By Kelsey Jacobson
Audience, spectator, participant, viewer, listener, onlooker, witness, voyeur, spect-actor, receiver: our terms for audience are multiple and many. And most of them connote particular expectations of the role of audience members or particular sensory experiences: ask yourself, which of these is most attractive to you? Why? I want to consider the connotations of the terms we use when describing audiences, especially as relates the idea of an active audience and how/if the pandemic and shift online has altered that.
Scholars have generally noted an increase in active audiencing, participation or co-creation in contemporary Western theatre. This explosion is occurring, perhaps, in response to the suggestion that audiences play a less contributory role in theatre than they have in the past. Caroline Heim cites theatrical shifts in the 20th century resulting in:
the disempowerment of the theatre audience, the decline in audience sovereignty, and the change from active to passive spectatorship. Due to changes in theatre architecture, the rise in power of arts professionals, changes in audience demographics, and the rise of a commodity culture, contemporary audience contribution has been largely relegated to laughter and applause. (1)
This perceived de-activation of theatre audiences over time is regarded as problematic and connects with the broadly pervasive notion that, as Matthew Reason writes, “an active audience is good, a passive audience bad” (272). Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator describes the two beliefs underlying this idea: “the spectator is held before an appearance in a state of ignorance…the spectator remains immobile in her seat, passive. To be a spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act” (2). As Rancière articulates, “Theatre accuses itself of rendering spectators passive and thereby betraying its essence as community action. It consequently assigns itself the mission of reversing its effects and expiating its sins by restoring to spectators ownership of their consciousness and their activity” (14-15).
And so we see an explosion in participatory, immersive, and otherwise activated spectatorship experiences. When I think about what I have done for theatre, the list is long: shared secrets late at night over the phone, committed to political action, slow-danced with a stranger, been held, caressed, cuddled, handcuffed, blindfolded more times than feels appropriate to admit, walked—and walked, and walked—through entire neighborhoods, historic trails, and huge warehouses. I am an active participant.
And then along comes COVID. And spectators, it seems, are forced once again into a deeply passive role - but there is opportunity here to really reconsider what we mean by active and why we value it. There is no running around the McKittrick Hotel. I am sat at home, on my couch, watching on my laptop screen. It would be difficult for me to have a measurable effect on the performance, especially in those instances where the programming is pre-recorded. I could potentially write some inflammatory comments on the Youtube stream or get myself kicked out of the Zoom (and the carceral qualities of Zoom rooms are certainly worth examining). But, my action seems limited.
Now it’s true that many online performances did require or at least invite, some sense of active participation. I watched (spectated, participated in, co-created?) “standard” livestreamed shows like NT at Home wherein audiences could offer typed comments, Creation Theatre’s memorable participatory Zoom Shakespeare where I provided my cat as visual scenography and offered sound effects when called on, and I navigated The Under Presents The Tempest via VR headset. Each of these shows challenged the notion that viewing ‘at home’ means non-active. However, rather than offer us the opportunity to actually renegotiate what we mean by active participation I worry that such experiences simply continue to reinforce the idea that what it means to be active is solely physical and not ontological or even epistemological.
Part of what I think inhibits the renegotiation of active audiencing in online theatre that I thought might happen is actually the virtual nature of such performance. What might be judged as ‘active’ participation in-person is rendered as two dimensional, limited to a small screen, and therefore viewed as potentially less active. This is because we have drawn evaluative distinctions between virtual and real - going all the way back to Western metaphysics and the core foundation of mimesis that values the real (especially the sensory and evidentiary) over the virtual (the unseen, the unmeasured).
This matters because given work-at-home orders, online school, etc. perceptions about what constitutes real ‘work’ and whether ‘online’ work is as valuable, have been rampant. I need only look at Twitter this morning to see statements questioning why tuition is the same for online university courses as in-person, or a recent article from the Rolling Stone that I saw just a few weeks ago stating “Why I think virtual awards for virtual theatre deserve real recognition.” The persistent devaluing of the online or ‘virtual’ against the higher value ‘real’ makes it paramount to discuss visibility and valuation of active participation and spectatorship.
Active, after all, is a very nebulous term. What kind of active? For whom? For what bodies? Rancière suggests that efforts to bring audiences closer to the artwork vis a vis active participation only serve to further underscore the different valuations assigned to theatremaker and theatrereceiver, emphasizing the distinction between the two roles as it tries to elevate the role of spectators. 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 are considered active actions from audiences. For online performances these processes of selection, curation, etc. are, I would argue, actually heightened in the creation of theatre events (choosing the space, snacks, etc.).
Don’t get me wrong – I miss in-person theatre, teaching, life. But what I want to point out is how quickly the value-laden idea of and desire for action and active audiences can manifest in making forms of labour and participation visible and invisible, especially online. This is a politics of spectatorship and work, that can’t be ignored so long as we continue to practice and live both online and in-person.
Complicating this valuation is the implicit connection between theatrical and political activity. In her book on theatre audiences, Helen Freshwater connects the desire for active spectatorship to political action when she describes “one of the most cherished orthodoxies in theatre studies: the belief in a connection between audience participation and political empowerment” (3). In other words, the perceived participation of the audience is indicative of broader ideals of democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in the real-world. But, this too needs renegotiation in an era of viral movements, activism organized via social media etc. The move online forces an opportunity to really think about the role of the audience. And it starts with terminology and the values we assign.
Freshwater, Helen. Theatre and audience. Macmillan International Higher Education, 2009.
Rancière, Jacques. The emancipated spectator. Verso., 2007.
Reason, Matthew. "Participations on Participation. Research the “active” theatre audience." Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12, no. 1 (2015): 271-280.
Heim, Caroline. "‘Argue with us!’: Audience co-creation through post-performance discussions." New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2012): 189-197.