Might we characterize audiences as pedagogues? My ‘provocation’ for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education conference argues for the examination of how audience members contribute to performance through sometimes obvious, and other times surreptitious, curricular systems of teaching audience behaviour.
While the proscenium stage might be viewed as encouraging uni-directional delivery – from the stage to the auditorium, thereby offering the easy metaphor of performers and performance as teachers and curricula to be delivered to the waiting receivers or students in the audience.
Following Ranciere’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, however, many scholars recognize that such a model – in which a student is dependent on teacher - is deeply limiting and negates other possible knowledges and notions of access. I’d like to similarly consider a more multifaceted network of producing and receiving in theatre.
I want to re-cast the audience as the central figure or object of study in my analysis. To allow for experimentation with the idea that centering the audience as producers of a theatrical event, rather than receivers, allows for an exploration of alternative theoretical possibilities. This was prompted by my attendance at two events, both well outside my ‘theatrical wheelhouse.’
First, at the Toronto Football club watching a soccer game: myself, an avowedly not-sportsy person, very quickly learned the moments to cheer (beyond when a goal is scored, that much I knew I swear), and in some instances was physically forced to join in. When the stadium begins to shake under the weight of hundreds of people stamping their feet, a kind of embodied pedagogy occurs wherein I move in sync with everyone else – my feet end up stamping along with everyone else because the whole stadium is shaking.
Second, at the Rocky Horror Picture Show, even if I have no knowledge of what audience participation is anticipated, I might be handed a goodie bag with newspaper, water guns, etc. Watching the model of my fellow attendees, I learn when to yell out lines, hold up my props, etc.
In both instances I, as audience member, am attuned to my fellow spectators, watching for cues, being entertained by their creative antics, and anticipating responses – when the TFC score a goal I quickly learn that the fans occupying the south end of the stadium will set off coloured smoke, so I know to look to them.
Kirsty Sedgman has written extensively on audience etiquette and the often culturally exclusionary practice that can result from holding fast to expected audience behaviours: you must sit still, be quiet, and focus – or you need to leave the theatre. In these examples, similarly, there is a clear expectation of how to behave, and you might for instance, be uncomfortably stared at TFC when you do not adequately pay attention to the game, as I can attest to. I rather stubbornly was an emancipated spectator insofar as I refused to attend to the soccer ball in favour of continuing to make notes about the spectators. But, these physicalized and/or vocalized versions of participation are all quite obvious markers of spectatorial pedagogy: audience members teaching other audience members how to audience.
This risks me making the erroneous implication that only physically participant audiences are active teachers and/or learners. Following Rancière’s Emancipated Spectator, Diderot’s Le Fils Naturel claimed that audience members were divorced of the “capacity to know and the power to act” (Rancière pg. 2) essentially characterizing them as passive, which spurred Brecht, Artaud, and other theatremakers focused on activating this problematically passive spectator. Instead, says Rancière there is no gap to be filled from less active spectators to more active theatremakers. Everyone is always already active. Rancière vouches for a re-valuing of viewing, in which processes of selection, interpretation, connection, acceptance or negation (pg. 13) are active actions from audiences. Audiences, he says are "only ever individuals plotting their own paths in the forest of things, acts and signs that confront or surround them" (p.16). So, let me offer a slightly different example of audience pedagogy.
Hamilton’s release onto DisneyPlus and my own newfound TikTok addiction spurred a different case study: musical theatre TikTok. In one TikTok a fan zooms into a moment from the Hamilton film. Actress Jasmine Cephas Jones, playing Peggy, is standing near Anthony Ramos, who plays John Laurens. The two of them dance and flirt. This all occurs in the deep background of the scene, far away from Lin-Manuel Miranda and the soloists, and is very easy to miss. The fan making the TikTok explains, however, the apparently deep significance of this moment: it is not simply that Peggy is now dancing and flirting with John Laurens, but in fact, Jasmine dancing and flirting with the man she eventually, in real life, becomes engaged to. The moment of flirtation onstage, takes on increased significance as potentially ‘more real’ because of the actors’ real relationship. This is a poignant example of binocular vision, to follow Bert O. States, in which the actor bodies onstage are oscillating between being characters flirting, and real people flirting. This is all helpfully pointed out by a fan in a twenty-second TikTok, who trains us how to watch this moment and read these layers into it.
This has spurred a number of different TikToks, many of which provide close-reading analysis of moments from the show, but also some poking fun at the practice of what some deem ‘over-analysis.’ In one satirical TikTok, a fan suggests that an ensemble performer coughing in the back of a scene was “an homage to one time his real life grandma got sick.”
This consideration of audience as pedagogue is closely intertwined with ongoing debates about expert and anti-expert discourse. Kirsty Sedgman describes an “imperative within the arts to push back against the encroaching de-hierarchization of cultural value beyond critical and scholarly perspective” (307). Some suggest turning to audiences for research purposes inflames an anti-expert bias, vaulting the ignorant spectator to a position equivalent to seasoned and experienced theatre critic. This is, I think, a misreading of much audience research, which does not aim to find equivalence between those two perspectives, but to study “how people from different subject positions and social locations actively make sense of things by drawing on varying ‘cultural reference points, political beliefs, sexual preferences, personal histories, and immediate preoccupations’” (Sedgman p. 318, quoting Helen Freshwater p. 6). How might we consider audiences as experts in being audiences: to consider not what the meaning is of the piece, but how audiences are approaching, negotiating, and analyzing it. To embrace diverse systems of knowledge.
This all serves to beg big questions: what is the role of the audience? How much should they know? Is the experience inherently improved by increased knowledge? Do these spectators cum pedagogues support or undermine Rancierean ideas? When I look to other audience members as experts in how to spectate, am I merely reinforcing power dynamics and knowledge values active = good, passive = bad? Or have I in some way re-negotiated positions of power to upset the uni-direction of the stage to audience? To me, this demonstrates the fluidity of expertise; that young Tiktoker undoubtedly is far more expert in the specific biographies of the Hamilton cast and performance. My expertise is entirely different and unthreatened. I am student to her as schoolmaster, but emancipated in my ability to be both between and beyond those categories of learner and teacher by choosing to incorporate, reject, or ignore her knowledge-sharing.
Freshwater, Helen. Theatre and audience. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2009.
Rancière, Jacques. The emancipated spectator. Verso., 2007.
Sedgman, Kirsty. "Audience experience in an anti-expert age: A survey of theatre audience research." Theatre Research International 42, no. 3 (2017): 307-322.
---. The Reasonable Audience: theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, and the Live Performance Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.