Changing the world, or, why I like talking with theatre audiences
This text is a somewhat tidied edit of a mostly scrappy keynote delivered at the launch event for the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts. My invitation had been to respond to the introductory texts, but each of those coaxed me into other chapters, and so every time I sat down to start writing, I became instead absorbed in reading more. The book is a mammoth compendium of essays from a multitude of perspectives in audience research: historical, philosophical, speculative, exploratory; interested in everything from the neuroscience of how people respond when watching a live performance to the nature of fandom and the political problem of globalising audiences. I finished collating my thoughts on the train to Leeds, where the event was taking place; after I read it out, someone from the audience said it was like listening to someone free associating, which was expressed as a compliment so that’s how I’m taking it.
I didn’t have a title for this until I listened to the presentation before mine, a scintillating and rigorous dialogue review by Emma McDowell and a group of fellow post-docs. ‘I want to know WHY they research audiences,’ said one person. ‘Is it about changing the world, turning society on its head?’ asked another. It was a lightbulb moment, illuminating that I had written to and from both of these sentiments.
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In the opening chapter to the Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, co-written by its four editors, I get name-checked as someone using unconventional methodologies for audience research. It was a relief to see that, because in an academic context I can start to feel a surging anxiety at my lack of rigour or expertise. In another chapter, co-editor Ben Walmsley identifies the approaches of the book’s many authors as related to arts management, cultural policy studies, political science, sociology, education; I read that list and think: nope, not me! I’m just someone who likes to be among audiences, watching theatre works, and hearing what other people think about them.
For sure there are all sorts of ways in which I'm making invisible my professional status in saying that. But I do so to gather us around the idea that there’s a hierarchy that is structural but also internal when thinking about audiences, a hierarchy that needs to be dismantled, because there are valuable insights to be encountered through listening to people who don’t, at first glance, tick the right, or professional, or status-privileged boxes.
In the spirit of the co-authored introduction, I thought I might share what I consider to be my first epiphany experience in a theatre. I was 14 and on a school trip to see Mark Rylance play Hamlet with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I vividly remember watching him caper about in pyjamas in the pretending to be mad scene, and thinking: wow. His performance was electrifying in its energy and complexity. The only problem is that I was asleep for most of the show before that, and for most of the show after that moment as well. I wish I could say my falling asleep amid an audience ended there, but it hasn’t. In other words, I’m fairly typical of how people, when part of an audience, are imperfect and unreliable – which isn’t much of a recommendation for audience studies.
But those experiences don’t tell a whole story about me – or indeed any of the other people you might see in an audience asleep, or fidgeting, or checking their watches (which these days might be connected to google and so effectively double as smart phones…). I’m very taken with the argument presented by Alan Brown in his conversation with Emma McDowell, that it’s important for researchers to understand the ‘lifelong arc of engagement’ [p134], and how culture is interwoven into people’s lives. To do this requires looking not just at isolated experiences, more or less immediately post-show, but inviting people to take stock of multiple experiences, or what Brown calls peak experiences, and think about how encounters with art might have shifted something in their lives.
My lifelong arc again makes me somewhat negatively typical, this time of the paradoxes of audiences that the editors contemplate in their collective Introduction. Audiences are passive and yet active; collective and heterogeneous; their attention is relied on and yet, as I’ve admitted, unreliable… In my late 20s, having watched theatre very intensively since I was 22, I crashed out of theatre altogether. I barely saw anything for four years, because I'd started to feel that everything I was seeing was dishonest. Saying this, I might be giving the impression that I was seeking naturalism or verisimilitude, but actually it was the opposite; when I did start seeing theatre again, what I tended to see was quite slippery work that destabilised the category of realism.
Nicholas Ridout writes towards this in his book Theatre & Ethics, when he argues that the value of representations on stage might lie not in the extent to which they are accurate, but in ‘what meaning or sense might be made by the viewer in the act of reception’ – the thought about the world to which the theatre work gives rise. [p21] I stopped watching theatre because too little of what I was seeing was inspiring me to think. I had become, to quote Ridout again: ‘a thinker of theatre who demands more and better than dramatic illusionism, [who seeks a theatre which] offers substantive encouragement to think of theatre in relation to ethics’. [p24]
I am no more a student of ethics than I am an academic researcher of audiences; and nor am I thinking about ethics here in quite the same terms as those discussed in the Companion, particularly in the chapter by co-editor Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow, which looks closely at research ethics: the micro ethics of how participants are treated, and the macro ethics of how research is commissioned and shared. Ridout is speaking of something else: the ethics of the encounter between the theatre work and its audience, and between audience members.
I understand this in the simplest terms possible: ethics is how humans live together and treat each other. A key refrain in the Companion is that acts of witnessing, looking and listening, are key to how humans live together. To quote the shared introduction: ‘to audience is an ordinary and natural act’. [p3] I enjoy this shift from noun to verb: it’s the same shift happening in Ellen Dissanayake’s conversation with co-editor Lynne Conner when Dissanayake asks: ‘what do participants do when they artify?’ [p26] Dissanayake shifts the word art from a noun to verb, speaking directly into this paradox of the passivity and activity of audiences.
Artist Jenny Odell does something similar in her book How to Do Nothing, when she writes about her own acts of witnessing, as a bird watcher: she sees not a collection of individual birds but a set of ecological relationships – what she describes as ‘verb conjugations instead of nouns’. [p157] Odell writes of bird-watching as an activity diametrically opposed to the productivity understood by capitalism – or the false productivity encouraged by the ‘attention economy’ of social media in service to capitalism. The focused attention Odell advocates rejects capitalism’s hierarchies, the better to attend to human needs within the broader needs of the environments they live in.
In the Companion, Dissanayake identifies the first three fundamental human needs [p28] as: to seek and respond to mutuality, to belong to a group, to find and make and share meaning – all of which might also describe the act of being in audience to a live performance. And I recognise in this formulation why – despite my lifelong appalling sleep habits and my long periods of disenchantment with theatre – I keep returning: because sitting among and talking with audiences, attending, and attending to, live performance, allow me to – and I quote here from the Companion’s introduction – ‘enter into complex relationships between my self and others, raising questions about identity, power and perception’. [p3]
These questions are what I call, when I talk about writing in response to theatre, addressing the play in the world: how the performance sits in a wider political, socio-economic, and historical context. By contrast, a lot of theatre criticism is focused on describing the world in the play. Ben Walmsley’s chapter co-written with Julian Meyrick addresses this difference as well, when they see the ‘value of cultural experience in connections between people rather than absolutely in the artefact’, and give preference to the ‘argument over the work of art, not simply the argument in it’. [p231] These phrasings connect with the model of performance described by Ridout in Theatre & Ethics: theatre ‘as an ethical encounter, in which we come face to face with the other, in a recognition of our mutual vulnerability which encourages relationships based on openness, dialogue and a respect for difference’. [p54]
To me, there is so much potential radicalism in this recognition and encouragement – especially in the environment we now inhabit, where debate is rancorous and quickly shut down, and long-practised power relationships of divide and rule are thriving. For the artist Rajni Shah, who I mention in my chapter in the Companion, the radicalism of theatre begins in the act of audiencing – or, in slightly more pernickity English, of listening. Rajni’s book Experiments in Listening argues for a different kind of listening: listening as a gathering to attend, rather than to argue, to sit alongside, rather than in hierarchy. They appreciate theatre as an encounter that allows people to confront difficult questions without immediately moving into action: an activated, engaged attending that is similar to the ‘doing nothing’ that Odell advocates as a more ethical way for humans to live together.
There’s an underlying paradox in what I'm saying here: if the act of listening, doing nothing, audiencing, is itself radical, why pry into it? I love what Ben says in describing his first epiphanic theatre experience: it inspired in him a passion for unpicking sensations. [p13] I recognise that passion – and recognise also that in me it expresses itself as a bias, one of many: for meaning-making that is additional to expressions of feeling. Another way this bias expresses itself is in a resistance to data collection and the kinds of scientific processes co-editor Matthew Reason introduces, of measuring people’s sensorial responses or scanning their brains. I’m more interested in – to borrow a formulation from Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow in their chapter on ethics – the fully realised human, rather than the data point. Or in the process named by Dissanayake: how people turn what they’ve seen into something that is theirs because of what they bring to it. [p34]
I find it infuriating and mind-boggling that the people who run theatres, who make the institution that is theatre, don’t apparently share this interest. There’s a piquant argument made by Herbert Blau, included in the collective Introduction, that feels as true today as when he was writing in 1990: that ‘audiences are often deliberately excluded from processes of interpretation because meaning-making is a politicised process which is primarily concerned with retaining power’. [p10] Social media may have given people the opportunity to share their own star ratings and sound bites but this isn’t the same as being invited into processes of interpretation. So, asks co-editor Lynne Conner, ‘when and how are audience members truly free to derive their own individual meanings?’ [p21] Time and again the Companion demonstrates how live this question is for people who work in audience research.
I have a painful feeling of skating the surface of what we might turn our attention to when responding to this book, but that’s inevitable: it’s 550 very big pages of argument and begins to address what it identifies as a key problem in audience research: the urgent need to diversify and decolonise critical studies of audiences. [p3] I am a product of coloniality – literally, as in my parents were born in a former British colony – but also as someone who has despite and because of that background internalised a number of white supremacist privileges in terms of education and class and engagement in culture that express themselves in the biases I've acknowledged and that remain latent in what I've said. Identifying bias, privilege and assumption are central to the ‘process of critical reflection’ Johanson and Glow call for in their chapter on ethics, and that again is both the argument and substance of the Companion. rather than offer the ‘big book of instructions’ called for by some researchers, it offers a huge number of questions, which lead to more questions. After all, as Ben Walmsley and Julian Meyrick note: ‘The value of culture is only ever an emergent construct, always under negotiation and in-the-making’. [p234]