Gay McAuley

Paper read at Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics

Conference, Sydney University, June 2000

The organisers of this conference, in bringing film, theatre and performance together, are clearly inviting reflections on the interface between these different expressive forms.I find this intriguing, as the tendency over the past few decades has taken film and theatre specialists in very different directions: they do not attend the same conferences or publish in the same journals, and film and theatre occupy increasingly different places in the cultural economy of every developed nation.Actors are perhaps the only professionals who are still expected to move seamlessly between the two art forms.

 

Theatre and performance are at risk of developing similarly separate pathways, although in the Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney we have always argued that theatre needs to be placed at the centre of our thinking about performance and performativity due to its historical dominance within western culture.As Herbert Blau wrote in 1987 "It is theatre which haunts all performance whether or not it occurs in the theatre". 

 

In taking the challenge posed by the conference theme, and in choosing the spectator as the site for some comparative reflections, I am aware of the hubris involved.Film theorists have written a great deal about spectatorship, while for theatre historians the spectator has been something of an unmarked term, taken for granted but until recently hardly explored at all.On the one hand, then, an excess of material, a lot of it fairly abstract and uncomplicated by empirical considerations of what actual spectators actually do; on the other hand, two and a half thousand years of history and a dearth of generally accepted theoretical positions.It is my intention to begin by outlining a theory of theatrical spectatorship and then, in the time that is left, to hint at the ways in which this can be used as a point of departure to discuss major differences between the meaning making and experiential processes of the spectator in film, theatre and performance.

 

Theorisation of cinematic spectatorship has revolved around what Jean-Louis Baudry, writing in 1970, called "the basic cinematographic apparatus", that is to say the projector, situated above and behind the spectators, beaming the image onto a screen placed in front of them, replacing the camera in a sort of relay process and making possible the "double identification" whereby the spectator identifies with the camera/projector as well as with the characters in the fiction.Following the same methodological procedure, we can ask if theatre possesses a comparable basic apparatus, and if so, of what it might consist.

 

Both theatre and the other performative genres that have come to be grouped under the heading of 'performance' may be defined in minimal terms as that which takes place between performers and spectators in a given space and time.There is no machinery comparable to camera and projector but it could be argued that the "basic apparatus" of theatre consists of human beings in a defined space witnessed by other human beings.The nature of the defined space has varied greatly from age to age and culture to culture, and with it the nature of the representation and the social experience involved, but the primary fact of both theatre and performance is the live presence of performers and spectators.There are two important consequences which flow from this primary fact: firstly, theatrical performance is necessarily embedded in a social event (you have got to be there), and secondly, it involves an exchange of energy amongst and between spectators and performers.My theorising about theatrical spectatorship is extrapolated from these two necessary conditions.

 
 

The social event
 

A performance is something that takes place in space and time, it happens, and it will never happen in the same way twice.For spectators to experience a play, they must go to the theatre, and the slippage between the literal and figurative meanings of that phrase is highly significant.Going to the theatre indeed involves going toa theatre, and the being there is a major part of the experience.The performance is embedded in a social event, and both the performance and the fiction it presents are constantly at risk of being overtaken by the social reality.Anything untoward occurring in the auditorium will disrupt the performance, if an actor gets sprains his ankle on stage, the reality of the injury will dominate the performance and will fatally disrupt the fiction.This of course is why actors dislike working with animals or young children, both of whom are far closer to the social reality than the dramatic fiction.

 

From this it might seem that the social reality has to be kept firmly subordinate to the performance, and indeed that has been a major tendency in twentieth century theatre, with its darkened auditoria and immobilised spectators.But the social experience is not merely a distraction, it can enhance, even accentuate the individual's response to the performance.One laughs more heartily and for longer when others are laughing too (hence the canned laughter in radio comedy, and the studio audiences for TV shows).Maurice Descotes points out that the extraordinary propensity for audiences in the 18th century to weep copiously at affecting moments can be better understood when we realise it was a shared, public weeping and it seems that displaying one's emotional response was as much part of the pleasure of theatre as displaying one's person.

 

Theatre buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries were designed to permit socialising between members of the audience, there were spaces for promenading and parading, and the organisation of the overall event encouraged such social interaction.Even today, the theatre functions in such a way as to transform the motley group of individuals who turn up on any particular occasion into a collectivity, a group with a particular quality that can be perceived by the actors and differentiated from other similar groups.Actors will say "it's a good audience tonight" or "they're a bit slow", or as Louis Jouvet was reported as saying of a responsive audience, "le public a du talent ce soir".

 

Spectators go to the theatre as individuals, or more frequently as members of sub-groups (couples, families, groups of friends, even teacher and students) and through the process of responding to the performance they become the audience, a collectivity possessed of its own characteristics.The architectural design of the building is a factor in this transformation process: some buildings encourage and enhance it (especially older style theatres), others militate against it (notably the theatres built and renovated in the 1960s and 70s).There are other aspects of the theatre event that contribute to the transformation process: the socialising that may take place before the show and in the interval (in the auditorium itself or in other social spaces in the theatre), the crush around the bar for drinks, the curtain calls at the end of the performance.It is probably the curtain call and the applause it elicits that functions most strongly to manifest the audience as a collective entity.Spectators leave the theatre in an energised state at the end of a really good performance, and they are energised and unified in part by their own actions in applauding and cheering.The polite applause that marks the end of a mediocre performance does not bring the audience together but, on the contrary, leaves it as disparate as any other arbitrary gathering of strangers in an aeroplane or train.

 
 

Energy exchange
 

Actors are energised by the presence of the spectators and the spectators are energised both by other spectators and by the actors on stage.One of the best accounts I know of the energy exchange between performer and spectator comes from Arthur Symons, attempting some years after the event to describe the impact of Sarah Bernhardt on the spectator:
 

There was an excitement in going to the theatre; one's pulses beat feverishly before the curtain had risen; there was almost an obscure sensation of peril, such as one feels when the lioness leaps into the cage, on the other side of the bars.And the acting was like a passionate declaration, offered to some one unknown; it was if the whole nervous force of the audience was sucked out of it and flung back, intensified, upon itself, as it encountered the single, insatiable, indomitable nervous force of the woman.

(Arthur Symons, 1926)
 

Theatre practitioners often speak of the special sense of risk created in live performance and of the energy generated by the dual presence of performers and spectators, and although these notions are intangible and difficult to document I do not think they can be dismissed as "clichés and mystifications" as Philip Auslander does in his recent book Liveness (pp.2-3).It seems to me that theorists must take seriously what experienced and intelligent artists and perceptive spectators have written about the performance experience unless it can be disproved through empirical studies and documentary evidence. 

 

Another notion which recurs in much of what actors write about the performance experience concerns their awareness of the audience and the way they must heed the minutest signals emanating from it.John Gielgud said, in one of his volumes of memoirs:

 

[the actor] learns to listen, to watch (without appearing to do so), to respond, to guide [the audience] in certain passages and be guided by them in others - a never-ending test of watchfulness and flexibility.

 

John Harrop, in a book on the teaching of acting, speaks of the dangers for a comic actor of:

 

playing last night's performance, with the rhythms and stresses that were successful then; playing for the laugh, rather than playing the action and the line in the present with an ear on how tonight's audience is responding.

 

These quotes are emblematic of many I could have chosen, and both point to the existence of what can be called "feedback loops" between performers and spectators.These feedback loops are crucial to the experience of live performance, they are part of the energy exchange, and they are clearly part of what enables actors to categorise a particular audience as slow or responsive or cold.Most spectators go to see a production only once and so tend to take the audience response as a given, while for the actors it is an important variable.One of the problems for performance theorists is that actors have not traditionally been much inclined, or indeed encouraged, to write their knowledge down, and this is why accounts such as those I have quoted are so valuable and why theorists have to take them seriously.

 

Extrapolating from these two necessary conditions, I suggest that there are a number of factors which need to be taken into account in any theory of theatrical spectatorship.There is time here only for a very brief presentation of the most important (but for those who are interested, there is a more extensive discussion of this whole question in the final chapter of my book, Space in Performance, published last year).The factors which in my view constitute the fundamental conditions of theatrical spectatorship are the simultaneous experience of belief and disbelief, the play of looks amongst and between spectators and actors, the multiplicity of focus within the performance event, and the obligation on the spectator to construct his/her individual sequence of semiotic inputs.

 

Firstly belief and disbelief, which should be written belief/disbelief, with the slash functioning to bind the mutually exclusive terms into an insoluble unity.This refers to the complex truth and reality status of what is experienced in the theatre.What is presented in the theatre is always both real and not real, the actors are present and not present: I see Gérard Depardieu and Tartuffe, a figure who is both Gérard Depardieu and not-Gérard Depardieu.Furthermore, there is Gérard Depardieu (film star and celebrity), and Tartuffe (fictional character) and between the two there is what the Czech semiotician Jiri Honzl called the Bühnenfigur (the stage figure) and what I call the presentational reality to refer to the way in which Depardieu (and the director, designer, costume designer etc) have figured Tartuffe in this production.So we have Depardieu and not-Depardieu and something else which is neither Depardieu nor not-Depardieu.

 

Theatrical performance occurs live, in real space and time, and as I have already argued, this means that the fiction is always grounded in the social experience of both performers and spectators.Within the theatrical event, spectators are always aware that they are watching a performance and that the dramatic fiction being presented is a fiction, and they also know that the actors who are presenting this fiction are really present on the stage.One or other of these knowledges can be foregrounded, either momentarily or throughout a whole performance: for example, the device of the play within the play or something else that draws attention to the spectators' role as spectators will foreground the presentational; the choice of film or TV stars or other celebrities as actors will foreground the social reality; and the fictional is foregrounded in genres such as naturalism, where both the presence of the spectators and the presentational reality of the performance are, as it were, placed under erasure.

 

In the theatre these three levels are constantly interacting, constantly competing for attention, can be exploited in different ways for differing purposes, but the key fact is that all three are necessarily present in some form or other (which is why naturalism, which sought to foreground the fictional at the expense of the social and the presentational, was a relative failure in the theatre).Although the production style and factors such as the celebrity status of the actors can mean that one or other of these levels is foregrounded, they are always all three in action, and they cross over and interact with each other and may even infect the spectator's grasp on reality.Lear's grief at the death of Cordelia, when I know perfectly well that there is no death and no grief on the reality level, may nevertheless cause me to weep real tears.I experience in my own body a physiological response to something which is not in fact occurring.

 

The second factor constituting the condition of theatrical spectatorship is what I call the play of looks amongst and between actors and spectators.Before going any further, I should warn that although I use the term "looking", it should not be assumed that the spectator's experience is primarily visual (notwithstanding the etymological evidence from words like "theatre" and "spectator").Spectators are members of an "audience", and hearing and listening are at least as important as seeing and looking; furthermore, even when sightlines and lighting techniques are good, people sitting or standing in a theatre experience the space with all their senses.It would be more appropriate then to speak of a spatial rather than a visual experience.I toyed with the idea of using a term like "channel of experience" rather than "look", for the spectator in the theatre is always involved first and foremost in the phenomenological experience of being there, of the space in relation to oneself, of one's self in the place, but I retained the word "look" because it permits the notion of active agency which would be lost if I used the word "channel".

 

There seem to be a number of different kinds of looking going on, which is why I have referred to the play of looks.There is the spectator looking at the actors and at the presentational space more generally, then there is the actor looking back at the spectators, and there is the spectator looking at other spectators.The first of these looks is also a major factor in film and television, where of course it works in different ways due to the mediation of the camera and editing process, but the second and third are peculiar to theatre and are constrained in particular ways by performance conventions and by the design of the performance space.

 

The spectator-actor look is clearly the primary look in the theatre, and it is the major means whereby the spectators' energy is communicated to the actors.The fact that the actor can see the audience, that the actor reverses the spectators' gaze is absolutely crucial to theatre, even though the practice of dimming the house lights means that the actors see less than they once did.In Barbara Freedman's brilliant analysis this returned look is so importantthat it can even be said to constitute theatricality,which she defines as:

...a fractured reciprocity whereby beholder and beheld reverse positions in a way that renders a steady position of spectatorship impossible.

The third look in the theatre is that between spectators, and the historical record shows that spectators in the theatre have usually been involved in a good deal of interaction with each other.A recurring theme throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries is that people went to the theatre to see and be seen, to show off their new clothes, to flirt and to socialise as much as to see a performance.Spectators go to the theatre to see a performance but they also go to participate in a performance of their own, what might be called the "other performance".Dressing up, putting oneself on display, but also watching other people watch, seeing the play through the filter of another's gaze, sharing one's looking with strangers, are all part of this "other performance".

 
 

There is much more to be said about this, but it is evident that spectators in the theatre have traditionally been involved in a vast range of different looks - shared, private, collective, offered, stolen, forbidden, obtrusive, unobtrusive, and so on.The important thing is that the look is always a process of looking, always complex, always multiple, always energising and never totally under the control of anyone.

 

The third condition of theatrical spectatorship concerns the multiplicity of sign systems and framing systems involved in performance, and the fourth concerns the way the spectator must work to process this multiplicity.The semiotic complexity of performance, involving visual, aural, architectural, proxemic, kinaesthetic, etc., etc. sign systems, is rendered even more complex due to the framing systems to which I have already referred.In the theatre everything is always double, treble, multiple in its functioning: the stage is always stage and presentational space as well as fictional place, the character exists only through the real presence of the actor and in the constructed being of the Bühnenfigur, the real time of the performance is displaced by the fictional time of the dramatic action, and so on.In addition to this necessary doubling and trebling, the theatre has traditionally foregrounded its own processes, for example in plots which turn on disguise, impersonation, pretence and the device of the play within the play, so the theatrical situation is frequently duplicated from within.The spectator is caught up in this play, aware of multiple levels of reality simultaneously, or willingly duped into ignoring one level only to have the tables turned as the suppressed level returns to throw into question what had been accepted as "reality".

 

The theatre confers a certain independence of vision on its spectators.The actors can influence this up to a point, and the mise en scène provides cues to the kind of attention that is required and an overall rhythm that will channel response in certain ways, but the spectators' experience of the performance is very much under their own control.Spectators have many calls on their attention in the theatre, conditions of visibility and audibility vary considerably from different points in the auditorium of even the most democratically designed theatre, there are many things that one can look at in the presentational space and in the performance space more generally, and the spectator's freedom to choose is an important part of the risk of live performance, and an important part of the energy that is unleashed in performance.

 

In the theatre each spectator must make his or her own montage of details, and each of these will be determined by that particular spectator's interests, knowledge and experience.The theatre spectator looks from actor to actor, looks at this one's hands or that one's feet, notices or does not notice details that in film would either be brought to the attention of all through a close up or may not be visible at all; in the theatre the fictional place as created on stage is present in all its detail throughout the action of a given scene and, again, the spectator can choose at any moment to glance around the space, may pick up a detail in relation to something that is being said that another spectator may pick up at another time in relation to something else.Furthermore, spectators are also experiencing the "other performance" in the auditorium and details of this will be incorporated into each person's montage of the performance event.

 

I have not left myself much time to talk about differences between the spectator's experience in theatre, film and performance.Film, insofar as it is a dramatic medium (and by that I mean a mode of story telling or presentation in which events are enacted in the present), shares with theatre certain features, notably the use of actors, mimesis and performance.Performance practitioners often define their activities in distinction, even opposition, to theatre: they frequently reject the notion of mimesis, sometimes even of story, and place the emphasis on the actuality of the doing, they are not actors, there is no pretence, what happens is really happening, and indeed the performance is constituted by the happening.It should be pointed out here, however, that although the practitioners may reject the notion of fiction or story, the spectators frequently construct a narrative in order to make sense of the performative events they are seeing.

 

The most obvious differences between the spectatorial experience in film and theatre concern the factors I have isolated as crucial to the theatre: the energies unleashed by the real presence of actors and spectators in the same space, the continued reassertion of the social experience in which the dramatic fiction is located, the shift in responsibility to the individual spectator to make their own montage.Film provides a sense of completeness and closure (the work exists in a relatively fixed form, even though today we may be tempted by a reissue of "the director's cut" and tomorrow by a colorised version of a black and white classic), whereas in the theatre there is an on-going process and the work continues to evolve and change throughout the run of performances, and a given production is just that, one possible version of a work which has no original or final form.Furthermore, the feedback loops between spectators and actors mean that the spectators' presence, behaviour and response become part of the work.

 

Reflecting on my own experience as a spectator in the theatre and in the cinema, I would say that I go to the cinema with a sense of relief, in the pleasurable expectation that the trajectory of my experience has been planned in advance, that I have simply to surrender myself to the film.Going to the theatre, by contrast, always involves a kind of mental "gearing up", the knowledge that I have to take responsibility for my own looking, knowledge that in some way I am a participant and that my participation is part of the event.This "mental gearing up" clearly relates to two of the factors I have described as crucial to theatrical spectatorship: the exchange of energies between stage and auditorium and the obligation on theatre spectators to make their own montage from the available semiotic material.

 

Film specialists will doubtless claim that spectators in the cinema, too, are free to notice or not notice certain features, that one's gaze can travel around the screen and that the direction of this trajectory is not curtailed, that some will "read" against the grain of the image, etc.All this is true, but there is nevertheless a huge difference between the amount of detail available at any given time to the theatre spectator, and the relatively structured viewing that film provides through the basic cinematographic apparatus which selects and frames and positions the spectator in relation to what has been filmed.It is this difference I am trying to account for and, in so doing, I am not claiming superiority for one art form over the other.

 

The notion of the performance event being embedded in a social occasion also raises interesting differences between film and theatre for it is, of course, true that spectators are present in the cinema and that this presence necessarily creates a social occasion.In the 1930s and 40s cinema going was much more like theatre going: the way the films were programmed, the intervals for selling ice creams and chocolates, the live music that was played in the intervals etc. all contributed to enhance the social experience.Since that time, however, the institutional organisation of cinemas has functioned to put the spectators' social presence under erasure: we sit in comfortable seats with our own uninterrupted view of the screen, in the darkness the rest of the audience almost disappears, and as soon as the lights come on we are unceremoniously ushered out of the place, often out onto a side or back street.In recent years there has been an attempt to re-establish the social experience, for a certain demographic, with fast food, computer games and glittering lights in the foyers, and it is perhaps the success of this that has led to the attempt to attract another demographic with the "premier class" experience (I have not yet had the pleasure of this experience so can't say more about it, but the fact that it is happening is significant).Comparing film and theatre though, it is evident that the social event in which the film or performance is embedded is less crucial to the film experience than to the theatre.It can be reduced almost to zero in the cinema, it changes with the marketing strategies of the companies who own and control the distribution networks, but does not seem to impact on the spectator's experience of the film with anything like the force it has in theatre.

 

It will perhaps have been noticed that in my theorisation of theatrical spectatorship, I have not made any hard and fast distinctions between theatre and performance more broadly.There is, however, one important distinction and it concerns the belief/disbelief factor.Insofar as performance rejects the notion of mimesis and the presentation of fiction, then it also abandons the play of belief and disbelief that I perceive to be one of the key distinguishing factors of theatrical spectatorship.In an influential essay first published in 1972, Michael Kirby proposed a continuum of performance modes running from acting to not-acting; the not-acting end of the continuum is what he called "non-matrixed performing" and it occurs when the "performer does nothing to feign, simulate or impersonate...and is not embedded, as it were, in matrices of pretended or represented character, situation, place and time".At the other extreme of the continuum is what Kirby called "complex acting", defined as such due to the number of "elements incorporated into the pretense".

 

There is no hard and fast division between the stages in Kirby's continuum, and there is no clear cut off point where what I call the belief/disbelief factor ceases to operate and indeed it is possible that, notwithstanding the best efforts of the proponents of "pure" performance, perhaps it never ceases to operate in some form in live performance.Octave Mannoni used Freud's concept of Verneinung (denegation) to describe the spectator's relationship to theatrical performance.Denegation (which has to be distinguished from denial - Freud's term for that is Verleugnung) permits a person to both admit and deny a fact, to admit to some level of consciousness a fact which the conscious mind refuses to acknowledge.The play of belief and disbelief that I have described is seen by Mannoni as functioning similarly to denegation, a psychic mechanism usually activated only through dreams, and it permits 
 

...par les conventions, par le symbolique, une sorte de reprise de l'imaginaire

(through conventions, through the symbolic, it permits us to repossess or reconnect with our own imaginary).
 

This is, of course, unlikely to happen with the non-matrixed performance and it is why a highly experienced theatre spectator like Anne Ubersfeld is led to suggest that the refusal of illusion and "acting" in much postmodern performance seriously limits what she calls "la productivité de la pratique théâtrale" (the psychic working of the theatre experience).

 

Taking up Ubersfeld's point about the importance of denegation in the spectator's pleasure is not to deny the fascination of non-matrixed performing, the spectator's admiration for the performer's skill/fortitude/capacity for endurance, etc., nor is it to downplay the value of the ideological motivation that led in the 1960s and 70s to the shift of emphasis from matrixed acting to non-matrixed performing, but it is important to point out that this came at a cost.The kind of performance that leaves the spectator on the outside, admiring or contemplating the physical is activating only a small part of emotional and psychic energy that is potentially there.

 

There is no time for a conclusion other than to say that in comparing aspects of the spectator's experience in these different performance genres, I am not intending to make value judgements, but simply trying to tease out what makes for difference when so much is shared, and beginning to explore what a coherent theory of theatrical spectatorship might reveal about other performance genres.