By Jenylle Rufin
Theatre is a unique place which many go to for a different experience from everyday life. The environment changes as we enter a theatre space amongst other strangers, strangers who we don’t know yet but have an unspoken relationship with the moment we all sit in the same space to watch the same show. Suddenly there is a new world created within the room, a world in which new relationships are forms, everyone comes together as a community, and work together to exchange energy between each other and the actors on stage. It is a Utopia… to some. Through an analysis of the world created by the audiences in traditional Western theatre, it can be seen that this utopian world created within the audience community, which calls for pushing differences aside and emphasizing community and similarity, results in utopia for the dominant classes within the audience but the marginalization of those who are identified as different.
The theatre space becomes a space for escapism for audiences, a place of leisure and get away from their every-day lives. As Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta discusses, "Nightlife worlds are meaningful to many [as] a "third sphere" separate from work and domestic life, where they strive to create a playful flow of employment in which everyday life seems to recede from view."1 He further discusses that places of leisure "offer a zone of escape from everyday societal control through an atmosphere of relaxed rules, suspended responsibilities, expanded possibilities, and pleasures unburdened by guilt or sanction. But these refuges are both socially fragile and vulnerable to violence, and so they often employ exclusionary practices that, under the guise of protection, run counter to the ethos of inclusivity and equality…"2 This perspective on theatre as a third space between worlds in which audiences escape into a more pleasurable and enjoyable environment has resulted in audiences attempting to create a utopian world within this space.
Prevalent in this utopian world is the creation of a hegemonic audience community. As O'Sullivin argues, there are 3 essential characteristics that audience perform: shared consciousness, collective rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility.3 Further, looking at the unspoken theatre contract in which audiences and actors have a contract where they must uphold in order for a performance to be successful, the audience community also work together to benefit the performance as a whole which calls for a shared consciousness, a uniform community, and a removal of differences within the group. These characteristics reinforce this idea of a utopian world, a world in which audience members work together to reinforce the hegemonic ideals of the shared consciousness of the community. Caroline Heim discusses this idea of emotional contagion, a phenomenon we see within the audience which intensifies this feeling of being in a community. She explains that "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… 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'…It is often through emotional contagion that the individual audience member becomes part of the audience collective."4 It is when we become aware that the audience is reacting the same way as us and realize we also react the same way as them that we start to become part of this audience and turn into a community, further emphasizing this Utopian world, a world where we feel like we belong.
As Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance argues, "live performance provides a place where people come together, embodied and passionate, to share experiences of meaning making and imagination that can describe or capture fleeting intimations of a better world."5 Within these utopian worlds created in live performance and theatre spaces, at the foundation of the world is the maintenance of vagueness and stranger-intimacy where differences are pushed aside. Much like dance spaces Garcia-Mispireta discusses in his book, theatre audience communities emphasize inclusivity while downplaying exclusions and this is successfully done through maintaining vagueness between each other, pushing differences and differing identities aside and creating hegemonic ideals and one common identity, as fellow audience members. This creation of a community by having a common identity but maintaining vagueness through subverting the acknowledgement of differences within the theatre space creates this idea of a vague feeling of intimacy.6 Garcia-Mispireta discusses this concept which he calls Liquidarity which he defines as a “fluid togetherness that manages to hold the shape of a heterogeneous and unconnected crowd….Under conditions of liquidarity, participants maintain a vague sense of social belonging, recognition, and intimacy while also enjoying the benefits of anonymity, fluidity, and a certain lightness of social contact…it identifies the affective relationships that can arise between people who are not bound to one another by traditional ties of kinship and affinity."7 As such, due to the established vague feelings of intimacy as well as the creation of a uniform hegemonic community created between audiences by attempting to erase differences between each other, we can see how the audience community has created, or attempts to create, a utopian world within a theatre space. However, as Garcia-Mispireta discussed "this vague feeling of intimacy not only binds a crowd across social differences but also serves as cover for inequity, exclusion, and even forms of violence."8 While pushing differences aside can sound utopian to some, the some being those who have created this idea of what constitutes as different, it also silences and forgets to acknowledge the alienation that occurs to those who identify as “different” and when differences are acknowledged and overtly presented within this utopian world.
This then begs to question, who and what gets to be labelled as "acceptable" and who and what gets labelled as "different"? And who makes these decisions? It is impossible to create a neutral world in which differences and differing identities are removed when theatre as an institution is one that is known to be ableist and classist. The architecture of most traditional western theatres themselves demonstrate this classist construct seen within traditional theatre space. With the most expensive seats within the theatre being the "best seats in the house" and the worst seats in the theatre being the most affordable. The rich upper class, those who can actually afford the best seats in the house, immediately demonstrate their identity and status within this Utopian world through where they sit within the theatre. The same applies to those in the lower classes, as those who cannot afford expensive seats make their differences and differing identities known through where they sit within the house. Within the theatre, it is these upper-class individuals who pay more and even afford to be a donor who are prioritized. As Kirsty Sedgman discusses, "We take their donor money and put them on boards, and we brush their microaggressions off as our old grandma or grandpa who might be a little racist and elitist but are otherwise harmless… It tells the upper-middle-class white audience that theatre is their home first and the rest of us are just guests."9 As such, it is impossible to enter a theatre which eliminates differences, rather, what we see in this utopian world is certain identities being prioritized and upheld while others are marginalized; experiencing microaggression but forced to be silent about this experience in efforts to maintain this utopian illusion and still be accepted within the audience community.
These microaggressions towards certain communities are reinforced through the outdated practice of theatre etiquette, a practice in which forces individuals to act certain ways and not to perform certain actions within the theatre, a practice that can be considered inaccessible to certain communities. As Hannah Simpson explains, "today’s regulating of audience behavior has become primarily a matter of self-policing by the collective audience…most audience etiquette is now enforced by other spectators rather than through the theatre’s authority figures. Modern audiences self-regulate by shaming those who break the ordained quiet-spectatorial status."10 Sedgman further discusses that it has been argued by many that "in order to produce communal affinity between the audience as a newly constituted public, the distractions and disturbances of individual spectators must be banished",11 which is done by self-policing and policing others. However, this idea of being able to act "normal" or "reasonably" or according to theatre etiquette is what Sedgman calls a culturally normalized privilege.12
As Boal argues, pulling from Marx, that "The dominating ideas in a given society are those of the dominating class"13 and theatre is no different with the elitist able-bodied individuals shaping the norms and ideas within the theatre space. As a result of this we see individuals who are overtly different, such as those with disabilities, become alienated from the community and highly policed within the theatre space. As Hannah Simpson discusses, "the demand for a quiet audience still frequently appears to outweigh the needs of individual disabled spectators…the cult of the quiet audience presents a sometimes insurmountable challenge to the neurodivergent spectator, whose cognitive and/or physical functioning may mean that she cannot guarantee that her body will remain quiet during the length of a performance… other audience noise that signals only an alternatively functioning body is often condemned as equally inappropriate or disrespectful in the theatre auditorium"14
Through the experiences of those living with disabilities in the theatre as well as the different treatments of patrons depending on economic classes, it is evident to see that this utopian world created within the audience community is a mere illusion in which the privileged individuals who identify with the dominant groups can be blissfully ignorant to the true oppressive nature and power relationships that work within the audience community. To those in the dominant group, this world created is utopia as it has been created and shaped according to their image. However, for groups who are "different" from the dominant group, it further marginalizes them and silences their alienating experiences. Utopia is this idea of a perfect place or perfect society where everyone is happy, but at the same time it also translates to "no place". So, while this utopian world might feel like it exists to some, it does not exist, for a utopian world cannot be truly be utopian if only the dominant class is happy.