Abstract
The traditional ‘audience contract ’ is usually invisible and unspoken, yet exerts a very real power. In return for performers’ labour , theatregoers implicitly agree to take part in creating and maintaining the onstage world. Relaxed, immersive, and participatory forms aside, this usually means sitting down and watching quietly. But this doesn’t necessarily lead to passive spectatorship . This chapter argues that audience activity is not simply the inevitable outcome of successful performance design, but rather is produced through complex viewing strategies.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact Paulus does go on to complicate her own assertions, explaining that while non-mainstream theatre might well be radical in formal construction it can still be conservative in effect. Non-linear structure, experimental staging, and controversial subject matter do not in-and-of themselves a radical performance make. For Paulus, in order to be truly radical a performance must overtly challenge the behavioural expectations of the theatrical institution itself (Paulus 2006: 334).
- 2.
Rancière explains how ‘the project of reforming the theatre [has] ceaselessly wavered between these two poles of distant inquiry and vital embodiment’ (2009: 272), with spectators pressed either to switch from a passive viewer to the role of a scientist ‘who observes phenomena and looks for their cause’ (Brecht), or to ‘leave the status of a mere observer who remains still and untouched in front of a distant spectacle’, and become immersed in the ‘magic power of theatrical action’ (Artaud).
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Sedgman, K. (2018). The Theatre Contract. In: The Reasonable Audience. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99166-5_2
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