By Bethany Schaufler-Biback
“Um being in an audience is safe. There’s a safety in numbers, um there's something comforting about being a part- about being a part of this collective together” (Maeve, 15 Aug 2022) mentions an audience member while reflecting on the importance of being a part of a collective. The sentiment of feeling comfort and safety within a group of people gathering for a common experience is not unfamiliar to discussions of theatre audiences. As noted by Jill Dolan, performance has the potential to “temporary communities” amongst those congregating to share the experience together. In this blog post, I’d like to investigate methods that audience members employ with the goal of preserving the sought after safe communal experience that many desire when attending theatre.
Let’s consider a few ways in which audiences experience feelings of safety as a result of being a part of a theatre collective. As described by Erin Hurley, theatre is an ‘affective machine’ (2007), and such affects produced by theatre contribute to the temporal community of audience members. In coming together to share space and time, visible and recognizable affects serve as a reminder that audience members are sharing a unique moment with one another. There is pleasure in taking notice that a stranger had a similar response to a specific instance as yourself, and in turn these shared affects connect audience members together and in turn may reinforce feelings of safety. Especially when considering more vulnerable feelings in a social setting such as crying, seeing strangers around you taking part in the same vulnerable emotion leads to reassurance and validation which contribute to a feeling of safety. Take this audience quote for instance:
“In there in the theatre there are other people feeling this. One very specific memory of like that experience in a theatre was like when I saw Dear Evan Hansen in Toronto, there was um the song “So Big, So Small”. Somebody in the audience like loud sobbing and we were like, I feel you. I’ve been there, done that. Um, I wanted to like find them and be like it's gonna be okay I promise, but they were like, on the other side of the theatre and you know, theatre rules you're not supposed to do that.” (Olivia, 27 Sept 2021).
Here, Olivia recalls feeling a greater connection to the other audience member due to their audible and recognizable affect despite being across the theatre. She goes onto say “Um, but like when I’m there, supported by other people I’m like: Ah yes, I am here to experience emotions with other people exciting times. Um, and that's when I like feel very free to go on the emotional journey. Mhm” (ibid). In these memories recounted by Olivia, sharing affects with those around her led to feelings of connectedness as well as freeness in the experience.
From a psychology perspective, similar sentiments of feeling safety in numbers can be connected to concepts such as emotional baseline theory and situation selection. Emotional baseline theory suggests that when gathering in a collective, specifically in predictable social environments, those within the collective’s are cognitively encouraged to return to their “emotional baseline state of relative calm” (Beckes & Coan, 2011). Beckes & Coan go on to write “When proximity is maintained or re-established, the brain is simply less vigilant for potential threats, because it is embedded within the social environment to which it is adapted (n.p. 2011). As for situation selection, it is the act of choosing to be a part of environments that one deems to maintain their desired emotional impact (Webb et al., 2017). Both of these concepts involve perception of surroundings with particular attention to the people they are sharing space with. Further, they involve having a desired emotional impact accompanied by a desire to act in ways that maintain the sought after emotional impact. What I find particularly interesting about these two concepts in conversations with feelings of collective safety in theatre are the conditions which allow these theories to be successful in influencing feelings of safety. Both concepts continually attribute the positive benefits of sharing space with one another such as feeling “less vigilant” or a sense of calm to the “understood and adapted social environment”. In the case of theatre, these positive benefits assume that all who are a part of the collective have had engagement in a theatrical social environment, and therefore have adapted to the social expectations in place at theatre performance. This points to questions of who in theatre audiences’ feelings of safety serve, and who the desired feelings are being maintained for.
Beckes, Lane and Coan, James. “Social Baseline Theory: The Role of Social Proximity in Emotion and Economy of Action.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, vol. 5, no. 12, 2011, pp. 976-988.
Hurley, Erin. Theatre & Feeling. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Thomas L. Webb, Kristen A. Lindquist, Katelyn Jones, Aya Avishai & Paschal Sheeran (2018) Situation selection is a particularly effective emotion regulation strategy for people who need help regulating their emotions, Cognition and Emotion, 32:2, 231-248, DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2017.1295922