Affecting Interviews

By Meghan Lindsay

We sit in our four-paneled Zoom wall and I notice the shift in my bedroom lights as our rural power quivers. Fidgeting with fingers and browsers windows. Nervous for the sound of my partner in the background of our shared room. I introduce myself. A familiar rush of adrenaline as the research participant acknowledges their role. I, silently, acknowledge mine. 

In the wake of COVID-19’s effect on the performing arts, the role of the audience has come to the forefront of institutional programming. Specifically, perceptions of comfort in theater audiences. The role of comfort was an underlying inquiry in ‘Being Together’—a research project that seeks to understand how contemporary audiences perceive feelings of ‘liveness’ and ‘realness’ and more broadly, the effect of the communal experience on audience perceptions.  

I note the occasional discomfort in performing the role of researcher. I note the performativity in engaging with strangers. Our collective unease in speaking within the parameters of the digital. Our unease with ‘other.’ I note the performance of the participants as they answer my questions, doubting the validity of their responses. Questioning their credibility to answer. I note the performance of my listening. Overt—a movement of my head, a smile, a sigh, a reassuring glance. A device to affect comfort.  

The interviews in ‘Being Together’ exposed performativity—specifically the performance of good audience member—as central to how audience members relate to fellow audiences, to stage performers, and to production. The audience member performs attention by smiling, gesturing, calling. In performing attention, they construct a feeling of agency in their power to affect the energy of the performance. The embodied act of creating comfort through visual and sonic cues of support. The construction of the audience as central to the success of a production. 

As I traverse the interview, I note my jaw relaxing. My bodily productions of good interviewer loosen. As the perceived energy shifts from a relationship of researcher/participant to a seemingly iterative conversation, I am able to more clearly attend to listening. 

Many of the participants interviewed were actively engaged in the theatre community—as actors, scholars, production members, etc. Many of the participants were white, were associated with academic institutions or formal theatre training. In interviews with these participants, we learnt that there is an ethos of expected reciprocity when performing the good audience member. A hope that by creating a positive energy as an audience, they would receive the same attention when acting as a stage performer. This speaks to how the positionality of the audience may inform certain norms of audience participation and etiquette.  

Here, I question whether the contemporary Canadian audience has evolved as a reproduction of colonial discourses of national “goodness” and whether performing listening carries unmarked racialised and classed norms in its perceived benevolence. Drawing from Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson writing on “affective contagion” as a manifestation of shared emotional experience of positive transformation by audience members (Robinson, 2014, 277), we see that perceptions of collectivity, positivity, and communal experience are not universal. And that a perceived universality can cause harm. Here, I consider if performing the good audience member detracts from listening. I consider what is at stake in prioritizing feelings of benevolence within the audience-production relationship. I wonder if we can actively listen if we are still performing? 

I finish the interview and I pump breast milk. I eat some chips and watch bad TV. The story of the interview vacates my brain and I rest. I remember very little.  

I return to the interview transcript a month later. My only recollection was that I stacked my pillows to make it appear as if I were at a desk. I remember smiling. 

Works Cited

Robinson, Dylan. “Feeling reconciliation, remaining settled.” In Theatres of Affect. Edited by Erin Hurley. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2014.

Why Archive? What is the Audience’s Role in the Archiving Process?

By Chanel Sheridan

The question of why audiences archive and what their role is within a production is an incredibly large one, yet I wanted to use it as a way to guide this writing piece and discuss some commonalities between the Gatherings interviews in the ways audiences document productions.  

Firstly, it is important to note that the style in which audiences archive is incredibly personal and oftentimes is a way for them to go back and remember which shows they attended, such as in the case with Barbara Moore and Vera Kadar (lines 460 and 66 respectively from their interviews). Yet at the same time, some audience members do not remember why they started archiving, such as Sandy Moser who speculates it might have been to remind her to talk to her daughter about the productions she saw (line 191). Many of the subjects do not archive or document in a physical style and instead recall productions from memory. While many of the subjects remembered specific details of the production, upon first glance it seems as though these archives are unreliable as a result of human errors and the limitations of human memory. Oftentimes things are forgotten such as Vera who didn’t realize she had attended the show before until looking in her archives (line 66). Additionally, Sandy’s only memory of a production is that she thought it was “fantastic” because that is what is written beside the entry in her archives (line 130). 

However, I argue that the archives of audience members are not a way of accurately documenting the production itself but are necessary to provide a record of the lives that production touched. Janis cites that the audience’s role is to actively listen, which she recalls through the experience of a show being recapped and understanding that she was supposed to be paying much more attention than she had been (line 462). The role of audiences as witnesses is an idea that is also reflected in Vera’s interview where she explains how a show cannot exist in a vacuum (line 84), as well as in Sandy’s interview who says, “without me, there’s no play- there's no reason for their, no jobs for them, you need the audience” (line 358). From this common theme within the plays, audiences believe they are meant to act as a witness to the productions, to be there and experience it. When extended into their archiving, it can be understood as their way of proving the production existed and proving they experienced it.  

Since audience archives seem to stem from personal insights and are a way of documenting their witnessing, these archives are also a way to document how a production affected the audience and what emotions arose in them. Every single subject spoke of their positive experiences and images that they remember, such as Sandy who speaks about a puppet of a little yellow bird with fondness (line 83) and Francie who mentions the “standout” scene where Lady Macbeth gathers a cloth into her hands that spans the stage (line 326). In addition to this, perhaps audience archives are a way for audience members to explore their own experiences. In a large communal setting such as a production, which is live and therefore is not the same every time, perhaps audience members feel the need to solidify that their thoughts and opinions matter. Through archiving they are fulfilling their perceived role as an audience member: to witness and engage with the production, which would not matter without them. Thus, audience archiving is a way to remember the way the individual audience member felt about that which is fleeting: the feeling they had in those specific moments because of the production.