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 Your Old Collection of Show Programs is Not Useless Junk

By Chanel Sheridan

In the corner of my room sits an empty scrapbook, its blank pages invisibly packed with my plans for it. On top of it rests a pile of show tickets, programs, and stolen posters. My summer project: a timeline of shows I have seen or been a part of, cataloging my experiences to be looked back on fondly in my future. Hopefully one day I will have many scrap books bursting with these experiences through which I can flip and return to a place in which I was stunned, surprised, excited, or even disappointed. Yet, I must also admit, there may be a time where my scrapbooks, so lovingly created, are seen as trash, useless. So why do I feel such a strong desire to document my shows in the first place?  

Perhaps it is to say, “I was moved in this way, because of this.” 

Perhaps it is to say, “I was here, and I felt something.” 

Whatever the reason, as that is another blog post in itself, I explore how these documents fit into the world of archiving for how can something that contains so much love and care, ultimately be seen as useless?  

According to Salazar, the “main difference between the memories of Performance Arts and those of everyday life rests in the intentional, artistic, and fictional dimension of performance and in the need to preserve a work of art that disappears as soon as the performance ends” (Salazar 21). In that essence then, the documentation of a production is intertwined with memory itself, which does not make it untrue since memories are in fact some kind of truth. They are a perception of a moment which was true and thus are true for the individual.  

But what of the ways in which we portray our truths and experiences? According to Deker et al, these documents in connection with the production itself are what they call “inter-documents”, constructing an environment instead of a persona thus moving “beyond mere representations of a former activity to become part of it” (Dekker et al 62). Therefore, these archives created by the audience do not attempt to document the performance itself but are part of the environment, showcasing how the performance was received. I think of my scrapbook plans – to capture elements of the show I enjoyed, not the entire show. Through my scrapbook I create something which exists in both the past and present, and, as Dekker et al describe, the “potential future performance” since part of its job is to tell the story of the past years from now (Dekker et al 66). 

The objects or documents created in an audience archive are more than just reflections of a past event, worthy of their own attention and space in which to tell their own story. Dekker et al describe Briet’s theory of how “documents are contextual, and rather than delivering remains of an isolated event, they are reflective of the networks in which that object appears” (Dekker et al 74). My scrapbook will tell more than one story while contributing to another entirely different one: the story of my artistic career, my engagement with the theatre community, my love of theatre. 

So, if my scrapbook is not junk, then what is it? Dekker et all believe they can be “extensions of the original artwork, the performance” (Dekker et al 76). My scrapbook will not be a collection of junk, but an artwork, an epilogue of the performance showcasing my experience. Audience archives are collections of care, of love, even if the collector themselves does not know why they are holding on to a faded program with the back cover missing and the pages falling out. These new pieces of artwork deserve a place within the world because they are not junk but documents of experience, as any other piece of artwork is. They want the viewer to experience something, even if that experience is as simple as: 

“I was here, and I felt something” 

Works Cited 

Dekker, Annet, et al. “Expanding Documentation and Making the Most of the 'Cracks in the Wall'.” Documenting Performance, edited by Toni Sant, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017, pp. 61–78. 

Sant, Toni. “Documenting Performance: An Introduction.” Documenting Performance, edited by Toni Sant, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017, pp. 1-14. 

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. 

Centering Spectators: Audiences as Pedagogues?

By Kelsey Jacobson

Might we characterize audiences as pedagogues? My provocation 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. 

Audiences, Attendees, Participants, Oh My! Re-thinking active spectatorship

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.