Abstract
Totally dark theatre performances form an instructive trend in immersive theatre practice. Focusing on dark theatre performances by Lundahl & Seitl, Alston asks: what happens to the productivity of spectatorship in total darkness? He proposes that the inherent creativity and productivity of spectators is exacerbated when faced with the risky prospect of participation. Drawing on risk research in the social sciences and its influence on Third Way politics, Alston identifies political connections between audience productivity and an active and positive embrace of risk in dark theatre aesthetics that chime with an equation of risk and productivity in neoliberal governance. However, he also considers how Lundahl & Seitl complicate these connections by finding a balance between risk and trust, isolation and intimacy, and responsibility and support.
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Notes
- 1.
Martin Welton uses the term ‘theatre in the dark’ as a subtitle in a chapter on theatre and darkness (Welton, 2006). ‘Theatre in the Dark’ was also the title of a symposium considering darkness in theatre and performance organised by me on 12 July 2014 at the University of Surrey.
- 2.
I am currently working on a new book project with Martin Welton, provisionally titled Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (London: Methuen), which will deal more comprehensively with the plural histories of dark theatre aesthetics.
- 3.
Third Way politics has its roots in New Democrat initiatives in the US. The New Democrats emerged as a Democrat faction disheartened by the success of Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal republicanism in the 1980s. The successful 1992 presidential election campaign of the New Democrat Bill Clinton ushered in the first wave of Third Way politics at the level of government, followed later by New Labour in 1997 in the UK. For both parties, neoliberalism was taken as a hegemonic given in a globalised world that was responded to not by expanding the political spectrum in opposition to neoliberalism, but by contracting that spectrum toward the political centre in an effort to work with, not against, neoliberal ideology.
- 4.
While the rhetorical and ideological onus on the centrality of work in the restructuring of social security remained in place, New Labour was also committed to poverty reduction by expanding means-tested social security (see Brewer et al., 2002, p. 10). The welfare state in the UK has since endured more substantial and damaging welfare reform under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, which shared power after neither party achieved a majority in the 2010 UK General Election. Cuts to the welfare budget under the coalition between 2011 and 2014 were linked to a decrease in the overall value of benefits, as well as reform of housing benefits and council tax support. As Katie Allen reports, ‘300,000 households have experienced a cut in housing benefit, 920,000 a reduction in council tax support and 480,000 a cut in both’ (Allen, 2014, n.p.). The attempted attenuation of social neediness by instituting new welfare programmes and reforms that purportedly aim to foster transitions into worker productivity, which have targeted benefit claimants, have expanded the number of citizens who risk poverty in a mode of governance that continues to embrace risk as a facilitator of upward social and economic mobility.
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Alston, A. (2016). Theatre in the Dark: Spectatorship and Risk in Lundahl & Seitl’s Pitch-Black Theatre. In: Beyond Immersive Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48044-6_3
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