Performing Arts: Audience as an Essential Element

in the Production of the Theatrical Experience

By: Carmen Hung

Date: 5th February, 2008

CMNS 488 Art WorldsCase Study 1:

Research Questions:

• What is theatre's place in the Art World?

• What does it mean for the performers that audience are presence?

• How does audience member 'participate' in the production of theatre?

• Does theatre reflect society/reality?

Event Attended:

• PuSh Festival (Jan 16th – Feb 3, 08)• Catalyst Theatre (Edmonton)• Frankenstein

(adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel)• 25th February, 2008 (Friday)• Vancouver East Cultural Centre

• (also in the audience is Mayor Sam Sullivan)

Thesis & Definitions:

Theatre performance, while not necessarily mimicking life, is an artistic experience produced collectively by both artists and the audience

•Play•Drama•Theatre•Performance

•Stage•Show•Performing Arts

(Review) Art & Audience:

Creators

Audience Mediators

Art

Culture (bi-directional relationship):

Interpretive CommunitiesHorizons of ExpectationsTheatrical Conventions

Interactive Relations

Source:Susan Bennett,

Theatre Audiences

Fixed timefor reception

OvercodingInternal horizonof expectations(mise en scene)

Fictional Stage World

Audience as Active Participant in Theatre:

“The audience is, in effect, one of the theatre artists; because theatre is a "living" art, because actual performers appear before actual audience

members, the audience is an active participant in the live performance; as a participant, the audience experiences the performed

work and responds in an immediate and emotional fashion; via that response, the audience directly affects the performance and, in fact,

becomes a creative partner in the living art of theatre.”

Paul N. Campbell (1984)

How Theatre Move Audience:

“The spectators are always in their senses and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players”… But stage move audience through being generalized: it

represents to "the auditor what he himself would feel if her were to do or suffer what is there feigned to be supposed or to be done. The

reflection that strikes the heart is not that the evils before us are real evils, but that they are evils in which we ourselves may be exposed.“

Samuel Johnson

“Meaning” & Spectators:

“The idea that any meaning can "belong" to the work is refused: the very process of its becoming is foregrounded as being the spectator's work. The performance thus force attention to process, to the ‘event’ occurring between spectator and presentation”

Nick Kaye (1994)

Socially Formed Ideas & Values:

“The Audience, like the artist, have ideas and values which are socially formed and which are similarly mediated. As the artist works within the technical means available and within to the scope of aesthetic convention, so audiences read according to the scope and means of culturally and aesthetically constituted interpretive processes.

Janet Wolff (1981)

Theatre in relation to the Readings:

• Art-making as a Collective Activity (Consensus & Conventions)

• Art as measure of Civilization, Technological & Social change

• Art not as Transmission Model

• Mimisis

• Artistic genius & Art world as socially constructed

• Audience as Reception/Consumption vs. Production/Creation

Reference:

Bennett, S. (1990). Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception. Routledge.

Campbell, P. N. (1984). Form and the Art of Theatre. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.

Shepherd, S., & Wallis, M. (2004). Drama/Theatre/Performance. Routledge.

Styan, J. L. (1975). Drama, Stage and Audience. Cambridge University Press.