Audience (Upd. July 14, ’21)
The audience is the spectator or partaker. For there to be an audience, there has to be at least one observer, and their place is a strange one as Peter Brook mentions: “It is hard to understand the true notion of the spectator, there and not there, ignored and yet needed.”1
The time and attention of the observer can be like currency. To Lakoff, two of the conceptual metaphors for time include TIME IS MONEY and TIME IS A RESOURCE.2 We seem to often perform in order to exchange something-to-show for the currency of attention.
The audience placement can take on several forms, e.g.: (1) from a side; (2) surrounding the performer; (3) at the center of the performance; (4) made to follow the performer to another space. Rhizome Lee’s concept of the nomadic rhizome is one example of number 4. In the nomadic rhizome, the audience is made to literally travel with the performers on a journey of endlessly differentiating spaces. By proxy, this gives the performance a strong audience participation aspect. Haunted house type theatre performances also uses this concept.
One can even play around with the amount of audience, such as having a one-on-one performance (one person at a time.)
It is not essential to satisfy the audience, but it is to leave a powerful impression. As Artaud put it, “We are not appealing to the audience’s minds or senses, but to their whole existence.”³ It is also not essential to lay out specific meaning or story for the audience. The most important part is to evoke feeling, not an intellectual response.
Kazuo Ohno explains: “The audience can be moved without having to comprehend all that goes into making your performance. Isn’t that the very reason we dance – to engage the audience on a visceral level? That is why I’m at a terrible loss to hear people talk of understanding my performance. Of course, you can use your brains to think, but when it comes to dancing, just forget all that.”4
Because humans are generally not satisfied with the ambiguous, they often try to impose labels upon it with that of the familiar. So if for instance somebody has never seen or known of Sea lions, and then witnesses one, the witness may be inclined to call it a water dog, mermaid dog, or merdog, possibly neglecting the uniqueness (or third category) of the phenomenon. Geoffrey Harpham calls these inaccurate labels storage spaces for non-things.5 A similar situation often occurs when somebody witnesses Butoh for the first time. Having never seen such a phenomenon, the witness may feel it is a form or corruption of mime, dance, theater, and/or performance art, but Butoh stands alone.
So when watching a Butoh performance: (1) quiet the mind; (2) be open; (3) feel. The type of audience for butoh may be the same type Grotowski desired when he said, “We are concerned with the spectator who has genuine spiritual needs and who really wishes, through confrontation with the performer, to analyse himself.6
Exercise 1: Waking the Ash Man
This is an exercise that deeply ties the performer to the audience. Beforehand, the audience is to make noise and/or movement of any kind. The audience is a direct influence on the dancer who wakes up from ash body (resonates) when there is audience participation.
Exercise 2: Entering/Exiting
This is an exercise in finding as many varying ways to enter and exit a stage/space. Oftentimes, the interesting endings or beginnings are neglected. Essentially, this is cultivating good Jos and Kyus of Jo-Ha-Kyus. Consider also that when one enters or exits the space, the audience is to believe that the activity was already going on before you went on stage and will still go on after one has left.
Deterritorialized & Beyond Human Audience
A deterritorialized audience is one that breaks the bounds of what typically would be known as audience. In performance art, for instance, when there is audience interaction, the audience has stepped outside of the bounds of mere observer and mixed with performer. In this way, they could be called perforbserver or spectactor.
A good performer is aware of the audience, and if this is so, has not that performer then also become the spectator of the spectator?
In the butoh jam phenomena, we may really see an audience/performer integration take place. The audience at any moment may join and what would have been seen as performance may the next minute be spectatorship.
What entails audience can also be taken beyond human such as animals, ourselves (such as in the mirror), or as even abstract as spirits or God(s), which expresses the performativity/theater within Bhakti yoga (yoga of devotion). The audience can also be the simple part of ourselves that is observing. Early dance throughout the ages was often a ritual for spirits or gods. Can we make, again, the spirits or gods the audience?
1 Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York :Atheneum, 1968. Print. Page 61.
2 Lakoff, George. Aspects Of The Self Are Distinct Individuals. Conceptual Metaphor Home Page. 1994. http://www.lang.osaka-u.ac.jp/~sugimoto/MasterMetaphorList/metaphors/The_Progress_Of_External_Events_Is_Forward_Motion.html
³ Artaud, Antonin. Artaud on Theatre. Edited with commentary by Claude Schumacher. 1989. Page xxxiii.
4 Ohno, K. (1 997b), Workshop Words (Keiko no Kotoba), Tokyo: Shichou Sha. (Japanese Edition).
5 Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque. New Jersey. 1982. Print. Page 6.
6 Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Hoboken. 1968. Page 40.
