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Audience Participation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

Richard Schechner
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Extract

Many think that because participation is new to them, it is new to the theatre. These same people automatically participate in responsive readings at church, flag saluting, standing for the national anthem at sporting matches, cheering, and agreeing to umpire a few innings of sandlot baseball. In fact, participation in theatrical events is a very old, widespread practice. It has been limited in our culture for several hundred years for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is “professionalism.” Because trained, skilled performers have come to be expected, there are those who grow uneasy contemplating direct interaction between performers and the unskilled audience. The audience, by and large, expects a show to begin and end on time, to be “finished” and “packaged” like other products of the Ameriaan culture. Therefore, many in the theatre are loath to risk a process that may upend these anticipations, such as accepting a rough or long performance, or not being sure how something is going to work.

Type
TDR/Document
Information
The Drama Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Summer 1971 , pp. 72 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 The Drama Review

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Footnotes

Editor's Note: This essay is excerpted from a book by Richard Schechner to be published in the Spring, 1972, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

References

1 I used to think quite differently. I often spoke of “articulating” and “controlling” the space, and staged several introductory scenes—such as the choric opening of Dionysus in 69 and the songs at the start of Commune to make clear who was boss of the space. After working with Tom Driver and Dan Newman for several weeks, I saw that I was wrong. The songs were dropped from Commune, and a new phase of the relationship between audience and performers in the space opened.

2 The Living Theatre's idea of participation is opposite to Grotowski's. When G used physical participation, he cast the audience into roles they clearly knew about and could accept or reject. Even in his later work, the tone of the play and its setting makes clear who the audience is and what it is to do. The Living's actors perform what they call “exemplary actions” designed to stimulate and evoke the audience, and when called, the audience is expected to fill in the open spaces with its own scripts. There are no pre-designed roles, only “maps” and challenges, indications of where to get to, not how or in what capacity to get there. Often these “audience scripts” are “wrong” or hostile or self-destructive; but this is part of the Living's risk. Audience participation there is not an extension of the aesthetic sensibility, as it is with G, but a reversal of it. For G, the audience becomes actors; with the Living, the actors become audience. So much so that in 1970, the Living Theatre disbanded. Judith Malina and Julian Beck are now (1971) in Brazil, attempting to do street theatre in the favelas when not in prison.

3 Nowhere is it more necessary to strike down the belief that “later is better” than in experiments relating to participation. The process is not progressive; we try something, it works for a time, then a flaw shows up or we move to another place in ourselves and we try something else. Solution 2 is different than Solution 1, but it is neither necessarily better nor worse.