the act of attending a performance is another issue addressed by cognitive studies. To what extent is the concept of the spectator still meaningful? And is it at all useful to think about the audience as individuals who are just responding and reacting to the action? How may the audience be seen as cognitive co-creators of the event? And how may cognitive studies contribute to the historiographies of audiences? In the post-9/11 world of global economic and ecological crises, ethics and the relationship to the Other is a growing concern. Ethics is another overlooked aspect of understanding the ways audiences relate and respond to performances. Connections between ethics and performance can be established in a variety of ways depending on the type of performance and the relationship to the audience. Ethics may be seen as Helena Grehan does in Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009) as the “process by which individual subjects make sense of [moral] systems and how they apply them to their own life”, hence applying ethics to the understanding of how audiences may connect to certain issues raised by performances and perhaps take responsibility for them. Or performance ethics may be understood as the Danish philosopher Ole Fogh Kirkeby has suggested in his work on the phenomenon of the event, Eventum Tantum (2005), as “understanding the event in terms of what is good”, i.e. finding the best way for allowing the event to happen, which would suggest the integration of this kind of ethics into strategies for developing dramaturgies of the spectator. In recent years there seems to have been a growing number of international artists doing live interactive performances: SIGNA, Forced Entertainment, Blue Man Group, Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, just to mention a few. Positioning the audience as “spect-actors” raises the stakes artistically as well as ethically, especially as the potential of interactivity beyond Boal is explored. The contingency of audience response to encounters with performers has to be put to the fore in the design of these performances. How do we dramaturgically deal with the emergency of play between members of audience and performers and communicating certain themes or even dramatic stories? What does it mean to work with dramaturgy in interactive theatre? What can be learned from computer game design and Live Action Role Playing? To what extent do we have to reconsider acting in terms of strategies and techniques? How do the actors/performers approach and engage audiences in these performances? What can be learned from popular entertainment such as theme park or renaissance faire-based interactive performance? In a wider perspective, theorizing interactivity might challenge the whole way we define participation in performance. Is participation only to be considered a concept saved for so-called “participatory” performance? If live performance is an event realized through the co-presence of audience and performers, then participation is always occurring – a claim which might find support in cognitive studies. Do we then need new differentiations between forms of participation, interactivity being one of them? These topics are just a few suggestions for joining this working group. To give an overview of possible topics of interest a list is added here: • dramaturgies of the spectator • audiences and cognition • audiences and neuro-esthetics • audiences and ethics • audiences and event • modes of participation • audiences and interactivity • audiences and Web 2.0 • audiences and ecology • audience and durational performance • audiences and gender • audiences and politics • audience as public • audience histories • audiences and sociology • “audiencing” (creating audiences by means of PR, community work, etc.) • different types of audience: sport, concert (rock, jazz, classical...), literary reading, stand-up comedy, courtroom, ceremony, ritual, opera, musical, dance, circus, children’s theatre, theatre • performing spectatorship at art exhibitions • performing spect-actor-ship on Facebook or in relation to other digital media Contact Initiator and organizer: Kim Skjoldager-Nielsen, MA Scientific assistant Dept. for Theatre and Performance Studies Institute for Art and Culture Studies University of Copenhagen Karen Blixen vej 1 2300 København S Denmark E-mail: Ova email adresa je zaštićena od spam robota, nije vidljiva ako ste isključili Javascript Cell: +45 2782 0471 |
