Audience Participation in Theatre

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Audience Participation
in Theatre
Aesthetics of the Invitation

Gareth White
© Gareth White 2013
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This is for all the Armadillos…
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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1
Audience participation 1
Why ‘aesthetics’? 9
The practice and theory of audience participation 14
Emancipating spectators 20
Subjectivity as material and medium 25
The structure of the book 27

1 Process and Procedure 29

Antony Jackson and frame analysis 32
Goffman’s Frame Analysis 34
The frame analysis of audience participation 39
Roles and resources 44
Working inside the frame 49
Control and social structure 51
Horizons of participation 55
The aesthetic meaning of agency 62
Armadillo Theatre 65
Analysing Armadillo’s procedure 69

2 Risk and Rational Action 73

Risk in performance 73
Real and perceived risk 76
Actual risk in audience participation 78
Horizons of risk 81
Risk management as procedural authorship 83
Ethical issues in the management of real and perceived risk 89
Protecting participants into involvement 94
Reading the audience participant 98
Performativity and the public self 103
Know One’s Fool 107

3 Irrational Interactions 114

Emotion in audience participation 116
Embodied cognition and the enactive theory of mind 120
vii
viii Contents

Empathy and intersubjectivity in audience participation 126

Laughter 129
Crowds 133
Liminality and communitas 138
Hypnosis 143
Procedural authorship and harnessing intersubjectivity 146
de La Guarda’s liminoid participation 149
Embodiment, enculturation and meaning 156
4 Accepting the Invitation 159
Theatre audiences and feedback loops 161
A new horizon 164
Weather on the horizon 166
Gaining roles and responsibilities 168
Experiential learning 173
Reflexivity and witnessing 176
Self-awareness and self-forgetfulness 181
Autopoiesis, allopoiesis, heteropoiesis 187
Tim Crouch: The Author and I, Malvolio 188
5 Conclusion 195
The procedural author 195
The aesthetic theory 197
Making special 198
Patterning and elaborating participation 201
The aesthetic regime 202

Notes 207

Bibliography 214

Index 221
Acknowledgements

Like many first books, I imagine, this has taken a very long time to
emerge, and thus has gathered inspiration and assistance from many
more people than I will be able to acknowledge here. It originated as
an academic enquiry when I started a part-time PhD at Goldsmiths
College in 1999, but the germ of an idea that there was something
more to audience participation than a means to an end occurred to
me earlier than that. Armadillo Theatre’s work between 1993 and
1996 is described and critiqued in the chapters that follow, but the
people who devised and performed it with me, and set me on the
path to the peculiar obsessions of this text, deserve the first thanks.
To the original Armadillos, David Gilligan, Nina Anderson and Tim
Dowan, and the second wave, including Tracey Emerson and Will
Meddis: thank you.
For help and support during a long and meandering PhD student-
ship, which provided the foundation of the first half of the book, I
would like to thank my supervisor, Brian Roberts, and Katja Hilevaara,
Alex Mermikides and other members of the Drama@Goldsmiths
research posse. Thanks to the Research Office at Central School of
Speech and Drama for financing invaluable sabbatical leave and to
my colleagues for taking up the slack. Particular thanks to Stephen
Farrier, Katherine Low, Sheila Preston, Josh Edelman, Kelly Vassie and
the Lynnes Kendrick and McCarthy, for giving their time and gener-
ous attention to early drafts of these chapters, to Jane Munro and
The Visitors, for some stimulating PaR. Thanks to the students of BA
Drama, Applied Theatre and Education, guinea pigs for these ideas
in lectures and devised performances over the years; and also to the
Performance, Community and Identity working group at TaPRA for
listening and asking the difficult questions. And thanks to Pichon
Baldinu and others in the De La Guarda company of 2000 ( Jim, Helen,
Claire); and to Jonathan Kay and Tim Crouch, at either end of a dec-
ade, unaware of me stalking them around the country. Thanks to Paula
Kennedy at Palgrave for being into it, guiding me through the process,
and finding a sympathetic and insightful (and still anonymous) peer
reviewer. Thanks to my mother Peggy and my sister Paula for encour-
agement and sustenance, and to Sam Evans for putting up with me,
for a while.

ix
x Acknowledgements

And thanks to you, Dear Reader. If there is to be hope for a book to

mean anything, it depends on you. I have found it helpful at points to
speculate how ‘we’ react to performances and their invitations to par-
ticipate. I don’t mean to assume that everyone feels as I do, or ought to.
I hope you are not offended.
Introduction

Audience participation

There are few things in the theatre that are more despised than audi-
ence participation. The prospect of audience participation makes people
fearful; the use of audience participation makes people embarrassed, not
only for themselves but for the theatre makers who choose to inflict it
on their audiences.
This is true not only among theatre’s traditionalists, but also among
those with broad horizons, aficionados of theatre informed by a century of
experiments with theatre form, by the influence of ‘performance’ practices
originating in fine art, and by an understanding of non-western theatre
traditions. Audience participation is still often seen as one of the most mis-
conceived, unproductive and excruciating of the avant-garde’s blind alleys,
or otherwise as evidence of the childish crassness of popular performance.
Meanwhile techniques, practices and innovations that ask for the
activity of audience members and that alter the conventions of per-
formance and audience relationships proliferate and garner critical and
popular support. What is it that makes participation exciting to some
audiences, and horrifying to others? Or, perhaps, what makes some
kinds of audience participation seem trivial and embarrassing, and oth-
ers substantial, seductive and effective? In what ways are the additional
activities (additional to the activity that usually adheres to the role of
‘audience member’, that is) of audience members meaningful? What
kind of conceptual vocabulary do we need in order to answer these
questions? Unpicking and exploring some of the difficulties and poten-
tials of audience participation is the purpose of this book.
This is not, however, a defence of audience participation, nor is
it an attempt to re-define or re-describe the relationship between

1
2 Audience Participation in Theatre

performers and audiences. I do not aim to convince you that

‘conventional’ audience–performer relationships are bankrupt (I shall
return to that ‘conventional’ shortly), or that participatory performance
has the special capacity to liberate audiences or to make spectators more
human. Audience participation has many passionate advocates already,
and I am inclined to side with them on occasion, but my aim here is
to articulate some important things about audience participation that
have not been clearly articulated before, and to do so in a systematic
way that can be applied to audience participation of any kind.
As I write, fashions for ‘immersive’ theatre and ‘one-to-one’ thea-
tre are in the ascendant; the former tends to make use of spatial and
architectural interventions, and to ask spectators to involve themselves
physically in tracking down or pursuing the performance; the latter
seeks a more direct relationship with the individual spectator. Both
of these putative new forms often, but not always, ask the spectator
to speak or act in dialogue with the performers or the performance
environment, or to make choices that structure their experience: they
invite the spectator to participate in ways that are differently active to
that which is typical of the theatre event. Both terms serve to legitimate
participatory practice, offering something more edgy and exciting than
mere audience participation, perhaps.
Both trends are undoubtedly influenced by participatory practices in
live art and fine art performance, where spectator/art work relationships
have been a matter of experiment and innovation since the inception of
this tradition early in the twentieth century, though from the basis of –
and often as a specific challenge to – a set of conventions and aesthetic
principles that belong to the tradition of fine art rather than that of the
theatre. The borders between theatre and ‘performance’ in this tradition
are now very porous, and though this book is centrally concerned with
theatre, and titled accordingly, I will use some important and interest-
ing ‘performance’ examples alongside those drawn from what belongs
more self-consciously to ‘theatre’; there is a growing body of theoretical
work in relation to fine art performance that is vital to my analysis,
as I will discuss later in this introduction. But the distinction between
theatre and performance remains meaningful, even if it depends on
institutional practice as much as actual performance practice: what
happens in a theatre building, is marketed as theatre or created by a
theatre company, rather than presented or promoted by a gallery and
created by an ‘artist’, is recognised and treated differently, though the
performance activity itself might be the same in all other regards.1 This
is not the place for a full discussion of this strange phenomenon, but
 Introduction 3

it is an assumption that is the basis for writing a book about theatre,

rather than the now common theatre/performance; and though I will
cite several examples that might be designated as such, I am not con-
cerned exclusively with the borderline territory of performance theatre.
So the new trends, the immersive and the one-to-one, motivate an
examination of audience participation at this point in time, but they
take their place among a much broader range of theatre practices and
traditions. Audience participation has always been important in applied
and social theatre, where the aim to engage audience members in social
activism and personal development has often been achieved through
direct involvement in drama at the point of performance of a play.
The techniques of participation that endure and thrive this tradition,
as well as those in popular theatres, from the British pantomime to the
musical, are only occasionally acknowledged or borrowed in the new
trend for participation, but they are just as deserving of analysis and
interpretation.
Throughout the book the argument will be illustrated by a promis-
cuous set of examples from practice across this range. Many of them
will be drawn from personal practice as an audience participant or as a
practitioner. Others are drawn from the literature described later in this
introduction, or other people’s accounts of their experience of audience
participation. Occasionally I have resorted to hypothetical illustrations.
Nothing here is articulated with the rigour of a case study, though some
of the data was gathered and recorded in this way for other projects, it
serves instead as an aid to the articulation of a set of concepts that the
reader may find helpful in their own practice or analysis. Each chapter
will conclude with a detailed discussion of a performance, or a set of
connected performances, that illustrates how the argument of the chap-
ter can be applied. These key examples are, to give an impression of the
frame of reference of the argument at this stage: Armadillo Theatre’s
touring workshop performances for schools (1993–95); Jonathan Kay’s
fooling performances at Glastonbury Festival and his touring show,
Know One’s Fool, (2000–03); De La Guarda’s Villa Villa (2000), an inter-
nationally toured dance performance from Argentina; and two plays by
Tim Crouch, The Author and I, Malvolio (2010–12).
Of course all audiences are participatory. Without participation per-
formance would be nothing but action happening in the presence of
other people. Audiences laugh, clap, cry, fidget, and occasionally heckle;
they pay for tickets, they turn up at the theatre, they stay to the end
of the performance or they walk out. They are affected emotionally,
cognitively and physically by the action they witness. Performers are
4 Audience Participation in Theatre

inspired by their audiences and are dismayed by them, feel and feed off
connections with audiences, or perhaps try to ignore them. Audiences
and actors, writers, directors and producers work together to bind
theatre and society together, so that one influences the other, inhabits
and is co-extensive with the other, exists in the other as metaphor and
metonymy. The balance in this relationship can be precarious, however:
performers usually retain authority over the action, while the spectators
usually retain the right to stay out of the action, and to watch and hear
it. To change these relationships in some way asks both parties to sur-
render something: both give up some of the control they might expect
to have over their part of the event. Should we, then, consider all theatre
for its interactive nature, and analyse it as fundamentally consisting of
interactions that happen in many different directions, not just between
performers and from performers to audiences? Clearly yes, and many
writers, such as Daphna Ben Chaim (Distance in the Theatre, 1981), Neil
Blackadder (Performing Opposition, 2003) and Erika Fischer-Lichte (The
Transformative Power of Performance 2008) take this approach. But I pro-
pose that there is a difference between the typical interactions expected
and licensed in audience behaviour, and audience participation; it is not
merely that some kinds of theatre are more interactive than others, but
that there is a meaningful distinction to be made, from which there are
useful things to be learnt.
My definition of audience participation is simple: the participation of
an audience, or an audience member, in the action of a performance.
The discussion that follows throughout this book uses examples of
audience participation that can be understood in these terms. This
kind of audience participation appears in many kinds of performance:
far too many and too broad a range of practices to be considered as a
movement, a school or a tradition of its own. But thinking about these
things together, for what they have in common, is worthwhile because
participation of this kind is exceptional, even though common. It is
an exception to the familiar social occasion of theatrical performance,
in the sense that we understand what an audience is in this context
and understand how we should behave as part of one, so that activity
that goes beyond this role feels different and is different to the activity
that we expect to see and take part in. It feels different to the person
who does it and to those who witness it. In this important experiential
sense it is different to the action performed by those who take roles
as performers, even if the actions they perform are in any other sense
the same; and it is different to the activity performed in the role of
spectator, even if this activity (in the form of laughter and applause,
 Introduction 5

for example) might be louder, longer, and a more faithful expression

of the what the spectator feels at any given moment. In this definition
activity where people arrive at the event as participants – at a work-
shop or a rehearsal, for example – is not audience participation. Nor
is the experience of audience members who respond to a performance
without becoming part of its action – in their deeply or shallowly felt
emotional and intellectual engagement with the work. Nor is the ritual
activity that belongs to the role of audience: applause, laughter, and
the vital choice to attend a theatre event in the first place. All of these
things can appropriately be called ‘participation’ in theatre, but they
are not what I want to consider as audience participation. This simple
definition entails some problems, of course. What is an audience? Why
should conventional audience response, which can make such differ-
ence to the course of an evening at the theatre, not be included? What
is action? What is a performance?
These questions run through the book, and are addressed in many
different ways. The origin and experience of action, particularly in
the sense of agency in relation to events, is articulated with terms
from social psychology, sociology, phenomenology and cognitive phi-
losophy. Action in the theatre always has at least two dimensions: as
everyday social action and as action within the extra-everyday space
(often but not always conceived as a fictional space) of the perform-
ance. These two dimensions combine and conflict with each other
in especially interesting ways in audience participatory performance,
which I will show to be important to the way this action functions
as aesthetic material. The audience, too, will be conceptualised in dif-
ferent ways through the book. For my purposes an audience is both
a socially constructed practice, and a notional position in relation to
external and internal phenomena: we become audiences and under-
stand what we do as audience members because of traditions that we
inherit and adapt, but we also go through our lives taking the position
of spectator to the world around us, our own actions in it as well as
those of other people.
The third important term in my definition is performance, a term that
also has more than one relevant meaning. Performance has a register
that comes before the theatrical or the artistic, in which we manage our
presentation of ourselves, and in which we find the materials that allow
us to become ourselves: audience participation exists in this register, as
well as in the territory of theatrical and artistic performance. Audience
members are performing themselves, and performing ‘audience’ as they
watch performances. But in the definition above ‘performance’ stands
6 Audience Participation in Theatre

for the theatrical and artistic register into which participants step, tak-
ing with them their performative social selves.
However, having asserted this definition, I must acknowledge the
degree to which it is provisional and strategic: it serves to demarcate a
field that will be meaningful to most readers, and vital to the framing
of my argument. Although the defence of the terms of the argument, as
outlined in the previous paragraphs, will become a useful and informa-
tive thread to that argument, it will not entirely remove a difficulty
with the definition that entails from its basis on contingent (historical,
institutional, conventional) practices: that these practices change, and
most importantly, that the phenomena that I am observing are often
instrumental in this process of change. So what constitutes action in
my definition will change, sometimes quite quickly, as conventions of
audience behaviour change. Rather than fundamentally undermining
this definition, this invites attention to this changing context, which is
often – not coincidentally – where the interesting dimensions of audi-
ence participatory performance occur. It also invites a shift in approach
to this definition and the need for such a definition: if what constitutes
participation is necessarily constantly in flux, why attempt to demar-
cate these exceptional practices at all? Why not pay attention to all
social action as participation, on its continuum with dramatic and per-
formance action? This is certainly a tactic that I will take occasionally,
as my argument progresses, as it is necessary to explore this borderline
just as theatre practitioners explore it. But it is not my purpose to write
a new theory of the audience in theatre, so I will continue with my
definition in place, as it puts some useful – if at times uncertain and
porous – borders around a field.
In the opening paragraphs of Space and Performance (2000), Gay
McAuley shows how the twentieth century’s definitions of theatre (she
gives examples from Bertolt Brecht, Eric Bentley, Jerzy Grotowski and
Peter Brook) all acknowledge the vital communication between the
audience and the performer. McAuley finds that theatre is built around
the spatial relationship between these positions:

The specificity of theatre is not to be found in its relationship to the

dramatic, as film and television have shown through their appro-
priation and massive exploitation of the latter, but in that it consists
essentially of the interaction between performers and spectators in a
given space. Theatre is a social event, occurring in the auditorium as
well as on the stage, and the primary signifiers are physical and even
spatial in nature. (McAuley 2000: 5)
 Introduction 7

The defining spatial characteristic in this passage is the division of one

group from the other, so that they can be brought together in a social
order based on this separation. A social occasion becomes a theatre per-
formance partly through the separation of performers from audiences.
The manner of this separation, achieved architecturally and socially, is
historically and culturally specific, as is the behaviour considered appro-
priate to the role of audience members. The current relative passivity of
the audience in the European theatre tradition has not always been the
convention, as Susan Kattwinkel (2003: ix) observes:

The passive audience really only came into being in the nineteenth
century, as theatre began its division into artistic and entertainment
forms. Practitioners and theorists such as Wagner, with his ‘mystic
chasm’, and he and Henry Irving with their darkened auditoriums,
took some of the many small steps in the nineteenth century that
physically separated the audience from the performance and discour-
aged spectatorial acts of ownership or displeasure or even vociferous
approval.

Prior to this the sense of the activity that was appropriate to an audience
was much broader, as it still is in many non-European cultures and other
performance traditions (such as stand-up comedy or popular music).
Pre-nineteenth century European and North American audiences would
socialise openly in the auditorium, buy and sell, and venture opinions
about the play itself, to the extent of exercising a right to ‘cry down’ or
‘damn’ a play (as in Blackadder’s excellent account of the last throws
of this power of veto at the turn of the twentieth century). What an
audience is and does is historically and culturally contingent, often in
complex ways. In this context my definition of audience participation
is also historically and culturally contingent, not in the sense that it is
intended to pin down what audience participation is at the historical
and cultural moment at which I write, but in the sense that as under-
standings change of what an audience is and does, so the sense of what
is or isn’t audience participation under this definition also changes.
Famous examples of audience participation are often notable events
in the progress of experimental performance: The Living Theatre’s
Paradise Now; the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69; Yoko Ono’s
Cut Piece; Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm O; Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervix
Announcement; De La Guarda’s Villa Villa; Punchdrunk’s Faust; and
Tim Crouch’s The Author. Anyone familiar with these pieces or their
reputations will note also that some of them are notorious as markers
8 Audience Participation in Theatre

of the excess of experimentation. There are also audience participation

practices that are less transgressive and which inhabit quite different
traditions with quite different ambitions: the British pantomime, for
example, and the Theatre in Education movement. These modes of
practice also stand out as exceptions to the general rules of theatre prac-
tice because they feature audience participation so heavily. Audience
participation marks a border in our understanding of what theatre is
and can be, and like many border zones, it is interesting as such. But in
commentary on moments (even of iconic moments) of audience partici-
pation, there is often a significant gap, a lack of concern for how it was
achieved, and for what moments of participation might have meant in
themselves because people other than the performing company acted
in them. The fact that people have participated and what they have
contributed to a performance might be commented on, but how it is
that they have been led to do so is most often not considered worthy of
comment. In an account of Ono’s Cut Piece: ‘[t]he audience was invited
to cut the clothing from Ono, who sat or kneeled on the stage. Ono’s
placing herself as the object for unwrapping or potential destruction
was rare’ (Iles in Ono 1997: 14). The imagery of exposure and violence
is referred to, as is the artist’s place at the centre of the work, but the
even more rare placement of an audience member as the subject that
does the unwrapping – or as the potential agent of destruction – is not
discussed here or in the rest of the article, nor is the procedure that led
them to it. Without this involvement of the spectator as a performer
of the crucial action of the piece, it would have been a quite different
work, and yet the technique that allows this to happen goes unre-
corded, as does its effect on the participant. But a consideration is nec-
essary, because Ono clearly intended something to happen that actively
involved her audience, and this intention is not the same thing as the
process through which it comes to fruition. Ono has made herself and
her body into a part of the media of her art, but she has also made the
audience members and their bodies into media. Further questions arise
about the performances of these participants: Ono has involved them
in an act of symbolic violence, and it seems safe to assume that their
participation is voluntary, but beyond that how far can we say that they
are in control of what they do? It is quite correct that this account pri-
oritises the agency of Ono, because she has ultimately inflicted this vio-
lence on herself, in an event that appears to have left participants with
two kind of conflict to choose from: either rejecting Ono’s invitation to
cut, or cutting as they have been asked to. Just who has cut or not cut
may be less important, in this instance, than Ono’s choice to initiate the
 Introduction 9

action, but we can be confident that it was important to those present

whether they participated in this way or did not.
There are procedures through which participation is invited, and
there are processes through which the performances invited become
meaningful in a way that is different to other performances. These proc-
esses make the audience member into material that is used to compose
the performance: an artistic medium. This book brings the processes
and media of audience participation into focus and provides a theory
for uncovering the procedures through which practitioners create the
participatory processes they aim for. Most simply put, the argument is
that these processes and procedures, particularly in the control they
both share and withhold and in the point of view that they engender
in the participant, are aesthetically important.
The range of practices brought into play by this definition and by
the nature of my enquiry is very broad, but there is some narrowing of
the field through a focus on the invitation to participate, rather than the
whole phenomenon. There is more to be said about how participation
is maintained by practitioners, and experienced by those who accept
an invitation, but my analysis will mostly be limited to the activity
that makes an invitation understood by an audience and the process
through which they accept (or decline) that invitation. This includes
the first few moments of participation, as the change of role takes effect,
and inevitably will stray further into the implications of what kind of
participation has been invited and what kind of activity can ensue.
By focussing on the moment when the definition of the theatrical
situation changes I aim to unpack the most important aspects of this
transformation.

Why ‘aesthetics’?

In an important sense anything that provides a new component of the

general theory of art is a work of aesthetics; but this is an ‘aesthetics
of the invitation’ in a more deliberate sense than that. It is part of my
assertion that the actions and experiences of audience participants is
worth paying attention to: I aim to show that these actions and expe-
riences are aesthetic material and have characteristics that need to be
thought through in an appropriate way. It is an assertion of a concern
with the dynamics, functions and value that the moment or episode of
audience participation has as part of an event or work of art. The key
questions become, in this light, concerned with what about audience
participation has to be considered as aesthetic material, and what is
10 Audience Participation in Theatre

particular about the aesthetic material of audience participation. The

answers to these questions, as I have just suggested, lie with the way the
audience member herself or himself becomes the artist’s medium, and
so the work’s aesthetic material.
Aesthetics as a discipline has always been concerned with these values,
characteristics and functions, but the word ‘aesthetic’ has proliferated in
meanings in a way that is not always helpful in organising our thinking
about these matters. As Leonard Koren says in his short but very useful
book Which Aesthetics Do You Mean?: Ten Definitions (2010: 3):

although “aesthetic” and “aesthetics” appear to agreeably elevate the

tone of whatever discourse they’re used in, they rarely function as
mere decorous vacuity. Yet because these terms confusingly refer to
so many disparate but often connected things, the exact meaning of
the speaker or writer, unless qualified, is sometimes unclear.

Of Koren’s ten definitions, several will be at stake in my discussion.

Most of all it is the nature of my argument as a development of a small
corner of the philosophy of art that qualifies it under this term. But my
argument also has a part to play in continuing discussions about the
place and nature of beauty, and other dimensions of artistic quality, and
of the development of artistic styles and tastes. Koren also notes that
the aesthetic sometimes stands for a particular cognitive mode, and the
intimate relationship between audience participatory performance and
the subjectivity of the participant makes this very relevant.
Aesthetics, as the philosophy of art, has always been concerned with
what art is and what it is good for. One of the consequences of the
enormous broadening of the available categories of art practice, and the
phenomenon of the appropriation of the everyday to make art (in col-
lage, in surrealism, in live art and so on) through which an object or an
action becomes art simply because the artist says so (and other people
are sympathetic enough to this claim to treat it as such), is that since the
early part of the twentieth century aesthetics has had to proliferate too.
It is no longer possible to have one theory of the aesthetic – if indeed
universal theories of art were ever adequate – it is necessary to recognise
a different ‘aesthetic’ for each different practice of making and receiving
work. This is related to, but not entirely the same as, the sense of an
aesthetic as a style of art making and its associated consumption. It is
relevant to the argument of this book where the performance practices
that include audience participation each evolve their own distinctive
aesthetic, which include participation in their media alongside more
 Introduction 11

familiar elements such as spoken language, choreographed movement

and scenography. An individual aesthetic will contain an implicit defi-
nition of what art is, within its practice: what is, and by implication
what is not, to be viewed or experienced in an art-appropriate way in
the context of this practice. And indeed it will contain an understand-
ing of what it means to treat things in an art-like way.
The argument of this book is that there are certain things that will
appear repeatedly in the aesthetics (in this sense of multiple, distinc-
tive associations of production, recognition and reception) of audience
participatory performance practice, such that they are worth consider-
ing as foundational concepts for the analysis of this kind of work, or
of the aesthetic that is in play in any example of it. The work becomes
meaningful through its aesthetic, and this aesthetic – as a collection
of propositions about what an artwork is and how to respond to it – if
examined in detail can tell us much more about the meanings and
potential meanings of the work than an analysis that takes effects as
the first line of investigation: in order to understand an aesthetic we
must understand its media. The ‘what it is’ of an artwork is built on a
common understanding of artists and audiences of what the media of
the work are, what is to be given attention and what kind of attention
to pay to it. What I do not aim to do here, however, is to isolate and
describe the specific aesthetic of any of the contemporary trends for
audience participatory performance. This research is being done else-
where, by other people, in relation to immersive performance and the
one-to-one, and with particular depth and rigour regarding ‘relational’
performance and participatory live art, as I will discuss below. I am con-
fident that what is thought through here will be useful to the identifica-
tion of the aesthetic conventions that adhere to particular movements,
trends and modes of practice, and inevitably my discussion will sketch
some of these conventions as I illustrate my argument with examples;
but my aim is to isolate and examine what it is that is likely to become
aesthetic material when audiences are asked to take action in a perform-
ance, and what kinds of outcomes are to be expected when these things
are treated ‘aesthetically’.
Some trends in aesthetic theory have tried to find the root of a special
‘aesthetic sense’, to explain what it is about responding to art works that
is so peculiarly affecting; this idea is generally rejected in the progressive
aesthetics that I am sympathetic to. Some theories – Clive Bell’s (2007)
idea of an ‘aesthetic emotion’, for example, and in another of Koren’s
definitions, of aesthetics as ‘a cognitive mode’ – recognise the origin of
the term and the discipline in ‘aisthesis’ as sensation and perception in
12 Audience Participation in Theatre

general; which is echoed by Wolfgang Welsch’s suggestion that in an

aesthetics beyond aesthetics: ‘aisthesis should provide the framework
of the discipline while art, although important, will be only one of its
subjects’ (quoted in Halsall, Jansen and O’Connor 2009: 191). Art has
a powerful affective dimension, continuous with the affective response
we might have to other things and events – to nature, the environment,
and to other people and what they do. Similarly, I am interested in
aesthetic affects, in the sense that thoughts and feelings are engendered
in response to audience participation. As I shall discuss throughout the
book, but particularly in Chapters 3 and 4, being in a position to take
action, taking action, and having a first-person relationship with that
action will inflect the understanding of and the feelings generated by
performance.
The idea of the aesthetic as a generalised mode of thought and being
has been the subject of vigorous critique, and is treated with consider-
able scepticism, particularly following the work of Pierre Bourdieu; Terry
Eagleton and more recently Jacques Rancière have added their consid-
erable theoretical weight behind this critique. Bourdieu’s sociology has
shown how the social practices that we collect under the concepts of
art and the aesthetic belong to our class and cultural structure, and
ultimately serve to preserve privilege. Rancière, (2004, 2009b), though
opposed to Bourdieu’s particular conclusions about social structure,
also opposes a sense of the aesthetic as transcendent, and portrays the
aesthetic as one of a series of ‘regimes’ under which that which we
now call art has been governed. Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic
(1990) surveys the thought that has accompanied this regime, from
Baumgarten and Kant as the originators of the enlightenment aesthetics
with its project to separate the understanding of art from politics, eth-
ics, logic and other kinds of thought, and to conceive a separate space
and a separate state of being for art. Eagleton’s view is broadly in line
with Bourdieu, that by and large the concept of the aesthetic has been
a bourgeois ideology, serving to justify – in varying and often contra-
dictory ways – social relations in the service of capital. In The Radical
Aesthetic (2000) Isobel Armstrong has challenged this view, proposing
that the propositions of European aesthetics over this time have often
been explicitly progressive, and sometimes able to put into effect the
work of using art in the causes of liberty and equality; there is work to
do, however:

The project that arises from questions about democratic access to art
is actually that of changing the category itself, or re-describing it, so
 Introduction 13

that what we know looks different, and what we exclude from tra-
ditional categories of art also looks different. This task is not accom-
plished. (Armstrong 2000: 16)

A contemporary aesthetics is implicated in this project, as is any pro-

gressive art practice. As a practitioner and teacher of ‘applied’ theatre
myself the work of re-describing the category of art and its potential for
social change is a daily task; making robust claims for emerging practice
like the ambitious and thoughtful use of audience participation is also
part of that task; and the following propositions about what else the
idea of an aesthetics can mean are proposed with this context in mind.
Identifying the media of audience participation serves this task, but
further to this is identifying the way in which we relate to these media
and make them meaningful.
The idea of the ‘aesthetically pleasing’ is often used in the mak-
ing of theatre as well as in everyday conversation about encounters
with things that can be subject to a simple judgement: furnishings
and architecture, music and clothes, the arrangement of food on a
plate, lighting, costume and sound, movement in a space. This idea is
somehow included in the category of art but excepted from its more
rigorous demands. Pleasure in this sense is something that has some of
the characteristics of the beautiful in Kantian aesthetics, it is palpably
personal, but also worth arguing in a general sense, and it can prompt
the recognition of a property apparently held by the object in question.
Obviously this kind of aesthetic pleasure has to be understood as part
of the regime of the practice of art that we live within, so that what we
feel in response to it, what we are able to say about it (and say through
it) is anything but independent of who we are and where we come from.
But this notion of aesthetic pleasure does point to something ineffable
in art experience, the felt response that can persuade us to make claims
for universality, or at least to urge others to appreciate what we appreci-
ate. If this is something like the beauty that has fascinated and eluded
aestheticians for hundreds of years, and which is now treated with great
scepticism as a tool of dominant (particularly sexist) bourgeois ideolo-
gies, then it survives in everyday speech. There has been a return to the
idea of beauty and the felt response to art experience, for example in
Janet Woolf’s The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (2008), which proposes a femi-
nist approach to beauty, in Joe Winston’s Beauty and Education (2010),
which asks for a consideration of the power of beauty in pedagogy, and
James Thompson’s Performance Affects (2009), which similarly shows
how emotional response to participatory drama can be as important as
14 Audience Participation in Theatre

its capacity to facilitate measurable ‘impact’. Where classical aesthetics

will privilege the beautiful or the sublime, progressive and participatory
aesthetics (both styles and theories) are as interested in other pleasures
and other effects: the uncanny, the unexpected and the transgressive,
perhaps. Most importantly they include the potential for political and
ethical values and outcomes to form part of the definition of aesthetics
and the work of art.
Most of the significant writing about audience participation has
placed a political agenda front and centre, prior to aesthetic considera-
tions of these various kinds. This is not the case with other kinds of
performance, for which we are able to identify their formal character-
istics and their media in a way that is at least in one sense prior to the
discussion of politics. In music we are aware that tone, rhythm and
volume are the media of the musician; in dance the moving body and
its relationship to the space around it and to other bodies are the com-
parable fundamental building blocks of the art form; in theatre these
spatio-temporal elements usually combine with the voice and words.
As Bourdieu has demonstrated convincingly, none of these things can
be considered as independent of their social context, or immune to a
political critique. All of these artistic forms, even the manipulation of
sound, space and time in music and dance, are implicated in the politics
of social differentiation and its expressions of power and subordination.
But in articulating these forms we allow ourselves a space for discuss-
ing fundamental elements that defers the political and ethical until a
later point. What I want to do for audience participation is to suggest
that there are questions of media that are fundamental to it that can be
discussed in these terms, and to defer the political analysis of them very
briefly. As John Dewey says in Art as Experience: ‘Everything depends
upon the way in which material is used when it operates as medium’
(1980: 66). This may be the biggest contribution that will be made by
this book in terms of ‘aesthetics’ – identifying what it is that practition-
ers of audience participation work with.

The practice and theory of audience participation

Where does audience participation happen? As a teacher of applied the-

atre and a maker of Theatre in Education (TIE), I declare an interest: as
someone who has taken audience participation for granted throughout
my career, and who is determined to think and write about its applica-
tion in community and educational contexts at the same time as in
more conventional theatrical contexts. TIE, Theatre of the Oppressed,
 Introduction 15

Museum Theatre, Reminiscence Theatre, Theatre for Development and

all the other multiplying fields that find themselves under the discur-
sive and pedagogical umbrella of applied theatre, whenever they put on
performances for audiences, are as likely as not to ask those audiences to
participate. These fields deal in participation of other kinds: longer term
involvement in the research, conception, devising and reception of
performances, as well as participation in workshops that never reach an
audience at all, are these days often considered to be the most challeng-
ing and appropriate activities to make lasting impressions on people’s
lives. Audience participation is no longer at the cutting edge of applied
theatre practice, but nevertheless, these fields and others like them are
part of the ‘where’ of audience participation.
Children’s theatre, including British pantomime and other tradi-
tional and popular forms, often make use of audience participation, or
have audience activities as familiar parts of their codes of behaviour.
Commercial musicals also have their interactive components: some-
times explicitly framed invitations to sing along, (as with The Rocky
Horror Show or Return to the Forbidden Planet) though also in the appar-
ently audience-led mass singing often heard in the ‘jukebox’ musicals of
the last decade (Mamma Mia, We Will Rock You, even Graeae’s Reasons to
be Cheerful). Though audience participation has often been a marginal
and experimental impulse, it also has its place in the most commercial
performance and is enjoyed by some of the largest audiences.
I have already noted a series of recognisably experimental works,
some of which should be thought of as ‘live art’ or ‘performance’; many
of the most interesting approaches to participation happen in these
areas or on their very porous boundaries with experimental theatre.
Among the conceptual points of origin for performance in the fine art
tradition is the presence of the viewer of the work in the temporal event
of its creation and reception, and the relationship of the artist to that
event and to the viewer. This is work that is predicated on formal experi-
mentation, so the proliferation of positions for the viewer/participant is
to be expected. Explicit connections between fine art performance and
theatre are sometimes evident, as in Schechner and the Performance
Group’s collaboration with Alan Kaprow for their early ‘environmental’
theatre, while Robert Wilson and Hans Peter Kuhn’s HG (1995, a pro-
duction which is an acknowledged influence on Punchdrunk’s Felix
Barrett) saw acclaimed theatre practitioners adopting the style of the
art installation.
Audience participation in applied theatre can be traced to early TIE
and Augusto Boal’s early use of ‘simultaneous dramaturgy’ in the 1960s;
16 Audience Participation in Theatre

live art performance has made use of it at least as far back as Kaprow’s
‘happenings’; its use in traditional and commercial performance can be
traced further back than that, to the nineteenth century music hall and
beyond; there is an unbroken continuity between traditional perform-
ance in some African traditions and contemporary playwriting – Femi
Osofisan, for example, makes this explicit in the form and content of
plays like Once Upon Four Robbers (1978, published in Gilbert 2001).
But though it is not new, it seems to be particularly current, especially
evidently in fringe theatre in London over the past decade. To say why
this is so suggests a different, historical and cultural enquiry to this
one, but for the moment note that over this period a brief – and not
exhaustive – list of successful audience participatory theatre playing
in London would include: De La Guarda’s Villa Villa (1999/2000) and
Fuerzabruta (2006); Shunt’s Dance Bear Dance (2003) or Amato Saltone
(2006); Punchdrunk’s Faust (2005) and The Masque of the Red Death
(2007); Tim Crouch’s The Audience (2009–10); and Para Active and
Zecora Ura’s Hotel Medea (2009–12). Though all of these are recognis-
ably fringe events, each (with the exception of The Audience, at the
Royal Court, though this too has been revived several times and toured
extensively) had a very wide appeal. They played to large audiences
over long and often extended runs, and often charged ticket prices
equal to shows in the West End. The kinds of participation on offer in
these pieces vary immensely, and are often accompanied by alternative
audience–performer formations and relationships. The appetite among
a substantial number of theatre-goers to be or become a different kind
of audience, and to accept the invitation to participate, is evident.
There is a growing tendency for theatre artists and producers to label
work as immersive: Punchdrunk, for example, claim to be pioneers of
‘a game-changing form of immersive theatre’ (2010). This particular
term is interesting in its implications and assumptions about audi-
ence experience, and about the nature and potential of theatre and
performance. Perhaps the term will become the point of convergence
for a trend towards experimental audience strategies, but its usefulness
in this study is to point up an attitude to the experiential nature of
participation. Not all audience participation would be claimed under
the rubric of the immersive (vague though that is, at this stage), but the
suggestion of being inside that comes with the idea of the immersive
has resonances with the experience of being able to take action within
the work, and with the changed point of view that is gained through
this experience that I suggest are the special characteristics of audience
participation. To be inside the work, not just inside its physical and
 Introduction 17

temporal space but inside it as an aesthetic, affective, phenomenologi-

cal entity gives a different aspect to the idea of a point of view, and of
action, so that the idea of immersive theatre will be a particularly useful
reference point for parts of my argument.
Despite its significant presence in diverse fields of theatre and per-
formance, and this growing popularity among theatre makers and
audiences, comparatively little has been written about the processes of
audience participation, even when the phenomenon has been docu-
mented. Two books, which bear the title Audience Participation, serve as
examples of two different ways in which the field has been addressed
in print up to now. The earlier of the two, Brian Way’s 1980 volume
(Audience Participation: Theatre for Young People), is a practitioner’s guide
to a specialist practice: the children’s theatre of which he was a pioneer.
In contrast to this is Susan Kattwinkel’s collection of essays (2003), each
of which is concerned with different performances, rather than form-
ing a single continuous theorisation. Both are useful books, but do not
present the broad-based theorisation that is possible. What they do offer
is a variety of accounts of audience participation events and audience
participation techniques: Way’s book of practice with young children
and teenagers, in theatre buildings and in school halls; Kattwinkel’s
of a range from avant-garde dance, eighteenth-century theatre, panto-
mime, to community-based drama. Writing that provides this kind of
material is fairly common: work that records audience participation as
a part of its description or analysis of performances without making it a
main focus. It appears in work that surveys counter-cultural theatre in
the sixties and seventies, by Kostelanetz (1994), Kershaw (1992), Craig
(1980) and Ansorge (1975). In surveys of performance art and live art,
such as Goldberg (1979), Kirby (1965) and Case (1990), more experi-
ments appear sometimes including the same personalities. Mason’s
(1992) guide to street theatre and Coult and Kershaw’s work about
Welfare State International (1990), show both how these progressive
audience participations grow and become part of practice that consoli-
dates and diversifies in the years that follow. More recent use of spectator
involvement in fine art performance has been theorised as dialogical,
by Kester (2004), and relational, by Bourriaud (2002), and the claims of
both these writers have been contested by Bishop (2004, 2006, 2012).
Applied theatre’s literature contains many accounts of audience partici-
pation, for example, Haedicke and Nellhaus (2001) on community-based
theatre, and Salhi (1998), Byam (1999) and Byram (1985) on Theatre for
Development. Where writing on applied theatre draws heavily on Boal’s
practice, his participatory techniques inevitably receive a lot of attention,
18 Audience Participation in Theatre

in Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman (1994), Babbage (2004), Dwyer (2004) or

Mda (1993) for example; and Cohen-Cruz’s recent Engaging Performance
(2010) places Boalian practice within a continuum of participatory prac-
tices. O’Toole (1976) and Jackson (1997, 2007), offer analytical views of
audience participation practice in Theatre in Education.
Boal’s own writing is easily the most influential by a practitioner
theorising his own practice, both in terms of the work done in applied
theatre and in the way it is thought about, though both his theory and
practice attract a degree of criticism. For the reader in English, Theatre
of the Oppressed (1979) provides his alternative theatre historiography,
critique of the non-participatory nature of conventional theatre and
proposal for a participatory theatre practice, though one has to look
to his other books, such as Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992) or
Legislative Theatre (1998) to find more detailed account of the tech-
niques. Schechner, in Environmental Theatre (1994) gives some detailed
consideration to the practicalities and the ethical difficulties of asking
for participation in progressive theatre. Less well known is Gary Izzo,
whose Interactive Theatre (1998) is concerned with commercial applica-
tions of similar techniques and sets out a new terminology of its own.
Johnstone’s (1981, 2000) writing about improvisation contains many
passing references to handling audience suggestions, and effective
ways of making use of participants, but only against the background of
improvisation by ‘performers’. Where there is sustained writing about
audience participation the perspective is usually that of a maker of thea-
tre rather than of an observer, the emphasis, at least for Boal, Izzo and
Johnstone is on understanding work as it is done, explaining it rather
than examining it. For Boal certainly, and partly for Schechner and
Izzo, audience participation is presented as a solution to questions asked
about conventional theatre, rather than as something to be questioned
in its own right. Schechner does go further, offering unresolved ques-
tions about what can be achieved with audience participation; some of
these unanswered questions are addressed in this book.
Claire Bishop has established an influential body of work on the
subject of participation and interaction in fine art performance. In it
she challenges romanticism about the emancipatory potential of par-
ticipation, and the contradictory thinking that underpins some of this
critique, drawing significantly on Jacques Rancière and taking issue
with Pierre Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics:

To argue […] that social participation is particularly suited to the task

of social inclusion not only assumes that participants are already
 Introduction 19

in a position of impotence, it actually reinforces this arrangement.

(Bishop in Halsall, Jansen and O’Connor 2009: 254).

Far from active engagement in itself being enough to open an intersub-

jective space that will alter the social relations at play around the space
of the interactive work, it is in danger of reproducing the assumptions
of that dominant social space, if it does not put itself to work in oppos-
ing them specifically. An art that does not focus on the harmoniously
social, but on the capacity for ‘relational antagonism’ (Bishop 2004: 79)
within the aesthetic frame of an interactive work has the potential to
scrutinise ‘all easy claims for a transitive relationship between art and
society’ (Bishop 2004: 79), and to properly critique society itself. This
antagonism can be expressed both within the work and in its relation-
ships with its social and political contexts: interactive work must be
allowed to clash with those that it invites to participate, as well as to
create convivial spaces for them to come together. She notes that in the
work of Jeremy Deller and Phil Collins:

intersubjective relations are not an end in themselves but serve to

unfold a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, disruption,
engagement, and the conventions of social interaction. Instead of
extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic and fusing
it with social praxis, the most interesting art of today exists between
two vanishing points. (2009: 255)

To occupy this space between two poles it needs to engage with both –
the aesthetic and the social; it follows from this that in order to be able
to understand and assess this work we need to have a full understanding
of what is aesthetic in this context.
In re-orienting the agenda of the political and ethical claims of par-
ticipatory art, and asserting the importance of considering the aesthetic
characteristics of the work as well as its work in the social sphere, Bishop
helps to set the scene for this study of audience participatory perform-
ance. What I pursue in this book is not an extension of this debate: for
a start the work with which she is concerned is clearly part of a different
institutional environment, and the terms in which she addresses it are
drawn from that tradition; equally, this practice is not always participa-
tory in the sense that I am interested in. Its characteristic, as ‘social’
art, is that it makes explicit extensions of the art work into the social
contexts that surround it, and makes these extensions and their impact
into aesthetic material. Sometimes this is through audience (or spectator,
20 Audience Participation in Theatre

given the different viewing practices of the field) participation, but often
the participation of the ‘public’ is invited and contracted in very differ-
ent ways. Think, for example, of Santiago Sierra’s 2000 work Workers
Who Cannot Be Paid, Remunerated to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes,
presented in Berlin, Havana and Guatemala City, where ‘the imagery of
boxed people both metaphorised and literalised local refugee and labour
politics’ (Jackson 2011: 61). Clearly this imagery is assembled around
the bodies and subjectivities of these ‘boxed people’, but they are not
the audience, their own relationship to the work is relevant – as well
as troubling and problematic – but the key orientation of spectator to
art work has not been fundamentally altered in this work. My citation
here is to Shannon Jackson’s Social Works (2011), which is a substantial
contribution to the debate initiated by Bishop. Jackson takes steps to
undermine the binaries that are instituted in this debate:

(1) social celebration versus social antagonism; (2) legibility versus

illegibility; (3) radical functionality versus radical unfunctionality; and
(4) artistic heteronomy versus artistic autonomy. (Jackson 2011: 48)

And while some of these terms have more resonance in the discourse
of fine art than theatre art – polarities of functionality and autonomy
certainly – Jackson’s nuanced discussion of how politically and socially
engaged work can operate across these poles rather than at their ends
gives a significant lead in showing how effects and aesthetics can entwine
with rather than undermine each other. The terms under which Bishop
and Jackson propose we address the value of participatory art will not
form a significant part of my discussion, but they are important to its
context. Instead I will use two of the contrasting theorists that feature in
Bishop’s discussions in order to set the terms of a different agenda.

Emancipating spectators

As with the advocates of the ‘social turn’ in live art performance, some
of the champions of audience participation in theatre simplify and
overstate their case:

Spectator is a bad word. The spectator is less than a man and it is nec-
essary to humanise him, to restore to him his capacity for action in
all its fullness. He too must be a subject, an actor on an equal plane
with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be spectators.
(Boal 1979: 154–155)
 Introduction 21

This is an extravagant claim. While it is entirely possible to show that

the practice of Theatre of the Oppressed, with its audience participatory
and extended participation techniques, can be instrumental in stimulat-
ing a capacity for (social, political) action in individuals and communi-
ties, and promoting an idea of a ‘humanised’ subjectivity (and some
of the works cited above do this, in relation to particular examples of
the techniques in context), it is not necessary to exaggerate the failings
of conventional spectatorship in order to make this point. More mod-
est claims are made for other kinds of audience participation, which
similarly define participatory performance as an improvement of the
relationship between performer and spectator:

Since 2000, we have pioneered a game changing form of immersive

theatre in which roaming audiences experience epic storytelling
inside sensory theatrical worlds.
Blending classic texts, physical performance, award-winning design
installation and unexpected sites, our infectious format rejects the
passive obedience usually expected of audiences. (Punchdrunk 2010)

The liberation on offer here is comparatively limited, but still the con-
ventional audience is denigrated in favour of one that is free-roaming
and adventurous. This kind of over-statement can serve as an easy tar-
get for those who would prefer a more distanced relationship between
spectators and performers. Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator
(2009a: 1–23)2 is a text that might already represent a cornerstone of a
sceptical approach to experiments with actor–audience relationships,
and it is welcome as such. In brief, Rancière’s argument is to address
what has he says has falsely been identified as the ‘paradox of specta-
torship’, and to critique the most famous responses to it. He looks for
the grounds for influential theories of the spectator, specifically those
of Brecht and Artaud, and finds them in Plato’s Republic. The paradox is
this: ‘There is no theatre without a spectator, […] but being a spectator
is a bad thing’ (2009a: 2). It is said to be a bad thing because seeing is
inferior to knowing, looking is inferior to acting, and in Plato’s opinion
watching theatre actively stimulates vice and disease. The problematic
response to this, for Rancière, is to manipulate spectatorship in either
direction increasing or decreasing aesthetic distance, and ultimately
tending towards a theatre without spectators. Though Rancière does
not make the point explicitly, this can be read as a polemic against the
most extravagant claims for audience participatory theatre, especially
when we remember Boal’s injunction that ‘spectator is a bad word’.
22 Audience Participation in Theatre

His argument is based on an analogy between theatre and pedagogy,

in which he casts theatre makers, ‘the dramaturges’, as traditional
‘masters’ who know what they have to teach, and collapse distance in
order to bring their pupils into possession of that knowledge. This urge
to collapse distance is based on a fixation with the inequality of intel-
ligence: on knowing how one’s knowledge is greater than another’s, and
how to give that knowledge to them. In contrast to this, it is the thesis
of his The Ignorant Schoolmaster that:

The human animal learns everything in the same way as it initially

learnt its mother tongue, as it learnt to venture into the forest of
things and signs that surround it, so as to take its place among
human beings: by observing and comparing one thing with another,
a sign with a fact, a sign with another sign. (Rancière 2009a: 10).

On this basis his suggestion is that we dismiss methodologies designed

to bring audiences into our superior understanding, and allow them the
autonomy to encounter performances as part of the ‘forest of things and
signs’ and thus we respect the intelligence of our audience, and allow
their emancipation, which consists precisely of ‘the process of verifica-
tion of the equality of intelligence’.
Among the strengths of the essay are that he makes us wary of mani-
festos, and ask us to question the dismissal of the spectator – though
he may exaggerate Brecht and Artaud, sometimes his caricature of the
radical dramaturge reads as if he is quoting Boal; Rancière shows how
reductive such arguments can be. He also reminds us that the contem-
porary potential to cross-borders and blur roles and forms can lead
to nothing more than another form of ‘consumerist hyper-activism’,
which ‘uses the blurring of boundaries and the confusion of roles to
enhance the effect of performance without questioning its principles’
(2009a: 21): theatre as shopping, with more choice but to no purpose.
But there are a number of things we might take issue with. This is a brief
sketch of Rancière’s argument, but in that argument Rancière himself
makes use of a cartoon of the practice of most theatre makers, in which
they have a mission to pass on superior knowledge, and are in thrall to
a mistaken, Platonic, antipathy to spectatorship. The essay seems less
aware of contemporary practice, than of the manifestoes that inspired
it at sometime in the past. It simply isn’t the case that most practition-
ers these days (and arguments could also be made on behalf of Brecht
and Artaud in this respect) have a thesis that they wish to transmit,
so the analogy with the pedagogical master that is at the centre of the
 Introduction 23

argument is weak.3 If there is an anti-theatrical prejudice in the con-

temporary avant-garde, it is more likely to be inherited from Michael
Fried’s influence on fine art performance. The conclusive suggestion of
the essay is that we should ‘revoke the privilege of vitality and com-
munitarian power accorded the theatrical stage, so as to restore it to an
equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the
gaze focused on an image’ (2009a: 22); this reads like a manifesto too.
Rancière says that distance is the proper situation: that it allows us
equality in relation to the maker of the work, through the mediation of
the work itself. Others suggest that intimacy, to the extent of the loss
of autonomy, might represent both a materially productive and ethical
approach. For Fischer-Lichte, in The Transformative Power of Performance
(2008), there is no distance between the spectator and the work, because
the spectator is part of the work. For her, in all performance, but in a
self-conscious and strategic way in performance since the 60s, there
is an ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ (2008: 39). Autopoietic because it is
self-generating, an emergent system that arises from itself, with only
the input of raw materials rather than an exterior guiding hand; and
a feedback loop because the activity of the spectators, however subtle,
becomes part of the event, generating the variations in the activity of
the performers and other spectators that generate more variations, and
so on, and produce the liveness of the theatre event. This is part of her
ontology of performance, and if performance makers have made a vir-
tue of it, it would be foolish of theorists to leave it out of the account:
‘If “production” and “reception” occur at the same time and place, this
renders the parameters developed for a distinct aesthetics of production,
work and reception ineffectual’ (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 18).
Rancière’s ‘emancipated spectator’, however, knows no feedback
loop. He or she meets a performance as a set of ‘things’, ‘signs’, that are
autonomous, and in the face of which he or she remains autonomous.
For James Thompson in Performance Affects the intimacy of participa-
tion in performance creates its ethical force. Meeting the other in a
situation where the forces of affect are working upon us both enhances
that encounter, and shows us: ‘the limits of our autonomy, and thus our
limitless responsibility to others, that I believe should be at the heart
of an ethical practice of applied theatre and the starting point for its
politics’ (Thompson 2009: 153).
This is especially powerful in applied theatre, where the sources of
affective response can be so personal and therefore more powerful, but
it applies in other performances too. These are two recent proposals for
a sense of what theatre is, and what is ethical about it, that come from
24 Audience Participation in Theatre

very different sources: Fischer-Lichte is writing about the European

avant-garde, Thompson about participatory applied theatre. But both
offer a definition of theatrical performance that does away with auton-
omy in the moment of reception, without ever saying that spectator-
ship is in any sense a bad thing.
The thesis in The Emancipated Spectator can be pursued a little further.
Rancière’s political subject depends on being heard as such: on having
a relation similar to that of the emancipated learner available to them.4
But crucially, the process by which they should come into this relation
is not one that can be imposed from above. The fullest political sub-
jectivity is achieved through a self-initiated democratic outburst. What
is in common between this view and that in The Emancipated Spectator
is that the gap that exists between teacher and learner, between per-
former and audience, has the potential to allow dissensus, rather than
to enforce consensus.
Another contrasting theory of emancipation through performance is
found in Relational Aesthetics, where Bourriaud draws on the theory of
Felix Guattari to suggest that participatory engagement with artworks
promotes the fluidity of subjectivity, in positive ways. He describes
relational art thus: ‘A set of artistic practices which take as their theo-
retical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations
and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’
(Bourriaud 1998: 113), which is a very broad definition, but the kind
of work he describes in the book is more tightly bound than this. It is
conceptual art predicated on interactions with the social world outside
the art gallery and the system of art production. The principle of his
theoretical development of this is that the best way to understand con-
temporary art, and especially relational art, is as an operation on and
through subjectivity. For a definition of subjectivity, he turns to Felix
Guattari: ‘“All the conditions making it possible for individual and/
or collective agencies to be in a position to emerge as sui-referential
existential territory, adjacent to or in a relation of delimitation with
otherness that is itself subjective”. Otherwise put, subjectivity can only
be defined by the presence of a second subjectivity’ (Bourriaud 2002:
90–91). He insists that we must de-naturalise subjectivity, recognis-
ing that as it comes into being through encounters with otherness, it
is assembled and re-assembled through these encounters. Art’s job in
this process is to resist the neurosis produced by capitalism, ideology,
supplier–client relations and all those forms of otherness that press us
into rigid, narrow, and frozen assemblies of subjectivisation. Ultimately,
‘the only acceptable end purpose of human activities is the production
 Introduction 25

of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the

world’ (Bourriaud 2002: 113). In another striking image, he says that art
has the capacity for thermodynamic effects: melting the frozen relations
produced by homogenising culture.
Bourriaud’s proposal collapses the work itself into the relation
between subjectivities, but does not collapse the subjectivity of the
spectator into the work, so it escapes Rancière’s specific objection in The
Emancipated Spectator. But they would not agree on the political nature
of art, or on the nature of political art. Rancière is very sceptical about
a political art that seeks to raise consciousness, as ultimately Bourriaud
would like to, as it is akin to not just the old-fashioned schoolteacher
but also the general form of political discourse that presumes to make a
place for the participant – as opposed to one where the individual has
taken that place for themselves. But he is not averse to art which makes
propositions or to the possibility of genuine politics emerging from or
around artworks. The programme of the relational artwork does not
impress him, as it seeks to operate on the subjectivity of the spectator:
bringing him/her to the boil. Rancière would rather see this boiling
point reached independently.
So there is no synthesis of Bourriaud and Rancière, but there is some-
thing more useful at this point in the task of beginning an aesthetics of
participation. The synthesis is not in finding a combination or middle
ground between these two, but in recognising how both possibilities
address something fundamental about subjectivity, and that they sug-
gest why moments like this work powerfully in participatory theatre.

Subjectivity as material and medium

By ‘subject’ I mean someone who recognises herself as having an

‘I’, as having her own peculiar perspective; a subject is an agent who
is able to be self-reflective, and to assume responsibility for herself
and for some of her actions. (Cavell 2006: 1)

Subjectivity in itself can be said to be largely a matter of the point of

view of the subject, and their capacity for action, and of the recognition
of this position by the subject herself and (missing from Marcia Cavell’s
definition) its recognition by others. For both Rancière and Bourriaud
these things are at stake in the spectator’s encounter with an art work,
and especially at stake because they are dealing with a proposal for an
encounter which is up-close, responsive or invasive: that is, participa-
tory. For Rancière the point of view of the spectator must remain at
26 Audience Participation in Theatre

some distance to the work, and their agency is to be defended to the

degree that we would not expect them to take action within the work
at all. For Bourriaud’s understanding of relational art the point of view
is within the work, and has become part of the work, and he seems to
have a very flexible sense of agency: if a spectator is participating in an
artistic encounter while the work is having a powerful ‘melting’ effect
on their everyday subjectivity, their autonomy must be in question.
To look at it another way, these two component parts could be
thought of as the recognition of the participant as a subject within the
field of activity of the performance with the potential to enter into
dialogue with it, and the addressing of the performance to forms of
subjectivity or subject positions that have a special point of view in rela-
tion to the performance by virtue of their participation in it. Audience
participatory performance has among its building blocks – its media –
the agency of the participant, and their point of view within the work.
These two theorists, like Boal, raise the possibility of an emancipatory
spectatorship; they see the matter of the recognition of the spectator as
subject as a political effect as well as an aesthetic one. It would be pos-
sible to reach a similar conclusion about the central position of these
dimensions of subjectivity through an analysis based on less politicised
theory, through psychoanalysis or analytical philosophy for example,
but I find my way there through two politicised approaches and place
this discussion here for a reason: to set aside, for the majority of this
book, the polemics about emancipation and the political possibilities
of audience participatory performance. My strategy is not to avoid
politics, but to strategically defer it, and to invite it back into the dis-
cussion when my terms are ready for it. The theory that I will exploit
in the analysis I present is often social theory concerned with power
relationships and how they are enacted in the microcosmic interactions
of everyday life. So this deferring of the political does not take it out
of the discussion entirely: each of the chapters that follow will move
fairly swiftly from some assertions about the various media of audience
participation as suggested above, to how they come into play in the
interactive, social, and often contested space of episodes of audience
participation. Each chapter will begin with questions that are initiated
by the logics available when making audience-participatory work. As
these questions relate to interactions between people, people as located
social subjects, the best approaches to answering them will be found in
the – often political – theories through which we can understand social
subjects, just as those subjects themselves are embedded in a social life
that is thoroughly penetrated by the politics that govern us. But the
 Introduction 27

questions themselves relate to the logics of practice that arise in the

work, and the politics implied by the answers offered here are left to
some brief remarks in the conclusion, and to the reader to elaborate for
her or himself. As Halsall, Jansen and O’Conner say in the introduction
to Rediscovering Aesthetics (2009: 7):

the ‘aesthetic turn’ as a curatorial strategy is […] contentious because

it is feared to prioritise aesthetic (i.e., sensuous, playful, or pleasur-
able) effects over critical social and political dimensions of contem-
porary art practice.

I, too, am wary of allowing this priority to hold sway beyond what

is needed in order to recognise how audience participation becomes
sensuous, playful or pleasurable – or whatever other qualities will arise
under this particular sense of the aesthetic. But I am certain that a
political and ethical critique will be sorely limited if it does not have
the conceptual equipment to show how an art work or event engages
us on these terms.

The structure of the book

Examining agency means being interested in how people are led to

perform, and in how far they can be said to be made to perform, and
to give performances that have been conceived by theatre practitioners.
By extension this will suggest how people are able to give perform-
ances that they invent themselves: the agency of the participant as the
inverse, the flipside, of the control of the theatre practitioner. These
questions will form the bulk of the analysis of Chapters 1, 2 and 3. The
matter of the participant’s point of view will inform this analysis, but
will be taken up in its own right in Chapter 4.
Chapter 1 ‘Process and Procedure’ sets out an initial theoretical
framework for the analysis of audience participatory theatre. Following
Anthony Jackson’s example (in his work on participatory practice in
TIE) I explore some ideas from Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis, sup-
plementing his terms with ideas from Pierre Bourdieu and Hans-Georg
Gadamer, to give this theory a broader capacity to address differences
in response through a hermeneutics of social signification. The chapter
concludes with a detailed discussion of a Theatre in Education work-
shop performance by Armadillo Theatre, an event that both facilitates
and manipulates participant agency. In the second chapter, ‘Risk and
Rational Action’, this initial theoretical framework is used to account
28 Audience Participation in Theatre

for the powerful influence of perceived and real risk in performance.

Contrasting practices of disguise, exaggeration or informed consent are
discussed as elements of the dramaturgy of participation, with much
in common with techniques of facilitation. Jonathan Kay’s fooling
performances are explored, to test and elaborate the theory in rela-
tion to practice that seeks to enact a challenge to audience members’
inhibitions.
Disrupting this model of participation as rational action, the third
chapter ‘Irrational Interactions’ considers embodied influences on par-
ticipation, and how they shape both decisions to participate and the
character of participation itself. The terminologies and mode of ques-
tioning deployed here are quite different, drawing on cognitive science
and the phenomenological philosophy associated with it, as well as
ideas from anthropology and evolutionary psychology. These ideas are
put to work in an analysis of De La Guarda’s Villa Villa, a performance
that addressed itself directly and deliberately to the bodies of specta-
tor participants. Chapter 4 ‘Accepting the Invitation’ shifts the focus
again, onto the experiential aspect of the moment of response, and its
effect on what follows. Ideas about the phenomenology of acting and
spectating are deployed to unpick the peculiar situation of doing both
at the same time, as well as to re-orient Fischer-Lichte’s proposition
about the autopoietic feedback loop of performance, before turning to
Tim Crouch’s The Author and I, Malvolio for an opportunity to consider
strategies that encourage reflexivity in the audience experience, using
discrete and focussed participatory procedures.
The focus of the book on the moment of invitation means that simi-
lar elements of practice and the problems associated with them return
many times, to be picked apart in different ways. Though the frame of
reference, in terms of the range of theatre practice, is very broad, its
focus in these terms is narrow – in effect taking a thin slice across audi-
ence participation practice as a whole. Returning again and again to the
invitation and its response, and looking at them from different angles
and with different theoretical lenses thus gives some hope of saying
meaningful things about such disparate practices.
1
Process and Procedure

In this chapter I will introduce three questions that relate the issue of the
participant’s agency to the practicalities of devising, facilitating and tak-
ing part in an audience participatory performance. These three questions
present areas of uncertainty in the understanding of interactive artworks
when we consider them alongside more conventional works. They are
also concerned with the nature of the artwork, especially in relation to
the contribution of the audience participant. The questions are:

• Who ‘authors’ audience participation and how?

• Who is in control when participation is happening?
• Where does the ‘art’ happen – in the event itself, or in the prepara-
tion for the event?

To explore these questions I will propose and articulate some terms,

most importantly ‘procedural authorship’, ‘invitation’ and ‘horizon of
participation’. Each is either borrowed from or develops from earlier
work in aesthetics, sociology or phenomenology; they provide the basis
of the discussion for the rest of the book.
Like most performances, those that include audience participation
usually involve a lot of preparation. Like most performances they can-
not be considered to be fully realised until there is an audience present
to watch, listen and appreciate, and to interact. But the quantity and
quality of the interaction that is needed to realise audience participation
is different to that which is needed to complete a more conventional
performance. Though any performance maker and regular performance
watcher knows how much performances can change from one occa-
sion to the next, we are in the habit of considering each performance
of the same production to be an iteration of the same work. Does this
29
30 Audience Participation in Theatre

make sense when audience participation is a significant element of the

performance? The answer may be yes, but if so it is yes in a quite dif-
ferent way.
The contribution of the participant is the important difference. It is
important to a conception of a work as interactive, and it is important,
though to varying degrees, to practitioners who ask for interaction. An
interactive work is an event made through the collaboration of artists
and participating audience members, and the way this comes to happen
is something we will need to ask questions about. If, as I have suggested
in the introduction, interactive work is characterised by the recognition
of the audience participant as a subject through their actions in the
performance, the way those actions come to happen is fundamental.
We cannot understand interactive performance without considering the
provenance of these actions and interactions: how invitations to partici-
pate are made, and how people are able to respond to these invitations.
Once again, most performance involves a great deal of preparation,
but does not come into being properly, as a work of art, until it is
performed for an audience; performance is an event. But the interac-
tive work is prepared so that it has gaps to be filled with the actions
of participating audience members (as well as, of course, gaps for the
coded participations of applause, laughter and other ‘normal’ audience
responses) and gaps that require the thought and felt response of the
audience to make sense out of its various material.1 So a significant part
of the work of an interactive work consists of creating the structure
within which these particular gaps appear, and the work of the interac-
tive performer consists of repeating this structure and allowing the par-
ticipants to fill the gaps in different ways in each fresh iteration of the
work. So does the audience participatory event consist of the structure
or the action that happens in the gaps that it creates? The answer must
be that it is both; to understand this dual nature of the work we need
good terms for it.
In drama education the emphasis is on drama as a process as much
as a product, and it is from this idea that much Theatre in Education
(TIE) has evolved,2 building a body of process-oriented practices with
audience participation at its heart. This chapter takes a theorisation of
TIE practice as a starting point: the terms appropriate for this kind of
process-based practice can, with some modification, provide a basis for
others not normally associated with it. A process involves uncertainty,
spontaneity, responsiveness and the chance for participants to express
themselves and make choices; these characteristics are also common in
audience participatory performance outside educational settings. But
 Process and Procedure 31

every drama educator knows the value of preparation, and carefully

constructs the activities from which such processes arise. This prepara-
tion and the presentation of prepared activities, in educational settings
and elsewhere, are the procedures that create process.
I have borrowed the word procedure from Jan Murray’s Hamlet on the
Holodeck in which she discusses the way that participation is manipu-
lated by computer game designers to create a system with which play-
ers to interact, and designing the procedures that allow and respond
to their activities. She insists this is a creative activity comparable with
that of poets, authors and playwrights: it is very similar to the work of
the creators of interactive drama, and Murray’s definition is one that
will transfer easily:

Procedural authorship means writing the rules by which the texts

appear as well as writing the text themselves. It means writing the
rules for the interactor’s involvement, that is, the conditions under
which things will happen in response to the participant’s actions. It
means establishing the properties of the objects and potential objects
in the virtual world and the formulas for how they will relate to one
another. The procedural author creates not just a set of scenes but a
world of narrative possibilities. (Murray 1999: 152)

Murray’s procedural author is involved in telling stories, as narrative

is important to these digital entertainments as it leads us to immerse
ourselves in a game, but narrative is no more essential to this concept
of authorship than it is to authorship of other kinds. What is important
is the suggestion of both the authority of the practitioner who makes
such a framework, and the distinctive character of the procedures they
use. It also implies that authorship here is quite different from author-
ship elsewhere. The creators of interactive performances are procedural
authors, though narrative is not always as important to their work as it
is to most game designers. In this chapter I will discuss how this concept
is helpful, as well as some of its limitations.
Does this mean that the procedural author is only in control up to
the moment where the procedure creates a gap, at which point an audi-
ence participant steps in and takes control of the event? Clearly not.
The exchanges that can happen between performer and participant
are extremely complex, so that control – and authorship – is shared,
and passed back and forth between them. The most nuanced analysis
of audience-participatory performance will address this sharing of the
control of the performed action, and will show how the initiative, the
32 Audience Participation in Theatre

power to make choices, and the freedom to express – in other words

the agency within the event – is shared by participants and those who
facilitate their action. The terminology and approach proposed in this
chapter is intended to allow this kind of nuanced analysis.

Antony Jackson and frame analysis

To begin to develop a theory in response to these questions, it is help-

ful to look at an existing set of terms that relate to a specific mode of
practice, to see how they can be generalised and developed to apply in
other areas. Anthony Jackson (1997: 48–60), in a discussion of interac-
tive strategies in TIE, introduces an interpretation of Erving Goffman’s
Frame Analysis (1986). He describes a series of frames used to facilitate
different kinds of participation, first a ‘Pre-Theatrical Frame’ in which
children are prepared for the theatrical experience, and an ‘Outer
Theatrical Frame’ in which a theatrical space is established. In these two
frames the audience does not yet imaginatively take on another a new
role, but they recognise the distinction between theatrical space and
normal space, and the expectations placed on their behaviour (that they
will watch) and that of the performers (that they will perform). He goes
on to name a number of ‘Inner Frames’ that can operate within this
outer theatrical frame, and between which TIE programmes move. In
the ‘Narrative Frame’ a story is told or introduced, in the ‘Presentational
Frame’ the actors present the story. Though the audience watching in
these frames remain just watchers and listeners, they may be ‘contex-
tualised’, given a fictional role related to the situation they are watch-
ing, perhaps one that gives them something to watch out for. The
‘Investigative Frame’ allows the audience to join the action, usually
with a specific task, and where the progress of the story is often sus-
pended. The ‘Involvement Frame’ is where the audience and performers
occupy the same space, physically and imaginatively, and the audience
have become participants with a significant influence over the course
of the action. Jackson’s analysis of M6 Theatre’s Grounded 3 shows some-
thing of how these frames might be found in typical TIE of the time:

The play opens with a brief scene between mother and daugh-
ter at the clinic, awaiting the results of Joanne’s pregnancy test.
Unambiguously, we watch through a presentational frame. Then,
before the scene is resolved, the mother turns to the audience and,
in direct address, she recounts the events of that day and all that has
led up to the current crisis, thus establishing a narrative frame, in
 Process and Procedure 33

present time. […] The workshop begins as soon as the play ends. Still
within the outer theatre frame (the students are not yet returning to
the classroom), the dominant frame is now the investigative – estab-
lished by the facilitator (in this case one of the actors who played
a less pivotal character and can thus be more ‘neutral’). It is clearly
signalled to the students now that they have a distinct role to play –
not merely to clarify but to engage with and test the action and the
characters (who stay in role throughout). ( Jackson 1997: 56–59)

The benefit of Jackson’s approach is that he suggests a way of describing

procedural authorship: as the manipulation of frames of interaction. As
I will go on to demonstrate, Goffman’s Frame Analysis offers a structure
for thinking about the procedure of participatory work and the proc-
esses that arise from it, and for how performers and participants interact
with each other as the event evolves. Jackson has named some catego-
ries of frames, but not described them in great detail, nor elaborated a
set of terms for this more detailed description, but the theory he draws
on offers such a set of terms. Jackson’s frames, as he describes them, are
appropriate to the work that is common in TIE, but they will not serve
to describe all kinds of audience participation. In particular, there will
be a greater variety of ‘inner frames’ available in addition to the ones
he describes, and also a greater number of variations on the ones he
describes.
In De La Guarda’s Villa Villa,4 for example, there were several kinds
of involvement frame in the middle section of the show, the ‘Fiesta
China’. Here the performers improvised dances with the audience, flirt-
ing with them, kissing them, carrying them off to other parts of the
building. In this section the content of the performance depends upon
the actions of the spectators who interact with the performers – and it
is certainly an inner frame. But it differs markedly from another episode
a few moments later in the show where one spectator is chosen to be
hoisted into the air above the audience, where most of the action up to
this point has taken place. This is also an inner frame, but it is quite dif-
ferent: the participant is much more the focus of everyone’s attention,
but is much less in control of what happens, so this is not consistent
with what Jackson calls integral participation. His essay points the way
but does not tell us how to differentiate between different modes like
these. He does not develop a way of describing in detail how facilitators
begin and end participation, nor how they guide interaction when it
is under way, but such an elaboration can begin with the terminology
he borrows from Goffman’s Frame Analysis. This chapter develops these
34 Audience Participation in Theatre

ideas and renders them adaptable to a wider variety of circumstances

and practices, setting out a scheme for the discussion of audience par-
ticipation that focuses on how it is ‘marked off’ from the usual interac-
tions of theatre.

Goffman’s Frame Analysis

Frame Analysis develops a vocabulary to describe how we organise our

perceptions of the multitude of different situations we observe and find
ourselves in. The most basic distinction made is between two different
types of ‘primary frameworks’: the natural and the social. In the natural
order we understand events to be determined beyond social control,
and not guided by human agency; and in the social order we perceive
the choices and efforts of other social beings like ourselves. Thus, at the
most basic level, we look at our experiences in different ways, bringing
to them different assumptions about their meaning: we place them into
frames that enable our understanding. As well as structuring our per-
ceptions, frames allow us to manage the different episodes of life, and
our behaviour in social life in particular. We clearly use different kinds
of behaviour in different situations, and in social life the movements
between the different kinds of behaviour are subtle and complex; the
problem is how to describe and account for these changes in behaviour.
Goffman’s idea is that we do this through ‘organisational premises’
(1986: 247) that make the situation real to us as well as manageable: we
have ways of understanding what kind of activity is going on, and
what kind of activity would be appropriate and beneficial for ourselves.
When Goffman uses frame to describe our functional understanding of
interactions in everyday life he indicates a network of shared assump-
tions about what an interaction means for its participants, and what is
appropriate behaviour at these interactions. A key phrase for Goffman
is ‘the definition of the situation’(1986: 1), the agreement between the
people involved in an interaction about what it is they are engaged in,
and what can or should happen.
Gavin Bolton gives an interpretation of Frame Analysis in an educa-
tional context, focusing on how it is necessary to ‘build belief’ in the
social context and our role in it (1992: 2). He gives the example of a
class, which begins like any other class with the teacher (Bolton him-
self) following his own pattern of teacherly behaviour to assert himself
as the focus and leader of the group, and the students signal their
understanding and acceptance of this by following their own student-
like routine. Once this is achieved they can all go about the business of
 Process and Procedure 35

learning and teaching, and become less concerned with demonstrating

their roles. In Bolton’s example the class was interrupted when one of
the students was taken ill, and another social order had to be hurriedly
put in place while this situation was dealt with; in order to begin the
class again he and the students had once again to go through a period of
demonstrating the ascendancy of the ‘classroom’ situation. Bolton sees
everyday life as an oscillation between demonstrating the kind of social
relationship that is appropriate and submitting to that relationship and
the process that ensues from it. Though Bolton uses this term ‘building
belief’, neither he nor Goffman intend that we disbelieve one definition
of the situation in order to move on to another, nor that we need to
hold conflicting beliefs in abeyance in order to move from one frame to
another, merely that it is necessary to agree on the current definition:

Together the participants contribute to a single over-all definition

of the situation which involves not so much a real agreement as to
what exists but rather a real agreement as to whose claims concern-
ing what issues will be temporarily honoured. (Goffman 1969: 21)

Clearly there is an issue of trust involved in this building of belief, a need

to establish that a ‘proper’ or ‘correct’ frame is being employed, and in
the idea of ‘whose claims’ are honoured; issues around trust will inform
the discussion of risk in participation in the following chapter. Goffman
indicates, in this phrasing, that frame is always to some extent a matter
of power, that those who are able to control the definition of a situation
are able to control what is talked about and how it is talked about, what
is done or not done, what is decided, what action taken. How control
of this kind happens is the concern of the second half of this chapter.
In drama work in the classroom, the rehearsal or in a workshop, we can
observe this oscillation between the setting up and settling into the drama,
and the work when it is properly under way and the actors are committed
to it. Relationships are set up where participants know what role they are
to play, and what others are to play, how they are to play them, and when
they are to stop, but once they are involved in this ‘playing’ it is no longer
necessary to think about these parameters. Drama work is clearly a frame
that can contain behaviours of different kinds – ‘acting’ or ‘not acting’
for example5 – and where people move easily from one kind of behaviour
to another with some ease. The situation in the theatre – as opposed to
the classroom, the rehearsal room or the workshop – is different, at least
at first glance. As Goffman observes, ‘the central understanding’ of the
theatre is ‘that the audience has neither the right nor the obligation to
36 Audience Participation in Theatre

participate directly in the dramatic action occurring on the stage’ (1986:

125). When some members of the gathering at a theatre performance
appear to change frames, to move into another definition of the situa-
tion where they follow, for example, scripted behaviour, others appear to
remain outside the frame, aloof from it and not part of the interaction
except in the most cursory way, in their laughter or applause. When
Goffman applies frame theory to the theatre he sees the divisions of roles
that cut across both sides of the divide between stage and auditorium,
the actor is present both as ‘stage-actor’ and as ‘stage-character’, both as
professional person and as a role within the constraints of the presented
world; the spectator is present both as a ‘theatregoer’ and as an ‘onlooker’,
both as a patron of the theatre spending time and money, and as a recipi-
ent and passive participant in the events of the play.
These roles, those that exist within the play and those that extend
beyond it, are constructed by and through frame processes, and as such
they are conceivable in different forms. If we can accept that we see the
actor in different roles during the evening’s show, as when he takes a
bow he leaves behind the character in order to be celebrated in the role
of professional, we can also accept this flexibility for the theatregoers
too: they too can take on more roles than that of onlooker. As Goffman
says, it is not a matter of interactions between the stage and the audi-
ence that we should attend to, but the frame that has been engaged to
facilitate an evening’s entertainment, and whether or how this frame
allows such roles to be taken by different people (Goffman 1986: 127).
Goffman provides a more detailed terminology for the way that
these frames of activity are constructed, both in everyday life and in
extra-daily activities like drama, theatre and performance. The frames
of behaviour that can contain fictional, ‘non-serious’ behaviour such
as theatrical acting, storytelling, or practical jokes, are called in Frame
Analysis ‘Keyed Frames’. He uses a musical metaphor to imply that they
may resemble serious forms of behaviour, but they are being played ‘in
a different key’, in a frame that has made it clear that this activity is
not to be taken seriously: at least not so far that promises made have to
be kept, views expressed have to be maintained, or that action under-
taken by a participant in the interaction is to be taken as part of their
presentation of their ‘real selves’. Theatre’s material and ritual trappings
are designed to assert this definition of a situation where the behaviour
of a privileged section of the participants is seen as keyed. Though we
all take part in other kinds of keyed behaviour, in games and sports, in
play, in jokes, most people do not enjoy the privilege of playing in one
of the keys of drama with any frequency.
 Process and Procedure 37

Though keyed frames are ‘non-serious’, just like all other frames they
must be connected to patterns of behaviour and context that surround
them. Keying is an approach to the autonomy of art-related behaviour,
how it is able to resemble, but also detach itself from, everyday activ-
ity. For Goffman putting interaction into an art-like key enables this
detachment, while also enabling its anchoring in the frames that sur-
round it. A very useful set of terms is presented in Chapter 7 of Frame
Analysis, ‘The Anchoring of Activity’ (Goffman 1986: 247–300): ‘episod-
ing conventions’, ‘appearance formulas’, ‘resource continuity’, ‘uncon-
nectedness’ and ‘the human being’.
The ‘episoding conventions’ (251–269) of a frame are the signals or
conventions through which an activity is ‘marked off’ from other activi-
ties, from the ‘ongoing flow of surrounding events’ (251), this might
be the opening of a curtain in a theatre or the opening remarks of a
conversation. These conventions help us to learn from others what kind
of activity is going on, and to signal what role we are going to take in
this activity and when we are doing so. They also allow us to move –
not always seamlessly, but fluently – from one mode of behaviour to
another, assuming that the conventions used have made it clear and
acceptable to all that a change in frame has happened. The ‘signalling’
and ‘settling into’ a frame that Bolton describes is what constitutes the
use and the acceptance of an episoding convention by those involved
in the interaction.
‘Appearance formulas’ (269–287) are made up, first, of person-role
formulas: relationships between the presentation given in the frame
and the other presentations given outside it by the same person, in the
general continuity of other frames. An appearance given by a player in
a frame is never entirely divisible from the person who gives it, so ‘cast-
ing’ a person in a ‘role’ as part of a frame makes the other roles they play
available, adding meaning to the frame of activity. Second, in drama and
theatre, Goffman reconstructs this as the ‘person-character’ formula: cit-
ing restrictions on the kinds of people who are allowed to perform and
what they are allowed to play as an obvious example of a formula – the
close physical resemblance between character and performer demanded
by western naturalism, or the Onnagata tradition in Kabuki, where the
female ‘romantic lead’ is played by a very experienced older man.
Alongside appearance formulas as the permissible differences between
the person and their role, there is ‘resource continuity’ (287–292), the
ways in which individuals bring aspects of themselves to different roles
and maintain a connection across various activities: among other things
this might constitute what we could call an individual’s style, but it is
38 Audience Participation in Theatre

also the use within the framed activity of the cultural and personal skills
they possess. ‘Unconnectedness’ (292–293) is the irrelevance of much of
the context of the frame to the meaning or the pursuit of the activity
within it. Some of what surrounds us during most kinds of interaction
is incidental, though the higher the degree of formality in a situation,
the more likely it is that the context is being used to ‘stage’ the interac-
tion in some way.
Finally in this chapter, Goffman makes a defence of the notion of
‘the human being’, not because he wants to persuade us to believe in
an essential soul or subject, but because such an idea is fundamentally
important to us in the way that we anchor our behaviour – because we
generally do, in a practical sense, behave as if there is a single indivisible
and consistent self at the centre of our actions and experience. Goffman
himself is often cynical about this, one of several aspects of his work
that brings him close to the ideas of those who have less optimism than
he about the ability of the individual to act on the world rather than to
be acted upon by it. Battershill says that in Goffman’s work we see an
early theorisation of ‘[t]he post-modern self [as] an interactive terminal,
its unitaryness an illusory effect of communicative process’ (Riggins
1990: 167). The self as an effect – illusory or otherwise – of communica-
tion with others, and among different aspects of our mind and body, is a
development of the principle that the meaning of experience is derived
from interaction, that comes to the fore in the pragmatist philosophy
of which Goffman is often considered an adherent. The problematics
of ideas of self, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and their relevance to
participatory performance, are explored in more detail in Chapters 3
and 4.
It is through these concepts of anchoring that Goffman describes how
people use common ground to establish frames for participation: mark-
ing the move from one frame to another, selecting those resources that
are to be used or ignored, maintaining a personal and collective nar-
rative that ties them together. The procedural authorship of audience
participatory performance anchors itself to the common experience of
its participants, grounds itself in the frames that they use in the rest of
their lives. The idea of episoding conventions can be used to describe
how people are invited to take part in an interaction, and the other
anchoring concepts to describe what the relationship is between this
interaction and their ‘everyday selves’, and other aspects of the context
of the event, looking at how these factors together produce a range of
possible activities that can take place within the frame. In this way we
can construct an idea of the frame produced by the procedure that is
 Process and Procedure 39

separate from examples of the procedure in action: not what the per-
formance is or will be, but an indication of the possible performances
it will give rise to.

The frame analysis of audience participation

Episoding conventions in audience participatory theatre can work in a

number of ways. Goffman’s term and his description imply that they
are conventional, that they work through shared experience and shared
assumptions, and in the majority of framed activity this has to be so:
the purpose of the idea of frame is to explain how we go from one kind
of activity to another without constantly instructing each other or ask-
ing questions about what is going on. The kind of social negotiation
that shapes a frame in everyday life is generally tacit it is achieved by a
shared, implicit process of recalling previous occasions of action in simi-
lar frames. Where a person enters a frame for the first time they might
be instructed explicitly about what is appropriate behaviour, and what
are the limits; or perhaps they might have been instructed in prepara-
tion, in how to behave in a frame:

When the individual does move into a new position in society and
obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail
how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press
sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without
his further giving thought to it. Ordinarily he will be given only a
few cues, hints, and stage directions, and it will be assumed that
he already has in his repertoire a large number of bits and pieces of
performance that will be required in the new setting. [...] He may
even be able to play out the part of a hypnotic subject or commit a
‘compulsive crime’ on the basis of models for these activities that he
is already familiar with (Goffman 1969: 79).6

The individual might ‘sit back’ and observe the actions of others, and
judge what similar frames they can associate with the new one, and as
Goffman’s two examples here suggest, we can often convincingly play
roles that are apparently far from our previous experience. As there
are likely to be neophytes at most participatory theatre they must be
catered for. This can happen through the use of established social or
cultural conventions of audience participation through traditions of
volunteering or responding in a group, or the appropriation of such
traditions into forms where they do not normally appear. But not all
40 Audience Participation in Theatre

frames can be established through the appeal to known conventions,

sometimes the nature of a frame needs to be introduced explicitly, to
make clear when interactivity is invited and what kind of activity is
wanted, and often this is done by stopping the progress of a perform-
ance and clearly describing what is to happen next.
To distinguish between these degrees of conventionality, it is a helpful
heuristic device to supplement Goffman’s vocabulary detailing some of
the kinds of episoding convention that can be found in audience partic-
ipatory theatre. The episoding conventions used by procedural authors
to introduce a participatory frame can be described as different kinds of
‘invitations’: overt, implicit, covert and accidental invitations, as well as
making an allowance for uninvited participation. An overt invitation is
one where the performers make clear to the audience what they want
them to do, for example, in the kind of explanations given by The Joker
in Forum Theatre, usually necessary because the technique, widespread
though it is, is not likely to be familiar to everyone in any given audi-
ence. An overt invitation need not always be as explicit as this, it could
consist of a performer, in or out of character, addressing spectators
directly in a way that makes it clear that they are being asked to respond
in some way, something as subtle as a change in tone of voice, or a ges-
ture, and a particular sequence of words, as in the initiation of an ‘oh
no he doesn’t!’ ‘oh yes he does!’ routine in a British pantomime. Or an
overt invitation might have been given in advance, before the moment
of participation arises, as for example, in Felix Ruckert’s Hautnah, where
the programme read:

Look around, relax and get ready for an evening full of encounters, to
be performed for a unique spectator. You will find the name of each
performer under each frame, as well as a badge/key holder. You may
take a badge as soon as you have made a choice. A missing badge
means that the performer is already busy (Abrams in Kattwinkel
2003: 3).

Thus prepared, the audience members became participants in the action

of choosing a performer – a process which made them visible to the
other participants, and involved some negotiation, competition, and
the prospect of disappointment – before becoming spectators again,
anticipating the arrival of the dancer and further invitations to interact.
Alternatively, there are examples of audience participation where
the invitation is implicit, where a convention does exist for participa-
tion and nothing has to be described to the audience. Enough of any
 Process and Procedure 41

audience at a British ‘panto’ will be familiar with its traditions that

if they see one character (a pirate in Robinson Crusoe for example, a
ghost in versions of almost any pantomime story) begin to creep up on
another (Ben Gunn, Buttons) they will shout, apparently spontaneously
‘he’s behind you’. These are learned, culturally specific traditions, in the
case of pantomime often baffling to spectators from outside the United
Kingdom, but familiar to most natives from an early age.
A simpler implicit invitation is employed every time a well known
sing-along song is begun, and an audience which is familiar with it joins
in. Implicit invitations can be ambiguous, creating moments where
spectators do not know whether invitation is intended or not: in Shunt’s
Dance Bear Dance,7 there were two different kinds of implicit invitation,
the first when one half of the space was transformed into a casino, and
the actors became croupiers. There was no formal announcement that
we should now take places at the tables, but it did not take long before
people began to take their seats, were given some chips, and began play-
ing. Later the show reached a hiatus, the actors all left the room, and
a telephone rang; the action did not continue until someone answered
the phone to receive instructions. Again everyone knew exactly what
to do with a ringing telephone, but this time it took longer for some-
one to step forward, first perhaps while they interpreted the ring as
an invitation addressed to them rather than being framed as only an
‘onstage’ ring, and probably also because it would make them the centre
of attention – making the action that is invited more risky. Ambiguous
invitations like this are interesting cases that reveal risky situations and
changing power relationships.
It is possible to invite interaction in ways that are covert, neither
implicit nor overt, but lead an audience or a spectator into participating
without letting them know that this is happening, though definitions
of audience participation can become tricky here, as many examples of
this kind will involve hiding from the participants the fact that they are
involved in a piece of theatre at all. Boal’s ‘Invisible Theatre’, for exam-
ple, is ultimately a politically motivated confidence trick that covertly
leads people into an interaction that they believe is ‘real’ and for them is
framed not as ‘performance’ but as everyday life (and, strictly speaking,
falls outside my definition of audience participation, as the ‘audience’
do not understand themselves as such). Any covert invitation relies on
the same deception: that the action anticipated will not become a part
of the theatrical performance, that a frame change will not occur, or
that it will not be the change that it turns out to be. In Box Clever’s
Something Beautiful, (a piece of TIE toured to schools in England in the
42 Audience Participation in Theatre

late 1990s), I would often initiate an interaction by offering to shake the

hand of an apparently random boy in the audience, seeming to invite
a simple interaction, with the words ‘Hello mate, what’s your name?’
When I followed this with ‘nice to meet you, could you just give me a
hand?’, and, keeping hold of the boy’s hand, pulled him onto the stage;
I was rarely refused. The ‘volunteer’ in this was not randomly chosen,
instead he was always one of the more confident boys in the audience,
pre-selected as the audience came into the performance space, so that
his performance of reluctance – sighs and shrugs – was enjoyed by their
peers, but being on stage and joining us in a brief scene did not seem
too difficult.8
To follow the logic of categorising episoding conventions it is neces-
sary to include two peripheral categories of unwanted episoding: the
accidental and the uninvited. It is possible to produce signals that are
so like the episoding conventions of known interactive theatre that
spectators will read them as such and respond when a response is not
wanted. It is also possible, and probably more frequent, that spectators
interject deliberately when no invitation of any kind has been given
or misunderstood; heckling in stand-up comedy is a conventionally
understood episode where the heckler deliberately changes the frame
into an interactive one, challenging the comedian to prove that he or
she can thrive in this new frame and end the episode authoritatively
to return to their routine.9 Of course the general tolerance of heckling
in stand-up suggests that it is a conventionalised practice, that there is
a standing implicit invitation to heckle a performer. There is disagree-
ment among performers about the place of heckling, and the nature of
its invitation is open to interpretation. Bim Mason describes the usual
approach of street performers to the interruptions of hecklers:

To a good performer most interruptions are not a problem, on the

contrary they are a gift. Because they present a situation that could
not have been rehearsed, the audience is fascinated to see what will
happen and how well it is handled [...] However some hecklers can
be destructive, especially if they are children or drunk, repeating
their once funny witticism ad nauseam. The best policy in this case
is to ignore them. (1992: 101)

He insists that ordinarily the street theatre performer must acknowledge

interruptions, that the frames of street theatre must be participatory,
remaining alive to the unpredictable nature of their setting. Children,
dogs and drunks can all be allowed into the frame for a while and
 Process and Procedure 43

then sent back, having demonstrated the performer’s versatility. The

interventions of the police, which are usually intended to end the per-
formance frame and re-introduce the utilitarian frame of a commercial
thoroughfare, Mason suggests, are best dealt with by the performers
leaving the space altogether, joining the audience and re-framing the
uniformed officers as the focus of a performance they had not antici-
pated (Mason 1992: 103). The gist of most recommendations for dealing
with unwanted interaction seems to be a confident re-assertion of the
frame, as if the performer’s own conviction that this is how business is
to be perceived and conducted will be enough: ‘Answering a heckler is
all a matter of not showing fear, of showing that you are still in control
of the situation’ (Double 1997: 134). Early in Shunt’s Dance Bear Dance
there were peculiar moments when the audience was seated around a
large table with the performers, who frequently addressed them directly
by the names – of countries, as delegates to the United Nations – on
the badges given to them as they enter the room. If this drew a reply
from the audience member, the dialogue was not continued. It was not
clear whether this was an accidental or an uninvited participation, or a
deliberate invitation to participate, but intended so that the participa-
tion could be ignored. If anything the unease that this might have cre-
ated for some members of the audience suited the strange atmosphere
of the show.
The invitation itself is not the change of frame. It has to be under-
stood by the spectators so that they perceive themselves as potential
participants. From the point where they understand that a new frame
has been offered, they will read a performance differently, though they
still may not – either as individuals or as an entire audience – engage in
any active participation. After an initial invitation is given, facilitation
through further invitations might continue, to encourage the spectators
to accept it and engage in interaction in the new frame. In the work-
shop section of Greenwich Young People’s Theatre’s Stop!,10 a scene was
repeated in which a character waited at home for an abusive partner
to return, and the audience had been invited to offer suggestions for
how she should act. An extra piece of narration was added to the scene,
which was not in the play in its first exposition: ‘Look, he’s on his way
home, he’s got his key in the door, she’s got to think fast!’ At this point
the invitation had been made, and the change in perception of the
frame had been assumed by the facilitators, but it was unclear whether
they had accepted the re-framing, and whether they would engage in
new kinds of interaction. The effect of this narration was to make the
intervention of the spectators seem more urgent, and to draw attention
44 Audience Participation in Theatre

to the new frame in which they had the responsibility for making the
character ‘think fast’. In this instance the performance continues, with
an overt invitation to participate in place, and encouraged by this facili-
tative narration. This technique, which puts pressure on the audience
members to interject, is explicit and overt, but it is also manipulative.
It makes use of an emotive, urgent demand put upon them by the
facilitator, and it is not entirely clear what will happen when a spectator
makes the choice to interject; the audience’s empathy for the characters
is exploited to give them greater investment in the situation, and more
motivation to explore it through participation.
As will become increasingly clear as my argument progresses, there
are overlaps between the different kinds of invitation that I have given,
where perhaps they can be read as either overt or covert, depending on
the response of the individual, where an implicit invitation leads to an
unexpected interaction, or where other ambiguities, accidents or strate-
gies come into play. As I noted at the beginning of this section, these
are heuristic tools to unpack a procedure of participation, but they will
require more subtle and specific analysis for the character of an invitation
to become clear. The following section, however, concentrates on what
kind of activity is invited, and how participants are able to respond.

Roles and resources

As the different kinds of invitations that function as episoding conven-

tions in audience participation are very important, I treat them sepa-
rately to the other ‘anchoring’ ideas, and subdivide them into types. The
other kinds of anchoring can be considered together as ‘continuities’;
they are different ways of observing how an action in a frame is con-
nected with its context. The sense of context here is very broad, so that
even the idea of the person connecting the actions performed by a
certain body is part of the context, as is the performing body itself, and
the role played by the person/body in the frame. Appearance formulas,
as I have said, concern role and person and person and character, two
different transformations of the participant in the frame. They can help
to establish if the frame calls for a person to take up a role – a position in
the framed activity that might come with obligations or expectations –
or take up some kind of character – a make-believe of being someone
that they are not. But as well as this we should consider how the role
or character has to be anchored in other roles the person plays, for
example, are they reproducing a role they play at other times, as when
a teacher plays a teacher in a TIE exercise, or a student a student?
 Process and Procedure 45

Appearance formulas, if the work within a frame is at all fictional, place

the performer in a matrix of time-place-character, as Kirby (1965: 44)
proposes, where the fictions of the theatre insist that these three vari-
ables are presented as other than those of the performer, whereas all
kinds of other combinations are available, up to and including a per-
formance of now-here-me. Goffman describes how theatre relies on
‘transcription practices’ (Goffman 1986: ch. 5), which adapt ‘real’ life
so that it fits the frame’s necessities of communication, suspense, unity,
and so on. Taking a character – a role that is matrixed in a fictional
world – will also mean taking up some of these practices, ‘transcribing’
the behaviour being shown into a usable form for the stage, a process
that will involve using the properties of the person in different ways
in different styles of theatre; the person-character formula employed is
one of these ‘transcription practices’ in the way it makes aspects of the
person’s appearance relevant to the performance they give.
Neelands, writing about drama work in the classroom, also describes
a nuanced idea of the differences between ‘person’ and ‘role’ and ‘char-
acter’, making a larger number of subtle distinctions showing that a
simple difference between playing a character and not playing a charac-
ter is not necessarily helpful, when considering the variety of different
role-plays and activities that students might undertake:

1. Public self in the social setting of the classroom.

2. Public self but operates as a role in the social setting of the drama.
3. Operates as a role, but now projects a social or cultural attitude to
events, which is different from normative or habitual self.
4. Operates as above but role taken is representative of a social or cul-
tural group with its own history and characteristic response.
5. Uses technique to ‘become’ a character that is physically and psycho-
logically unique.
6. Projects self as actually being the character – the performer’s ‘self’ is
masked by her physical manifestation of a ‘flesh and blood’ charac-
ter. (Neelands 1998: 16)

These detail the different relationships a student in classroom drama

can have with the performance they give, but can easily be applied
to other examples of performance in very different contexts. When a
spectator picks up a pair of scissors to cut off part of Yoko Ono’s cloth-
ing (Ono 1997: 14, 126), he or she retains a ‘public self’, but operat-
ing in the social setting of the gallery, the behaviour is ‘keyed’ by the
gallery frame as non-serious, but has not taken a key that allows us to
46 Audience Participation in Theatre

make-believe that anyone but this individual did the cutting. A spect-
actor intervening in a Forum Theatre show often does pretend to be
someone else, to ‘become’ a unique other person, though the amount
of technique used might be minimal. In looking at audience participa-
tion these distinctions can be useful, and we can look more closely at
the list through the filter of Goffman’s anchoring terms. The first two
of Neelands’ levels are clearly person-role formulas – the participant
in Ono’s Cut Piece is involved in a person-role formula – and the last
two are clearly person-character formulas – the spect-actor in Forum
Theatre, for example, is involved in a person-character formula. But the
two levels in between do not fit these categories so easily: they seem to
be made up of some aspects of a fictional setting and some aspects of
the person’s place outside the fiction, it would be possible to say that
they take on only some of the variables in the matrix – the time and
place variables, but only limited parts of the character variable. I might
describe them as person-role-situation formulae, but it is more worth-
while to note these different kinds of appearance formula here, and to
leave the idea open, so that specific formulas can be ascribed to roles
following specific invitations.
The invitation thus establishes the relationship between the partici-
pant and the performer, and it will do this by drawing on other shared
resources, roles that are understood by all. It will simultaneously create
the network of associations that give meaning to the role, its conti-
nuities with the other parts played by that person. Another thing that
will be established at this point, which is not developed in depth in
Goffman’s theory, is the goal that is associated with the role. In much of
Goffman’s work the goal that is uppermost in the minds of the people
he conceives is the maintenance of a successful ‘front’, a performance
that benefits the team to which the person belongs (Goffman 1969: ch.
4; 1970). Self-presentation to serve a team may be the dominant goal
of a frame or role in audience participation, but there will often be a
more specific aim given to participants in order to focus their perform-
ances, or to generate experiences of some kind. The resources that they
have been given, or that are indicated as part of their role, constitute
the techniques and tools that they will use to reach that goal. John
O’Toole (1976: 24) gives an example of a TIE piece in which a group
of children had been introduced to performers playing members of a
tribal community in a situation where water was very scarce, and left
alone to safeguard a supply of water, before meeting a different char-
acter: a thirsty traveller. Their resources in this case were no more than
their social selves, their ability to interact with others, and the bowl of
 Process and Procedure 47

water itself. The explicit goal of conserving the water, in conflict with
the needs of the new character, amounted to a dilemma that created a
meaningful experience from the drama.
A person’s ability to construct a role or a character, to adapt to a formula
of any kind, and to work towards a goal depends upon their use of
‘resource continuity’, the continuity with the cultural and personal
resources that are available to them. The cultural resources might include
language, genres, and stories that will be shared by the spectators and
the performers at an event, allowing participants to take the roles
offered to them or the conventions of how to behave during audience
participation. When a performer in improvised comedy (professional
performer or volunteer from the audience) acts a scene ‘in the style
of…’ they make use of shared resources in an obvious way, but so does
a guest at a visitor attraction, who interacts with actors representing
characters or types from familiar literature, films or history. Personal
resources might include skills – the ability to play a musical instrument
for instance, that can then be played on stage – or knowledge – experi-
ence of the disciplinary procedure in a school that can be used when
interacting in a TIE performance. Kaprow (1993: 50) makes clear the
importance of the intelligibility of the invitation, and of the shared
language necessary for interaction: ‘This may seem truistic, but partici-
pation presupposes shared assumptions, interests, meanings, contexts
and uses. It cannot take place otherwise’: but there is always the possi-
bility that resources will be shared by some and not by others. When, in
Dance Bear Dance, the performance space is transformed into a casino,
those who know the games available will be able to participate more
fully than those who do not.
A play that is presented, or partly presented, in the outer theatrical
frame is always a shared resource specific to the event, there for all to
draw on as they produce their own performances. In a procedure that
works through stages of interactivity from the presentational to the
investigative to the involvement frame (using Jackson’s terminology),
the experience of a simple interaction gives participants not only confi-
dence but also some shared resources of experience and language to use
in the later frames. There will also be a shared resource in the participa-
tion itself, when for example, there are repetitions of the same scenario
in a Forum Theatre show, the previous (perhaps failed) attempts will be
in the minds of all participants as a resource in the next attempt at the
problem. But just as a performance will be received differently by each
spectator, it will be useful to each participant in different ways, as each
individual’s experience will make available different interpretations of its
48 Audience Participation in Theatre

content, and will shape how they choose among these interpretations,
suggesting that relatively homogenous audiences will provide more
consistent or predictable reactions to participatory performance, as they
will have similar resources available to them.11 Punchdrunk’s various re-
workings of canonical texts – Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe and Goethe
among them – allow the participant to explore environments and scenes
that are not shown in the original plays, and to interact with some of the
characters. The use that can be made of these opportunities will be very
different for a participant who knows the play, and for one who does
not. This difference in cultural resources is not trivial, of course, and will
be considered more carefully later in this chapter.
This kind of dilemma – judging what resources are available to spec-
tator-participants – has some similarity to the judgements that have to
be made when making conventional theatre, the need, usually, to con-
sider whether the content of a performance will be understood as it is
intended. But a failure to understand can be more damaging to a partici-
patory procedure: if no-one understands the participation that is being
invited, or no-one has resources in behaviour, language, or skills with
which to participate, then the interaction will fail. Kaprow’s observation
that participation has to be tailored to its audience is reinforced by the
way that participation in popular performance is built up around rou-
tines that have become known to all, rather than around innovation:

Audience participation shows have evolved as popular art genres

along with political rallies, demonstrations, holiday celebrations, and
social dancing. Parts of the common culture, they are known and
accepted, the moves individuals must make are familiar, and their
goals or uses are assumed to be clear. […] The complex question of
familiarity never arises in vernacular communal performances, […]
Everyone knows what’s going on and what to do. (Kaprow 1993: 185)

Goffman’s idea of ‘unconnectedness’ concerns me because so much

of the context of theatre (contemporary Western theatre at least) is
designed to emphasise a kind of connectedness. The use of the stage
itself and especially a proscenium arch instructs us so explicitly that
what is in this space is to be attended to that it is difficult to ‘disattend’12
anything that enters onto it. It is vital, if interactive theatre involves the
playing of characters, that some elements of the person as context for
the role have to be disattended, simply because it is usually impossible
to cast or costume or rehearse audience participants in order to allow all
aspects of their performance to be consistent, convincing or relevant. In
 Process and Procedure 49

audience participation, clothes for example usually have to be seen to

be unconnected to a character, as do physical and vocal attributes of the
person. Unconnectedness in this sense appears to be merely the oppo-
site or the lack of the two kinds of anchoring that have come before,
and to a degree this is so. But Goffman notes it separately as a way in
which activity may include, even make use of in some peripheral way,
elements that are not in a significant way part of the frame.

Working inside the frame

As well as understanding how a frame is initiated, and how it is anchored

in relationship with the other frames of social life that it emerges from, it
is also necessary to take account of how the frame is managed while it is
under way. In other words, how the procedure is maintained and devel-
oped by the facilitators and facilitating performers: what further signals
elaborate or reinforce activity once it has begun. As well as the continuing
work of procedural authorship, there will be influences on action from
other participants who have joined the action from the audience, influ-
ences from those who remain in the audience, and other factors such as
the performance environment and even inanimate objects.
Procedural authors can use in-frame activity in a huge variety of ways,
some of which are worth noting here to give an idea of their scope.
Performers in a facilitating role, of course, do more than just deliver the
invitation, they can give further instruction, advice and encouragement
to participants after they have become involved. A facilitator often has
a position that is in the frame, but also observing it, not from outside,
but with an outsider’s eye, thinking ahead, aware of the consequences
of actions in the frame, and ready to anticipate the adjustments to the
procedure to keep the frame functioning. The Joker in Forum Theatre
is an example of this facilitator, who manages the procedure ‘live’, so
to speak, sometimes giving out rules as the ‘game’ is running, or modi-
fying the rules according to the needs or whim of the audience. Such
a facilitating role need not be held by one person (it need not always
be present at all) performers might step in and out of it, as an episode
of interactivity opens and closes, or they may remain in a character
role throughout, facilitating through role-play within the fictional
context. The actors in Izzo’s interactive theatre (see Izzo 1997, 1998)
work entirely without coming ‘out of character’ and without any non-
character facilitators to introduce the frame. They guide their ‘guests’
by improvising with them, giving them roles to play in scenarios by
implication: covert invitations.
50 Audience Participation in Theatre

Props can be introduced to a frame in order to provide a focus for

action and to motivate action: the bowl of water given to the children
in the TIE show cited above is such a case, the children in this play had
to decide which was most important, the thirst of a friendly stranger,
or the trust placed in them by their elders, a dilemma facilitated by the
idea of their guarding some water, but made concrete in the presence
of the water itself. The microphone is a powerful symbolic as well as
functional object to viewers and performers in broadcast media. Its
functional role is to allow the transmission and recording of sounds
and voices, but it is also used to signal who is speaking, and when they
should speak. It can be made invisible, but often it is not, with large
hand-held microphones used where it would be possible to use smaller
ones. The hand held microphone is a symbol of the control held by a
television presenter over the conversational order, allowing them to
give or withhold the licence to speak by placing it in front of the face
of a interviewee (it is like the theatre stage, which also has functional,
acoustic and visual properties, but whose symbolic properties are
equally important). Other props can be used to show that a participant
has become a performer, as well as to show the role that they are to
play – a hat for example, or another small piece of costume; or an object
can be used to signal turn taking.
The clapping and cheering that is encouraged in some interactive
shows is a way of using the audience as a motivator for action within
a frame, they can show their encouragement to those brave enough to
take part, or they can try to influence the actions of the participants,
to make them take one course or another. Other rewards or incentives
can be offered, conceivably of a quite tangible kind – Keith Johnstone
insists on giving gifts of free tickets to people who participate in ‘Gorilla
Theatre’ (2000: 20).
The activity of the participants who become active in the frame is
not entirely in the control of the procedural author, but it is to some
degree. The resources provided or suggested to them, with the goals and
techniques given in their role means they are at least partly predictable,
and the mixing of these roles and stimuli is one of the key techniques
of designing a procedure, of allowing the participants themselves to
provide the stimulus for a frame to maintain itself. Forum Theatre is a
framework for very successful processes because it allows for an expand-
ing number of roles for ‘spect-actors’ to take, each fitting into a simple
set of goals and techniques. The first spect-actors have to break the
oppression set out in the forum play, later spect-actors have the option
of stepping in to show how the oppression might be reinforced, and
 Process and Procedure 51

later again others can step in to further help to break it. The Joker and
the facilitating actors might have very little to do by these later stages,
as the roles set out in the procedure provide plenty of structure for the
participants to work without them.

Control and social structure

The theory of frames, as I have used it so far, allows the agent to deploy
resources as rationally and strategically as they see fit, and to their own
advantage. It does not address how this deployment is itself a skill and
a resource, as determined by experience and social background as the
resources that are there to be deployed. It suggests, therefore, a theory of
procedure and process of audience participation in which the procedural
author merely has to judge the resources available to participants and cre-
ate a procedure that addresses them, in order for an open space to appear.
It does not take account of the myriad inhibitions, reservations and obli-
gations that will come into play in a micro-sociological exchange like an
episode of audience participation, and which will make the deployment
of these resources a much more complex matter. This is not satisfac-
tory, but by augmenting Goffman’s theory at this point with ideas from
Pierre Bourdieu, it is possible to introduce a component – the habitus –
that allows us to think of the disposition towards the use of resources as
another factor that the procedural author has to strategise for, to work
around and with, as both an obstacle and a resource. The following two
chapters explore how perceptions of risk and unconscious embodied
responses will inform participatory choices, while this section – and the
remainder of this chapter – adapts what has come before to account for
differences of class and culture among prospective participants.
Goffman’s idea of resources has affinities with the notion of capital
that Bourdieu employs to show how different symbolic attributes can be
viewed as goods at a social market. There are many varieties of capital
in his writing. Richard Jenkins distils them into three:

social capital (various kinds of valued relations with significant others),

cultural capital (primarily legitimate knowledge of one kind or another)
and symbolic capital (prestige and social honour) ( Jenkins, 1992: 85).

All of these can have a part to play in a participatory event: social capital
coming into play when a participant has useful, or inhibiting, connec-
tions with other participants, either audience members or performers;
and symbolic capital when status relationships affect participants’
52 Audience Participation in Theatre

perceptions of each other and ultimately the way they interact with
each other. Most importantly, cultural capital will consist of the skills
and knowledges that participants can bring into the interaction with
them. Though all three are kinds of resources that can be important
to a social interaction of this kind, it is the idea of cultural capital that
reflects the resources that have been discussed in detail so far.
Bourdieu’s field, too, has some resonances with Goffman’s frame –
though he is much more at pains to define the interconnections between
capital and field. It is the specific field of social interaction that will
dictate the relative value of the different elements of capital that can
be brought into use at any time. Academic qualifications, as symbolic
capital, are more valuable in fields of work or education than they are
in fields of recreational interaction, among friends, family or strangers;
the social capital of friendships of family connections will be of greater
value in creating more and stronger such connections, and will be valu-
able in some fields of work and education, but probably only a limited
range of such fields as are connected, through class or sub-culture,
to these family and friendship networks. Goffman’s frame is a more
microcosmic view of this, engaged with the smaller scale of immediate
interactions, and concerned with perceptions in the moment rather
than permanent or persistent institutions and practices.
Bourdieu achieves this by insisting that capital cannot be used with-
out recourse to the ‘structuring mechanism’, which indicates what its
value is, and how it is to be deployed in an appropriate field. This struc-
turing mechanism is the habitus:

the strategy generating principle enabling agents to cope with

unforeseen and ever-changing situations […] a system of lasting and
transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, func-
tions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and
actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitely diversified
tasks. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 18).

These dispositions give the individual a way of interpreting and making

use of the ideas, objects and situations employed in a field. In Bourdieu’s
analysis habitus is intimately connected with class identity, and while
Goffman is generally less interested in a theory of social classes, his idea of
resource continuity is also a framework for how the individual interprets
a situation according to experience, background and learned disposition.
Habitus, for Bourdieu, is the reason why the same things are understood
and used differently by people from different backgrounds – why capital
 Process and Procedure 53

has different value in different settings, and the reason why people from
similar backgrounds tend to respond similarly to situations they under-
stand on the basis of this shared experience. Bourdieu’s landmark text,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), is a study
of culture, class and education in France in the 1970s, revealing and
theorising the persistence of social immobility in the face of initiatives to
remedy it. This matter of the defining character of social background, and
the way it shapes not only the resources available to us, but also the way
we are disposed to make use of them, is of some importance when we
consider invitations, especially by procedural authors who do not know
their audience personally, as is often the case in audience participation.
Supplementing Goffman’s conceptual structure with Bourdieu’s allows us
to see how class, gender, age and other cultural distinctions will deter-
mine how frames of participation are used.
There is disagreement amongst commentators on Bourdieu: some
say that his theory clearly denies the choice-making of the individual,
their agency, and that habitus is a variation of the theory of a power-
ful hegemony that penetrates the individual’s psyche and overrules
choices that are not pre-determined by social structure. Others protest
that Bourdieu himself has misunderstood the capacity of his theory to
account for agency, that the habitus is a ‘strategy generating mechanism’
rather than the entirety of the strategy itself. These theorists are inclined
to see how resistance to social structure is not only possible, but also
necessary if we are to understand phenomena within that structure: for
example, the changing nature of the structure, and our ability to com-
mentate upon it. To de Certeau, for example, Bourdieu treats habitus as
an ‘immobile stone figure’, and ‘throws a blanket over tactics’ (de Certeau
1988: 58–59), where he himself uses the idea of tactics to show people
as able to resist domination through improvisations in the spaces left by
structure. Structure, for de Certeau, works at the level of strategy, where
it has command of the terrain and that which is ‘proper’ to it; beneath
this we operate tactically, without autonomy from the strategic level, but
with trickery, tenacity and challenge. He is interested in a theory that has
room for the agency of individuals and groups within social structure.
In an essay on the dichotomy between structure and agency, Hays
finds that although this dichotomy is almost ubiquitous in social the-
ory, it is often disabling rather than useful. In place of this opposition,
she looks for a balance in which:

Agency explains the creation, recreation and transformation of social

structures; agency is made possible by the enabling features of social
54 Audience Participation in Theatre

structures at the same time as it is limited within the bounds of struc-

tural constraint (Hays 1994: 62).

This is a reciprocating relationship. She doesn’t eliminate the tension

between a lasting and self-perpetuating structure, and an impulse for
change or independence: ‘structurally reproductive agency’ is contrasted
to ‘structurally transformative agency’ (Hays 1994: 63–64). Habitus,
according to this interpretation, allows us to place the operation of the
relationship with dominant discourses (or fields) back with the indi-
vidual, by insisting that the ways that a person or a group can engage
with them is determined differently according to their background and
experience. We will each be disposed differently towards events such
as participatory performance, and will respond differently, so that the
determinations of our learned responses are particular to each of us,
and thus even more unknowable for the procedural author. We will
also each bring different capital to these interactions, different materials
with which to resist, subvert or enjoy the control of the procedure, to
work tactically, in de Certeau’s terms.
The frames of audience participation are always citational, always
make use of the material of the rest of everyday life, and our actions
within them are always mediated by our learned dispositions towards
behaviour (habitus) and our usable social attributes (capital). In giving
an invitation to participate, the procedural author articulates a relation-
ship between the participant, these contexts of pre-theatrical and outer
frame of performance, and the performances that might be given in the
frame of participation.
For the most part practitioners are happy to cite whatever vocabular-
ies they can access with their participants, the shared resources that
make it easy for people to speak and act in public. At best this might
produce the Freirian ideal of validating people’s understanding of the
world, allowing them to speak for themselves using the words and
actions they use every day. At worst it runs the risk of reproducing dis-
courses that perpetuate oppression or discrimination, or fails to articu-
late any viewpoints except those of the dominant culture. A potential
benefit to a politically motivated practitioner can be an interrogation of
the ideas available in the dominant discourse, emphasising the contin-
gency of these vocabularies over any presumed universality because of
the need for negotiation between participants to secure understanding.
But using genre resources (as Izzo does so enthusiastically in his work)
gives a short cut to a kind of universalised vocabulary, a conceptu-
alisation separated from the world and its contingencies, and so with
 Process and Procedure 55

a fraught relationship with free expression. The characters, and the roles
they play, in a Western or a historical romance, for example, have some
room for manoeuvre, but it takes some ingenuity to escape from the
demands of the stereotype when inventing action on the hoof. Even the
non-matrixed performances described by Kirby (1965: 44), make use of
shared resources, the discourses of the body are particularly emphasised
when the performer is not fictionalised, and references to the person
are more closely associated with that person: the continuity is with
resources used in everyday contexts as well as in artistic or political
contexts. Thus even the subject matter adopted in a procedure will be
limiting in itself, it will create the boundaries of the action.
The terms that can be taken forward from these theorists will allow a
more nuanced understanding of the determinations at play in a frame
of audience participation, or the way that action is shaped. Procedural
authors will work according to their own habitus, just as their par-
ticipants will; their agency could become structurally reproductive or
structurally transformative; and they will make tactical moves under
the strategic influence of the dominant disciplines of theatre culture.
But the microcosmic social structures of participatory theatre will also
mimic the influence of social structure in the way that a procedure, and
the processes that result from it, shape and dictate the action of partici-
pants. Inevitably, the way participants can deploy their capital will be
guided by habitus, but they will also be able to use tactical approaches,
within what at this level is the strategic field set out by the procedural
author. However, it is the procedural author who has control over the
action at the level of strategy, in de Certeau’s sense, while the participant
has the possibility of a tactical response within this dominated field.

Horizons of participation

To unpack further what emerges from the interaction of procedural authors

and audience participants, and to offer another perspective on the framing
of activity, it is worth turning to an account of the reception of art work in
its usual, more passive form. Reception theory celebrates the agency of the
reader of literary texts, and the interaction between text, author and reader.
But even in appropriations of this theory for the different conditions of
the theatre audience – by Susan Bennett for example – the proposal is for
agencies and interactivities of a different order to those that are possible
in participatory theatre. Bennett makes some inroads in developing these
theories for use in performance analysis, taking into account the differ-
ent conditions at work for ‘readers’ of performance: the broader range
56 Audience Participation in Theatre

of sign systems in play, the effect of the presence of other spectators, the
chances and contingencies that can change a performance from one day to
another, and, most importantly, the direct effect audiences can have on the
performance. Though her analysis does not extend to full audience partici-
pation, it provides a grounding for any discussion of the perceptions, and
by implication the behaviour of theatre audiences. Bennett makes good
use of the notion of ‘horizons of expectation’ for how audiences come to
the theatre with preconceptions that guide how they view a performance.
This is based on Hans-Robert Jauss’s introduction of the term to the field
of literature, accounting for how readers approach a text.

A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present

itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum,
but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by
announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or
implicit allusions. ( Jauss 1982: 23)

These predispositions amount to the horizon beyond which a reader

cannot see, and beyond which the audience of a performance cannot
see. For Hans-Georg Gadamer – Jauss’s key source for this idea – the
recognition that all perception involves preconceptions is of funda-
mental importance, and is required for a full appreciation of the nature
of understanding. Gadamer and Jauss are not simply saying that the
encounter with a text is limited by preconception, but that the under-
standing of a text is facilitated by the pre-judgements that tradition and
experience make available to us. The text, of course, must contain the
cues which alert us to what in tradition we must make use of:

The psychic process in the reception of a text is, in the primary hori-
zon of aesthetic experience, by no means only an arbitrary series of
merely subjective impressions, but rather the carrying out of specific
instructions in a process of directed perception, which can be com-
prehended according to its constitutive motivations and triggering
signals, and which also can be described by a textual linguistics.
( Jauss in Holub 1984: 61)

There is a circularity to this – the text can only be understood through

the ‘triggering signals’ but these signals are themselves part of the
text; nevertheless the notion that the perception of a text is guided
by the codes that the text itself declares is robust. Though Gadamer’s
discussion in Truth and Method is founded on hermeneutics – the
 Process and Procedure 57

interpretation of texts – he is interested in understanding in a much

wider sense, so that the everyday situation and the social action that
derive from it are implied too:

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of

‘situation’ by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the
possibility of vision. Hence an essential part of the concept of situ-
ation is the concept of ‘horizon’. The horizon is the range of vision
that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage
point. Applying this to the thinking mind, we speak of narrowness
of horizon, of the possible expansion of horizon, of the opening up
of new horizons, etc. (Gadamer 2004: 301)

Audiences at the theatre are also guided in their perception of the per-
formance, by an even greater organisation of contextual material than
that which can be controlled by the authors of books. But more interest-
ingly for my purposes, the ‘psychic process’ occurs within a social proc-
ess, which is also established through signals embedded in the event and
its conventions: and as has been discussed at some length, theatregoing
is such a social process, where audience behaviour is guided as well as
audience perception. Gadamer extends this ‘range of vision’ to all mat-
ters of experience and understanding, and though he does not make the
link to a notion of horizons of action, the Goffman-like proposition can
be made that action is determined by perception, and by expectations of
what is appropriate within a perceived situation. I propose a ‘horizon of
participation’, in which audience members perceive the range of behav-
iours through which they are invited to participate in a performance.
Gadamer’s use of the metaphor implies finite limits, but like Jauss, he
is also at pains to point out that the horizon also implies a perception
beyond the immediate, the transcending of narrow limits of perception,
and that horizons continually extend and adapt; the notion of a horizon
as a limit does not indicate a fatally restricted viewpoint, but should sug-
gest the opposite: ‘A horizon is not a rigid frontier, but something that
moves with one and invites one to advance further’ (Gadamer 2004: 238).
Authors, too, have horizons, in how they anticipate the reception
of their work, and in the potential they perceive in the traditions at
hand. They arrive at the conjoined practices of writing and reading –
or theatre making and theatre going – with these practices in place,
and when they attempt to exploit, adapt or revolutionise practice they
must confront their own interiorised expectations of practice, as well as
challenging those of readers and audiences. Reading a text or receiving
58 Audience Participation in Theatre

a performance is not a matter of adopting the author’s horizon, but the

‘fusion’ (Gadamer 2004: 305) of the reader’s horizon with that of the
text, which occurs as an event of understanding:

[t]he horizon of understanding cannot be limited either by what the

writer had originally in mind, or by the horizon of the person to
whom the text was originally addressed (396).

For Jauss there are works that extend horizons. The literary text itself,
when first encountered, is seen within horizons of form or genre, a ‘para-
digmatic isotopy’, but then presents its own movement within this para-
digm to establish an ‘immanent syntagmatic horizon’ – each work moves
within the apparent rules of its type to create the structure for its own
reception as an individual utterance. As forms and genres are challenged:

A corresponding process of the continuous establishing and altering

of horizons also determines the relationship of the individual text
to the succession of texts that forms the genre. The new text evokes
for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectation and rules familiar
from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even
just reproduced ( Jauss 1982: 23)

How far these horizons can be extended, however, and into what behav-
ioural territory, is another matter, and here the question of control
becomes more acute: not only do traditions and practices in perform-
ance influence very closely how audiences participate, they also cir-
cumscribe the opportunities in which participants get to make choices
of their own about what their participation consists of. Umberto Eco
(1979) is notable among semioticians for considering the active choices
of the reader, for example, in his idea of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ texts: an
open text is one where there are fewer textual imperatives, and more
opportunity for interpretation, and a closed text being more conven-
tional in telling the reader what it is. We can, similarly, expect there
to be participatory events that are more or less open in the sense that
they create spaces in which participants have a wider range of choices
about how to respond to an invitation. Similarly Iser gives us the idea
of the textual ‘blanks’ or ‘gaps’ where the reader or spectator has to infer
meaning from what the text or play does not show or say:

Blanks allow the reader to bring a story to life, to assign mean-

ing, and by making his decision he implicitly acknowledges the
 Process and Procedure 59

inexhaustibility of the text: at the same time it is this very inexhaust-

ibility that forces him to make his decision (Bennett 1997: 44)

The production of texts, including performance texts, is also a matter of

creating gaps for readers and spectators to fill, though often this might
be an entirely unconscious element of the creative process. A procedural
author creates gaps of a different kind.
The horizon of participation, like the horizon of expectation, is a
limit and a range of potentials within that limit, both gaps to be filled
and choices to be made. Unlike the horizon of expectation these gaps
and choices are about action rather than interpretation. When invited
to participate we construct, in this way, an initial assessment of the
potential activity appropriate to the invitation – in Goffman’s terms we
understand a frame, in Gadamer’s we perceive a horizon – which has not
told us what to do, but offered us a set of limits and a perception of the
potential values of action within those limits. The horizon metaphor
describes limits and the possibilities within those limits. The horizon is
a limit in the sense that it stands for the point at which we recognise
(correctly or incorrectly, in the sense that other people, including a pro-
cedural author, may understand or intend something different), invited
and appropriate action ends, and inappropriate responses begin. Within
perceived limits there are multiple possibilities, which if we extend the
metaphor of the horizon a little, we can conceive as a landscape or ter-
rain to be explored or navigated.
Horizons, in this sense, are not set by the procedural author, but
arrived at through the interaction of all the contributing elements of
the process as a perception of the audience participant. Just as physical
horizons change as we move through a landscape, the horizon of partic-
ipation changes as we interact and perform, moving with us and invit-
ing us to advance further. Alternatively, we might read the metaphor in
conjunction with Bourdieu’s idea of ‘field’, as a situation in which it is
necessary to take a place, to plant oneself, and thus to alter the meaning
of the landscape around this place. Either way, seeing the invitation to
participate as revealing a horizon through which to choose a path or to
take a position, becomes a subtle and flexible tool for understanding the
processes of participation.
The procedural author can work to change the horizon, both as a
limit, as they might indicate that the invitation is open to more than
had previously been understood, and in the sense of landscape, as they
guide the participant towards certain paths or terrain. The range will be
comparatively broad or narrow in different procedures, where some are
60 Audience Participation in Theatre

designed to produce very specific actions – singing along, or shouting

a set response – others are intended to give opportunities for creative
expression to participants.
To continue the example of the pantomime given earlier, the invita-
tion is to shout ‘behind you’. To shout something else would be quite
possible but it would be inappropriate, it would break the frame, exceed
the horizon, and it would be churlish behaviour at a children’s event.
A procedure that successfully invites participants will see them explore
the horizon, play within it to produce performances that are both
theirs, and the procedural authors, as Abrams, again, notes in Ruckert’s
Hautnah:

Tactility was the central element in this piece: two props – a knife
and a peacock feather were present in the space, she caressed her-
self with them, caressed me with them, offered them to me to do
the same. I echoed but changed the movements, responding rather
than imitating. She led, I followed – here the solo became a duet.
(Kattwinkel 2003: 3)

Goffman’s terminology for the construction and interconnection of

frames, and my additions to its relation to the invitation of participa-
tory frames, will transfer easily to the interactive process of perceiving a
horizon. Invitations will either be explicit about the acts wanted, or will
imply (conventionally, covertly or accidentally) a known frame, or an
audience member will begin to use another convention, (or there will
be a combination of explicit and conventional instruction and generic
implications). The continuities will produce limitations and indications
of what is expected through appearance formulas, resources, and dis-
connections, and facilitators will work in-frame to provide the context
for the actions, again limiting the range while suggesting which parts
of it to explore.
The horizon that participants perceive maps out the possibility of
their agency in the event, thus using these concepts to describe and
understand this horizon and how it is created will help to answer the
question of the relative agency of the participants and the initiators
of the event. It will also serve to show the control that the procedural
author has over the participants, as the horizon is established primarily
by the invitation to participate, and by the relation between the event
and its context, and the further activities of the facilitators in the frame,
all of which are to some degree expressions of procedural authorship.
Much of the ‘in-frame’ activity just described can be thought of as
 Process and Procedure 61

shaping this terrain, closing parts of it and making other parts seem
open – obvious or attractive to participants. Sometimes facilitation
might become ‘difficult-ating’, when a horizon has established itself
and people are participating wholeheartedly, new problems can be
introduced, and thus work can be advanced by developing the terrain
that is being worked in rather than moving to a different frame. The
horizon therefore, rather than a fixed set of possibilities, is a changing
landscape that develops as participants take action and as practitioners
intervene.
Although the horizon is arrived at for each participant through their
interaction with the invitation given, rather than a direct imposition,
it is through controlling these aspects of a procedure that theatre
practitioners – procedural authors – can to a degree keep control of the
actions of their participants, and hence the performances that arise
from their procedures. Complete control of these actions is not pos-
sible, but there are a number of ways in which performances will be
suggested and limited, so that what happens remains within a horizon
and its terrain has been largely foreseen by the procedural author. First,
they construct this horizon in ways that are available to theatre mak-
ers and authors of more conventional kinds – defining the immediate
pre-theatrical frame and the outer theatrical frames – and provide many
of the resources that the participants will use in their performances.
In the selection of the setting, and in the writing of the performance,
continuities are implied between the performances to be given in the
participatory frames and the performances given by the participants or
known by participants, in other parts of their lives.
Second, the procedural author can use the invitation to participate
and in-frame activity to describe the horizon explicitly. At the point of
invitation they have the opportunity to define the range in ways that
can make it more open or closed, most decisively when giving goals
for the participants to achieve. The actions of facilitators and facilitat-
ing actors following the invitation will continue to shape the horizon
and its terrain, closing off some possibilities and opening others, and
these actions are manifestations of procedural authorship. All of the
actions of the facilitators will have an effect upon the horizon, though
they may not be entirely in control of their own behaviour in having
these effects, and might suggest performances in ways that they have
not foreseen. As these varied actions will shape the opportunities in
different ways in relation to different kinds of action, and in relation
to different participants, the horizon can be thought of as having a
constantly shifting landscape. This landscape, however, has always been
62 Audience Participation in Theatre

shaped by procedural authorship, whatever efforts have been made to

keep this influence to a minimum.
Some ambiguity may be detected in the way I have described hori-
zons in this section. Just as Jauss writes of horizons as belonging to
texts or traditions, as well as to readers, I have suggested that horizons
of participation belong to individual participants, but are shaped by
procedural authorship, and implied in performance traditions. Though
a strict sense of a horizon that manifests when an individual encounters
a situation and comes to an understanding of its possibilities and limita-
tions on the basis of the pre-dispositions given to them by experience is
worth keeping in mind, horizons that are culturally shared or assumed
by practitioners and audiences are useful as long as we remember that
the manner of their actual manifestation depends upon real people in
real situations. Horizon is a metaphor, first of all, and it is flexible and
has many useful correlates.

The aesthetic meaning of agency

This chapter has introduced an analytical framework for the analysis of

audience participation, based on questions of authorship, control and the
nature of the art work. The creation of audience participation has been
shown to be a collaborative process in which a horizon of participation is
arrived at through the interaction of expectations about theatre and per-
formance events, the invitation strategy of the procedural author, and the
availability of social resources to be used in performance by individual
participants. The work has to be seen as both the procedure, which is
designed to create this process, and the distinct iterations of the process
and performances it gives rise to. Authorship has been shown to be a
dynamic property of this process/procedure evolution, where the horizon
of participation manifests limits and opportunities shaped by the invita-
tion of the procedural author, but which is arrived at individually by each
participant, and within which the participant has agency to make choices
about their action. Giving this interplay of agencies an important place
in the active generation of performance material and into the experience
of the participant, I propose, makes it into not just a practical problem to
solve, but an aesthetic property of the work.
Antony Giddens suggests that the absence of intention can be consid-
ered the absence of real agency:

It has frequently been supposed that human agency can be defined

only in terms of intentions. That is to say, for an item of behaviour
 Process and Procedure 63

to count as action, whoever perpetrates it must intend to do so, or

else the behaviour in questions is just a reactive response’. (Giddens
1996: 95)

This intention, however, is not necessarily a rational process: the inten-

tions do not have to be careful, beneficial or right in order to display
agency. Agency, though, can apply as a meaningful term to only part
of our behaviour:

I am the author of many things I do not intend to do, and may not
want to bring about, but none the less do. Conversely, there may be
circumstances in which I intend to achieve something, and do achieve
it, although not directly through my agency’ (Giddens 1996: 93).

In this view, to achieve something through a reactive response is not

agency, to achieve something by accident is not agency, and to merely
intend and achieve nothing is not agency. For an end to have been
achieved through our agency there must be a connection between our
actions and the results we intend: our actions must have power. So if
a decision to participate, or how to participate, in a performance, is
made on the basis of incomplete information where that information
is withheld by another party, the agency is undermined: it is not based
on an informed decision. The weakness of this perspective on agency is
that no-one ever has a full understanding of circumstances surround-
ing an action, so all actions are taken with incomplete information.
If the implication that an informed agency is therefore impossible is
to be avoided, the threat of mis-information must be a relative one:
a reasonable degree of information is necessary, but some element of
ignorance is inevitable. An agent who has this capacity to act or not, on
the basis of reasonably complete information, whether fully rationalis-
ing the situation or not, can be held responsible for their actions. They
have the benefit of being able to take credit or blame; this makes their
actions meaningful, as Daniel Dennett says: ‘blame is the price we pay
for credit, and we pay it gladly under most circumstances’ (2004: 292).
Responsibility is a freedom worth having.
The apparent opposite of creating positions of (reasonably) informed
agency for participants is to create positions in which their actions are
manipulated, because they cannot be said to have sufficient informa-
tion to intend the consequences of their actions. The result might be to
create experiences, but not experiences of choice, and to provoke per-
formances by audience participants that are not meaningfully created
64 Audience Participation in Theatre

by them. But the discussion in this chapter has shown how complex
the matter of choice in social interaction is, how moments where we
make choices are informed and structured by experiences and learned
dispositions; and the following chapters explore other aspects of choice
making, action and experience. Agency in the context of these ideas is
a matter of feeling as well as a matter of a reliable connection between
conscious action and its results. The experience of making choices –
whether they lead directly to desired outcomes or not – or of having
choice taken away, makes up one part of the aesthetics of participation.
An example of participation of this kind occurred in the closing sec-
tion of Gob Squad’s Kitchen,13 when several audience members were
given headphones, and asked to take the place of performers. The per-
formers then took places in the audience, with microphones, and gave
instructions for action and dialogue to their replacements through the
headphones. As ever these volunteers had the option to refuse the invi-
tation to participate, or to adopt behaviours outside the frame offered,
but when they accepted the invitation, the horizon available was very
limited indeed: they became puppets for the performers who instructed
them. The quality of this sequence – to me as an audience member
who did not perform – was informed by the style and content of the
preceding material, made up of pastiches of several Andy Warhol films
and their rhetoric of transforming everyday life into art. The framing
of these puppets as part of this attempt to reconstruct a utopian experi-
ment was inflected by the participants’ evident anxiety and uncertainty,
their growing confidence in the parts they were playing and the inflec-
tions they began to give to what they were evidently being instructed
to do. So even in this very tightly controlled horizon choices were avail-
able, albeit tiny ones, which were magnified for those watching by the
process through which they were put on show. In this sense the experi-
ence of becoming a performer was revealed for the rest of the audience;
perhaps it was meaningful in this sense for the participants themselves.
Agency changes the quality of all action taken: an action that belongs
to me feels different; and conversely (and perhaps perversely), when we
take action that does not belong to us in this sense it also feels different
on that account. But the extent to which action can belong to an audi-
ence participant has not been solved in this chapter. In further chapters
this dimension of the recognition of the subjectivity of the audience
member through participation will be explored in more detail, and
challenged in different ways. The model of the subject as it has been
theorised in this chapter is more-or-less secure and monadic: it needs
to be considered that, as well as the social influences on our behaviour
 Process and Procedure 65

accounted for by Bourdieu’s habitus, field and capital, there are physical
and psychological influences too, particularly when we are in the com-
pany of others. The depth of the influence of these factors draws atten-
tion to the embodiment and intersubjectivity of human experience,
understanding and action. Intersubjectivity – the way in which the
presence of other people in our world both gives us a point of view, and
draws action from us – will have to be examined explicitly, for the way
it creates our ability to respond in audience participation, and for how
it becomes part of the substance of these performances. The embodi-
ment of culture as expressed in the dispositions of Bourdieu’s habitus
intersects with pre-culturally embodied physical processes in both con-
scious and unconscious responses to stimulus, again dictating or inflect-
ing how we act in any given situation. These factors add significant
dimensions to aesthetic theory, particularly around the ontology of the
artwork and the engagement of the spectator with it, dimensions which
will be especially pertinent to the aesthetics of audience participation.

Armadillo Theatre

A detailed analysis of a procedure of participation that deploys a com-

plex of choice and manipulation will help to demonstrate further how
the concepts of this chapter can be used. The description that follows
outlines a procedure and its invitations in some detail, to start with,
before discussing the processes that arose from it. It is drawn from
my own experience as a co-creator of the workshop, and performer
and facilitator on many occasions over a number of years. No formal
documentation of the participants’ experiences was made at the time –
any speculation about this aspect of the work is just that, speculation,
but based on many observations of behaviour, response and informal
feedback. The form is fairly typical of Theatre in Education of its time,
a conflation of a Forum Theatre style, but unhitched from the strictures
of Theatre of the Oppressed, and other interactive techniques. It is not
offered here as a model of good practice – my critique of its potential
failings will become apparent, as well as its strengths.
Armadillo Theatre’s workshop around bullying in school was produced
in conjunction with a research project at the University of Sheffield in
1991–92. It continued to tour for several years independently of this
project in forms that developed from the original described and has been
assessed by Smith and Sharp in School Bullying: Insights and Perspectives
(1994). The version detailed here is from some time later, and was used
with larger groups of children, up to three classes at a time, and with
66 Audience Participation in Theatre

a fairly broad age range, from nine up to thirteen. The aim of the work-
shop was to promote awareness of bullying as a problem that involves
and affects everyone in the school, which should be dealt with openly,
and to encourage children to think of bullying as something that they
can all help to change rather than just a problem for those immediately
affected. In this version Forum Theatre takes a central role in the process
along with the performance of a play, ‘hot-seating’ of characters, discus-
sion led by a facilitator/joker, and short passages of ‘teaching in role’.
There are four actors, two of whom stay in character most of the time,
two of whom take turns to facilitate the exercises.
The programme begins with a very brief introduction delivered by
one of the actors to the students, who are gathered as an audience in
the school hall, usually in a large circle of chairs, several deep. One of
the four actors introduces the company and asks the students to watch
a short play, and to watch carefully. The play has four scenes and four
characters: we first see Ian and Mark kicking a ball to each other in
a games lesson, talking. Their friend Nicky arrives, taking a short cut
because she is late for school, and Ian talks to her, pointedly excluding
Mark. In the second scene she returns a homework book to Mark, Ian
snatches it and refuses to return it, dropping it on the floor and mak-
ing Mark beg for it. He does not return the book, but says that he will
give it back at youth club that evening instead. There is a brief scene
in which Mark tells his teacher, Mr Jenkins, that he has forgotten his
homework, and refuses to admit that anything is wrong. The final scene
is at the youth club, where Ian tosses the book to Mark, then asks him
to lend money for the pool table. When refused, Ian grabs Mark by the
collar, and the play ends. The whole thing lasts a little more than ten
minutes, uses no set, and only a book and a football as props; all the
characters are played by adults dressed in their own clothes. As an outer
theatrical frame it draws on generalities of school life rather than on the
realities of any school in particular: the conversation revolves around
football, watching videos and avoiding homework. The characters are
not caricatures or stereotypes, but they have only the characteristics
to make them seem ordinary, and also to fall into clear categories of
‘bully’, ‘victim’ and ‘innocent onlooker’. The banality of these thematic
resources is designed to allow participants to pick up the threads of
conversation easily, and to identify and play with the interests of the
characters. The theatrical conventions – the lack of set and costume,
and the adults playing children – are the shared resource of a theatre
technique that is easy to pick up, and present person-character formulas
that are very flexible.
 Process and Procedure 67

At the climactic moment of danger, when Ian has taken hold of Mark,
the performer playing Nicky comes out of character and explains that
the children now have an opportunity to talk to the two boys, and
divides them into two groups, sending one to one end of the hall, where
Ian is waiting, and to the other where Mark is. They are left to talk to
each actor, who remains in character, for around ten minutes before
swapping. When questioned, the actors respond freely according to
how they see the characters (a number of different actors played each
character, sometimes alternating the roles morning and afternoon, and
each had scope to interpret it within the parameters described here),
but with some very specific constraints: neither offers anything in the
boy’s background that would explain the behaviour, even if they are
directly asked about it: Ian likes fighting and getting what he wants;
Mark knows he’s not good at fighting and wants to be friends with eve-
ryone, he even considers Ian to be his friend. Mark appears unhappy
and can be persuaded to see that Ian, and even Nicky, are not behaving
as friends should. During the hot-seating Ian can be persuaded that his
actions make Mark unhappy, but will not agree to change, or even rec-
ognise that there is any compelling reason why he should.
After telling the students that they have a chance to ask the boys any-
thing they want, the facilitators do nothing to ensure that a dialogue
gets going, and the teachers who are present are asked not to intervene,
even if it appears nothing will happen. As in-frame facilitators the actors
make some effort to keep the discussion relevant, answering all ques-
tions as long as they maintain ‘belief’ in the situation. Some answers
given are shorter than others, and Mark ensures that at some point he
describes his feelings about Ian’s bullying. Little is done to control the
students’ performance as questioners; they are not allowed to wander
away, or to give up on the task entirely and the actors take some meas-
ures to make sure the overall performance of question and answer pro-
duces some useful information. As an invitation it is fairly explicit, but
also fairly open; it draws on the students’ expectation that they will be
asked by responsible adults to undertake tasks – on this disposition in
the habitus of the school-child – but begins to neglect some of the clear
structuring that such activities normally take.
After this the facilitator asks the two groups to return to their seats,
and explains that the play will now be shown again, and that this time
the audience should watch out for moments were Mark could do some-
thing different, and to shout ‘stop’ at these moments. This is a limited
Forum Theatre introduction, no more instructions are given at this
point, but when the play runs, and the first ‘stop’ is offered – usually
68 Audience Participation in Theatre

quite early on, where Ian ignores Mark, or interrupts him in conversa-
tion with Nicky – she asks the student to describe what Mark should
do, then asks him or her to show everyone. Often this first volunteer
is nervous about doing so, and so she offers the service of the actor
who has played Mark, who listens carefully to instructions from the
child, and acts the forum scene for them. But the tactic at this point is
for the actor to get it wrong, to make sure the intervention fails, with
the intention of inspiring the child or one of his or her friends to offer
to do it right. When they do, Ian makes sure that it works, and that
the child looks good doing it. After this there is usually no shortage
of volunteers. This strategy manipulates the suggested interventions –
ultimately manipulating the idea that has been offered by the child – in
the interests of overcoming any initial nervousness about participation.
The invitations, again, are explicit at each stage, and create an increas-
ingly broad horizon of participation, though they do not explain all the
details of what will happen when the invitation is taken up.
It is only after this that the facilitator explains that the actors will
also try to show how a suggestion might fail, and the forum begins to
alternate between suggestions offered, and shown working, and then
repeated with the actors improvising to make them fail. The usual
Forum Theatre rule of not allowing any suggestions that are ‘magic’ (or
asking the spectators to shout out when they spot such interventions)
is not included, so ‘unrealistic’ ideas, such as for example ‘get a gun and
shoot Ian’ are shown, in slow motion, action movie style, (and usually
then repeated showing Mark – for example – being arrested and sent
to jail), and are included alongside the sensible ones. Shared generic
resources from popular entertainment are deliberately included, such
as gunfights and martial arts battles, and explored on their own terms.
A short discussion is encouraged after each intervention, principally
consisting of The Joker asking whether Mark is better off, and why, but
also allowing some discussion of whether an intervention is realistic, or
morally right or wrong.
Without drawing conclusions from the forum and the discus-
sions of it, the facilitators move the process on to another episode of
hot-seating – this time of Nicky. The questioning soon turns to why she
doesn’t stop Ian from behaving as he does, to which she replies that
she doesn’t know how to go about it, and she’d feel better if she had
some help. When the help is volunteered by the children she makes
them agree that the next time they see him picking on Mark, they
will intervene with her. Sometimes they offer to beat him up for her,
but she insists that they do not do this, because he is still her friend.
 Process and Procedure 69

‘Nicky’ manages the conversation so that it seems she is following the

implications of the students’ questions, but in fact is ensuring it leads
to this conclusion. As soon as this agreement has been made Ian and
Mark re-appear; the actors simply make themselves seen somewhere
behind Nicky, striking up a simple routine of Ian pushing Mark around.
Nicky approaches and tells Ian, uncomfortably and ineffectually, that
he should stop. This is an implicit invitation – the frame has changed
from the clear-cut question-and-answer hot-seating to one of situ-
ated conversation between characters, but without the children being
returned to their audience role. They have been led to offer their help if
Nicky speaks to Ian, so at this stage the children either join in with her
verbally, threaten Ian or attack him physically. In any case, but more
quickly if the latter, Mr Jenkins, the teacher reappears and reprimands
them all for picking on Ian. He then questions them carefully about
what had happened, but tells them that they should be speaking to him
about it rather than taking matters into their own hands. This closing
sequence is ambiguous, it leads the group into an action that is then
disapproved of by an authority figure; it is certainly coercive in the way
it leads them in this way, but it also serves to leave the programme as
a whole with an open ended message, which has to be developed and
explored by a teacher in follow-up work for the programme to become
coherent.

Analysing Armadillo’s procedure

The invitations to participation are given so that they are coercive in

a way that Theatre of the Oppressed processes are not – or should not
be if they seek to be true to the values set out in Boal’s books. There
is a gradual revelation of the nature of the interactive frame, so that
participants early in the event are not entirely aware of what they are
to do when they shout stop, or even when they make their first inter-
vention in describing what they want Mark to do. The use of the actor
in the frame to make this limited kind of participation unattractive is
also manipulative in making it necessary to take the role in person in
order to make the intervention work. It is these in-frame activities that
are the real closing strategy in this process, the work of actors who have
thought about and prepared for the interventions that will be offered,
and are ready to make them look good and to look bad. Ideas that might
challenge ‘proper behaviour’ are given a hearing, but the negative
development has the advantage of coming second and last, and might
remain more memorable. The Joker has control over which suggestions
70 Audience Participation in Theatre

are to be played out, and while there is a policy to play all kinds of sug-
gestions, perhaps more so than might be expected in a school setting,
this episoding convention – the decision of whether the invitation to
suggest and discuss becomes an invitation to take the character and
play the scene – remains in the control of a person in authority, an
adult among children. The most manipulative of the episoding proc-
esses comes at the end of the programme, where a clear invitation is
not given, but the action moves from a frame of hot-seating with one
character to a frame of free improvisation with another character, while
a third waits in anticipation of the interaction that is certain to follow.
Some of the important openings in this process are properties of the
style: the freedom to shout ‘stop’ at any moment when the play is run-
ning, the invitation that is open to all – at least as far as the stopping
and discussing is concerned – and the freedom, once on the stage, to
play with the content of the scene. The openness of the hot-seating
conversations helps to develop the atmosphere of freedom, and encour-
ages the students to take responsibility for the progress of the action
before the Forum Theatre begins. There is also an important freedom
in the availability of the ‘victim’ role to whoever wants to play it: there
are no particular person-character formulae, although the implication
is generally that the teachers who are present will not participate in
this way. In the forum section the range of action is constricted ini-
tially by the resources introduced through the plot and characters, and
through the goals set out in the invitation: it is fairly broad, and to an
extent broader than in many Forum Theatre performances because of
the exclusion of the ‘it’s magic!’ rule.14 The nature of the relationship
between the performers and the participants, however, shapes the range
of action in a different way: they are adults working with children, hav-
ing rehearsed for some time to produce a procedure, and inevitably able
to influence each intervention substantially once it is under way. The
controlling strategies are more obvious here, to the practitioners, and
to observers, but it is not until they have done their work that they will
be obvious to participants.
In the final section of this procedure Armadillo Theatre has taken
such a strategic control over the horizon of participation that they
leave very little tactical space for the students to make use of. The pre-
prepared sequence can absorb any response and use it as material to
re-enforce something like a moral for the piece, an officially sanctioned
message about the role that school authorities should take in this kind
of situation. Credit is given to the resources that the students bring
to the Forum Theatre section, to what is meaningful to them, but it
 Process and Procedure 71

is undermined by the resources brought to bear by the company, in a

more serious manner, in the section that follows. There are two kinds
of resources at work: the students draw on their own resources to show
their understanding of the problem, and argue with each other and the
company about it; the company draw on their understanding of school
life and of the problem, which is close to an ‘official’ understanding of
bullying. The capital of the official understanding is, however, more
highly valued, is placed last, and is not followed at this point by an
examination of it in discussion.
The participants in this work have spaces in which to exercise their
cultural capital, to speak in their own language, in a manner that con-
forms to their ‘habitus’, but only in parts of the event does this equate
to an agency that avoids manipulation through either the withholding
of information or the creation of restricted ranges of action. The final
sequence has an outcome which they cannot intend – leading them
into a performance as bullies being disciplined by a teacher – because
they are unaware that their actions will be re-framed as an interac-
tion with a teacher. The procedure that leads to this doesn’t give them
informed consent about how they perform, or about what will be done
with their performance. But it does give them access to experiences of
choosing to reject victimising behaviour, as well as choosing aggres-
sive behaviour of their own. They are likely, in these moments, to feel
a variety of emotions – excitement, shame, confusion, perhaps; the
success of the process as pedagogy depends upon the follow-up work
of the teachers who see it with their students, who must interrogate
these feelings and the actions that give rise to them. Post-hoc reflection
on an aesthetic experience is always an important – perhaps the most
important – element of how it becomes meaningful to us, in this case
choices, the actions that arise from those choices, and the feelings that
arise from this action, are the material that needs to be reflected on.
The young people in Armadillo Theatre’s workshop, who stumble,
uninformed, into a role play in which they exemplify a lesson in cycles
of victimisation are essentially humiliated, precisely because they have
been seen to make a choice – and have presented themselves as mak-
ing a choice – but in a situation in which the only likely choice (the
horizon of participation) is then re-cast as a wrong choice. This results
from the use of an implicit invitation that has no clear explanation,
and an address to the specific plot resources already introduced, and
to the dispositions towards behaviours that can be expected from these
participants. This results in a narrowly delineated horizon of participa-
tion, and hence to the performance desired by the procedural authors.
72 Audience Participation in Theatre

For James Thompson, applied theatre is ‘a practice that engages in the

politics of prepositions. The theatres “of”, “by”, “with” or “for” ques-
tion each other because none is given primacy in the term’ (2003: 15).
Audience participation is always a theatre with the participants. It can
generally lay claim to being a theatre for its participants, but the terri-
tory of a theatre of or a theatre by is more difficult to confidently assert.
When authorship is shared, in a balance that will be specific to the
moment of interaction, these labels might apply, but if the participant
has been reduced to the status of the object of performance, perhaps
they cannot. In this example what has been made with these partici-
pants, at worst as puppets of the procedure, is still an experience for
them, and potentially a meaningful one.
This lengthy discussion of a procedure of participation, without in
this instance any exploration of specific iterations of it, is placed here
to show how the terminologies of the chapter can be applied. It might
also unpack the ethics and ground-level politics of a procedure, but
although my references to humiliation and manipulation have an ethi-
cal flavour, my concern is not (at this point) with the ethics of the work.
A further analysis might consider whether what I have called humilia-
tion, and the clear manipulation of the participants, might be ethically
valid when viewed in a wider context – most importantly taking into
account the continued work of class teachers in following up the pro-
gramme with the young people after the event. My point, however, is
that the crafting of these experiences is a kind of authorship, through
the shaping and bringing into heightened attention the experience of
choice and action.
A further development of my proposition that the experience of
making choices is an aesthetic property of the art work depends on
hearing what these moments felt like as they happened, and as they are
remembered. In the chapters that follow the experience of process – as
opposed to the structure of procedure – is examined through my own
experience as a participant, through interviews with other participants,
and through observation of participation in work where I didn’t become
a participant, as I explore other influences on whether and how to
accept an invitation, and what accepting an invitation means to an
audience participant.
2
Risk and Rational Action

Risk in performance

An action staged in a theatre is a relatively contrived illusion and

an admitted one; unlike ordinary life, nothing real or actual can
happen to the performed characters – although at another level of
course something real and actual can happen to the reputation of
performers qua professional whose everyday job is to put on theatri-
cal performances. (Goffman 1969: 246)

Real and actual things can happen to characters in interactive plays,

insofar as participants can in some cases change the characters’ desti-
nies. But the characters we watch most closely in audience participatory
performance are often the people who perform, rather than the charac-
ters they portray. Audience participants are not professionals, so they do
not put their reputations in jeopardy in the way that Goffman describes
here, but they have reputations nevertheless, which can really and actu-
ally come to harm in a performance. In everyday life the risk of embar-
rassment has a disciplinary effect on people. We are under injunctions
to control ourselves, to present performances of ourselves that fit the
personae we present to the world. So when participatory theatre invites
performances from audience members, it presents special opportunities
for embarrassment, for mis-performance and reputational damage, such
that the maintenance of control and the assertion of agency that pro-
tects this decorum is important to the potential audience participant,
especially at the moment of invitation.
It is, therefore, also of vital importance to the practitioner of audience
participatory performance, the procedural author. Participation is risky
for these practitioners too: the presence of non-professional volunteers
73
74 Audience Participation in Theatre

on the stage is a risk. A participant may do almost anything or they may

do nothing; they may do what is invited and do it badly. Practitioners
who are used to the conventional roles in the theatre will not find
it easy to make the sacrifice that has to be made by the procedural
author. To have an unrehearsed performer on stage might go against the
instincts of the writer who wants his or her words to be said and to be
said well. It might go against the instincts of the director who cannot
direct the actions of the participant. It might go against the instincts
of actors because they do now have to direct, and because they can
be made to look foolish. A principle of Western theatre, at least in its
orthodox traditions, is that the show should be as controlled and com-
plete as possible before being presented to an audience; in interactive
theatre this must be sacrificed as some of the performers cannot be fully
rehearsed. The payoff for this risk is that a performance is produced that
is even more ephemeral and unique than most live performance, and
that is demonstrably a product of the people who are present at the
event. However, my focus for this chapter is on the inhibiting force of
risk and the perception of risk for potential participants, and on three
key questions:

• What do participants risk in performance?

• How does procedural authorship manage risk and the perception of
risk?
• What does the element of risk mean for the aesthetics of participation?

A detailed consideration of how risk manifests when participation is

invited affords an alternative viewpoint on the role and activity of pro-
cedural authors: considering them now as facilitators of the potential
performances of participants, rather than as the co-creators of these
performances. The audience participant is seen differently in this light
too. In the previous chapter I discussed the continuity of their brief life
as a performer with the rest of life outside the performance, but now
turn to the difficulty presented by the potential contrast and conflict of
these two modes of being. In a sense this is a re-focussing of the theme
of the previous chapter: the agency of the procedural author is brought
to the fore as they take responsibility for the safety, and the perception
of safety, of the participant; while the participant’s agency is re-cast
from the perspective of their need for self-protection and rational mini-
misation of harm.
This dimension of the relationship between these two roles is never
the whole story, but its importance to the practice of creating audience
 Risk and Rational Action 75

participation, (from both creative positions), and therefore to the per-

formance produced, will become evident. An initial characterisation of
this aspect of the work of the procedural author can be drawn from the
comparable work of the workshop leader in participatory theatre work
of other kinds, where the importance of this issue is taken for granted.
As Hahlo and Reynolds acknowledge at the beginning of their guide to
building an effective workshop:

Those taking part, especially if it is a new experience for them, have

to be encouraged to get to a point where they can begin to take small
but significant personal risks, and prick the bubble of inhibiting self
consciousness. The workshop leader [...] won’t physically or even
metaphorically have to drag spectators into active participation; but
she or he will inevitably gently need to persuade and cajole some-
times reluctant spectators into positions where they can become
active participants in making a dramatic event of their own. (Hahlo
and Reynolds 2000: xxiv)

Spectators, in this passage, become active participants, and even in the

private format of a drama workshop take on a more public role. Good
facilitators have strategies for overcoming the inhibitions that haunt
this change of role: gradually building up involvement over several ses-
sions; disguising participation by asking only for verbal contributions
from more inhibited participants; raising the tempo and physicality of
the activities through games and moving swiftly into physical role-play;
or ‘trust games’ might feature, and an atmosphere of trust consciously
developed. Through these and other strategies people are led to do
things that they would not have expected, to surprise themselves.
Performances that are the culmination of an extended workshop proc-
ess, happening privately or semi-publicly, also work with the dynamics
of risk, for example in Westlake’s account of a Seattle Public Theatre
project with homeless young people:

To establish a safe environment the facilitators closed the workshop

to everyone but the participants, SPT staff, me, and the occasional
journalist. Also anyone who was late or who missed a day was not
allowed to come back. This reduced the group to a few committed
youth. […] The facilitators led a series of ice-breaking exercises geared
towards knowing the body. The work helped the participants get used
to moving around. It also helped them to develop trust and become
comfortable with one another. (Haedicke and Nelhaus 2001: 70)
76 Audience Participation in Theatre

Safety is engineered at three levels here: in the environment, in the

membership of the group, and in the activity itself. It is in these events
that we can see the workings of risk-management openly exhibited,
though other strategies may be hidden or may be implicit in the pro-
cedure in a way that even the facilitators themselves are unaware of.
The first read through of a play, for example, might be presented as
the natural starting point in a rehearsal process, but it also masks a
moment of high anxiety and allows actors a managed forum in which
to begin working together, it is a facilitative strategy for the group. In
these contexts participants are persuaded that what they put at risk
by taking part is worthwhile given the potential benefits. This kind of
investment – to continue the metaphor of resources and markets used
in the previous chapter – is encouraged partly by explicitly address-
ing and reducing the actual risk, but also by managing anxieties that
might exaggerate the feeling of risk. This chapter explores how this
risk management is the basis of the facilitation of audience participa-
tion too.

Real and perceived risk

This reluctance to perform in public is not based on an irrational fear,

it is based in an understanding of a real risk. To expose unconsidered
thoughts or emotions in a semi-public space is risky, just as it is to
display incompetence, inappropriate enthusiasm, neediness, distress or
loss of poise. The risk in all these cases is that we undermine the careful
(though not often entirely conscious) performance of a consistent and
functional persona: a public self. Jonothan Neelands gives us a list of
issues at play when leading drama with young people:

The sequencing and staging of the learning process of the lesson – the
realising of the objectives – has to be mediated through the impera-
tive of making the student’s lived experience of drama comfortable
enough for them to want to join in. Whatever the planned objectives
might be, students’ inhibitions, physical embarrassment, fear of cen-
sure, transient moods and relationships to others in the group need
to be taken into account. (1992: 44)

Adults also get embarrassed and fear censure, and have relationships
that need protecting; we also need to overcome these things in order
to enter a worthwhile engagement with any participatory material,
whether in a workshop or audience participation. We go to great
 Risk and Rational Action 77

lengths to ‘save face’ in everyday life, especially in avoiding unfamiliar

or un-habitual public activity, to protect our public personae and other
people’s perceptions of them; we even go to some lengths to protect
other people’s ‘face’:

When an individual employs these strategies and tactics to protect

his own projections, we may refer to them as ‘defensive practices’;
when a participant employs them to save the definition of a situa-
tion projected by another, we speak of ‘protective practices’, of ‘tact’.
(Goffman 1969: 26)

People are likely to employ defensive practices in avoiding public per-

formance, and, to a degree, have a right to expect that theatre practi-
tioners will demonstrate some tact in the way they engage with their
participants, that they should take some steps to protect their dignity.
In his essay ‘Where the Action Is’ (in Interaction Ritual, 1972),1 Goffman
raises the idea of ‘gambling the self’, of knowingly taking risks with pub-
lic esteem. Public performance is one of the settings in which it is pos-
sible to gamble ‘self’, where (as we have seen) the resources employed in
performances are continuous from one frame to the next, and though
their value might vary in different frames, a resource expended in one
frame – overstretched, shown to be insubstantial, contradicted – might
then be undermined for use in the other frames that follow.
The genuine risks involved in performing in public come in a variety
of forms, of which this risk of embarrassment is only the most persist-
ent. There are also potentially risks in taking part in an activity that
is not enjoyable, or which might even be distressing, actual physical
risks involved in the activity, and risks that a performance will bring
dangerous consequences after the show is complete – unusual, but a
real possibility for participants in Theatre of the Oppressed in a site of
conflict, for example. These actual risks may not, however, be as impor-
tant to the procedures of audience participation as the perception of
risk in the minds of the participants. If the initiation of participation is
a rational response by the audience member to an invitation, as it has
been portrayed so far – and which entails some problems, which will
be taken up in the following chapter – then the choice depends on this
potential participant’s assessment of risk rather than on the risk itself.
And where the resources in play are as varied and individual, and the
potential outcomes so personal and specific, at the same time as the
anticipation of adverse outcome determined by such diverse experience
and disposition – perceptions of risk will be highly unpredictable, much
78 Audience Participation in Theatre

less predictable than the relative difficulty of performance tasks, and the
risks of failure or physical harm that they involve.

Actual risk in audience participation

Following this logic and this language, then, each procedure of audi-
ence participation will produce, in the landscape of possibilities avail-
able to its participants, a challenge to their abilities and to their desire
to remain safe from loss of face. The topography of each horizon of
participation presents different risks generally, and different risks to
each participant, and whether an invitation is accepted and how it
is navigated will depend fundamentally on the perception of these
risks. Before exploring the ways that procedural authorship consists of
manipulating risk and perception of risk, a few manifestations of risk
in participation are worth outlining; but, as will become obvious, any
discussion of specific instances of audience participation inevitably
leads to accounting for the facilitating strategy of the performers – this
element of their procedural authorship.
The obvious thing that will affect the real risk involved in a public
performance will be the nature of the performance task itself. Some
activities clearly risk humiliation; some are evidently physically danger-
ous; some more likely to provoke an adverse reaction from people in
the audience. Jonathan Kay, in his Know One’s Fool performances (which
are described in more detail at the end of this chapter), sometimes
challenges his spectators to demonstrate that they are not inhibited by
social convention, and to kiss the person sitting next to them; those
who follow the invitation make a small transgression against normal
sexual mores. When a fire juggler asks for a volunteer – to throw a club,
or hold a hoop – the risk that someone will get burned, whether per-
former or participant, inevitably increases.
The difficulty of the task to be performed will also make a difference
to the actual risk of physical injury – if there is any such risk – or injury
to public esteem because of failure. Virtuosity is a key part of many
public performances, we applaud musicians, dancers, jugglers and
magicians because they can do things that we cannot, as well as for the
beauty of their actions, and the same is true to a degree for actors. And
while there will be different attitudes to failure at different kinds of tasks
it can generally be said that a difficult task lays the performer open to
a bigger risk of embarrassment through failure. Even the most appar-
ently minimal performance can expose the performer to judgement,
the audience at an improvisation or Theatresports (Engleberts 2004)
 Risk and Rational Action 79

show vie with each other to provide the most spontaneous and original
suggestion, and these suggestions will be judged by the other specta-
tors as acts in themselves, even though the performers may find them
uninteresting and choose to use others. In Jane Munro’s Invitation,2 an
interactive dance performance, participants are wordlessly invited to
learn the steps of a restoration partner dance, and to begin to perform
them for other audience members. The atmosphere and effect of this
piece derives from the way individuals accept or reject the invitation,
while watched and watching each other, as well as from the subtle strat-
egies of body language used by performers to lead them to take the risk
of performing a dance in front of others.
The relationship of the act to its audience can increase the actual
risk of embarrassment, especially in the amount of exposure that the
performance brings to the performer. An act that takes place in front
of a large audience, and fails in some way, is magnified; if the audience
is small the potential for embarrassment is not so great. For example
You, Me, Bum Bum Train’s pieces take individuals through sequences of
encounters where improvisatory responses are required of them:

Wheelchairs transport ticketholders, at staggered intervals and one

by one, through a labyrinth of rooms, each providing a different,
explicitly rendered environment. And you, dear audience mem-
ber, become the undisputed focus of that environment: you’re an
American football coach, urged to exhort his team to victory; a
patient in an M.R.I. machine (that winds up transporting you, lying
down, into a Japanese restaurant); a bungling apprentice to a cat bur-
glar, prowling through a sleeping woman’s bedroom; an evangelist in
a chapel; a government minister (with supposed financial interests
in BP) at a news conference; and an idolized musician, encouraged
to leap into the extended arms of a throng of fans. (Brantley 2010)

These acts are in a sense private, though given in a public place. They
are seen by the performers that invite them – at some points crowds
of many performers at once – they are not on show to the rest of the
participants.
Pantomime provides another example, the children who offer
‘behind you’ warnings to the characters don’t usually leave their seats,
while there is often a game in which a group of children are taken onto
the stage; this group of children leave the designated space of audience
and enter the space of the performer, visibly becoming part of the show,
while those who remain behind may shout as loud as they like, they will
80 Audience Participation in Theatre

always remain physically part of the audience. Similarly a performance

that is given by one person with many watching has more potential
for embarrassment than one given by many people at the same time,
or even many one after another, as in the latter cases one’s mistakes or
discomfort will be less visible. In the Forum Theatre described in Boal’s
texts – as opposed to other pragmatic adaptations – spect-actors come
into the performance space to present their arguments one at a time.
Although they may interact with a number of other spect-actors and
actors once involved in the action, they generally take the step from
audience space to stage space individually and detach themselves from
the crowd that makes up the audience. Variations on the technique may
allow spect-actors to offer their ideas from the safety of their seat, giving
instructions to others to act on their behalf. Alternatively in pantomime
the audience shout ‘Oh no he doesn’t’ or ‘He’s behind you’ as a crowd,
not individually, and will therefore not put themselves on show, and
will not take as much risk.
Ontroerend Goed’s Internal3 is notorious for manipulating several
levels of intimacy and public exposure, making the embarrassment of
participants into a feature of the work. In Tom Phillips’ review in Venue
magazine he describes how his participation consisted of a private, one-
to-one encounter with a performer where he shared some information
about himself, shared an imaginary journey and an imaginary kiss. The
second ‘act’ of the piece involved various pairs of performers and par-
ticipants being interrogated about their interactions:

Compared with what happened to the others, my conversation with

Maria seemed entirely normal and sane. Then the two of us became
the focus of attention. I was asked (by another actor) if I thought that
we’d “clicked”. I said “Yes”. Why wouldn’t I? Maria and I had got on.
We’d had a chat, shared a laugh, made a toast to friendship. “Prove
it!” said the other actor, quite aggressively. I looked blank. How on
earth do you do that? Before I could think, Maria had opened her
arms and she was kissing me. Warmly. On the lips. Suddenly, I was
emotional jelly: euphoric as a 17-year-old who’s just copped off with
the best-looking girl in school. Then Maria very matter-of-factly
announced to everyone that I’d been with my partner for 25 years.
Ouch. (Phillips 2010)

The private encounter appears to be low-risk, but proves otherwise

when a further public performance is conjured out of it. Phillips’ review
elaborates how this public embarrassment, nevertheless, subsequently
 Risk and Rational Action 81

led to complex and meaningful reflections about loyalty, sexual politics,

and his own ability to be tricked using everyday ploys involving body
language and flattery. There is a deliberate strategy of embarrassment,
and the risk of damage to participants’ relationships is also real, the
covert nature of the invitation has brought criticism, but some audience
participants at least have found the work to be worth the investment.

Horizons of risk

Real risk, however, being only the potential for harm in a situation
rather than known or intrinsic harm as such, is not what prevents peo-
ple from participating. It is perception of the risks by the individual that
leads to conscious and unconscious choices about how and whether to
participate, and there are some obvious and some less obvious factors
that shape these perceptions.
While prior experience of the actions invited will make successful
performance actually more likely, familiarity – which can be read as the
anchoring of the frame in shared resources of performance traditions – also
has a great influence on the perception of the difficulty of an act. Asking
an audience to clap or sing along to a familiar song repeats a routine they
are familiar with, and is quite different to asking them to sing a new tune,
or clap a strange rhythm. A member of a community that is used to using
Forum Theatre as part of a decision-making process is going to think less
of standing up to contribute than someone seeing it for the first time. The
individual’s perception of themselves as a performer or potential performer
will be very important, as will perceptions of the other people at the event,
and of the meaning and atmosphere of the performance.
Being in a crowd that participate together can make people feel safe,
for a number of reasons. First, simple safety in numbers prevents an
individual from either being seen to be choosing to give a performance
individually, or even just from being seen while they are participating.
Second, we are more likely to associate ourselves positively with an
action that we see a number of other people undertaking. Third, the
understanding on which we build our assessment of risk is ongoing,
and will be influenced by the evidence of the actions and implied risk
assessments of others: in effect the shared aspect of the element of the
horizon of participation that relates to risk (of which more below) is
exaggerated when participants are in a group of some size when invited.
Perceptions of risk in performance will be culturally determined.
As Felix Ruckert observes about audiences in different countries,
‘Americans take fewer risks, they are open but less actively […] in
82 Audience Participation in Theatre

Germany the people are very controlled […] the Italians are very play-
ful’ (Kattwinkel 2003: 8); and as Boal recalls of working with prisoners:

Amongst other things the macho men were embarrassed about doing
physical exercises and hostile to the idea of man-to-man bodily con-
tact; in one particular exercise they were standing in a circle with
their eyes closed, and when I said I was going to pass behind them
and tap them on the shoulder to designate ‘the leader’ their protests
were vociferous. ‘Don’t creep up behind me, mate – stop right there!’
they chorused, almost to a man. (Boal 1998: 42)

Specific contexts will bring powerful shared horizons of participation:

work with prisoners, for example, must take into account that vol-
unteering will imply risks that are magnified beyond what might be
expected in other situations or institutions. The incident remembered
by Boal illustrates how prevalent attitudes embedded in the context –
in this case homophobia – require a performative conformity. Public
embarrassment, or a performance of complicity with the official regime
of the prison, or the appearance of weakness, will all have implications
that are not easily understood by those who do not share this world and
its way of life. Schools will often have similar dynamics. The ‘economy’
of self-presentation in any social milieu, but especially in a closed insti-
tution, will shape the horizons of those who inhabit it.
As every teacher knows children’s perceptions and expectations regard-
ing public performance change enormously at different ages, though they
are never entirely easy to predict. Younger children understand social risk
in very different ways, sometimes appearing fearless, sometimes very shy,
teenagers are notoriously reluctant to perform, except for those who are
inveterate show-offs. The issues of procedural authorship are the same
with children and young people as with everyone else, though sensitivity
to the needs of different age groups, and even specific groups of young
people will be invaluable in assessing their horizons of participation.
The mood of the audience member of any age is fundamentally
important, and often hard to anticipate or account for. Pre-theatrical
and outer theatrical frame activity can obviously have a significant
effect, but the initial individual mood of audience members is generally
beyond the control of practitioners and the understanding of commen-
tators. People arrive at performances in very individual states of mind,
and might have radically different attitudes to their capacity to per-
form, or to the potential for engaging in interaction to do them harm,
depending on all sorts of contingent circumstances of the day, states
 Risk and Rational Action 83

of mental or physical health, or positive/negative anticipation of the

performance event. State of mind, emotion and its relationship to deci-
sion making, empathy and intersubjectivity are discussed in the next
chapter, where the problems of the model of participation, as a rational
response that maximises benefit and minimises risk, is explored. Clearly
the perception of risk is a matter of emotion and affect, of a set of irra-
tional anxieties and excitement, as much as it is of rational assessment.
All of these factors and dimensions, then, will shape the horizon of
participation that has been outlined as a key part of my conceptual frame-
work: the risks perceived by audience members are self-evidently part
of the make-up of the horizon of any moment of interaction. However,
viewed from this perspective it appears more like the horizon of expecta-
tion brought to an experience (Gadamer) or a text ( Jauss), in the sense of a
limit defined by preconceptions, and this reflects the potential of perceived
risk to prevent potential participants from accepting an invitation. But we
can think of the horizon from the point of view of more flexible readings
of Gadamer and Jauss, in which horizons of expectation account not only
for fixed limits but for the space of potential, and for the possibility of
extensions and adaptations of capacities. This allows the handling of risk
by procedural authors and audience participants to be conceived in a full
and flexible way. In other words, pursuing the landscape metaphor implied
by the idea of a horizon may suggest inviting paths or dangerous terrain, or
a precipitous and dangerous route that is a worthwhile challenge.
Nevertheless, a horizon of risk, as a dimension of the horizon participa-
tion as a whole, is given structure by the negative impulses of the audience
participant, and the positive exertions of the procedural author who tries
to anticipate, elide, ameliorate and/or overcome these perceptions. It is
also where the landscape within the horizon is given further shape and
character by felt responses of a negative kind, by anxiety or trepidation.

Risk management as procedural authorship

The simplest strategy available to the procedural author is to anticipate

a general horizon of risk and make sure that all interactions are con-
tained within it in a way that is comfortable to most of the audience.
Other strategies that work on the basis of a general horizon of risk might
be characterised as:

• changing the general horizon somehow;

• making the audience feel that they want or ought to explore the
horizon;
84 Audience Participation in Theatre

• misrepresenting activities so that the horizon is not a fair representa-

tion of what they will be asked to do; or
• beginning well within the general horizon of risk and gradually
becoming more difficult and more risky, broadening the horizon
from the inside rather than challenging it straight away.

A procedure of gradually including one participant after another, being

sure to take good care of each, should have the effect of expanding the
horizons of those who are more reluctant, as Brian Way recommends,
when working with children:

Many will wait until they see what kind of thing they are going to be
asked to do. When they discover that there is nothing to be afraid of,
that no individual is going to be picked on and watched by the rest
of the audience, and that no one is going to criticize them or hold
them up to ridicule, then confidence will grow and grow and with
the confidence will come fuller participation and the probability that
more people will become involved. (1980: 41)

Way says that his participants will ‘discover that there is nothing to
be afraid of’, but perhaps, really, they change their perception of what
danger is presented by the activity, they change their horizons as their
confidence grows. Other forms do this too: Forum Theatre initially
allows audiences the security of distance and then invites, inspires or
provokes them to abandon this in favour of full involvement in the
‘theatrical game’. Inspiring and provoking are both different strategies
for expanding horizons of participation, rather than ways of honestly
proposing an interaction.
The invitation that changes an ordinary theatrical performance frame
into an interactive performance frame works on the basis of these
expectations and perceptions of the event. Where the outer theatri-
cal frame makes it clear that interaction and participation are going
to happen, especially where this changing of frames is something
traditional or familiar, the audience will have a clearer perception of
the risk or difficulty of the performances that might be asked of them.
In these circumstances the episoding might be entirely conventional,
tending towards an implicit invitation because many people will know
what is required of them, and their perceptions might not need to be
addressed by the performers or the procedure. Where a more overt
invitation is given, the facilitators may explicitly address the percep-
tions of the audience and attempt to take advantage of the flexibility of
 Risk and Rational Action 85

their perceptions, using language and tone to construct the audience’s

understanding of what they are to be asked to do. Covert invitations
can make a play on people’s expectations and perceptions of an event
so that they do not perceive their performance as a performance per se
and so perhaps bypass their sense of the show as risky.
In the earlier examples – the fire juggler and Kay’s invitation to kiss
another audience member – the perception of the risk is nuanced by the
performance of the invitation and after it: fire jugglers create an air of
real physical danger around their shows, which is not entirely fictional,
but the risk to performer and participant is much less than it is made
to appear. Like Kay, Las Furas Del Baus sought, in XXX, to make a point
about conventional inhibition, not merely to invite exhibitionism, but
to follow it up with further invitations in a manner which this observer
considered bullying:

At the end of row J, 20-year-old Nina from Australia removes her bra
and reveals her naked breasts. The large audience stares and claps.
She volunteered, and her boyfriend Seth is standing next to her, but
she’s being bullied by the maestro into getting down to the flesh. She
won’t let him remove her trousers, but Seth – perhaps to spare her
blushes – removes his own and reveals his pierced penis to the world.
(Benedictus 2004)

The risk is managed not to reduce it but to guarantee its outcome, as a

rhetorical strategy. Like Ontroerend Goed, this company are not wary
of taking a risk themselves, of giving offence to their audience; but
their manipulation is not to covertly invite participation and lead par-
ticipants into something unexpected, but to overtly invite a perform-
ance that seems challenging enough, only to follow it up with another
invitation. It seems they will remain unsatisfied, and performing their
invitations as demands, as bullying, inflects the horizon of participation
of audience members, as well as the way others will respond.
The activities of facilitators and facilitating actors will continue to
affect perceptions once a frame has changed and an interaction has
begun, both for those who are performing and for those who continue
to watch and may be considering what to do if another invitation is
given. They can give encouragement, which builds confidence, giving
the impression that a performance is better than it might otherwise be
thought, or conversely they can criticise,4 so that a performance seems
to have been of lesser quality. In either case the risk of entering the
performance will appear different, whether because the audience fall
86 Audience Participation in Theatre

for this manipulation and perceive the actual activity differently, or

because they see through it and now consider the facilitators to be more
unfriendly. The apparent difficulty of a task, as it is evidenced in the
achievements of participants who actually undertake it, will be a very
great influence on the perception of the difficulty and risk involved for
those who might follow, and the appearance of difficulty is something
that can be manipulated by the facilitating performers or other tech-
niques of procedural authorship.
Seeing someone fail and embarrass themselves makes it seem likely
that this might happen again, though of course some people will take this
as a challenge rather than a disincentive. Interactive performers, as well
as the obvious facilitators, can take part in the provocation and inspira-
tion that serve to change people’s horizons of participation, as in Mark
Weinberg’s observation of community based theatre with young people:

During the scene a gay couple danced together, was hassled by others
at the prom, and forced to leave by the chaperones, ostensibly ‘for
their own safety’. At the end there was applause, but also signs of dis-
tress in the audience. However, when I asked for someone to replace
the protagonist no one moved. Fortunately, one of the students not
in the scene stepped in as one of the protagonists. She chose the
worst possible option – to say that dancing with her partner was a
joke and deny his sexual identity… I did not have to prod anyone
again. (in Kattwinkel 2003: 195)

The student here appears to be an audience participant, and is not a

plant in the sense of performing a pre-planned action that engineers
participation. But she is aware of the process that needs to happen, and
intervenes with her own contribution to the procedure: an action that
challenges the young people present to defend their values, and the
values that they think should be presented at this event.
Individual performances can be invited from within the audience, to
make distinctive contributions but from a position of security, as in a
Forum Theatre event described by Frances Babbage, in which Richard
and Matthew are audience participants (spect-actors), and Kirk a
performer:

It was clearly too soon to expect either of them to enter the perform-
ance space – Richard, anyway, was adamant he would not act – so Kirk,
as Jennifer, simply came into the audience. Matthew was prepared to
adopt the teacher’s role from where he sat. (Babbage 2004: 84)
 Risk and Rational Action 87

The important thing for the practitioners in this case is that some action
is taken for the forum to proceed; for the participants the important
thing is that they don’t draw attention to themselves in the wrong way:
the compromise works for both parties. Detaching oneself from the
crowd can be exhilarating, because of this perception of danger; Liepe-
Levinson considers this experience of risk to be one of the distinctive
elements of participation in striptease shows:

This thrill consists of voluntarily exposing oneself to some sort of

perceived external danger, such as standing up in front of an audi-
ence and being scrutinised by the group. It is the possibility of being
carried away or done in by the event; it is the pleasure produced by a
mixture of fear, the hope for a positive outcome, and the exhilaration
of having experienced ‘danger’. (1998: 12)

The ‘possibility of being carried away’, rather than just the anticipation
of this possibility, is on the agenda of the next chapter, and the uses of
exaggerated risk will return later in this one, but this thrill is made pos-
sible, in Liepe-Levinson’s account, by detachment from the crowd, and
the risk of scrutiny that it entails.
The seriousness of a performance is also important, though it can
produce risk in complex ways. A trivial performance might have less
serious implications for public persona than one taken seriously, but
equally it may be seen as less embarrassing to fail at something worth-
while than at something pointless – the Armadillo Theatre workshop
programme described in Chapter 1 took place with groups of teachers
and school support staff as well as with children, and though many of
these adults insisted that they wouldn’t actively join in the role-play,
often the most adamant performed with conviction once they under-
stood the exercise as a tool of serious debate. In part these teachers may
have been inspired by an empathic relationship to the characters, they
came to care about the situation just as audiences of young people did,
but as well as this their anxiety may have abated when the complexity
of the situation presented a genuine challenge. Again Babbage tells of a
nervous participant who finds courage when it appears that she is not
being taken seriously, Jennifer, once more is the character at the centre
of a Forum Theatre model:

Julie proposed that Jennifer try talking to her mother properly,

confronting the situation rather than avoiding it and cosily watch-
ing television. She was invited to enter the scene and replace
88 Audience Participation in Theatre

Jennifer, which perhaps surprisingly she did immediately. But once

‘onstage’, even though this was only three steps from her chair, she
lost confidence – ‘I don’t know what to do, what am I supposed to
say – I can’t believe I’m doing this’ – but regained it when Dave
got up to go; she told him smartly to sit back down, and he did.
(Babbage 2004: 82)

Julie’s relationship with Dave is important to this behaviour, but in

Babbage’s re-telling it is clear that she wants him to hear what she has to
say, and does not want her performance to be undermined by his depar-
ture. A direct relationship between seriousness and risk, and its inverse,
where people are able to laugh about an activity they will consider it to
be of less consequence, and so to be less likely to make them lose face,
seems logical; but where a serious subject is engaged in a performance,
to say or do the wrong thing can make one look ignorant or stupid, but
it can also produce embarrassment if a serious subject is not engaged
with seriously.
The casting of participants can be arranged so that facilitators have
control over who will be offered a task, and they might use this as an
opportunity to try to make sure that a suitable person is invited to
take part. There is huge scope for error in this of course, unless the
facilitators know their audience beforehand. With Box Clever Theatre
Company, touring to young audiences in schools, we would always try
to talk to children as they came into the performance space, to spot
those that were confident but not too rowdy, and that seemed popular
with other students, and by having brief conversations as they took
their seats. Choosing such a participant for the first piece of audience
interaction in the play helped to make sure that they would respond
positively, be able to do the simple tasks required and also that others
would be willing to follow; it was, of course, a strategy to reduce risk to
us, the performers, too.
This doesn’t mean that facilitators will always make safe selections,
with Box Clever I made the mistake of choosing a boy who was bullied
by his schoolmates, and was heckled when he participated, and a girl
who had just left hospital, still wearing an ID bracelet on her wrist.
They had both volunteered, and initially appeared good choices for the
reasons given above, but participation was risky for each of them in an
additional, real way, that we could not have known about.5
It is also possible to cast participants appropriately by creating roles
that suit them; this would be the case in a workshop drama process,
but a quick thinking facilitator will apply the same idea in an audience
 Risk and Rational Action 89

participation, as did Adrian Jackson of Cardboard Citizens in this

account by Babbage:

The scene was set; Jackson drew in two others, casting them as
mourners with the assurance that they wouldn’t have to speak. Payne
played the vicar, Still the boyfriend-in-waiting. Jackson inserted addi-
tional theatrical touches, giving the mourners a box to represent a
coffin, directing them to make an entrance and help establish the
solemn atmosphere; they ended up doing more ‘acting’ than they
had intended, and seemingly enjoyed it. (2004: 88)

Covert invitations deal with a different set of expectations, and differ-

ent behavioural horizons, because they are not explicit or honest about
the fact that a theatrical interaction is to take place. Their place in a
procedure that manipulates perceptions of risk is a tricky one – they
can lead people into a very different set of expectations, and a different
horizon of participation, or they may simply annoy or alienate partici-
pants, who, thinking they have been tricked, will restrict their horizons
drastically. Again, where facilitators choose participants before asking
them to participate, they may sometimes try to anticipate their attitude
to participation, and try to choose someone with a broad horizon so
that they will be more likely to agree to join in, and will be relaxed and
enthusiastic when they do.

Ethical issues in the management of real and perceived risk

So far my discussion has been concerned with managing risk and per-
ception of risk to ensure that participation happens, but there are also
ethical reasons for making these choices. Real risks, and to some extent
the perception of risks, bring with them obligations on the theatre maker
and rights for the participant. The interrelationship of these two fac-
tors brings not just questions about what should be done and how, but
also some perspective on the dynamics of what it can mean. A useful
comparator – though not directly applicable in a great many cases – is
the principle of informed consent and the capacity for such consent. This
principle, that comes into play in academic research wherever a human
being is involved in a research project,6 as well as in medical practice, is
designed to protect individuals taking part in research whether that be
medical, scientific, sociological or in the humanities. That this applies
across the board validates, to some degree, what I have said about risks
to social and mental well-being as well as physical – subjects in social
90 Audience Participation in Theatre

science research are rarely put at risk of physical harm, but need to
judge whether they risk reputational damage through sharing personal
information or memories. Having begun to argue that the performances
of audience participation are always to some degree performances of the
social self, the relevance of this is clear.
I do not want to argue for the treatment of audience participation in
strict accordance with this principle – far from it. I have seen participa-
tory performances which, under the influence of a misreading of the
obligations of research ethics in a university context,7 have been pre-
ceded by a notice announcing that participation would be invited and
that audiences were free to choose whether they took part, and which
thus lost an important element of surprise and the delight that comes
with it. But there is a capacity for audience participatory theatre to be
distinctly unethical, to manipulate participants into situations they did
not anticipate or were not informed about and which expose them to
significant public embarrassment or the revelation of private material;
and more commonly there is work that plays on the boundaries of this,
where embarrassment might be acute and painful in some cases, but in
most cases not damaging in the long term, where the harm caused might
be better characterised alongside ‘taking offence’. Often the discussions
of the ethics of such invitations are concerned as much with the nature
of the manipulation as with the actual performances invited or given.
Where children and other vulnerable people are involved in research
the principle of informed consent is not applied, consent must be given
by another responsible party, and the law is very clear about who such
people are and who is empowered to consent on their behalf. But the law
is silent on who should consent on a child’s behalf in audience participa-
tory theatre: there is an assumption, perhaps, that the adults responsible
will be familiar with the conventions by which children (so often) will
be asked to participate, and consent implicitly to the presumed minor
risks involved. The comparison is not entirely fatuous, in a culture where
child protection has become increasingly regulated, performance for
children, especially outside school buildings, gets off lightly.
Is there a similar implied consent for responsible adults attending
theatre performances? To a great extent there is. The theatre is an
institution made up of a myriad of institutions each understood by its
constituent public – there are traditions in which we understand the
conventions and thus imply consent to them when we attend, and there
are other sites – festivals, venues, companies –- where the challenging of
conventions is to be expected, and thus a degree of consent also implied.
Anyone attending an Ontroerend Goed performance is likely to expect
 Risk and Rational Action 91

their sensibilities to be challenged as part of the performance, and for a

kind of participation to be invited which could be potentially humiliat-
ing. But their reputation did not always precede them.
Where participants are vulnerable – by legal definition or through a
dangerous context, rather than as a result of accepting the invitation
in itself – the logic of how to make an ethical choice about informed
consent might be read as a pragmatic cost-benefit analysis, or as an
absolute obligation to fully inform all participants. Think, for example,
of the use of participatory performance to discuss domestic abuse, and
where a ‘conspiracy of silence’ perpetuates the normalisation of abuse;
is a manipulative invitation to participate that leads to a revelation
about such abuse in a public forum ever justified? Most practitioners
would probably agree that it would not be; but might be less certain if
the participant manipulated into revealing the truth was the abuser and
not the abused – in other words if manipulation was used to expose and
embarrass the oppressor rather than their victim.
The techniques for reducing risk or giving consent do not have to
consist of excluding certain kinds of material or giving full and clear
explanations to every audience member. Some TIE and children’s thea-
tre shows include a stage of rehearsal where acts are prepared away from
the large audience before being put in full view of their peers. If a par-
ticipant is prepared and rehearsed for a task they will be more likely to
complete it well, and they may also have an opportunity to anticipate
and get advice on how to perform difficult or potentially embarrassing
material, or to consider carefully what they want to present.
Obviously in many situations the manipulation of perceptions of risk
is not a serious ethical consideration, the street performer who asks a
child to help them for example, but uses all their skill to make the task
for the child look difficult – throwing a club up to the juggler when on
a high unicycle for example – and when they succeed they make sure
that the child feels that they are getting most of the applause. The game
of taking risks then becomes the mechanism through which the event
becomes meaningful for the participant, where the apparent risk is so
well judged that it produces a frisson of excitement appropriate to their
perceptions of what is challenging behaviour to their horizon of risk.
But this kind of game can be introduced in more ethically fraught situ-
ations: as in Liepe-Levinson’s observation of a Chippendale’s perform-
ance in New York:

After the lead dancer completes his routine, three more bikini clad
male strippers enter and wrap crepe-paper streamers around the
92 Audience Participation in Theatre

women’s bodies so that they look as if they are tied to their chairs.
The trio of strippers then alternately dance for and caress their
bound amours. In contrast to the first half of the scene, the women
remain motionless. The play concludes with the strippers kissing the
captives and then releasing them. The symbolic and practical use
of paper bondage in this scene demonstrates the importance and
underlying mutual consent necessary for the playing out of such
erotic encounters. To be in bondage is presumably to be controlled
and therefore to be placed in real jeopardy. But here, the ‘bonds’ are
conspicuously under the command of both the dancers and the tied-
up spectators. If the male sex and courting show isn’t up to par, the
captive women (even though they may be subject to peer pressure
and the intimidation of the theatrical scene) can still get up and walk
away. (1998: 22)

This erotic thrill of this challenge is turned on its head in Barbara

Smith’s Feed Me, in which she greets her audience one at a time while
naked, inside a constructed domestic space inside a gallery.

Although the space may have been safe and nurturing for Smith, it
might have not have seemed so to the visitors, witnessing private
acts in what was, no matter how it was disguised from the inside, a
public space. Indeed their very presence transformed the space from
private to public. And, as with any solo performance, they were
essential to the event as performance, as was their willingness to
‘take risks’ by becoming active participants. (Kattwinkel 2003: 159)

This might be an example of what Claire Bishop characterises as an

‘agonistic’ encounter, in her treatment of socially interactive live art.
Designed to be uncomfortable and quietly confrontational, the feeling
of social risk provoked by the disjuncture of public and private acts,
clothed and unclothed bodies was perhaps as important to the sub-
stance of the work as the legible meaning of Smith’s performance. The
ethics of audience participation, then, aren’t as simple as removing all
significant risk or ensuring explicit or implicit consent. At times effec-
tive participation – and politically challenging participation – will be
that which puts participants in compromising situations.
Keith Johnstone’s attitude to the ethics of invitation in improvised
theatre is ambivalent, and the strategies he suggest for handling invita-
tions interesting. This is one form of public theatre where the audience
have a clear role to play, but in Impro for Storytellers, which describes
 Risk and Rational Action 93

the form that Theatresports and Gorilla Theatre should take, he warns
strongly against handing over too much responsibility, mostly in order
to avoid giving volunteers work to do which is too risky. When discuss-
ing inviting spectators on to the stage to take part in improvisations
themselves, he is enthusiastic, and he clearly expresses an awareness
and concern for the risk that these participants are taking:

Audience volunteers interest the spectators in a fresh way, and the

time spent improvising with them doesn’t feel like ‘part of the show’.
Never abuse them (as happens in stand up comedy), and when they
kill idea after idea – as they will – you must somehow manoeuvre
them into being successful. Always be seen to be making them
the centre of attention (they will be anyway, so you might as well
take the credit for it). Give them free tickets or T-shirts, or tokens
for the concessions. Treat them with love, courtesy and respect; yet
I’ve seen volunteers who were wandering about in a scene with the
players ignoring them; who were asked to be the hero of an adven-
ture which became an excuse for the players to shine; who were not
introduced; who were not given prizes; who were not thanked; who
were not accompanied back to their seats. ( Johnstone 2000: 20)

Johnstone’s volunteers are to be handled with kid gloves, and rewarded

for their bravery. This care for the volunteers in fact might not always
allay the sense of risk, if anything it might heighten it. By giving prizes
for coming onto the stage the performers draw attention to the risk
taken, rather than taking attention away from it. The way people are
brought onto the stage can make the act appear more significant:

Be inventive. I’ve lain down on the stage and said that nothing
will happen until we get eight volunteers to play a ten-minute
Theatresports match. We listened to music until eight sheepish peo-
ple emerged. The audience cheered everything they did with wild
enthusiasm. ( Johnstone 2000: 20)

The invitation here goes against the grain of what happens in workshop
drama, albeit playfully; it puts pressure on the participants instead of
taking the pressure off. And as the danger of public performance is
almost entirely to do with appearance, with how one presents oneself
to the social world, the risk is increased by drawing attention to it,
even though the scope for individual invention, and therefore personal
embarrassment, is being carefully contained by the performers. The
94 Audience Participation in Theatre

acknowledgement of the volunteers’ lack of expertise and the assist-

ance they will need in order to ‘succeed’ betrays Johnstone’s lack of
confidence in what they will produce when left to their own devices.
The strategy seems to be to make volunteers look good by exaggerating
the task they undertake and avoiding giving them responsibility for the
performances they give; sometimes the sense that they are to lose their
agency entirely becomes quite clear: ‘let volunteers open and close their
mouths while the players dub their voices, or tell the players to be pup-
pets, and have the audience volunteers manipulate them in scenes (the
‘puppets’ providing the dialogue).’ ( Johnstone 2000: 20)
There are two different kinds of audience participation, which
Johnstone describes: participation on stage in ways that are controlled
and almost risk free, and the use of suggestions by participants to be
enacted by performers. The first he encourages, though it is to be used
with restraint, the second he discourages, though it is widely used by
others. The kind of interactivity recommended tends to involve inviting
people onto the stage, in small groups or individually, to act in scenes
that they have never read, with people they don’t know, and in front
of an audience. In most elements these acts will therefore be towards
the riskier end of the scale: in being located on the stage, in being sepa-
rated from other audience members, in being asked to do unfamiliar
and unrehearsed things. The fact that they are going to be under the
control of the performers means that the actual risk is reduced, the acts
are designed to keep the responsibility for the resulting performance
with the actors, though it might be made to appear otherwise; but the
situation places them at the centre of attention, so the perception of risk
might be very high. Though we must not underestimate the seriousness
of trying to be funny, the game-play frame makes the consequence of
success or failure into something frivolous. Johnstone is adamant that
the participants are not to be left stranded on the stage, that when they
get into trouble they are to be rescued, and preferably, what they do is
to be clearly led by the actors, not by their own impulse. The ethics of
participation he proposes are entirely to do with the safety of the par-
ticipant from embarrassment, and not at all to do with giving away the
control of the theatrical event.

Protecting participants into involvement

As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, workshop techniques

pay close attention to risk management. But in the best practice the
approach is designed to lead to deep involvement rather than simply to
 Risk and Rational Action 95

ensure participation. Often a workshop will follow a path of progressive

exercises that starts with less risky activities and becomes more chal-
lenging, gradually expanding the participants’ horizons of participation
rather than challenging them outright to start with. Warm-ups also
serve to draw people gradually into activity and similar strategies are
sometimes employed in interactive theatre. The aim of the warm-up for
the participants, to prepare them for heightened physical and mental
activity, is genuine, but disguises other benefits to the workshop proc-
ess. It is a way of marking off the workshop activity from everyday life,
like a kind of rite of passage:

The warm-up is always necessary, because the beginning of any

workshop is like going through an ‘air lock’, moving slowly from a
highly pressurized environment to one where the pressure is radi-
cally reduced. It helps people clear away some of the daily clutter
that they bring with them into the workshop and which needs to be
ditched if they are to establish the necessary focus on the work in
hand. (Hahlo and Reynolds 2000: 5)

The pressures of everyday life are various and persistent, but by denying
their power within the workshop a facilitator makes it possible to focus
on the specific kinds and qualities of interaction that are at the heart
of the educational or therapeutic workshop. The airlock effect given
by a warm-up helps to frame these intense representations of social
life safely, and to allow the distractions of real social life to be set aside
for a while. I think the metaphor can be interpreted differently, that
the work that happens in participatory drama and theatre is in some
ways more ‘high pressure’. It is magnified, distilled action, and it puts
people more overtly into the position of performing for others than is
true of most forms of everyday behaviour, but it serves to show how the
change of frame is a very significant one. For audience participation the
outer theatrical frame can serve some of the functions of a warm-up by
developing emotional investment in an event, by creating a space in
time and behaviour between the outside world and participation, and
by modelling some of the work to be done in participation.
Writing about classroom drama with children, where problems may
more often arise from over-eagerness than from reluctance, Gavin Bolton
introduces a useful idea of protective strategies to take people into activity.

The notion of protection is not necessarily concerned with protect-

ing participants from emotion, for unless there is some kind of
96 Audience Participation in Theatre

emotional engagement nothing can be learned, but rather to protect

them into emotion. This requires a careful grading of structures
toward an effective equilibrium so that self-esteem, personal dignity,
personal defences and group security are not over-challenged.
(Bolton 1984: 128)

Although with children the emphasis will as often be on engaging with

emotion at the right pitch rather than encouraging engagement for the
inhibited, which it more often will be with adults, that which Bolton
describes as needing protection – self-esteem, personal dignity, personal
defences and group security – is the same across all kinds of group
drama work. The warm-up, with its role as demarcation of the special
nature of workshop time and space, is an example of an important
protective device. Classroom drama practitioners like Bolton might not
use a warm-up in the same sense as Hahlo and Reynolds describe, but
instead some introductory activities or games that have a similar func-
tion. His comment not only illuminates what the opening sequences
of workshops and classes and participatory performances can do, but
also indicates the second major task of the facilitator – to ensure that
the participants engage with the purpose of the work in a significant
way. The facilitator will bring material to the process, but also needs
the participants to bring something of themselves to it. Of course, the
contribution required will depend on the kind of work being done –
a workshop programme with children will often need to engage them
with information that is new to them, while a therapeutic process may
rely on contributions of a deeply personal nature.
Although this might appear to be a process of making interaction
safe and easy it is, as Bolton makes clear, a matter of protecting partici-
pants to allow them a more serious involvement – the strategy, in his
terms, is to protect children into emotion rather than to protect them
from emotion. This can also take the form of balancing one kind of
risk with another, so that a performance is safe in one way but risky in
another. In the Rocky Horror Show it is the appearance of the performers
and audience – in both theatre and cinema versions the audience often
attend cross-dressed, in make-up, or in ‘fetish’ clothes – that is the site
of the mildly transgressive behaviour that all of the ‘safe’ activities –
singing songs, scripted interjections into the play, throwing things – are
designed to facilitate for the crowd.
The terminology of participatory drama implies a certain kind of
procedure; practitioners describe themselves as ‘facilitators’, seeing the
role as making things easier. It is obviously potentially a waste of time to
 Risk and Rational Action 97

design a theatre that asks for participation that is bound to fail, or that
scares people away from interaction, but the alternative to these strate-
gies is to make it seem hard. People respond to challenges, and might
‘gamble’ more of their public esteem if it seems there is more kudos
for success, or more stimulation on the way. Faking the difficulty of
an activity, so that the performer does all the work and the participant
gets the applause, as in street theatre, intensifies the feeling of risk for
this purpose. In some performances the nervousness of the participants
may be foregrounded, to exploit the tension and fear, as Bim Mason
observes:

Another way to create tension, and therefore keep attention is by

interactions with members of the public either as participants or as
part of the crowd. Improvisation between performers is often excit-
ing, but with volunteers from the audience a different sort of drama
is created because the rest of the audience identifies with the volun-
teer. Therefore, it is important that they come out of the situation
well – the audience will feel a collective sense of relief and achieve-
ment. These feelings will be the greater the harder the challenge. The
danger is going too far so that they become fearful and embarrassed.
(Mason 1992: 98)

Making some kind of challenge apparent to participants in workshops

or classroom drama is acknowledged as good practice, as identified by
Helen Nicholson for example: ‘a general atmosphere of trust, where
there is familiarity between participants but no element of risk, is
unlikely to lead to drama which presents students with new challenges’
(Nicholson 2002: 85). This ‘general atmosphere of trust’, bred, in the
examples she is concerned with, through familiarity, is not the same as
the more valuable trust that must be harnessed for a group of students
to embark on new and unfamiliar tasks, in new relationships with each
other. This is what Johnstone is trying to provoke very quickly when
he lies on the stage and waits for a volunteer to take responsibility for
the show, and in another sense what Ono is referring to in works like
‘Cut Piece’ where:

the woman […] is intruded upon physically, by subjecting herself,

sitting or kneeling on stage, to the actions of the audience, who have
been invited to cut off parts of her clothing with scissors […] the
performances question the limits of the boundaries of trust between
people. (Ono 1997: 126)
98 Audience Participation in Theatre

The question of trust is presented in a powerful visual image, but also

in an experience that will change the relationships of the people who
undergo it, although to no specific pedagogical aim in this case. The
notion of ‘protecting’ people into involvement has been turned on its
head in both of these examples: people are being challenged and pro-
voked, even in the light-hearted provocation of the street performer,
into changing relationships with the material and with each other.

Reading the audience participant

The invitation is a prime site at which to address an audience’s expecta-

tions explicitly, and to draw attention to their horizons of participation,
it is the point at which they can be given the view of the coming activi-
ties that you want them to hear. An overt invitation that consists of a
full, clear description of the activity will help to break down anxiety as
long as the activity described constructs an amenable horizon for most
potential participants, but will serve only to increase their reluctance
if it gives an honest picture of something they wouldn’t want to do.
However, this can become part of the procedure’s meaning, as when Las
Furas Del Baus ask for people to strip, an act clearly beyond most peo-
ple’s horizons. But if no-one does, the show is not spoiled, in fact it may
serve to make their point about our continuing conservative attitudes to
sex and our bodies more strongly:

Like all participatory theatre, XXX is a challenge to its audience.

And like all challenges, it is difficult to face. When XXX appeared
in London last year, it triggered a predictable volley of yawns. Such
exploitative gimmickry could never shock me or turn me on, said the
critics. I bet it did both. (Benedictus 2004: 10)

In this case it seems likely that the provocation was the content as
much as the participation that resulted. A lack of active participation
at this point did not represent a failure of their procedure as the lack of
response became a performance of the audience’s inhibition.
With this sense of the audience themselves, present both as a repre-
sentative body and as a group of singular individuals who become the
subject matter of the performance, it is worth unpacking the different
ways in which participatory performances can be read by audiences
and participants. Horizons of expectation in the theatre shape how
spectators read the most important semiotic equipment of theatre –
the actors. The actor is available to be ‘read’ in a number of ways, as
 Risk and Rational Action 99

himself, as a specific person from another place and time, as a category

of people like himself, or perhaps as a set of distinct performances of
signs not attached to any particular self or category of people. The actor
most often stands for a fictional (or fictionalised) other person, giving a
presence, actions and words to ideas necessary to the development of a
fictional narrative. This involves the audience in a double reading: the
indexical signs of the present body of the performer are read as icons of
something that is not present. This is a more complex process where the
indexical signs, which can be read in the actor and are sometimes signs
of real physiological events in his/her body, are read as standing for the
presence, state and actions of another person in another time and place.
Actors also stand for categories of people like themselves, men,
women, short people, tall people, black people, white people. The proc-
ess here is at basis simpler, one of synecdoche: one stands for the many
with no need for the double reading of fictional representation. But it
becomes more complex when aspects of the fictional narrative come
into play, where the actor stands for ‘angry people’, for example, a
state partly pretended by the actor, or for ‘revengers’, a category largely
defined by genre conventions rather than everyday social practice.
Alternatively, the behaviour of actors can be read independently of any
attention to their own narrative, that of a character they are playing,
or of the groups of people they might stand for: as merely a set of dis-
connected acts, words and gestures. Many live artists and some dancers
deliberately operate at this level, avoiding representation for the sake
of examining actions in themselves. But the poetic, choreographic and
scenic elements of a conventional play operate in this way too, though
they might make connections with sets of ideas from the fiction of a
play that are not actually present. It is this variety of different ways of
reading a performance that is guided by interpretive communities, their
horizons of interpretation and their ideological overcoding.
However, as well as these ways of reading a theatrical performance,
an actor or performer is always discernable as a person in his/her own
right, though this continuous individual self is disguised or denied by
a variety of techniques of performance and conventions of watching.
Those who know the actor or who have seen more than one perform-
ance are always able to compare, or to consider a performance as part
of the greater narrative of a life, or a career. For example, watching
Ian McKellen in Strindberg’s Dance of Death might bring to mind any
number of earlier stage performances, but it might also have brought
to mind his knighthood, his political activism, or his appearances as
Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. None of these will necessarily
100 Audience Participation in Theatre

detract from the reception of the work at hand, but the idea of him as
Strindberg’s malicious, pathetic and aged character will be inflected,
for many spectators, by some of these dramatic and public roles. We
always, to some degree, watch a performance with some attention to
this current narrative of the achievement of the performance – how well
the actors do with a role, who gives the most compelling performance,
who makes the small errors and the fine judgements. This is a particu-
lar kind of intertextuality operating in theatre where actors, to some
extent, always resemble characters they have played before, and so for
some spectators produce an intertext between one play or performance
and another. This is, in semiotic terms, an indexical sign relationship,
the sign that the actor’s body and performance stands for the actor him-
self, and cannot be separated from it. There are complexities that arise
when the perception of the actor reflects again on the character, becom-
ing part of the intertextual theatrical moment. Escolme comments on
her own reading of Mark Rylance as Hamlet:

My account slips from ‘performer’ to ‘Hamlet’ back to ‘Rylance’ here.

A man on stage signalling discomfort with being before an audience
cannot but denote ‘performer’, while the lines he speaks denote
Hamlet’s fictional discomfort. It is as if the presence of the audience
produces the move away from the contemplation of not-existing,
towards more purposeful performative speech, the justification of his
perspective on his mother’s marriage.
Rylance’s performance, then, does not merely replace Q1’s simple
act of communication with an internalised expression of disgust and
grief to be spied upon by the audience. His is a subjectivity produced
in the moment of communication with that audience and at a point
where the performer’s relationship with the audience is most clearly
foregrounded, the moment of direct address. (Escolme 2005: 65)

Her thesis is that this double reading is part of the early modern drama-
turgy, an inheritance from modes of storytelling that were closer in time
than the assumptions of realistic representational theatre; but all acting
traditions will suggest a horizon of expectation that allows some kind of
play between the actor’s identity and the roles they play.
This analysis of the way performance is read has implications for the
spectator who becomes a performer in audience participation, explor-
ing as it does the relationships between the performer and the various
ways things can be read from him or her. First, there are reasons why
we are more likely to interpret a performance as saying something
 Risk and Rational Action 101

about the person who performs, to read it as a performance that belongs

to the person rather than being detached from them. It is important to
the reading of a fictional character in performance that we are able
to ‘disattend’ (Bennett 1997: 68–69) those parts of the performance that
are inconsistent, much in the same way that we ‘disconnect’ (according
to Goffman) some things that are present from a frame of interaction in
everyday life because they have nothing relevant to do with it, or might
even distract from its sense or tone.

It is not that the excluded events – such as audience activity – have

no semiotic value (it does make a difference if one is allowed to see
the stage hands or if the entire audience is noisily eating popcorn),
but that they are understood as belonging to a different level of
action. (Elam in Bennett 1997: 68)

The knowledge of what to disattend comes from familiarity with what-

ever kind of theatrical frame is in use – the experienced spectator of an
Onnagata in Kabuki knows to pay attention to the quality of gesture
and the beauty of costume, and not to the evident masculinity of the
performer’s body or the stage hands that help him sit or rise, as they
belong to a different level of action. The spectator of a naturalistic
drama knows that she is entitled to gripe about inconsistencies because
everything on the stage is expected to belong to the same level of action.
The audience of a participatory performance will often see the trans-
formation of a spectator into performer, thus seeing the person as ‘him-
self’ and remaining aware of this primary role, whereas the concealment
of the actor’s ‘real self’ from the audience during the performance is a
strategy still at use in most theatre practice. The audience, depending
on what kind of relationship they have with each other, might know
the participant before the show, might be familiar with his other eve-
ryday roles and therefore be ready to confuse or conflate them with
the role of ‘actor’ or the actions associated with a character on stage.
They might even know him intimately, and be unable to read the per-
formance except as a significant event in his personal narrative. They
will almost certainly be aware that this special role, of actor, does not
normally belong to the participant, and that they would not normally
be given the licence to perform; they might be less inclined to grant
this licence, and its privileges, to an ordinary person, and unwilling
to disconnect their actions from the rest of their lives. The participant
himself, of course, might well not have much skill, and so be unable
to pull off the tricks of imitation and transformation that remove great
102 Audience Participation in Theatre

portions of the need for disattendance. An audience participant step-

ping onto a stage may perhaps recall other staged performances, but will
certainly bring to mind the everyday performances they give at other
times, and so they will produce another kind of intertext for those who
know or have seen them before. This might add up to a failure of the
performance as a piece of theatre, if the action has not been ‘keyed’
properly so that it is seen as connected with more mundane realities,
in other words there has not been the proper ‘suspension of disbelief’.
Nicholas Ridout reminds us:

We know who we expect to see on stage. We expect to see actors.

This needs saying: we do not expect to see human beings, in all their
diversity, but, as their representatives, a kind of group apart, more
beautiful perhaps, more agile, more powerful and subtle of voice.
(Ridout 2004: 58)

To see someone more ordinary in this position, someone we know to

be ordinary because we pass our ordinary days with them or queued to
enter the theatre with them, can be thrilling. It can also, at the same
time even, disappoint and undermine our ability to play our part in the
game of theatre.
We see the performance in the context of the performer, so complete
disattendance is no more possible than the absolute suspension of disbe-
lief, in any kind of performance. However, this becomes more significant
in audience participation where the distance between the performer and
the act is more noticeable, and the connection of the act to the everyday
impression of the performer can be more significant. As well as being a
potential detriment to the performance, it can create interesting inter-
textualities, which can inform readings of the performance as related to
its context, and which might allow a person to be seen with interesting
new attributes. Or it can cause interference, as the spectator is unable
to accept this distance, and so pays attention to it in a negative way,
as evidence of the inadequacy of the performance and possibly of the
performer. In some kinds of interactive theatre the distance will be more
noticeable than others. In work with children for example, the partici-
pants might be less skilled as performers, and so will audiences be less
skilled (or less generous) as watchers, making it less likely that they will
pay attention to what is being offered as a performance, and not to what
isn’t. Disattendance is also a performance by those watching, a choice
to display competence and sensitivity through paying attention to the
performance as it is intended. To display an overt lack of disattendance,
 Risk and Rational Action 103

to show that we are aware of the distance between the performer and
their role, is to attack the performance for its inadequacy. A significant
stumbling block for interactive theatre (especially with children, and also
a worry in work with adults) is the lack of respect that can be shown to
participants, increasing the real and perceived risk but also altering the
way a performance is read by all those present. Whatever the reasons for
this disrespect – and with children it might be a matter of wanting to
assert their own informal frames of behaviour wherever possible, or of
giving a negative reaction to patronising or overly authoritative facilita-
tion – it amounts to a refusal of the participatory frame.
This connection of the performer to the role, which the institution
of theatre generally stages as a managed disconnection, is the source of
the embarrassments, inappropriate and inopportune performances that
constitute much of the risk of audience participation.

Performativity and the public self

As I have already begun to suggest, Goffman’s metaphors cannot say all

that needs to be said about the ways behaviour is managed in public.
He can be criticised for simplifying the matter of social agency: making
it a matter of agents who act on the world, rather than being shaped
and acted on by it. This is fair in respect of The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life, which makes little attempt to move beyond this idea of
the deliberate staging of social life. In Frame Analysis, however, there
lurks a stronger impression of the ‘definition of the situation’ as some-
thing that is not entirely within the scope of our control. Subsequent
social theory develops concepts of how such definitions are arrived at,
and how they serve to reinforce social conformity. For Judith Butler, as
well as for Bourdieu, we become ourselves in the performances avail-
able to us, rather than acting on the world through performance. Some
unpacking of the relationship between this assertion of a social self and
the pre-given structure from which it emerges will help to put a differ-
ent emphasis on what is at stake in public performance.
In Bourdieu it is the linked concepts of field, capital and habitus that
describe how the social world is operable for social agents. In Distinction:
A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Bourdieu uses these
concepts to unpack the class-bound tastes of the French in the sixties
and seventies:

Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or sym-

bolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices,
104 Audience Participation in Theatre

is the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive

preferences which express the same expressive intention in the spe-
cific logic of each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing,
language or body hexis. (Bourdieu 1984: 173)

Appropriations of objects and practices according to the acquired logic

of a class are what constitute lifestyle, and it is through these formulae
that ‘[w]here some only see “a Western starring Burt Lancaster”, others
“discover an early John Sturges’” (Bourdieu 1984: 28). Habitus is the
facility, determined by class, culture and gender, which allows us to
deploy our social capital in social situations in an informed way but,
it is the degree to which this ‘informed’ is actually ‘determined’ that is
the crux on which questions of social agency rest. It is, then, an invalu-
able concept for this examination of agency in audience participation,
as it allows us to consider the habits of behaviour and interpretation
that participants bring to their actions in an interactive procedure. The
resources we are able to deploy are both facilitated and limited, not just
by the skills and experiences we have – our various capital – but by the
dispositions that we are able to take in response to the fields with which
we are faced. As Maria Shevtsova says, habitus is a sometimes discon-
certingly flexible term, as it has the scope to include the different logics
acquired at different levels of our experience:

The concept of habitus in Bourdieu is slippery insofar as it appears

to refer to the dispositions of individual social agents, to the disposi-
tions of social agents taken as a group (thus we could speak of a group
habitus) and to the dispositions incarnated in or interiorised by the
practice of a field in its distinction from another field – a distinction
that is only possible because it is relational, that is always defined in
respect of something else that it is not. (Shevtsova 1989: 57)

The relational quality of these concepts is an important aspect of this

sociology, it is through this that the social subject can be seen to exist
as a set of evolving positions, rather than as a fixed and finished entity.
As Shevtstova says:

To acknowledge the presence of subjectivity and individuation

in the cultural field does not discount in the slightest its ‘objec-
tive relations’. Nor does such an acknowledgement desocialize the
subjectivity of the socialized agent of action. In fact, this agent is
capable of individuation only because she/he is a social being, and
 Risk and Rational Action 105

is differentiated only because she/he can be differentiated within the

collectivity and from the objective social relations that constitute it.
(1989: 47)

Although some attempts at describing subjectivity posit a transcenden-

tal self, abstracted from all events but those of the mind, later theorists
consider the self to be socially constructed. Different turns of this
strategy – James’ ‘self-feeling’, Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’, Meads’ the
self becoming an object to itself through interaction8 – all point toward
a self that is ‘other directed’.
The theory of performativity as developed by Butler is concerned
with the performative nature of gender and sexuality, which she sees as
performed through each of us rather than by us and constituted before
all other changes and commitments can be made. Her writing focuses
on these determinations, but she has space both for the importance of
the idea of the self as part of everyday practice, and for our agency in
the strategic use of this practice:

According to the understanding of identification as an enacted fantasy

or incorporation, however, it is clear that coherence is desired, wished
for, idealised, and that this idealisation is an effect of a corporeal
signification. In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the
effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the sur-
face of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest,
but never reveal, the organising principle of identity as a cause. Such
acts, gestures and enactments, generally construed, are performative
in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport
to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through cor-
poreal signs and other discursive means. (Butler 1999: 173)

This use of acts, gestures and enactments to fabricate an identity is a

fundamental strategy of everyday behaviour, for all that it may ulti-
mately be self-deceiving. Though the idea of the performative here is
very particular – the construction of an identity through gestures and
acts – she acknowledges the connection between theatre and politics,
and suggests how her work as an activist as well as a theorist has con-
nected with overtly theatrical interventions such as ActUp (Butler
1999: xvii). In her theory we have an elaboration of the importance of
performativity (with ‘performance’ as a subcategory of this interpreta-
tion of language and action), in the process of making ‘character’, ‘self’
and ‘identity’ both private and public. Butler says that performance in
106 Audience Participation in Theatre

public is one place where the battle for agency can be fought, but she
also shows just how difficult it is to have agency over the fundamentals
of identity.
Later pragmatic social scientists (Holstein and Gubrium 2000: 21) take
hold of the tendency to verbalise this fabricated identity in the form of
narratives, as a methodology for both research and social work practice,
in which the analysis of the way people ‘story the self’ tells us a much as
anything about how they are taking positions, and developing disposi-
tions to their evolving circumstance, as any other mode of enquiry, with-
out having to burden these narratives with any greater truth than this.
These ideas: of performance as constitutive of the self, of the embodi-
ment of ideas of the self in corporeal signs, of the narrating of the
self, are very suggestive of the power of a performance that becomes
attached to the narrative of a person. If, as I have suggested, audience
participation has a special capacity to be taken as a representation of
the person performing, it might speak about this public identity in
especially powerful ways – whether it speaks truths about it or not.
Audience participation is another space where we take part in the per-
forming/becoming of the self, and the risk we perceive is a risk to this
idealised substantial self, to this pragmatic self, or at least to whatever
version of it we are trying to promote. This is despite the safety of the
fictional space, despite the make-believe and the suspension of disbelief
that we expect in our theatre: in audience participation we are lucky if
the irony, the license to play or experiment, the conditions of carnival
or liminality operate as they do in other kinds of theatre – either with
or without audiences.
The kind of investment desired by Bolton and other practitioners of
workshop drama, and some of those who invite audience participation,
has a way of making it ‘real’, of bringing consequences. This invest-
ment is pursued by some contemporary performance practitioners, Tim
Etchells for example:

Investment forces us to know that performative actions have real

consequences beyond the performance arena. That when we do
these unreal things in rooms, galleries and theatre spaces the real
world will change. To me that’s the greatest ambition and the truth
of cultural practice – things can change, things can slip, things
can move, because they’re pushed (deliberately), because they’re
knocked, by accident. All that has to happen is that the direct lines
of investment get drawn – between performers and task, between
witnesses and performers. (Etchells 1999: 49)
 Risk and Rational Action 107

But it is, through audience participation’s peculiar ability to put the

person on show, through the tendency for the theatrical character to
be transparent and for the everyday character underneath to show
through, easier to deliberately push or accidentally knock action towards
this kind of perlocutionary performative. When we volunteer we invest
ourselves in a performance. The investment of a participant in a per-
formance may not be as profound as that of a practitioner who has
prepared, rehearsed and conceived a performance, but it is immediate.
The practitioner’s very preparation mediates, through the perception of
the audience of their role as performer.

Know One’s Fool

Jonathan Kay’s Know One’s Fool is an ongoing body of practice, rather than
a specific piece of theatre. It takes a number of forms, from small-scale solo
shows, to ongoing workshops, to larger festival events where hundreds of
participants are involved. To conclude this chapter I will discuss both his
Glastonbury Festival shows over a number of years, and compare them
to some small-scale performances at Camden People’s Theatre in 2002,9
showing how his work uses (in my terms) procedures of participation
to challenge audiences to overcome their anxieties and inhibitions, and
further demonstrating how the theory can be applied to interactivity that
specifically addresses people’s reluctance to perform in public.
He begins his theatre performances in something approximating a
stand-up comedy frame, one that also has resonances of circus clowning
and other pre-modern kinds of ‘fooling’ performance. Expectations of
performances at Glastonbury are coloured by the celebratory, carniva-
lesque nature of the festival, where nothing serious is expected. In the
‘theatre field’ there is mostly street performance and circus, and in these
there is rarely an expectation of a conventional actor–audience relation-
ship. However, the clown–audience or comedian–audience relationship
that Kay works from is generally still only partially interactive – either
may imply heckling, singing or shouting, even some movement, but
the focus still remains on the original performer: there is not a horizon
of participation that contains continual and substantial participation.
There are of course expectations about Kay himself, his show is famous
in the festival, and people often come knowing something about
what they will be asked to do, or at least that they will be asked to do
something.
As I have observed, Kay does not spend much time explaining what
the show will consist of, but he does establish early on that this will not
108 Audience Participation in Theatre

be a conventional show, then launches into activity, describing how

modern life encourages us to follow rules and conform to roles, and
inviting us to take the opportunity to act spontaneously for a while.
As the interactions develop he invites some specific activity, (singing
songs, kissing – as already mentioned) sometimes in detail, sometimes
directing action and the quality of action as it happens, making it clear
what he wants from participants, but not giving an outline of the event
as it starts. The procedure here is the unfolding of a relationship, a
series of requests and demands for the indulgence of his whims, and the
building of a belief that if we go along with him, we will have fun. This
is participation that emphasises the fact of joining in, rather than fore-
grounding any specific content, and especially not giving any attention
to the skill or quality of the performance. Participants are very much on
show, drawn out of their shells, behaving abnormally, and the lack of
emphasis on quality or consequence plays a major role in allowing this
to happen, in overcoming the element of risk in the situation.
Many of the activities of the Glastonbury 2002 show were familiar
from previous festivals. Kay often uses a group movement – sometimes
it has been sheep, this time it was fish – to take the audience out of
the theatre tent and into the field outside. The sheep image, perhaps,
undermines the sentimentality of what Kay has said before this – it can
be read as a parody of the context and of the participants own herd-like
following of his instructions – the crowd, on their hands and knees,
‘baa’ at other spectators as they move around the field. Though this
may be satirical of Kay’s ability to inspire a following, and of whatever
aspects of festival culture or contemporary life the viewer or participant
might like to make of it, the fish movement has different and less obvi-
ous readings, as fish we are silent and though still frivolously character-
ised, and perhaps not so degrading as the sheep; however our glass-eyed
mouthing is an expression of vacancy that comes close to the sheep’s
image of surrender to Kay’s will.
Another feature of this show helps to allay the fear of performing
in such a public setting, and makes use of the aggression that this fear
tends to inspire, by redirecting it. Early in the show and repeatedly
throughout it, the audience are invited to shout ‘fuck off’ en masse, at
Kay himself, at another section of the group, at passers-by not in the
group, at some absent other, a ‘them’ who would, supposedly, want
us to do or not to do something. The performance of reluctance is
incorporated into the audience-performance, multiplied and magnified
and brought to the surface in parody, but never entirely effaced. This
loud, obscene, aggressive stance gives license to be innocent, to join in
 Risk and Rational Action 109

and be ‘un-cool’. This is a decisive part of Kay’s facilitation. Without

it perceptions of his act – and the activities we are asked to join in
with – could be dominated by the ‘hippy’ or ‘new-age’ associations that
accrue with performances that ask for innocent, celebratory, coopera-
tive participation.
Even in the context of this festival resistances to activities with such
associations are high, and strange events are kept at arm’s length. There
is license here, but it is a license to drink, take drugs, immerse ourselves
in the safe participatory activity of dancing, and to watch performances
by other people. Festival goers rarely speak to strangers or act spontane-
ously, they generally engage with the entertainments in a conventional
way. There have been perceptible changes in the nature of the festival
over its long history, demographically, spatially, and rhetorically – there
are generally older, wealthier people there, there is more room to move
than in the more chaotic festivals of the eighties and early nineties,
and there is commercial sponsorship. Nevertheless the festival retains
some of its anti-establishment aura, its air of rebellion, even after it has
achieved respectability after forty years and many changes. Kay’s show
encapsulates some of the contradictions of the event, between the rebel-
lious and individualistic ethos of punk and rock, the mellow commu-
nitarianism of the festival’s hippy roots, and the affirmatory hedonism
of dance culture. These tensions are reconciled and reproduced many
times in pop subcultures represented at the festival, and are still recog-
nisable characterisations of its meaning.
Kay’s performances in a conventional venue, when I have witnessed
them, have concentrated on individual activity and have been less
comfortable experiences. Though they contain similar elements and
themes, there is less predictability to their structure. With a smaller
audience there is more room for flexibility, for Kay to run with ideas
that are offered by the audience. There are stories of whole audiences
leaving the theatre and singing songs in the street,10 reminiscent of the
Glastonbury shows, but it is also common to see individuals perform-
ing ideas of their own for large parts of the performance. The procedure
in the events I witnessed and participated in was: Kay enters the stage
tentatively, dressed in one of his peculiar costumes, and makes his way
around the performing space, treating it gingerly, exploring. He speaks
some of his idiosyncratic philosophy, in his rudimentary character, the
gist of which is to raise the idea of our inactivity and lack of initiative,
which he, like us, cannot completely conquer. He plays the piano, asks
us why we shouldn’t do something very simple such as kiss the person
next to us, or sing a song. Sometimes this develops into group activity,
110 Audience Participation in Theatre

sometimes it does not. He strikes up a dialogue with someone in the

audience and sooner or later invites them onto the stage to begin some
act or activity. He strikes deals with the whole audience about how they
will repeat their activities after the show is over. He plays the piano
again and makes a final inspirational speech before leaving the stage.
He meets the audience in the bar afterwards, in ordinary clothes, ‘out
of character’.
Again these performances are usually attended by people who know
something of what to expect, or who have come before and want more.
The agenda of self-realisation that is suggested in the larger festival
shows is pursued more purposefully. This is manifest in the closer
focus on the individual, on material that is more personal, and in a
more forceful attitude to participation for all. Those who don’t want
to participate are sometimes isolated, in one performance in which I
participated, two women who did not want to join in the communal
song were surrounded by the rest of the audience and sung at, mak-
ing them visibly uncomfortable. On another occasion when he asked
why we should not kiss each of our neighbours, unlike with the larger
Glastonbury audience, he was able to pay attention to how people went
about it, and to direct the attention of the whole audience to the kissing
as it went around the room, asking why people didn’t want to kiss, how
and where they wanted to kiss the person next to them. All of this was
achieved with a smile on the face of most participants, but it clearly,
and I think quite deliberately, made some anxious.
Individual acts I have witnessed have included a meeting with the
Buddha, arising out of a conversation with an audience member who
had met Kay before, and who apparently was looking forward to
doing something more fulfilling with his life. His conversation with
Kay turned to travel and religion, and when he was asked if there was
something he would like to do that night, he offered that he would like
to meet the Buddha. Another volunteer, after asking which school of
Buddhist thought he should conform to, took the part, sat in a corner
of the stage and, after a number of approaches in which Kay instructed
the pilgrim to prostrate himself properly, gave gnomic answers to the
questions offered. This light-hearted wish fulfilment was, however, the
exception to the majority of the individual acts I have witnessed. More
characteristic was the man who danced like a ballerina while we sang
for him, or the woman who sang and danced a party piece for us, a
music hall song with some very mild innuendo. Another element is
added that is not present in the festival performance: the piano. Kay’s
playing is simple and sentimental, its effect is to give time for reflection,
 Risk and Rational Action 111

space for the spectators to attend to themselves rather than to him or to

other spectators, and it adds a note of pathos to the proceedings. Where
in Glastonbury we are encouraged to be frivolous and to live carelessly
in the moment, the mournful tone Kay’s piano interludes acknowledges
the difficulty of this project, it allows us to retreat to an internal world
to consider the gains and losses in taking Kay seriously.
Activities like this make the individual the centre of attention, par-
ticularly when a more personal contribution is asked for. The group
activities in the smaller scale procedures will also draw more attention
to individuals for how and whether they join in. It is also more diffi-
cult to escape, it is easier to walk out of a large audience in a tent, for
which you haven’t paid an entrance fee than it is from a small crowd
in a small theatre. Though there is always a number of inconsequential
acts to begin with, the show moves towards more meaningful participa-
tion by each person and by the group, though it usually has a sense of
being unfulfilled in this ambition. Although Kay is more than liberal in
what he allows us to do he is often very unclear as to what he expects.
This combination of implied seriousness of ambition and lack of clear
instruction makes for a peculiar tone to the event, in my experience
(though it clearly could be very different at other times). Kay’s show
seems to be about what each person brings to the event and makes
of it, while giving few clues to what should be profitably brought and
made. There is a lingering feeling that we have failed to make the most
of an opportunity, and there is also the feeling that Kay too has failed
to make the most out of us. As an extension of the explicit criticism of
our inertia and everyday hiding, it is effective. As an event in itself it is
frustrating.
These two procedures seem to be designed to mean different things.
The Glastonbury show allows festival goers to identify themselves
publicly with the ‘weirdness’ of the theatre field; it also contains an
experiential dimension in giving an opportunity to cross some incon-
sequential boundaries; and it is also a chance to give a performance of
non-conformity that satirises itself and the event it is part of. To other
festival goers participants become another strange performance – they
might just as soon encounter a giant ‘Terminator’ robot, a family group
of gorillas,11 or Kay’s crowd, singing Summer Holiday and shouting
‘fuck off’ at them. Participants also represent the same thing to them-
selves, performing a participation in the festival for their own benefit.
They must confront personal fears (albeit minor ones) so they can con-
gratulate themselves for doing so. These performatives do not, in the
sense intended by Austin, create social contracts, and of course when,
112 Audience Participation in Theatre

as he does from time to time, Kay officiates at an impromptu wedding,

or naming, or the initiation of a cult, the conditions are not ‘felicitous’
to make these actions count. At the conclusion of the small-scale shows
the performative is more specific and overt: we promise, in conclusion,
to ‘create our world’, we ‘declare’ in a secular ceremony that is not
entirely unserious, and agree specifically to be ready to begin our acts
again should we meet outside the theatre.
There is a contrast between this approach and the careful and non-
manipulative strategy taken by practitioners of interactivity in most TIE
and other ‘applied theatre’ models. There the principles are democracy
and consideration. Here they are carelessness and insistence. Kay’s
ideology is not based on the same class politics as Boal, but he is con-
cerned with another kind of liberation, one which does have resonances
with Boal’s idea of the ‘cop in the head’ (Boal 1999). His technique of
empowerment is very different. He makes an event that, in most of its
iterations, is about the possibility of presence and liberation, but only
by provocation, not by self-realisation. His is not a rehearsal for revolu-
tion, but a performance of the need for personal revolution. What he
ultimately does is problematise the agency of the individual, by invit-
ing us to do ‘what we want’ and leaving us to decide what that is, or
giving us things to do that pastiche our lack of agency – being sheep
for example. The simplicity of the surface of his events hides some
complex intertextualities between the performances of the participants
and the context in which they are produced. Its appearance may still
seem naive, ‘naff’ to the sophisticated theatre goer and it is, I think,
consciously so. But it is intended to address our resistances, to remove
the blocks of sophistication as much as those of fear or confusion. Its
success in this is limited, and Kay has a workshop practice that claims
success of a different order. But the methods he uses to make an artwork
out of the process of involvement are interesting because they exem-
plify how form and content echo each other in participatory theatre.
Kay’s events exemplify how audience participation becomes a ‘self-
performance’ because his rhetoric turns attentions back on to the par-
ticipant, consciously and deliberately making the freedom to perform
‘what we want’ and ‘ourselves’ in public his theme, while challenging
the learned, role-based behaviours that we might be tempted to present
for him. He seems to suggest a kind of pure experience that might
be achieved by throwing off these bounds, but his work puts such
emphasis on performative display that it, paradoxically, produces great
self-consciousness. The effect seems to be to illustrate that which he
is trying to free us from, to reflexively and ironically demonstrate our
 Risk and Rational Action 113

impotence in the face of our inhibitions, while continuing to urge us

to throw them off.
The ‘meaningfulness’ – the amount of meaning that can be carried –
of an audience participation performance is not necessarily dependent
upon the freedom of the participant to create it: it is possible for a nar-
row horizon to suggest and produce very important performances, and
for a broad range to suggest and produce banal or superficial ones: when
Kay creates a very open range of action in his smaller scale shows, the
performances seem to say very little, when he closely directs audience-
performances at Glastonbury Festival, he produces satire. Nevertheless,
the experience of freedom to act in public (within whatever range of
action) is meaningful in itself because it is risky. Producing perform-
ances that are both free and meaningful requires a synergy of intention
and effort, of the willingness of the procedural author to open up to
the unpredictable, and of the participant to be bold and take risks in
a performance. This is both how audience participation can become
important, and how it can do harm.
In this chapter the aesthetics of audience participation has been
re-considered in the light of a major influence on the decision-making
process of participants: their perception of risk in public performance.
The theoretical framework as it has been established so far is largely
able to accommodate this by taking an alternative perspective on the
terms used so far: once again applying Bourdieu’s idea of social capital,
and using a more extended version of the metaphor of the marketplace,
public performance can be seen as an investment of social capital in
a market where good returns are not certain. This helps to explain
why the creation of interactive performances can be difficult, why the
tension between audience and performer arises when participation is
invited, and provides another perspective on the agency of the partici-
pant who seeks to control their performance.
3
Irrational Interactions

So far I have portrayed the procedure of participation as a matter of

creating horizons of participation where participants can freely choose
whether and how to behave, though they will do so within limits based
on the resources and dispositions they bring from previous experience.
I have also suggested that manipulation can take place through with-
holding information about the procedure, and that the perception of
risk might lead a potential participant to refuse an invitation, or might
create enough anxiety to make participation unattractive. But there
are many other influences on a participant’s state of mind at the point
of invitation, which become potential tools of the procedural author.
Procedures that create excitement of some kind could be considered
manipulative, if that excitement means people join in who otherwise
would not. Some states of mind can be said to overwhelm the conscious
decision making of individuals, and make them susceptible to guidance
from a crowd or from a performer. This idea of ‘state of mind’ is also
largely misleading, as changes in the mind are often initiated and evi-
denced in changes in the body – and as I shall show, a clear distinction
between mind and body is fallacious in the first place.
These factors need to be considered not just in terms of how they
might play a part in manipulation, but also once again in terms aesthet-
ics: how the experience of different states of mind/body are part of the
art work of audience participation. The key questions for the chapter are:

• What states of mind and body play a part in accepting an invitation?

• How are they used by procedural authors, and experienced by
participants?
• Is our understanding of agency, and its meaning in audience partici-
pation, altered by a consideration of mind and body state?
114
 Irrational Interactions 115

My discussion so far has followed Goffman’s lead in modelling social

interaction as a rational maximisation of benefit through strategic
interaction, to describe how people make choices in response to invita-
tions in an interactive frame. While this has been useful in developing
a vocabulary and a model for my subject, it has not so far addressed
directly how other, non-rational, influences on behaviour – such as
affect, emotion and the embodied elements of cognition – must also
play a part in interaction. All rationally motivated behaviour happens
in the context of feelings about situations and people, and of inclina-
tions to follow or resist suggestions that arise in the behaviour of others.
One of the overall weaknesses of sociology in Goffman’s mould is that
it fails to account for these aspects of our behaviour. Bernard Meltzer
and Jerome Manis identify the weakness of this approach in two areas:

1. Interactionism places an over-emphasis on self-consciousness; it

‘plays down’, ignores, or makes light of both the unconscious and
emotive factors as they influence the interactive process.
2. Symbolic interactionism is guilty of an unwarranted demotion of the
psychological; it has robbed human needs, motives, intentions and
aspirations of their empirical and analytical reality by treating them
as mere derivations and/or expressions of socially defined categories.
(Meltzer and Manis 1978: 84)

This wilful under-playing of conscious and unconscious motivations,

and the over-emphasis on apparently deliberate action shaped by
‘socially defined categories’ facilitates a useful description of the struc-
turing of social life, but it only tells part of the story. When it frames
action as ‘self-conscious’ it entails a proposition that conscious decision
making is the entire or most important determinant of social action.
And when the ‘symbolic’ element takes hold, the independent, indi-
vidual character of the decision maker is relegated below their place in
the social order. But in articulating decision making as rational and goal
directed, it doesn’t theorise how we perceive, interpret and rationalise
situations and the goals we can achieve in them; this kind of theory
is essentially interested in the structures of social life at this level of
interaction, but not the full complexity of what drives and allows
human subjects to create and take part in these structures. By introduc-
ing Bourdieu’s theory of socially stratified influences on action I have
attempted to account for some aspects of difference between people in
how they are able to operate at this level of interaction, but a further
elaboration, based on the ‘state of mind’ of individuals and groups of
116 Audience Participation in Theatre

participants in the moment of invitation can restore the unconscious,

the emotive and – to a degree – the psychological, to the picture.
In this chapter I will borrow from some approaches to perception and
action, to describe some of the troublesome unconscious phenomena
that can have an effect on the structured interactions that have been
described so far. As in the rest of my discussion, I will be epistemo-
logically promiscuous, moving fairly rapidly through some perspectives
that might not normally be taken together, if the differences in their
methods and assumptions were fully taken into account. My aim, as in
earlier chapters, is to suggest the grounding for a broad-based theory of
audience participation: to fully ground discrete elements of this theory
would require more rigorous examination at every point. Broadly speak-
ing what follows is drawn from theories of embodied cognition, which
show how thinking – and decision making – happens throughout
the body, involving affective and emotional states and processes and
according to some theories directly depending on other bodies too.
Considering the decision making of the audience participant using
these theories suggests how some of the conceptual gaps left by sym-
bolic interactionism might be filled, and points towards explanation
of some specific, apparently intersubjective, processes such as laughter,
crowd formation, and liminality, which are especially relevant to audi-
ence participation.

Emotion in audience participation

It is self-evident that emotion plays a part in decision making in

many situations of human life, and that an invitation to participate
will evoke emotional responses in individuals. These responses will be
informed by expectations of, dispositions towards and prior experi-
ences of theatre and audience participation, as well as drawing on the
performance that has preceded the invitation, and the style or structure
of the invitation itself. Procedural authors make overt and covert use of
emotional response while audience members will have both predictable
and unpredictable individual responses; and – according to the theme
of this book – this nexus of the authored procedure and the process of
action that derives from it becomes part of the substance of the event.
Any precise account of an experience of participation must articulate
the feelings involved: the nervousness, excitement, anger or exhilara-
tion that motivate or demotivate a reaction to an invitation. Everyday
language serves well enough to describe how our feelings inform our
decisions, but turning to the science and philosophy of cognition
 Irrational Interactions 117

for more precise definitions (and distinctions, for example, between

emotion and feeling) helps to develop an understanding of a more
integrated relationship between the apparently rational mind, bodily
reaction and emotional response, which is in operation at every stage
of a theatre event, not only when we ‘feel’ an emotion.
As Antonio Damasio argues in Descartes Error (2006), a bias in conven-
tional thinking about perception and cognition, which held that mind
and body were distinct entities and emotions interfered with rational
analysis, has been shown to be wrong. Not only is it evident that
emotions play a significant role in perception and cognition of many
kinds, but also that without an emotional element thinking can break
down and become ineffective, even illogical. Supported by an extensive
hypothesis about the way representations of internal and external states
combine to create the feelings that are essential to our sense of self and
mind, Damasio proposes that:

At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us

to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we
may put the instruments of logic to good use. We are faced by
uncertainty when we have to make a moral judgment, decide on
the course of a personal relationship, choose some means to pre-
vent our being penniless in old age, or plan for the life that lies
ahead. Emotions and feelings, along with the covert physiological
machinery underlying them, assist us with the daunting task of
predicting an uncertain future and planning our actions accord-
ingly. (Damasio 2006: xxii)

The decisions here are life-changing matters, but such decisions are
made up of and expressed in the kinds of everyday negotiations
mapped out by symbolic interactionism, and the dispositions towards
ourselves and others that they are built on are also exhibited in the
(generally) non-life-changing options presented in audience partici-
pation. The distinction, then, is not between rational/conscious and
irrational/unconscious decisions, but between different combinations
of emotional/mental cognition, where both responding immediately
and thinking through a situation are partly made up of emotional reac-
tion, sometimes imperceptibly in the background of a rational assess-
ment, sometimes to the extent that conscious thought seems not to
have happened at all. Damasio is at pains to point out that this is not
the dominance of ‘nature’ over ‘nurture’, or of an essential humanity
over context, culture and experience. Nor does he prioritise un-thought
118 Audience Participation in Theatre

emotional response over considered action, which is where he makes

use of a distinction between emotion and feeling:

By itself, the emotional response can accomplish some useful goals:

speedy concealment from a predator, for instance, or display of anger
towards a competitor. The process does not stop with the bodily
changes that define an emotion, however. The cycle continues, cer-
tainly in humans, and its next step is the feeling of the emotion in
connection to the object that excited it, the realisation of the nexus
between object and emotional body state. […] feeling your emo-
tional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions, offers you
flexibility of response based on the particular history of your inter-
actions with the environment. Although you need innate devices
to start the ball of knowledge rolling, feelings offer you something
extra. (Damasio 2006: 132–133).

Feelings, for Damasio, are emotions become conscious, recognisable

and most importantly memorable and transferable to other similar situ-
ations in the future. Just as important, for my purposes, is the origin of
both in the body, and their effect on the body:

Emotion and feeling thus rely on two basic processes: (1) the view
of a certain body state juxtaposed to the collection of triggering and
evaluative images which caused the body state; and (2) a particular
style and level of efficiency of cognitive process which accompanies
the events described in (1), but is operated in parallel. (Damasio
2006: 162–163)

This is a bundle of interconnected and mutually re-enforcing

phenomena – a body state that arises directly from triggering phenom-
ena, the recognition of that state, and the ‘particular style and level of
efficiency of cognitive process’ that shapes active responses. Though
the language of predators and competitors again suggests extraordinary
situations for the modern human being, Damasio asserts that this is a
consistent, everyday undercurrent, or ‘substrate’ to our cognitive lives.
Why should this be important to an understanding of interactions
in performance, if emotion is the substrate of everyday thinking, can
it not be taken for granted, or merely discussed in everyday terms?
Because, as has already been noted, the participant’s experience
reaches an important climax at the moment of decision making in
response to the invitation, and knowing what this decision making
 Irrational Interactions 119

consists of is therefore important; because the procedural author’s

work inevitably includes addressing these emotional, non-conscious
processes; and because the art work, being made up of the participant’s
experience and its nexus with the work of the procedural author,
therefore takes shape at this level of combined conscious and non-
conscious response.
The ‘risk assessment’ outlined in the last chapter mostly as if it was a
cost-benefit analysis will in some cases, momentarily at least, be deter-
mined entirely by emotion, in the way that Damasio styles it, especially
if an invitation has arrived very suddenly, or with a sudden change
in atmosphere or environment. Given time to think, we assimilate
emotion – as feeling – into a thought process, and a conscious narrating
of the situation that will attach an identifiable feeling to the emotion,
and assess risks and benefits with the help of an appropriate emotional
accent to our thinking.
Other theorists do not make the same distinction between emotion
and feeling, Bruce McConachie, in his Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive
Approach to Spectating in the Theatre, (2008) builds his discussion on
Ciompo and Panksepp’s six basic emotional systems: FEAR, RAGE,
PANIC, CARE, PLAY and SEEKING (the capitalisation is McConachie’s
strategy for distinguishing these systems from a conventional use
of these words, and I will follow it here), where less extreme or sub-
tler variations on these basic emotions are considered part of each
‘system’. These basic systems will associate with different kinds of
response to stimulation from the environment or emerging situations,
and they suggest broadly positive and negative responses that we
can easily imagine playing a part in motivating participation: CARE,
PLAY or SEEKING; or demotivating: FEAR, RAGE or PANIC. But it is
conceivable that RAGE – manifesting as a kind of righteous anger –
might inspire participation in which a certain point of view needs to
be put across, or that variations on FEAR or PANIC might negatively
inspire participants away from one kind of activity and into another,
in some kind of covert invitation. Following Ciompo and Panksepp,
McConachie lists the ‘general operator effects’ of emotions on cogni-
tion; they will:

stimulate or, on the contrary, inhibit cognitive activities, that is they

act on them as energy-regulating ‘motors’ or ‘brakes’;
focus the attention on emotion-congruent cognitive objects, thus
tending to establish an emotion-dependent hierarchy of perceiv-
ing and thinking;
120 Audience Participation in Theatre

preferentially store and mobilize emotion-congruent cognitions in

memory; and
tend to link emotion-congruent elements and to combine them in
larger cognitive entities. (McConachie 2008: 94–95).

Think of Armadillo Theatre’s Mark, threatened and intimidated by Ian,

inspiring CARE in an audience of young people, their attention focussed
on Ian’s behaviour and Mark’s distress, and their thinking ‘motoring’
towards ways of changing the situation. Think of the emotion-congruent
cognitions, based on RAGE and FEAR, at work when Yoko Ono or Marina
Abramovic invite symbolic violence against their own bodies. Think
of the complex of PANIC and PLAY assembled around Jonathan Kay’s
Glastonbury performances, as the threat of embarrassing participation
becomes a celebratory transgression, inspiring ‘cognitive entities’ in which
audience members think of themselves as more adventurous and liberated.
So emotions and feelings tell us what to prioritise in our thinking,
drive us towards certain kinds of thinking in response to stimuli, and
organise our thinking about stimuli in the present moment and on
reflection. This much-simplified introduction to the cognitive science
of emotion suggests both how decision making at a conscious level is
informed by an embodied ‘substrate’ of emotion that then becomes a
conscious feeling, and that this substrate can dictate some responses
prior to conscious thought.
But there are contrasting ways of conceptualising emotions, they are:
‘either a basic set of neurophysiological and anatomical substrates or rec-
ognisable and identifiable categories that are confined in particular bodies
and subjects’ (Reynolds in Reynolds and Reason 2012: 125); so either a set
of emotions that are shared among all people, though they can evidently
vary greatly in degree and precise manifestation, or a fundamentally
person-specific phenomenon given by the individual character of experi-
ence combined with the culturally specific terms we have for describing
and therefore learning about feelings. Without seeking to resolve disagree-
ments of this kind, a further exploration of the science and theory of mind
and what it has to say about inherent and culturally informed modes of
interaction will be productive, particularly in relation to the question of
the feeling of agency in deciding how to respond to an invitation.

Embodied cognition and the enactive theory of mind

The state of mind in which we make decisions is more than a state

of emotion, and to interrogate the notion of a state of mind further,
 Irrational Interactions 121

it is worth pursuing a particular theory of cognition. The ‘enactive’

approach originated by Varela, Thompson and Rosch is appropriate as
it prioritises the way our minds are embedded in our bodies and their
physical and social environments: it is a theory that sees mind as a
contextual, cultural and historically emergent phenomenon, as well as
neurologically and evolutionarily determined. It is also, in some signifi-
cant aspects, compatible with the social interactionist theory that I have
used in earlier parts of my discussion. Evan Thompson, in his book
Mind in Life, outlines the propositions that are brought together in this
approach: ‘The first idea is that living beings are autonomous agents
that actively generate and maintain themselves, and thereby also enact
or bring forth their own cognitive domains’ (2010: 13).
Second, that the nervous system is an autonomous system that gen-
erates and maintains meaning and meaningful activity: both of these
propositions recognise that a perceptual system has to be autonomous
of the world at a basic level in order to do the work of perceiving it.
Third cognition is the ‘exercise of skilful know-how in situated and
embodied action’, bodies are in a dynamic relationship with their envi-
ronment, learning and applying what is learnt. Fourth:

a cognitive being’s world is not a pre-specified, external realm, rep-

resented internally by its brain, but a relational domain enacted or
brought forth by that being’s autonomous agency and mode of cou-
pling with the environment. (2010: 13)

The fifth proposition refutes earlier cognitivist and connectionist

models where mind is thought of as either resembling a computer or
a neural network, and to embodied dynamic models where the impor-
tance of the body was recognised, but in isolation from experience and
environment: ‘that experience is not an epiphenomenal side issue, but
central to any understanding of the mind, and needs to be investigated
in a careful phenomenological manner’ (2010: 13).
This last proposition connects enactivist cognitive philosophy with con-
tinental phenomenology, a tradition with which Hans-Georg Gadamer
was intimately involved, and which has things to say about aesthetics
and social interaction as well as perception, philosophical and scientific
method and the nature of experience. Paying attention to subjective
experience is methodologically important to the enactivist position, as
it avoids an explanatory gap through which the phenomenon of con-
sciousness evades exploration by other theories of cognition – by taking
first-hand experience seriously this approach does not seek to avoid the
122 Audience Participation in Theatre

‘hard question’ of what it is to have a mind. And it is important to the

questions of this book, as an understanding of first-person experience is
central to an understanding of audience participatory performance.
Fundamental to phenomenology and to the enactivist approach is the
idea of ‘intentionality’, which – not to be confused with the everyday
concept of having intentions as goals or purposes – is the directedness of
the mind towards things beyond itself. Though the idea of intentional-
ity has been important for the discussion of mental states in much of
Western philosophy, for phenomenology intentionality belongs to all
mental states. The mind is constituted by its directedness towards things:
not only when we want something, fear something, remember or imag-
ine something or otherwise direct our attention towards a real or non-real
object, but whenever we are conscious (and even in some unconscious
states such as dreaming), we are intentionally directed towards the world.
In this theory mind and world are not separate realms, which interact
through sensory data and physical action, but a conjoined being-in-the-
world, a consciousness of the world that emerges through its intentional
directedness towards its bodily presence in the world.
As a method of investigation, phenomenology is characterised by its
attention to things as they appear to us (as phenomena, as opposed
to noumena – things as they are in themselves – a distinction derived
from Emmanuel Kant), as they are disclosed to us by intentionality. This
extends to states of mind which are not obviously ‘object-directed’ or
amenable to a simple model of intentionality, Thompson outlines how
such things as moods, pains or feelings are intentional:

such experiences do qualify as intentional in the broader phe-

nomenological sense of being open to what is other or having a
world-involving character. Thus bodily feelings are not self-enclosed
without openness to the world. On the contrary, they present things
in a certain affective light or atmosphere and thereby deeply influ-
ence how we perceive and respond to things. A classic example is
Sartre’s discussion of feeling eye-strain and fatigue as a result of read-
ing late into the night (1956, 332–333). The feeling first manifests
itself not as an intentional object of transitive consciousness, but as
a trembling of the eyes and a blurriness of the words on the page.
One’s body and immediate environment disclose themselves in a
certain manner through this feeling. (Thompson 2010: 23)

This example serves to illustrate the holistic attitude of this approach to

being-in-the-world, with its implications for perception, mental states
 Irrational Interactions 123

and ultimately decision making and action that is informed by them.

The human being in question ( Jean-Paul Sartre, in this instance) has an
experience by virtue of the disclosure of the physical object – the book
and its printed words – and his first awareness of the fatigue he feels is
via the manifestation of these words in this disclosure: they tremble and
become blurred. The phenomenological approach to this sequence has
stepped back from the obvious inference – that Sartre’s eyes are tired – to
address what has been disclosed and how it has been disclosed, and it
reveals how body and environment are knitted together in our experi-
ence of them and of ourselves.
I don’t want to propose that we should apply this approach (known
as a phenomenological reduction) to all episodes of audience participa-
tion, though I shall do in some of the examples that follow. But I do
want to use this brief sketch of the interdependence of body, environ-
ment and cognitive process to suggest an underpinning for various
ideas about the way decision making is embedded in the complex of
moment-by-moment experience.
Before moving on to some developments of this theme in relation
to other bodies, I want to introduce an idea from Shaun Gallagher’s
How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005) as a way into how this situation
of embeddedness is culturally constructed, and to elaborate something
implied in my discussion of emotion: the idea that sometimes the body
makes decisions ‘before you know it’.

The body sets the stage for action. Perhaps the claim should be
a stronger one. Your body is already acting ‘before you know it’.
Certainly there is evidence that indicates that one’s body anticipates
one’s conscious experience. I reach to pick up a glass. Before I am
aware of it – if I ever do become explicitly aware of it – my hand shapes
itself in the best way possible for purposes of picking up the glass. If I
had reached for some differently shaped object, I would find that my
hand had already shaped itself accordingly. (Gallagher 2005: 237)

First, the readiness of the body to fit itself to interactions with the physi-
cal world without the conscious mind having to examine and anticipate
the objects in question is captured in the idea of affordance:

things in my surroundings, such as teacups, computer keys, and door

handles, have motor senses or meanings, what Gibson (1979) calls
‘affordances’, which elicit appropriate actions. Things in the world
bring forth suitable intentional actions and motor projects from
124 Audience Participation in Theatre

the subject (the subject is a project of the world), but things in the
world have specific motor senses or affordances only in relation to
the motor skills of the subject (the world is projected by the subject).
(Thompson 2010: 237)

This circuit of intentionality, where body fits environment and vice versa,
is made possible by experiences of specific categories of objects and their
uses. In a world without teacups, computer keys and door handles – the
world of most human beings for most of human history – these affordances
would not exist; and in a world where teacups are shaped and used differ-
ently, then the affordances will be different. The body is enculturated at a
pre-conscious level via these affordances – and here we can hear a strong
resonance with the social constructionist thinking of Bourdieu and Butler:
for affordance we might read dispositions, generated by a habitus, or per-
formatives in a citational system of gender difference. Though it is not
stated explicitly in Gibson’s theory that affordances apply to encounters
with people as well as objects,1 the extension is implied when Gallagher
says ‘Even in my encounters with others, prenoetically, before I know it,
I seem to have a sense of how it is with them’ (2012: 237).
The ‘pre-noetic’ for Gallagher is the term for this unconscious or pre-
conscious occurrence, where some part of the mind-body system takes
action without or before it coming to mind. It derives from Husserlian
phenomenology, and the two inseparable poles of intentional expe-
rience: the ‘noema’ as the object, as it is disclosed, and ‘noesis’ as
the intentionality and disclosure of the object. The prenoetic is not
disclosed, or not yet disclosed, to the conscious mind. What leads
Gallagher to this is experimental data indicating quite convincingly
that in certain circumstances action has begun before we are aware
that we have decided to act: electrical activity can be detected in the
motor systems of the active part of the body before any electrical activ-
ity can be detected in the parts of the brain where conscious thought
originates. For some this suggests that the sense of having initiated
the action is nothing more than a useful fiction, giving the conscious
mind a perspective on the actions taken by unconscious (pre-noetic)
processes. It is a potentially alarming notion of what it means to be a
thinking human subject, but for Gallagher, even if this delay in aware-
ness of the initiation of action were to be proven in all cases, it would
not disprove the agency of the conscious subject:

What we call free will, however, cannot be conceived as something

purely subpersonal, or as something instantaneous, an event that
 Irrational Interactions 125

takes place in a knife-edge moment located between being unde-

cided and being decided. If that were the case it would completely
dissipate in the milliseconds between brain events and our conscious
awareness. Free will involves temporally extended feedback or loop-
ing effects that are transformed and enhanced by the introduction
of deliberative consciousness. This means that the conscious sense
of agency, even if it starts out as an accessory experience generated
by the brain, is itself a real force that counts in the formation of our
future action. It contributes to the freedom of action, and bestows
responsibility on the agent. (Gallagher 2005: 241)

And:

The ‘loop’ extends through and is limited by our bodily capabilities,

into the surrounding environment, which is social as well as physi-
cal, and feeds back through our conscious experience into the deci-
sions we make. (Gallagher 2005: 242)

Agency, according to Gallagher, is extended temporally and spatially, as

the ‘accessory experience’ generated subsequent to an action becomes
part of the background mental state of actions which follow, and as
the work done in creating this mental state and the physiological state
associated with it is distributed across the mind, the body and the envi-
ronment that the body is in. The proposition that subjectivity is not
the point of origin of our actions – arrived at from an entirely different
direction from the determinism that would attribute action to social
structure – has been displaced by another unsettling notion, that subjec-
tivity is distributed beyond the brain and the body, as intersubjectivity.
This has a number of reference points in audience participation:
those moments where we consciously decide to act (to raise our hand,
to shout ‘stop’, to step onto a stage), may have arrived pre-noetically,
in conjunction with some kind of social affordance associated with a
frame of interaction, an idea which, though downgraded in its impor-
tance by Gallagher’s argument, is still not trivial. Or the idea of the
pre-noetic might help to unpack the moments where we find ourselves
participating without knowing why, or surprising ourselves by stepping
forward in response to an invitation. And intersubjectivity, the distribu-
tion of meaningful elements of the structure of experience and agency
across the body, the environment and among other people suggests
that procedures of audience participation can make invitations that do
more than address themselves to the individual’s rational maximisation
126 Audience Participation in Theatre

of benefit, however rational the individual might feel about the process
themselves.

Empathy and intersubjectivity in audience participation

The meaning of intersubjectivity is hotly debated in cognitive science

and philosophy, with bold claims for ‘extended mind’ or ‘embedded
mind’ models of the kind put forward by Gallagher. Again not presum-
ing to take a firm position in these very challenging debates, I will
outline some dimensions of the idea of intersubjectivity as it relates
to social cognition – the way that we think about, and in conjunction
with, other people – as a way to unpack some of the issues around audi-
ence participants’ interpretation and response to invitations. Some of
the issues in play are very familiar in theatre and performance studies –
the role of empathy for example, has been considered important since
Aristotle’s Poetics – but drawing on cognitive science and philosophy for
explanatory strategies is relatively new. The strategy I want to draw on is
part of the ‘enactive’ approach outlined in the previous section, putting
particular emphasis on the ‘dynamic’ elements of social interaction:

The interaction process includes several components such as bodily

resonance, affect attunement, coordination of gestures, facial and
vocal expression and others. Social cognition is not a solitary task of
deciphering or simulating the actions of others but emerges from the
dynamical process of skilfully interacting with them. Such a view on
social cognition has recently been described as ‘participatory sense-
making’ – the process of generating and transforming meaning in
the interplay between interacting individuals and the interaction
process itself. (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009: 446)

The terms used here – bodily resonance, affect attunement – are used to
account for well-known phenomena that are now, in recent neurologi-
cal experiments, being evidenced at the level of brain function. ‘Mirror
neurons’ are famously found to reproduce activity in the same areas of
the brain of a spectator as would be active if they were engaged in the
physical movement they watch; and similar mirroring occurs when
we witness other people’s emotional processes. All of these effects are
important to the process of becoming an audience participant, as other
people will be present either as facilitators or co-participants in the
vast majority of invitation procedures; and perhaps where a physically
present facilitator is not involved, that very absence might be said be
 Irrational Interactions 127

such a striking characteristic of an invitation as to be a key factor in

the (still) social cognition in any case. I have already said something
of the importance of the emotional state of the individual audience
participant, as it might be addressed or generated in pre-invitation per-
formances and in procedures of invitation, but the emotional states of
the facilitating performers themselves are important too, as are those of
other audience members. In some respects the simple presence of other
human beings has a direct effect on cognition at the pre-noetic level.
The idea that empathy is an infection in the body by the emotional
state of another person has been reinforced by empirical studies show-
ing that when we observe another person’s emotional state, it is echoed
in our own body. In some theories we ‘simulate’ emotion as part of our
unconscious assessment of ongoing interactions, and at times to the
degree that it becomes consciously our own felt response to the situation
(McConaghie 2008: 67–68). But Fuchs and De Jaegher view this model
of simulation as overly dependent on a kind of representation of the
other in the mind of the individual, and thus some kind of conscious
perspectival interpretation of this representation. Their phenomeno-
logical approach is based on ‘an inherent and “visible” intentionality’
(Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009: 467) that is shared by people who interact
in (a term taken from Merleau-Ponty) an ‘intercorporeality’ or ‘mutual
incorporation’. They use the example of the tennis player:

I not only incorporate the ball and its trajectory but also my oppo-
nent’s position, posture and movements. I feel the thrust and direc-
tion of his stroke as well as the momentum the ball receives, and
with this, my own body’s reaction is already being prepared. Here
my lived body is also in an ambiguous state, fluctuating between the
incorporated body of the other and my own embodied position. In a
fluent phase of the game, even before one player strikes the ball, the
other’s reaction unfolds, and this already influences the first player’s
initial action. As this goes on reciprocally, both players are connected
in a feedback/feedforward cycle, and there are no gaps of reaction
time. (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009: 474)

We can imagine corollaries of this in performance of all kinds, from

music and dance to the moment-by-moment nuances added to a
scripted dramatic text by actors working in close concert with each
other. The aim may be cooperative rather than competitive, but the
feedback/feedforward cycles by which each performer responds to the
other’s initiatives are of the same kind. A performer’s interaction with
128 Audience Participation in Theatre

an audience, too, though not a balanced exchange of actions of the

same kind, is nevertheless a mode of intercorporeality. An audience
member immersed in a performance, anticipating each word and move,
and responding in synchrony with other members of the audience as a
whole is in a mutual incorporation with both the performers and those
sitting with them in the auditorium. And such a connection is bound
to inform any response to an invitation to participate, should it follow
a passage of such deep, intercorporeal involvement. These examples,
however, capture interaction in moments of intensity rather than in
everyday social exchange. The thesis of enactive intersubjectivity is that
this is the basis of all social understanding, although we may often be
thrown back on our individual resources of interpretation, when we
engage with others our intentionality will tend towards this mode of
cooperation. A performer who meets our gaze, extends a hand towards
us, or motions towards the stage in an act of invitation, is aiming for
an intercorporeal bond, and will in return feel the responses of the one
or the many that they invite, whether or not they have achieved an
intense mutuality in the performance leading up to this.
Empathy is not forgotten in this theory, though its importance as a
representation of another’s subjectivity is demoted. Mutual incorpora-
tion is, instead, seen as a decentring of intentionality, so that there is
an oscillation of activity and receptivity and a shifting centre of gravity,
absorbed into a dynamic whole. Empathy is the part of this process that
gives us access to another’s state of mind: ‘In order to understand the
other as other, empathy has to be balanced by alterity’ (Fuchs and De
Jaegher 2009: 476).
The phenomena that I will now go on to deal with in more detail
all appear to depend upon embodied cognition, empathic processes,
and forms of intersubjectivity: laughter and crowd behaviour appear
to show agency shared across individuals; liminality describes a set of
characteristics of social interaction, but its prospective attendant con-
dition – communitas – is another phenomenon of apparently shared
perception. Hypnosis is more difficult to pinpoint, and remains as
controversial in itself as the notion of intersubjectivity as a whole.
Intersubjectivity, it has been said, is both an epistemological dilemma
and a proposition about ‘how situations involving embodied interac-
tions with others can impact on and intensify experience’ (Reynolds
and Reason 2012: 22) and while the impact on and intensification of
experience is a central concern in audience participation, the dilemma
of defining and locating subjectivity has something in common with
our enquiry into the location of the art work and its originating artists.
 Irrational Interactions 129

The shared agency, which has been noted already as the proper ontol-
ogy of audience participation as art work, does not in itself qualify as
intersubjectivity, but a closer examination of the phenomenology of
participation will reveal that the term can apply more, and explain
more, than this. Giving attention to some specific phenomena that are
explainable as products of intersubjective processes of perception and
response provides a bridge between the possibilities of actor-audience
influence and performance-audience influence, which will be a signifi-
cant factor in many invitations to participate that address an audience
as a group in the first instance. These group-based phenomena are also
familiar elements of theatre and performance practice, and connect the
idea of embodiment to a range of strategies of facilitation.

Laughter

The limited range of behaviours available to members of a conventional

theatre audience can be thought of in two categories: as conventionally
constructed signals, such as applause, ovations, and shouts of approval,
and involuntary reactions to the performance, such as laughter or tears.
Obviously these categories are not entirely discrete – people will restrain
or allow tears or laughter according to the dominant convention, and
an ingrained convention may become spontaneous, even apparently
involuntary in someone deeply involved in a performance. Considering
laughter, for example, it is apparent that this is a kind of intersubjective
behaviour, one that is not under the control of the conscious mind and
that has a complex relationship with our mood, our thoughts, and our
perceptions of those around us, all of which are important to theatre,
interactive or otherwise.
Theories of laughter tend to be theories of what we laugh at, and why
we laugh at them,2 but not what laughter is in itself. Robert Provine
(2000) has taken this other route, examining the properties of laugher
as a physiological process, and from this evidence considering its func-
tion and evolution. At the most basic level he finds that laughter is
stereotypical – more or less the same voiced exhalation is made by eve-
ryone, all over the world. Different cultures may write down laughter
in different ways, as ‘Ha Ha’ or ‘He He’, and different individuals have
different laughs, but the sound itself does not vary culturally, it is not a
culturally determined code like verbal, and much non-verbal, commu-
nication: people with unusual laughs stand out, though they are mostly
unable to control or change their laughter. He also finds that laughter
is involuntary. This is most starkly demonstrated if we try to laugh, it
130 Audience Participation in Theatre

is very difficult. It is possible to imitate laughter, but hard to create a

genuine laugh.3 Through studying people’s laughter in everyday social
interaction – away from theatres, comedy clubs, television sets – Provine
gets a surprising picture of how and when people laugh. He finds that it
is more often the speaker who does the most laughing, not the listener,
and that laughter is mostly not to do with jokes (Provine 2000: 40), it
just happens as a result of stress-free social contact. He also finds that
laughter follows a pattern that prevents it from masking conversation,
although the laugh may be involuntary, rarely do we laugh so much
that we can’t speak, and rarely do we laugh over someone else’s speech
(Provine 2000: 38). This indicates that laughing is not part of a simple
stimulus-response routine, it is not so simple as ‘hear joke – laugh’,
though this is the picture we are used to from stand-up comedy and
comic theatre, and other ‘cultures of laughter’. The conversational
laugh itself, then, is an unconscious, non-verbal vocalisation that fits
around conversation, and is shared by all the members of a group: it is
a signal of belonging to the group.
But it is the contagiousness of laughter that is its most significant
behavioural aspect. We often begin to laugh, even can’t help laughing,
when we hear other people laugh, a fact exploited by the producers of
television comedies, who add ‘laugh tracks’ to encourage us to laugh
along. Why does this happen? Are we subconsciously trying to join in
with the group that is laughing, to make us feel socially accepted by
pretending to get the joke? Provine thinks not:

The contagious laugh response is immediate and involuntary, involv-

ing the most direct communication possible between people – brain
to brain – with our intellect just going along for the ride. Contagious
laughter is a compelling display of Homo Sapiens, the social mam-
mal. It strips away our veneer of culture and challenges the shaky
hypothesis that we are rational creatures in full conscious control of
our behaviour. (2000: 129)

Laugh tracks edited into television programmes use the involuntary

response to make us laugh, and perhaps because we are laughing
we can’t help but feel better, that we are in company, that what
we are watching is funny. They bank on the prospect that what we
are watching will actually become funnier simply because we are
laughing. Provine cites neurological research showing that people’s
brain-function is affected when they laugh and that laughter can trig-
ger enjoyment, as well as vice versa. He doesn’t intend that we are
 Irrational Interactions 131

helpless against this involuntary response – we might easily be put off

by the laughter of others, either through awareness of an attempted
manipulation or through an unconscious resistance – but he wants to
emphasise the secondary position of the conscious mind when this
effect is operating.
This contagious impulse to laugh is a kind of ‘affect attunement’,
as noted by Fuchs and De Jaegher. We seem to be neurologically pro-
grammed to begin laughing when we hear others laughing, just as when
a wolf or a dog can’t help howling when it hears another howl. Provine
gives an extreme example of the contagion of laughter, and of laughter
that is not a response to humour: a ‘laughter epidemic’ in Tanzania that
lasted for several years, spread from town to town and across borders
and caused schools to be closed. Most of those involved were teenage
girls, a group that are sometimes unjustifiably associated with hys-
terical behaviour, but before allowing this phenomena to be ascribed to
those of weak minds, in less civilised countries, he reminds us of cults
(Provine 2000: 134–136) and therapies of laughter (192) in Europe and
America, which deliberately harness the contagion of non-humorous,
group laugher, and its effects. As Provine says, it has to make us doubt
that we are in conscious control of what we do, and I believe it is one
indication that the time when we are least in control of ourselves when
is we are among other people. This is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s idea of
Rabelaisian4 carnival laughter, the uncultured laugh, the laugh that
exists for its own sake and infects. Laughter, then, according to Provine,
isn’t just a way of showing amusement it is an instinctive socialising
mechanism that predates speech in our evolution, and in our childhood
development. Though often linked to the sharing of jokes, observations
and irony – all very conscious procedures – the laugh also operates at an
intersubjective, intercorporeal, level.
There are times when laughter irritates or disturbs us, but these are
likely to be when we do not identify ourselves with the group or indi-
vidual who is laughing. Unlike the inclusive, primal laughter of carni-
val, comedy revels in others’ misfortune, it excludes, it humiliates, it is,
as Umberto Eco says, ‘always racist’.5 We sometimes perceive laughter
as directed at us, and feel threatened and excluded by laughter: as well
as laughing with, we also laugh at. Again we may be using this laugh-
ter to identify ourselves as a group, but in this way by excluding those
who are not in the group; we laugh at others’ misfortunes because
they are not our own and because they are not shared by those close
to us. Again this laugh is involuntary, sometimes embarrassingly so,
but where the tickle laugh shows that a touch or social interaction is
132 Audience Participation in Theatre

stress-free, a comedic laugh shows that an apparent danger has passed,

was not so dangerous, or is not a danger to one of us. Seeing someone
fall, we identify danger, but also seeing that it is not us, or one that
we care about, that falls, we register a lack of danger by laughing. It is
a laugh of tension release and a sign that we do not care. This kind of
laughter, too, helps to create and define a crowd: when we laugh at, we
are identifying ourselves with the other laughers, and the victim of the
misfortune that leads to our laughter as someone we care less about.
When framed as theatre the formal and contextual signals (a horizon
of expectation) that tell us whether we are watching comedy or drama
will let us know how to receive such a spectacle of another’s pain, as
will the specific execution of the action, in its timing and manner of
exaggeration.
Other embodied states of emotion and feeling are intersubjectively
shared, but rarely as evidently as with laughter. Laughter in the theatre
is the clearest signal that performers can get of how their audience feels.
Applause waits for the end of the act, and the intense silence that accom-
panies drama can, to the anxious mind, sound like an audience that has
gone to sleep. In interactive performance we have the luxury of looking
into the spectator’s eyes, even asking what they think while the show
is still on, but in conventional theatre we must wait for sounds from
the darkness of the auditorium. To hear waves of laughter rolling onto
the stage is to know that your audience is having a good time, and – so
long as you are performing a comedy – to know that your work is suc-
ceeding. In many of its guises the theatre is a place where we can come
together to laugh. But the phenomenon of laughter tells us more than
this, it can show us how audiences transform themselves from groups of
individuals into crowds, and how people’s responses aren’t always gov-
erned by their conscious mind. While laughter at a performance event
is an interaction in its own right, a participation that is generally very
welcome, it is also an influence on the possibility of participation of
other kinds. As well as stimulating more laughter, hearing laughter can
stimulate feelings of enjoyment, and laughing oneself can do this too.
Laughter as a therapy to stimulate feelings of well-being, and even to
aid recovery from illness is occasionally fashionable (Provine 2000:180).
but a more common expression of this phenomena is the feeling many
of us will have experienced of laughing without entirely knowing why,
at something we cannot objectively say is funny, but finding ourselves
in a better mood anyway. An audience that has laughed together will
be in ‘a better mood’, more likely to find things amusing, and probably
more amenable to being invited to participate.
 Irrational Interactions 133

Crowds

The contagion of laughter is one specific and highly developed element

of intercorporeality as it is manifest in physical responses. As social ani-
mals our behaviour is influenced both consciously and unconsciously
by other people, by what they do and say, but also simply by their pres-
ence. When we gather together in crowds certain kinds of behaviour
are more likely, laughter among them, but also fighting or rioting. The
study of the behaviour of people in crowds and the psychology that
shapes this behaviour has tended to focus on this potential for violent,
apparently primitive, action. Stephen Reicher suggests that this empha-
sis in the literature, beginning with Gustav le Bon in the late nineteenth
century, has an unconscious ideological basis:

one of the more remarkable features of traditional crowd psychology

is that it has tended to constitute a theory without a referent. Rather
than starting from a set of phenomena that are in need of explana-
tion, a set of explanations were elaborated in order to underpin
certain ideological presuppositions about the crowd – or at least the
suppositions of gentleman observers who viewed the masses with
alarm from the outside. To them, crowds seemed anonymous, their
actions inherently destructive and random, their reasons unfathom-
able. (Reicher 2002)

The ‘theory without a referent’, here, is ‘de-individuation’, which pro-

poses that under the influence of large numbers of proximate others
individuals lose their sense of self, and are easily led into uncharacter-
istic behaviour, or even to do things normally against their own values
or beliefs. While Reicher mounts a defence of crowds that take action
in the interest of shared belief – using examples from political unrest
from the nineteenth to late twentieth century to show that far from
being phenomena of mindlessness, concerted action by crowds can
be a powerfully rational response to material need. Others have used
the idea of de-individuation to try to explain cooperation in acts of
brutality, Stanley Milgram’s experiments at Yale in 1963 being the most
famous example.
Elias Canetti’s view in Crowds and Power (1992) is a particularly vivid
evocation of de-individuation, and one that is more interesting as he
attributes positive effects to it as well as discussing violence. He calls it
‘pack’ behaviour, likening human beings to other social animals, and
categorises different kinds of human crowd behaviour. His names for
134 Audience Participation in Theatre

the main types of pack behaviour are more or less self-explanatory: the
hunting pack, the war pack, and the lamenting pack; his fourth term,
the increase pack, is more complex, to do with the absorption of groups
into increasingly larger groups, the domination of one pack so that it
integrates others. His view of their roles in the make-up of culture is not
wholly relevant but his account of the point at which the individual
surrenders to the pack instinct is.

The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge.

Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge
which creates it. This is the moment when all who belong to the
crowd get rid of their differences and feel equal (Canetti 1992: 18).

And this is the moment where they become part of a larger organism
that appears to make decisions with a will of its own. Until this point,
he says, we are careful to avoid physical contact with others, to preserve
our space and our distinction from others, we are fearful both of embar-
rassment in front of others and of being unduly swayed by them. This
distance is a burden, and though we protect it we are also glad to be
rid of it:

During the discharge distinctions are thrown off and all feel equal.
In that density, where there is scarcely any space between, and body
presses against body, each man is as near the other as he is to him-
self; and an immense feeling of relief ensues. It is for the sake of this
blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that
people become a crowd. (Canetti 1992: 19)

When people go to a crowded place for recreation it is usually with

an expectation that they will join the crowd, not resist it. Gathering
to drink alcohol and/or dance are practices of our culture that exploit
this, as is watching sport, and the violence that sometimes goes with it.
Canetti talks of the violent impulse of the crowd, that the crowd loves
the sound of things being broken, and of the way that the destructive-
ness of the crowd is the seed of its manipulation in mob rule and in the
making of armies, but he also cites religion as an extension of the crowd
that gathers in grief, the lamenting crowd. He says that it is the urge to
return to our origins as pack animals that governs our social behaviour:
we have an instinctive way of reacting as a group when faced by a crisis,
when threatened, hungry, faced with death, we can form a crowd and
work as one animal. Canetti, a Jew who fled Vienna in 1938, writes with
 Irrational Interactions 135

despair about the potential of the crowd, and the crowd to which he
gives the least attention is the one that has the most positive potential:
the feast crowd, the crowd of celebration. This is the crowd of carni-
val, the crowd celebrated by Rabelais and Bakhtin, and the crowd in
which contagious laughter will play a significant part. Where violence
is the malign aspect of the crowd, laughter is the benign. This kind
of intersubjectivity can have a complex relationship with a person’s
understanding of their own experience, and with their sense of agency.
People who have a diminished sense of personal initiative and personal
responsibility also lose some of their inhibitions – they will do things
that they normally wouldn’t, whether that might be shouting and sing-
ing, or breaking windows.6 They will also be less likely to do things that
make them stand out from the crowd: crowds can bring freedom, but
they can also bring conformity.
Rather than providing the basis for a coherent model for the under-
standing of crowd behaviour, Canetti’s ideas represent the kind of fas-
cination that crowds evoke. Contemporary researchers are less likely to
construct a holistic theory like Canetti’s, with its mystical evocations of
our animal inheritances and their potential to undo the civilising proc-
ess at a stroke, than they are to attempt to pull together ideas of states
of arousal, social cognition and learned cultural behaviour, along with
the embodied and enactive models of mind that have already been dis-
cussed in this chapter. An integrated theory of crowd behaviour seems
some way off, but Reicher’s view of a rational crowd remains an excep-
tion, with research tending to focus on the negative: crowd safety in
public events and the process that leads a peaceful gathering to become
a riot. Contemporary research tends to see this not as a theory without
a referent, but as a set of phenomena that so far do not have a coherent
explanation.
These phenomena reflect some of what happens to the crowd at a
theatre. When we laugh, cheer, and applaud together we access a kind
of social affordance to show that we are sharing the same reactions
as those around us. But the process of apprehending a show is not so
simple as receiving it entirely individually and then agreeing with those
nearby. The feelings we share with others around us in relation to a
show are far more reciprocal than this, we look for evidence of other
people’s reactions, both consciously and unconsciously, sometimes in
order to declare our feelings boldly in contrast to them, but more often
to validate what we feel, so that we show reactions that do not contrast
markedly with what is being shown by others around us. However, the
process begins prior to this, before any show has been given or received,
136 Audience Participation in Theatre

when the crowd first gathers and even earlier. When choosing a show,
buying tickets, moving towards the theatre, we are sharing behaviour
with a group of strangers, aligning ourselves with a group and planning
to become part of a crowd. A full auditorium is a crowd deliberately
squeezed into a small space,7 partly for the economic benefit of selling
as many tickets as possible for the given space, but also for the purpose
of driving people towards the intercorporeality that Canetti calls the
‘discharge’, towards the feelings of losing oneself, and towards a closer
relationship with those around that will cause reactions to a perform-
ance to be magnified. It inclines a theatre audience in another way
towards intersubjectivity.
Bill Buford describes how the suspense of a football match is inten-
sified by the contact with other fans on the terraces, to a degree that
sounds like a transformatory experience:

As the match progressed, I found that I was developing a craving

for a goal. As its promises and failures continued to be expressed
through the bodies of the people pressed against me, I had a feel-
ing akin to an appetite, increasingly more intense, of anticipation,
waiting for, hoping for, wanting one of those shots to get past the
Millwall goalkeeper. The business of watching the match had started
to exclude other thoughts. It was involving so many aspects of my
person – what I saw, smelled, said, sang, moaned, what I was feeling
up and down my body – that I was becoming a different person from
the one who had entered the ground: I was ceasing to be me. There
wasn’t one moment when I stopped noticing myself; there was only
a realisation that for a period of time I hadn’t been. The match had
succeeded in dominating my senses and had raised me, who had
never given a serious thought to the fate of Cambridge United, to a
state of very heightened feeling. (Buford 1991: 169)

Buford’s ‘ceasing to be me’ sounds distinctly like a kind of de-individ-

uation. The numbers (even watching a relatively small team such as
Cambridge United) are much larger, and the competition raises the ten-
sion enormously, but a similar transformation is conceivable in theatre
crowds. All actors are familiar with the difference in playing to a full
house and one that is half empty, and that it is a difference often not
just of quantity but of quality too, as the crowd effect of an audience
tightly packed together intensifies the feelings of that audience.
Audiences at performances in different settings come into the proc-
ess of becoming a crowd at different points: an institutional audience
 Irrational Interactions 137

such as a school comes with its own conflicts and solidarities, perhaps
readier to become a crowd, but a crowd with a history; a congregation
at a ritual performance may or may not have everyday knowledge of
each other, but will have more of a common purpose and expectation,
sometimes an expectation of moving into some altered mental state,
as individuals or as a crowd; a theatre crowd has norms of licensed
behaviour that encourage simultaneous response that will draw people
into intercorporeality. The physical relationship of an audience will also
affect this process: in a promenade performance an audience will often
be encouraged to move as a crowd, physically enacting the process of
‘becoming one’ with those around, though this can be disrupted by the
need to compete for a good view, or get a comfortable spot to sit.
In audience participation this can bring advantages and disadvan-
tages. A crowd that has identified with each other and begun to share
responses that approve of a performance can be more likely to give
similar approval to invitations to participate, and if they have moved
towards some kind of ‘discharge’ of their feelings of individuality may
give little thought to whether or not to participate and simply follow
the crowd into whatever it is doing. Alternatively a crowd that has set-
tled into a feeling of a lack of differentiation might react badly to an
invitation for individuals to participate, and this is one of the reasons
that an invitation given to a large, well-established audience can be dif-
ficult, as separating oneself from the comfort of the crowd feels more
distressing, like an act of violence against the larger body. A crowd can
also magnify adverse reactions, either to a show as a whole or to an
invitation, and a crowd that has become excited can become ‘out of
control’.
A number of things are implied in this everyday phrase, ‘out of con-
trol’. It might refer to the pre-noetic, ‘before you know it’, phenomena
that Gallagher proposes, and much of the shared and unconsciously
directed behaviour of crowds must originate at this level. It is also indi-
cated in the distributed agency involved in intersubjectivity, where self-
control has been replaced, or at least delegated and diluted, by shared
impulses. But it suggests a wildness and danger that is not necessarily
what these theories refer to. Loss of control is a fearful thing, and this
fear is embedded in this kind of idiom; while some trends in cognitive
science tell us that conscious control may be largely illusory in any case,
when we are experientially aware of giving up our self-management, it
is something alarming or exhilarating. If we surrender self control to
another, do we also expect them to take responsibility for our safety,
and our actions? This suggests a return to the issue of informed consent.
138 Audience Participation in Theatre

If I have surrendered my agency to another or allowed it to dissipate

among a crowd, should I be held responsible for my actions? Or alterna-
tively, if I am about to enter into such a state, should I not be informed
of the possible consequences, before I take actions that I might other-
wise wish to deny responsibility for?
In the relatively trivial situation of audience participation these
questions most often represent the anxieties that some people bring
to events, rather than troublesome ethical issues – and as such they
become part of the material of agency that is shaped by the procedural
author, but as I shall show later in this chapter and the next, the eth-
ics of control and consent can be both aesthetic material and genuine
dilemma. However, my purpose in introducing the potential power
of crowd phenomena is not to put a value on it, despite the charged
language used by Canetti and the alarmism noted by Reicher: I do not
intend that ‘losing oneself’ in a crowd is either a good or a bad thing,
merely that it can and does happen. When it does happen, it will bring
with it qualities of feeling derived from whatever physical changes it
might entail, and from whatever cultural associations it has for the
individual. Being among other people will influence behaviour in subtle
ways, but forming such an intense bond with a crowd as to find that
one’s behaviour is experienced as directed from outside oneself brings
an altered relationship to one’s agency. This changed relationship, and
its felt quality, will become part of the meaning of any audience partici-
pation that makes use of crowd phenomena.

Liminality and communitas

However, there are cultures and practices that value the potential for
de-individuation very highly. Ritual processes are sometimes portrayed
as making use of intersubjectivity and de-individuation in a highly
developed way, using a very focused procedural authorship to produce
very intense experiences that mark moments of change in the lives of
participants. In the rites of passage famously described by van Gennep
(1960), and in the liminality modelled by Turner (1969) we have a
particular set of procedures that use sequences of frames that mark off
times and places as ‘special’, and mark the people who will inhabit
them as special too, leading to behaviour that belongs in this time and
place and nowhere else.
A liminal phase in ritual, put simply, is when the ritual participant
is passing from one social status to another in a process marked by the
ritual, and for a time they are considered to have neither their previous
 Irrational Interactions 139

status nor the one they are about to take up, so that for a time they
have no status at all. This process, according to van Gennep, has three
phases: separation, margin and aggregation. In the first phase the
subject is separated from society, symbolically and sometimes physi-
cally. In the second, the marginal phase, the ritual subject is at the
threshold, both about to become something new and about to leave
behind their previous self. According to Turner ‘during the interven-
ing “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject […] are
ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of
the characteristics of the past or coming state’ (1969: 94). At this time
the subject is to some extent free of rights and obligations, and is not
subject to customary norms and ethical standards. The subject is in a
special state that is often considered to have magical consequences,
and in which he is expected to produce, and has license for, extraor-
dinary behaviour: a period of liminality. After aggregation into society
with new status the subject will be affected by a new set of norms,
rights and obligations.
There is a possibility of confusion between the conventionally
required performance of bawdy songs, cross-dressing or animalism
within a ritual procedure and the spontaneous transgression of normal
behaviour brought on by a feeling of liberation in the liminal phase.
Turner and Van Gennep give examples of the former as a common
property of liminal events, but Turner also implies that the latter may
also occur as a symptom of the absence of responsibility at this time.
He implies that to be given a space and time in which to be free and to
be given unusual and transgressive acts to perform, is to be stimulated
to further wildness. Within the liminal phase there is a glimpse of a
life free of organisation and care, without obligations, rights, ethical
standards and norms. The paradox is that this phase of life is fenced in
by structured ritual observances, and itself may involve performance
of required acts, for all that they are transgressive or liberating. It has a
number of typical symbolic attachments:

It is ritualised in many ways, but very often symbols expressive of

ambiguous identity are found cross-culturally: androgynes, at once
both male and female, theriomorphic figures, at once animals and
men or women, angels, mermaids, centaurs, human-headed lions,
and so forth, monstrous combinations of elements drawn from
nature and culture. Some symbols represent both birth and death,
womb and tomb, such as caverns or camps secluded from everyday
eyes (Schechner and Appel 1990: 11).
140 Audience Participation in Theatre

Turner characterises this as a period of ‘anti-structure’, which contrasts

to the structuring of life that we normally enforce, and notes that it
has been incorporated into modern culture in a number of ways, often
leaving behind its specific ritual context. For example, he sees a number
of religious movements as ‘liminoid’ – making use of the properties of
liminality – in the way they are radically egalitarian and put themselves
outside the boundaries of normal society, and by the same criteria
he saw hippies (a new and transgressive phenomenon at the time of
his writing) the same way. Turner’s distinction between liminal and
liminoid is useful as his terminology has been adapted to describe a
wide variety of phenomena, particularly performances, that either set
themselves outside society or operate on the threshold of one category
and another.
It is worth noting the difficulties in applying this model directly to
theatre events. Theatre performances will not have the weight and con-
sequence of the rites described by van Gennep and Turner: the partici-
pants will probably not be permanently transformed by the experience
either in their own minds or in the eyes of society. They are not in this
sense at a threshold at all, and so not taking part in a liminal activity. It
is the license and liberation that come as a consequence of the liminal
phase that is of interest here, not the permanent transformation of the
participant. To describe all staged performance as liminoid makes some
sense, as it helps to understand the special character of a stage, some-
where that has been marked off from normal space and time, and where
extraordinary things happen.
A feature of liminal activity noted by Turner is a loss of the sense of
self, similar to the ‘discharge’ described by Canetti: an altered mental
state he calls ‘communitas’. In communitas the ritual subject has been
stripped of social status and its trappings, and grouped with a number of
others in the same condition, through ritual actions and markings they
have been placed outside society, and they are expected to behave in
opposition to what is ‘normal’. As a consequence of this they may feel
less like an individual as the apparatus of individuality has been taken
away, they will feel closeness to their companions enjoying a free and
direct communication. Turner sometimes characterises this relation-
ship as ‘human’ as opposed to ‘social’, and as an existential awareness
of being without self. In a state of communitas people are less aware of
the boundaries between them in a physical sense, of where their body
ends and another begins. Turner associates communitas with marginal-
ity, with low status, as if in order to lose attachments and associate on a
human level, one must become a pauper or an outsider. Liminal rituals
 Irrational Interactions 141

often involve literal or figurative expulsion from the social world for a
time before being re-integrated into the community: ‘There is a dialectic
here, for the indeterminacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy
of structure, while in rites de passage men are revitalised by their expe-
rience of communitas’ (Turner 1969: 120).Thus, communitas is the
opposite of structure, and liminality one of the ways of facilitating it.
The twentieth century’s advocates of ritual in theatre, such as Artaud,
Grotowski and Brook, were attracted by the possibility of a theatre that
did not depend upon words or representations, which became a vital
and existential experience. Of the three types of communitas named
by Turner: ‘ideological’ – the organisation of a subculture with its prin-
ciples at the core; ‘normative’ – the use of the ritual process to help
maintain a functioning culture; and ‘existential’ or ‘spontaneous’ com-
munitas, it was the latter that was striven for by performers looking for
the unique, magic moment in their event.
The external characteristics of liminality and communitas are, there-
fore, recognisable enough. But it is far from certain that they signify
such an altered state in the participant. A different approach is neces-
sary if we are to learn about the subjective experience, the internalised
state of being that might correspond to Turner’s communitas. Colin
Turnbull, concerned with the perspective of the anthropologist, and
of the deficiencies of emphasising rational and objective observation
as the only model of anthropological work, insists that phenomena
such as liminality must be wholeheartedly and generously experienced
if they are to be understood. More than a methodological preference,
his interpretation puts a much clearer emphasis on a liminal state. For
him it is not a collection of behaviours or outward signs, or even an
individual’s perception of social relationships – which is how the more
cautious will read Turner – but a distinct and consistent mode of being,
capable of endowing extraordinary power:

as long as we insist on taking liminality to imply a transitory in-

between state of being, we are far from the truth. In our own terms
it would be better seen as a timeless state of being, of ‘holiness’, that
lies parallel to our ‘normal’ state of being, or is perhaps superimposed
on it. Liminality is a subjective experience of the external world in
which ‘thisness’ becomes ‘thatness’. (Schechner and Appel 1990: 80)

It is in the achievement of this state among a group as well as the indi-

vidual that greatest gifts are endowed upon the community, the ideal
of Turner’s existential communitas. Notice that it is music, communal
142 Audience Participation in Theatre

singing, that brings the culmination of the ritual in Turnbull’s example,

the Molimo:

and when ultimately the perfect sound was discovered it coincided

with the discovery of the perfect mood: all disharmony, social, spir-
itual, mental, physical, musical […] vanished and for a brief moment
the Mbuti ideal of ekimi reigned, ‘making good’ everything, for in
their own words whatever is, when that moment is reached is good,
otherwise it would not, could not be. (Turnbull in Schechner and
Appel 1990: 77)

Such a powerful experience is not to be taken for granted, and is not

achieved every time a ritual of liminality is performed, although it may
have evolved over millennia.
For a performance company to attempt to produce this effect may
seem a worthwhile but daunting aim. Nevertheless, once again, I want
to emphasise the quality of the potential phenomenon rather than
its value. In Chapters 1 and 2 I made much of the connectedness of
frames of performance to everyday life, and its norms and expectations,
and the risks that are attendant upon giving performances in public.
According to the theories of liminality and communitas, processes of
detachment from everyday structure can radically alter the nature of
this connectedness and remove the sense of risk associated with having
a social self to protect. When one has become nothing, one has noth-
ing to lose. As described by Schechner and Appel, and Turnbull, com-
munitas seems like a highly particular state rather than one that could
occur by degree, but given that Turner allows for varieties of liminoid
phenomena that find different routes to and through status-lessness, we
might expect different kinds and degrees of communitas. The subjective
experience of such an alternative state of being, as well as undermining
the power of social risk, will have a quality, and inflect the meaning of
any participatory experience where it is manifest.
The above are not, by any means, the only irrational influences
on our decision making processes: alcohol and drugs will influence
our responses,8 and our prior emotional or physical state will be very
significant. Nor are these the only ways of describing these irrational
impulses: there are many more, developed to a sophistication that
cannot be explored here. Social psychologists write of our tendency to
make decisions without carefully analysing, to follow ‘heuristic cues’
rather than argument when being persuaded of something:9 a person
might follow an instruction because everyone around is doing so, or
 Irrational Interactions 143

because they perceive that the instruction has come from an expert.
They also discuss ‘audience effects’ – the influence of passive spectators
on the behaviour of others in everyday life, and ‘co-action’ effects – the
influence of those who are engaged on the same tasks as each other
(Argyle and Colman 1994: 103) and de-personalisation: ‘The process
of being dissolved, of losing the identity, personality, the “I”. A mental
phenomenon characterised by loss of the sense of the reality of oneself’
(Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson 1967: 284).

Hypnosis

Stage hypnosis works like this. When you are hypnotised you are
less inclined to be self-conscious; rather like being drunk. When you
are intoxicated, should someone suggest that it would be a bit of a
laugh to pretend to be a Martian, or Elvis, or a Ballerina, or whatever,
you’ll probably try it – why not? It’s only a giggle after all. You do try
it and it gets a few laughs, so you do it some more because making
people laugh is good fun. That fun is intensified by your ‘intoxicated’
state and so you enjoy it more and so on. If the hypnotist is adept at
helping you retain that lowered inhibition and maintaining a high
degree of audience reaction, then the fun of being funny lasts as long
as you stay in that state. (Chase 2005: 14)

This, from Jonathan Chase’s ‘complete instruction course in stage hyp-

nosis’, outlines how it works as entertainment rather than as a cogni-
tive or psychological process. But stage hypnosis is a genre of popular
performance that has evolved a set of routines and practices, which are
based on powerful inter- and intra-subjective phenomena. It is also,
obviously, a form of interactive performance, one that might suggest
not only a variety of procedures and invitations, but also phenomena
that might be manifest in other forms, traditions and approaches to
inviting participation.
Hypnosis itself is an area of controversy among psychologists and
cognitive scientists. Under hypnosis people are demonstrably able to
endure pain, to increase their powers of recall, to overcome anxiety,
and can be led to do things that in normal circumstances they would
not; it is also a popular and successful tool in some forms of psychiatry.
However, there is no agreement about what hypnosis is in psychological
or cognitive terms, or how it works. Some say that the hypnotic trance
is an altered state of consciousness, to which some people are suscepti-
ble and in which they are highly suggestible; some say that the trance is
144 Audience Participation in Theatre

a variation of other altered states – daydreaming or deep involvement in

a physical task for example; others deny the reality of the trance state,
and believe that suggestibility is a normal, everyday phenomenon, har-
nessed by learned behaviours culturally specific practices of hypnosis.
Again the phenomenon seems likely to be accessible to the strategies of
enactive cognitive science, and suggests that the basic premises of inter-
subjectivity and intercorporeality are manifested in some particularly
powerful ways in some kinds of interaction:

Our perception of others always includes a proprioceptive compo-

nent that connects their bodies to our own. In more marked cases,
unidirectional incorporation may even reach the degree of fascina-
tion. Thus we may listen to a spellbinder, literally hanging on his
every word – or on his lips, in the German expression – and feel
being drawn towards him […] This reaches an extreme in hypnosis
where the subject is entirely coordinated to the hypnotist. His gaze is
fixed, he is captivated by the hypnotist’s appearance or performance,
unable to move, or only moving in the ways the hypnotist suggests.
However, a mismatch in the coordination could break the captiva-
tion and bring the subject’s separateness and autonomy back to his
awareness. (Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009: 474)

This reference to ‘fascination’ recalls Freud’s explanation of hypnosis, as

a replacement of the ‘ego idea’ of the hypnotised subject with an image
of an idealised other, and also suggests a trance-oriented interpretation;
but they do not pursue the idea, and the benefits of a full cognitivist
explanation remain to be explored.
The techniques for the induction of a hypnotic trance – or alterna-
tively, the preparation for hypnotic suggestions – vary, but those used
by stage hypnotists tend to address the entire audience, but only briefly,
in order to select a smaller group to work with. The hypnosis that hap-
pens on stage is almost always on an individual basis. Those who join
in one of these acts surrender themselves to another individual, and do
so voluntarily. Stage hypnotists tend to use procedures that find people
who are especially suggestible – who will respond to their instructions
easily and fully. This character of hypnotic trance is reminiscent of the
state of absorption that might be observed in a theatre audience and
similar, physiologically, to the state of people who get deeply ‘involved’
reading a book or watching a play, and also similar to the mental state
of some performers. In this kind of state people lose track of time, forget
and even become unaware of things around them.
 Irrational Interactions 145

A stage hypnotist is a procedural author working with a highly devel-

oped skill that takes these phenomena for granted, but who may also
deploy other performative devices to control mood and atmosphere, to
inspire confidence and compliance in participants, even to the extent of
using ‘stooges’ to lead genuine subjects to volunteer, or as the subjects
of climactic or difficult routines. An act may also, of course, be entirely
faked, either by using pre-rehearsed stooges throughout or by recruiting
willing subjects during the performance, secretly inviting them to ‘put
one over’ on the rest of the audience (McGill 1996: 506).
It is possible to think of all procedural authorship as working on
the suggestibility of a group of subjects, though not necessarily of all
procedural authors as hypnotists. Hypnotic subjects do retain agency,
despite the usual conception of being ‘in the power’ of the hypnotist.
They respond to suggestions using the resources they have available,
such as their own memories and their own imagination. The primary
benefit and method of hypnosis is perhaps the removal of inhibition –
surrendering to the will of the hypnotist allows a person to perform
bravely, appearing to have lost their own ability to direct their actions.
Stage hypnotists do not give detailed instructions to their subjects, the
suggestion is often very similar to the brief given to a group of impro-
visers: a set of given circumstances, aims and motivations. Chase’s
examples of the Martian, Elvis and the ballerina imply given circum-
stances, which he would briefly elaborate with things to do. How the
subject constructs his or her Martian, Elvis or ballerina performance,
is a product of the individual’s imagination. In my terminology, the
hypnotist has given an invitation to enter an altered state, facilitates
this, then indicated a horizon or participation, just as another proce-
dural author would.
People who have been hypnotised will often say that they remember
clearly what has happened, what they were asked to do and what they
did, but that they simply saw no reason not to do it. The trance state
and the hypnotist’s suggestions remove the inhibitions that would nor-
mally prevent performance. It is clear that agency here is not a matter of
a single, indivisible subject, able at all times to consider the wisdom and
propriety of action, or to access the creative and imaginative faculties.
The subject seems to have different capabilities depending on his/her
interactions with others. The hypnotist appears to both take the agency
from the subject by inducting them into a ‘trance’ (whether this is an
empirically changed brain state, or a culturally sanctioned readiness to
cooperate) and giving suggestions, and to give agency by using this state
to give free reign to the imagination and the subject’s creative impulses.
146 Audience Participation in Theatre

The primary process in stage hypnosis is to remove inhibition, and

to make people amenable to following suggestions according to their
own capabilities. Most practitioners insist that a hypnotic subject must
always be willing, so rather than having their agency stolen from them
by the hypnotist, they lend it for a period of time, allowing themselves
to be manipulated.
There are two broad themes to draw from this in relation to audi-
ence participation: the first if we see hypnotic suggestion or processes
as part of actual audience participation procedures, and the second in
an analogy between hypnosis and the experience of audience partici-
pation. If suggestibility is a feature of everyday intersubjectivity, or (by
the alternative model of the phenomena of trance) we are never very
far from trance-like states, then it seems likely that an audience gath-
ered to watch a performance might become open to suggestions, and/
or that something like a trance might be achieved in theatre-watching
without the need for explicit hypnotic inductions. In the absence of
specific empirical science to draw on about how these phenomena
might be present in theatre audiences, and in view of the disagree-
ment about the basis of the phenomena as a whole, I shall leave these
questions here.
In analogy, the audience participant might appear like the hypnotic
subject who delegates agency for a time, all the while having to draw
on their own resources, both performative and ethical, in creating a per-
formance. Stage hypnosis fascinates audiences because of the uncanny
aspect of seeing people apparently taken out of themselves, and because
of the frisson of the risk of allowing this to happen to ourselves. Much
the same fascinations can be involved in any audience-participation
show.

Procedural authorship and harnessing intersubjectivity

Successful audience participation often produces these intersubjective

effects; participants describe their experiences in terms that highlight
the transformatory, as in Benedictus’s account of Paint Show 04:

I saw people lose it in there. And I think I lost it in there, too.

Certainly in my first fight, as champion of the red team, I found
myself surprisingly merciless towards the poor girl from the hated
blue tribe. There were moments when I didn’t feel completely
human. (Benedictus 2004: 10)
 Irrational Interactions 147

or the communal, as in another of the same author’s participations at

the Edinburgh Festival in 2004:

There’s an extra-special kind of laugh, the kind that rings out from
the heated core of party games and food-fights, which is an unthink-
ing response to pure, innocent abandonment. This kind of laugh
one only gets from joining in, and I was exhausted from it after 75
minutes of Mimirichi.

Theatre performances of many kinds employ these effects as means as

well as ends: they already exist within the network of practices that
frame behaviour in the institutions of performance, in procedures that
turn individuals into crowds, encourage a trance-like state, mark off
behaviour from that outside the theatre, and inaugurating the stage as
a place where specialised behaviour takes place. Audiences that have
reached states of heightened intersubjectivity respond more openly,
more in harmony with each other and with the performers; and invita-
tions to participate are more likely to be accepted.
Interactive theatre that uses separate audience and performance spaces
as a starting point has some attributes that can be used to an advantage,
and others that work against interactions across this division. Musicals
that ask their audiences to sing along, for example, are helped by the
crowd-like aspect of an audience sitting in rows, but detaching oneself
from this crowd to cross the threshold of the stage is much more difficult.
In the earlier analysis of conventional theatre as consisting of a liminoid
frame on the stage, and a different, non-liminoid frame in the audience,
I suggested that this design helps to keep the audience in a position of
passivity. Logically then, in order to make the audience active, it might
be necessary to make a frame for them that has a liminoid aspect, or
a sequence of increasingly participatory frames that draw them closer
to the communitas that might be experienced by performers, to give
them a situation where they feel that extraordinary behaviour is not
only allowed but expected and easy. To attempt to create a frame for
the audience that is liminoid in precisely the same way as a stage space;
to replicate all the conventions of the performance for the audience to
participate in, would be an impossibility in most genres of contemporary
theatre, with their scripts and organised plots, but perhaps approached in
something like the walkabout improvisation of Izzo’s Interactive Theatre,
or in Punchdrunk’s environmental installations. In work of this kind
the physical organisation of the audience space has been altered, mak-
ing it continuous with the performance space throughout. Schechner’s
148 Audience Participation in Theatre

Environmental Theatre describes practices where the audience’s entry to

the performance space was ritualised, they were given food or drink,
greeted, anointed, or asked to take off their shoes.10 These are invitations
to participate in a limited performance, to interact with performers and
other spectators in a way that is risk free, or nearly, but takes the indi-
vidual away from themselves, and a step towards the freedom of perform-
ance, they create an outer theatrical frame that recognises the audience
in a place inside the symbolic language of the show, and a gradually
expanding horizon of participation.
Creating an impression of a space of freedom can be one of the
themes of a performance, as well as its technique, making the possibility
of transgressive participation a challenge to the audience; in his account
of Las Furas del Baus’ XXX, Benedictus has already stepped onto the
stage and had his trousers pulled down by a performer:

Can you make it hard for us?’ asked De Sade, pointing at my cock.
No, I need the loo, I said. This got a laugh, but it was quite true; I’d
been holding it in for the past half-hour. ‘Well, you can piss here,’
De Sade said, motioning hospitably across the rubber floor. (And he
meant it. I can see that he really meant it.) No, I said. That’s your lot.
(Benedictus 2004: 10)

The sense given here is not that the performers want particular per-
formances, or expect them, but that they want to create the impres-
sion of a limitless range of action, and so will make further invitations,
whatever is offered by the participant, each more extreme than the
last. The nakedness and projected film of the performers having sex
that preceded this moment were potentially shocking, and potentially
carnivalesque in framing the space as transgressive. Whether this was
instrumental in inspiring Benedictus to cooperate and drop his trousers
is not clear, but clearly it didn’t broaden his horizon of participation to
the limits the performers were willing to explore.
Working through a sequence of frames can also involve changing the
physical relationship between members of an audience, and between
audience and performers. A row of seats in a theatre typically has one
arm-rest, causing neighbours to have some limited physical contact that
they wouldn’t have if the seat had more comfortable, separate arm-rests,
and this helps to develop a crowd feeling. An audience that queues
together for some time before a show goes through a procedure that taxes
them a little physically, that brings them into contact with each other,
physically as well as verbally, and they will enter a theatre with a different
 Irrational Interactions 149

quality of anticipation to a group that walks straight to a seat, and with

greater feeling of identity with each other – although this enforced com-
munity might find expression in resentment instead of excitement. The
physical procedures people can be put through in the theatre are limited
by their tolerance for discomfort and for humiliation, but a great variety
of procedures can be conceived that will increase or decrease crowd feel-
ing, call up feelings associated with other events, or which are meaning-
ful in their own right. Crowds can be squashed, cosseted, soaked, singled
out, chilled or warmed up, left alone to get to know each other, made to
feel lost, put in the dark, or assaulted with bright lights and loud noise.
All of these will have an effect on the way an audience feel about the
show, about each other, and about themselves. Instead of an individual
making rational choices, we see a collapsing of boundaries, and action led
by impulses that come from both from within and without.
So far in my discussion of agency, I have mostly considered the indi-
vidual’s influence on a performance, and how that individual can be
influenced in turn. Interactive events that emphasise the crowd over the
individual can be very different from those that focus on the individual.
Or perhaps more pertinently, those events that detach the individual from
the crowd of the audience are the more radical, as they seek to undo the
work that has been done in bringing people into a crowd. Theatre relies
on the effect of the crowd upon people, although it may disguise the fact
and celebrate the thoughtful response instead. This has implications for
the analysis of interactivity, as well as for how it is controlled. If the indi-
vidual is so powerfully influenced by the crowd, then their responsibility
for their actions is mitigated – they are not acting entirely as themselves,
but as part of a larger organism. Their agency in the process appears to
be undermined. Watching in a crowd is the essence of theatre, and yet in
our consideration of the reception of theatre we treat the individual as an
individual, rarely with reference to how the crowd influences our thought
process. My thesis is not that we are helpless in the crowd, unable to make
up our own minds, but that if, as Provine has demonstrated, laughter can
be stimulated by such mechanical processes, and further, can have an
effect on our receptivity, we must accept that other neurological processes
set in train by being in company will also have their effect on our emo-
tional and cognitive responses to performance.

de La Guarda’s liminoid participation

I have already used De La Guarda’s11 Villa Villa to illustrate a number

of ideas: the appearance of different ‘involvement frames’; the direct
150 Audience Participation in Theatre

control of a performance; and the manipulation of space and atmos-

phere to create an outer theatrical frame. I will now develop this last
point, to consider whether this company successfully creates a limi-
noid frame for their participants, and how they make use of aspects of
embodied intersubjectivity to do this, as well as to broaden the horizon
of participation of their audiences. As well as my own experience of a
number of visits to the show, I will use the accounts of reviewers, mem-
bers of the company, and audience participants interviewed immedi-
ately after shows at the Roundhouse in London, in March 2000.
Press reviews for the London production recognised a transformative
effect on the show’s audiences: for example calling it ‘a legal high that
produces a real rush’ (Spencer 1999); or noting that the cast ‘create the
kind of danced up delirium you get when your footie team has just
lifted the Cup’ (Watson 1999). Some of the comments hint at how this
effect is achieved, in describing the behaviour of performers and audi-
ence: ‘This is a world in which no-one talks – people growl, rant, scream
and shout, but civilised behaviour is banned’ (Halliburton 1999);
‘There’s a thrill of unbuttoned sexuality in the air, a sense of orgiastic
celebration in which the constraints of language, thought and gravity
itself have been gloriously suspended’ (Spencer 1999). The suspension
of rules, the banning of civilised behaviour, delirium, a legal high: in
these comments it seems that the critics at least observed something
like a liminal event.
The outer theatrical frame of the show is unusual, and designed to be
unlike the usual experience of taking a seat to face a stage. The audience
stand throughout, in what first appears to be a large black tent sus-
pended inside the Roundhouse. Entering this tent is unlike entering the
auditorium of a theatre, and unlike most other performance spaces; and
unless you are familiar with the company’s work or reputation there
are no clues about where the performance is to take place. The tent is
dark, the roof is close to your head, there are a lot of people very close
together, there is no stage, there are no seats to point you in the direc-
tion of the performance: the architecture does not instruct you about
your place. The immediate effect can be unsettling, but for many it con-
tains allusions to spaces such as night clubs and festivals, which have
participatory aesthetics and participatory practices of their own. During
the opening section the performers are visible only through the roof of
the tent, now transparent; when shapes and noises and colours become
apparent above us, it is clear that this is the performance space – the
space above our heads. This space is more radically altered again when
holes appear in the roof, and the performers appear and reach down
 Irrational Interactions 151

into the audience’s space. The paper roof is torn back and the larger
space above is revealed. This transformation is crucial. The original
space is unusual in itself, but it is then disrupted and expanded. A per-
formance space that is directly above has different boundaries to one
that is in front, and while it seems unlikely that we could easily invade
the performance space, as is always physically possible with a stage, the
performers always seem in danger of invading our space as they defy
gravity above our heads. The threat that one of the flying performers
will swoop among us and steal us away is there from their first appear-
ance through the torn ceiling, when this very thing happens, although
with a ‘plant’. Our desire – or fear – for this to happen ‘for real’ is not
fulfilled until much later.
The invasiveness, threatened at the beginning, is gradually built up
through the show – there are hoses trained on the dancers, which
gradually begin to catch a few people in the audience, then later soak us
comprehensively. The water has a levelling effect, it isn’t aimed at any-
one in particular, and apart from a few who shelter under the scaffold-
ing, we are all soaked and the distinctions marked by each spectator’s
clothes are soon dissolved. Our sense of smell is addressed as well, there
is a censer swinging over us, spreading incense, and dampness hangs in
the air. More conventionally, the music is very loud, and there is dry
ice periodically obscuring the view, but at all points audience members
are not allowed to remain mere spectators, they are not able to reduce
themselves to a gazing subjectivity, the invasiveness of the architecture
of the show and its multisensory spectacle make this impossible: the
outer theatrical frame locates the audience in the middle of a storm
of activity. Towards the middle of the show the dancers come into the
crowd and play with us, invading the audience space further, inciting us
to dance with them and each other. Most of the interaction takes place
at ground level, but towards the end of this section a bare-bottomed,
impish dancer (male or female on different evenings) grabs people and
flies them in circles above the rest of the audience.
This participatory section arrives in the middle of the event; it is its
centre. It is not the conclusion of the evening, neither the outcome of
a process nor a party added on as an extra; it is somewhere to get us to
before carrying on with the performance. At every performance there
are a number of spectators who hang back from the interactivity, tak-
ing shelter – literally – under the scaffolding from which the perform-
ers jump and swing, but most join in to some extent. As performance
alone it is spectacular, accomplished, intoxicating, it shows scenarios of
struggle, community, pain, ecstasy. There is a recurrent atmosphere of
152 Audience Participation in Theatre

loss about to be regained, of joy and struggle. The imagery is of fraught

though indeterminate situations – battling through storms, chasing up
vertical walls, dodging flying bodies, falling repeatedly. A crucial, often
repeated, image has all the dancers spiralling in a tight ball above our
heads, struggling to keep together, while reaching outwards towards us.
Arms, legs and bodies become one mass, each body indistinguishable
from each other. If these images give resources to be used when direct
participation is asked for, they suggest recklessness and physical contact
more than anything more concrete.
Witnessing this performance from close proximity, with the threat of
physical harm hanging, literally, over our heads, provokes a powerful
kinaesthetic empathy. We frequently have to move to avoid performers
moving quickly through the audience space, or swooping low over our
heads. This calls on the kind of pre-noetic intentionality that would be
in process moving through any everyday crowd, but with the kind of
heightened sensitivity required in an unpredictable environment. Much
of the performance will be happening to the audience member’s body
before it is disclosed to the conscious mind. And what is disclosed will
be inflected by a state of arousal engineered by physical contact, bodily
discomfort and potential threat.
Pichon Baldinu, one of the show’s directors and original performers,
describes De La Guarda’s early street theatre performances12 as ‘teatro
terrorista’, or ‘like you are throwing a bomb’.13 The aim of Villa Villa is
still to ‘throw a bomb’ into their audience but now without the brevity
and disorientation of the street theatre. The aim is still to take people
out of themselves, a few steps away from their normal lives, but now
through celebration rather than shock. To change the way people feel
now, in the same space and time as the performance, not to give them
something to think about later, has become fundamental to the way
they work. They aim ‘to have this relationship with the audience, like
something that is closer, that puts me in a closer place so that I can
touch them, kiss them’ and to ‘place the audience and make them play
on the same side you’re playing, don’t get them on the other side’. This
interaction ‘has to be something important […] something strong and
something real’ it is not enough to pretend an interaction, ’to kiss some-
body, you have to really kiss somebody’. Baldinu speaks about making
people ‘open’ so that the performer can ‘come inside’. These comments
indicate that they are attempting to make a liminal space, a space where
rules are meant to be broken, particularly rules that are rarely broken
in life: (in the show) ‘a woman can go and touch the arse of a guy, but
a guy cannot go and touch the arse of a woman, because it’s so easy,
 Irrational Interactions 153

that always happens.’ He observes that at the beginning of the show

the audience apologise to each other for every moment of contact, but
at the end they don’t, and describes their new behaviour as ‘natural’ or,
even more tellingly, ‘dirty’. His use of ‘dirty’ seems particularly reminis-
cent of Turner’s lowly, debased figure of communitas; and the lack of
physical embarrassment at being touched recalls Canetti’s ‘discharge’ at
the point of formation of the crowd.
How participation is engineered and encouraged is something the
performers are very aware of, they have rehearsed parts of the show as a
participatory procedure. When talking about it they use the language of
improvisation: of ‘saying yes’, of finding out ‘what is the game’, which
echoes Johnstone,14 among others. They also speak of looking into
the participant’s eyes, and of imitating their body language, the body
language of flirtation. Imitating the audience is also a way of remind-
ing them of their own presence, and that they have not been given
the privileged position of spectator, reduced to pure gaze, that they are
agents, able to affect the social world of the performance. Specific games
played by performers reveal the seductive, covert, but playful quality to
their invitations:

I often allow them to, encourage them to play with me, but lead
them into it. So, I’d get them, I’d make them cup their hands and
then I’d actually lie down on them, and they’d take my weight and
they’d suddenly realise that they were participating, and they’d
move around trying to let go, but not wanting to let me drop, and
that’s already kind of involving them more than they want and then
people clear out and then if I go to the ground then I’m immediately
in a position to offer and ask for help.15

This is a procedural strategy for involving people, rather than a fixed

procedure. As an invitation it is subtly manipulative, it acknowledges
that participants may be reluctant, but asks for a very small contribu-
tion in the first place, and uses that contribution to trap the participant
into feeling an obligation to continue: the overt becomes the covert.
But it is the performer who makes herself vulnerable, takes a lower
status than the audience rather than imposing upon them from a
position of power, and calls on the empathy of the audience member
at this point to make them accept the invitation and broaden their
horizon of participation to include physical interaction, to the extent
of sharing weight. Eye contact is important to this kind of interaction,
reminiscent of Fuchs and de Jaegher’s tennis players, and a kind of deep
154 Audience Participation in Theatre

intersubjective involvement is possible in these moments, brief though

they are. Some of this game will address itself to the conscious mind of
the participant, who will almost certainly be able to think through the
implications of the performer’s sudden dependence upon them, how-
ever briefly. But as well as this the momentary changes of weight and
effort needed to maintain her in a ‘safe’ balance will arise directly in the
musculature of the participant, in a body-mind occupied in the inten-
tionality of this physical contact. To hold another’s body like this calls
upon affordances between hand and head, neck, shoulders – instinc-
tive familiarities with touching another human being, but that when
disclosed to the conscious mind may seem incongruous, and perhaps
uncomfortable, even as the participant’s body continues to engage and
interact without the need for thought or reflection.
The audience members didn’t speak to me explicitly of intoxication,
transportation, of being seduced, of doing the unexpected and being
licensed to break the rules. Like the critics, they described the event
as unlike other theatre or dance performances: they spoke about it as
reminding them of a music festival, or a ‘rave’, the loud music particu-
larly seems to have served to locate people’s experience.

parts of it didn’t feel like a performance, it felt I was the perform-

ance, it felt like I was at a rave or, do you know what I mean, like at
Glastonbury or something like that, just like not caring about, what-
ever, just going with the flow.16

One identified the crowd as ‘a really clubby audience’, though another

seemed frustrated that there wasn’t more eager participation ‘I think,
like, you could do with a bit more, like, party people in there.’ Horizons
of participation must have been coloured by perceptions of the event
as belonging to these categories, at least for those who frequented such
events as well as dance/theatre shows. Several referred to their anticipa-
tion of the event, many came on the recommendation of a friend, or
had seen the show before, but among those who were there for the first
time, surprise was equally important. This anticipation that something
unusual was likely to happen would be useful in developing a liminal
space, the heightening of the senses through a little fear might make
people more than usually susceptible to the multisensory signals of the
space. They described their feelings during the performance in ways that
echo this feeling of nervous anticipation, one woman told me she felt
‘excited and tense and happy all at the same time’, another that she was
‘a little bit scared of the performers’. But another spoke of frustration
 Irrational Interactions 155

at not getting more directly involved, ‘I wanted to go up with them

but they didn’t grab me, I was pissed’. Few of those I spoke to had par-
ticipated directly in interaction with the performers, though most had
danced with them briefly, and danced with each other. The interactions
they described involved being ‘grabbed’ ‘leaned on’, having a hat stolen
and having skin blown on or sucked; a focal point in the discussion of
participation was the ‘flying’ of a handful of audience members, who
were roped to one of the performers, and hoisted into the air with them.
Some of those who had held back from participating gave reasons that
were rooted in their own character: ‘I’m one of those sitting on the
bench type girls, you know’, or in being unprepared: ‘I wouldn’t have
minded going flying, I’d have loved that, yeah. Probably wasn’t dressed
appropriately, had too many clothes on, it would have suited people
with t-shirts on, I’ve got a skirt’.
Overall, these responses don’t indicate a collapse of social norms, nor of
a feeling of radical interconnection between audience members, but they
suggest that extraordinary experiences might have been within reach, if
people were brave enough to throw themselves into the event: ‘But you
wanted them to do that didn’t you deep down, you were kind of like
avoiding their gaze, but deep down you really wanted to go up there.’
And although the performers made many references to their sense
of play, suggesting that they are directly addressing what McConaghie
would call a basic emotion system of PLAY, it seems that the audience’s
feelings were somewhat more complex. Their comments show aware-
ness that play is being asked of them, as an activity, but the quality of
PLAY as an emotional state is inflected by elements of FEAR and perhaps
PANIC, while the weight sharing strategy and others like it evoke CARE
very explicitly.
The performers gave indications of a different sort that some kind
of liminoid frame had been created at the event, telling of being
assaulted during other parts of the show, when they were flying past just
above the heads of the crowd, of being grabbed and groped – sexually
assaulted – ‘as if they think we’re superhuman or, or, because we’re fly-
ing around with our knickers showing’.17 A feeling that the performers
were super- (or perhaps more accurately sub-) human seems to have
allowed behaviour that would be beyond the pale in normal interac-
tion. Or perhaps it is normal that some men would fail to respect the
physical boundaries of these women, given the opportunity and ano-
nymity of a crowd and a lack of bright light.
The company’s intention to make their audience ‘lose it’ (to borrow
Benedictus’s phrase) has, then, been fulfilled to an extent, but with
156 Audience Participation in Theatre

some occasional unintended results. The protection of performers from

participants who take the freedom to interact physically caused The
Performance Group to modify their work decades before this, though
it seems not to be an issue for Las Furas del Baus. And though these
assaults were rare, and not by any means the only interesting feature
of the performance, they do highlight the bind that practitioners of
audience participation put themselves in: in surrendering control one
invites a degree of chaos, especially when using an overt language of
chaos and abandonment in one’s procedure, and when addressing,
through the use of liminal frames, crowd processes and carnivalised
environments, anti-structural interactions and anti-social behaviour.

Embodiment, enculturation and meaning

Some conflict might be perceived between the conceptual apparatus of

the previous chapters, and the approaches adopted in this one. Turning
to cognitive science and philosophy might appear to be incompatible
with social theory; but as I have observed, the basis of the enactive
model of cognition and other recent developments across the field is
that all cognition is enculturated, or rather that culture is embodied at
such a deep level as to affect even pre-noetic responses. The notion of
affordance, too, might be developed in Bourdieusian terms – particularly
if we think of social affordances as instances where a situation invites
and draws from us certain types of action. Much as designed objects –
cups, door handles – fit and call forth action from human bodies, and
do so as part of a material culture, so also (and perhaps more so) types of
greeting or gathering call forth the appropriate kind of active response,
the response that we are disposed to because we are schooled in it, at a
deeply embodied level.
However, it is more difficult to reconcile the more extravagant claims
for anti-structural freedom in some readings of liminal phenomena, and
a thorough interpretation of Bourdieu. Communitas appears to offer a
relatively easy escape from the embodied dispositions of habitus, field
and capital. To ascribe transgressing performances to acquired dispo-
sitions associated with the relevant cultural practice could integrate
the approaches, but would merely restore them to a properly struc-
tural origin, and offer little to those who would seek similar results in
non-traditional societies or those who see real structurelessness as the
outcome of a liminal process. My scepticism about this version of limi-
nality should not negate the importance of crowd phenomena or other
situations where we might ‘lose ourselves’; it is rooted in a preference
 Irrational Interactions 157

for explanations that set them alongside other enculturated behaviours,

as designated times where we have learnt a version of how to let go.
Rather than attempt a resolution to these conceptual difficulties,
I shall turn to Carrie Noland’s Agency and Embodiment (2009) for a view
of the emergence of freedom within physical action, which does not
depend upon such an easy route out of cultural habituation. Noland
aims to offer some balance to what she calls an ‘entrenched histori-
cal determinism’ (8), through an examination of agency in everyday
gesture. Such gestures are enculturated right down to the muscular and
neuromuscular level, she agrees, but she insists that there is a lack of
identity between gesture at a discursive level – the gesture as a sign –
and as an interoceptive experience. Just as others read the performative
gestures that our bodies produce, we too read them and understand
their meanings, but there is the potential for dissonance between that
culturally enscribed meaning and our felt experience of the gesture
itself. She draws on Merleau-Ponty to examine how a smile, for exam-
ple, can be understood in three ways:

(1) as an example of motor behaviour, an attempt to solve a prob-

lem, to do something in the world (a psychological ‘I can’); (2) as a
‘figure,’ a conventional and culturally specific sign for pleasure and
approval, or, alternatively, anger and frustration; and finally (3) as a
set of kinaesthetic experiences, such as clenching (of the cheek mus-
cles and jaw), stretching (of the lips and chin), and exposure (of the
teeth and gums). Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of gesture is provoca-
tive because it suggests that interaction among these three levels is
constant and, under certain circumstances, available to reflection.
Gestures are the site of a complex negotiation of forces without
which situation meanings would never appear and the history of
such meanings would never evolve. (Noland 2009: 62)

The different disciplines drawn on in this chapter would understand a

smile in different ways, and have different perspectives on the balance
of voluntary and involuntary impulses that lead us to smile at and
with other people. But what Noland draws attention to is the interplay
between action, signification and sensation. Often a smile, and any
other gesture, at the moment when it is called forth by a situation, will
feel entirely ‘natural’ and suited to the affective state of the moment
and the interaction; it will function as a sign and intercorporeally draw
out appropriate matching gestures from others; and it will pass from
memory without any need for reflection. At other times, however, a
158 Audience Participation in Theatre

smile may feel forced, making us aware of its clenching and stretching
actions, and that we are working to produce the sign that is appropriate
to the moment rather than effortlessly experiencing it in passing. Or as
the moment of a smile passes by, we might notice some incongruity in
the situation, something less comfortable, and have cause to reflect on
how the gesture was drawn from us.
My theme in these three chapters has been agency in audience par-
ticipation, and the problems with understanding exactly where it lies.
Noland does not provide a complete answer (and nor do Gallagher,
Bourdieu, Goffman), but she does show how in the fine detail of cultur-
ally determined gesture there is the capacity for a self-awareness that
does not derive entirely from the shared codification of the gesture, but
from the dissonance between the gesture and the private, interoceptive
experience of it. This is where she finds agency, in the resulting distance
between the subject and the performative gesture, the space that allows
for the repetition of gesture to be inflected with the accumulated under-
standings of embodied experience.
When audience participation draws action out of the bodies of
participants it can create these kinds of dissonance, experienced in
the moment or in reflection, which in themselves become part of the
meaning of the performance event. They can also become part of the
vocabulary of the individual, informing how their gestural interactions
are used in the future.
4
Accepting the Invitation

The questions of this chapter relate to the experience of accepting an

invitation to participate, in particular the consequences that this has
for the reception of a piece of participatory theatre for the audience
participant, as their ‘point of view’ in relation to the performance alters
radically at this point. The key questions are:

• What is it like to be an audience participant? And to be audience,

performer and performance, simultaneously?
• What is it like to make choices at the same time as observing those
choices as an audience member?
• How does the experiential aspect of participation contribute to a
distinctive aesthetic character?

A piece of audience-participatory theatre will be other things as well

as being audience participation. As well as containing audience par-
ticipatory performance it may contain performances with conventional
actor–audience relationships, and its audience participant performances
will often be watched via such conventional perspectives in any case.
It will have its explicit and implicit content, and it will be embedded in
its traditions (even when rebelling against them), and be meaningful in
their terms.
But when an invitation is offered, and even more so once an invita-
tion is accepted, certain dynamics come into play between the par-
ticipant and the performance they offer. Accepting an invitation to
participate means accepting an altered social role, as we have seen, and
it also means accepting some risk to social esteem, and some risk of (or
opportunity for) responding unconsciously. The alteration of social role,
and the roles that are played may vary enormously according to the
159
160 Audience Participation in Theatre

tradition, practice and procedure of participation concerned, but what

distinguishes this change of role, and the roles that emerge from such a
change, is that it is a change from a simple audience role to an audience
participant role. We might also call this an audience-performer role; but
either way I propose that the ‘audience’ aspect is not extinguished in
this change: when we become audience participants we remain audi-
ence members.
This is true for two reasons: first because we arrived at the event as
theatre-goers and become audience members, and therefore we carry
through the experiences of the event an expectation that we will ‘con-
sume’, ‘receive’ or ‘enjoy’ the event as such. The institution of theatre is
structured around the audience member and their consumption, recep-
tion or enjoyment of what is produced and performed, and whatever
subsequently happens begins with this structure. Second, we will leave
behind the role of audience participant, and leave the event restored to
the role of theatre-goer, and look back on an experience organised on this
premise. Whatever happens, any new relationship that emerges out of
this change of role will have begun with the initial audience–performer
relationship and the role of theatre-goer that extends beyond the
moment of performance itself. The ‘whatever happens’ repeated in
these two formulations is important because, as we have seen, there is
at least the possibility that audience participants can ‘lose themselves’
in the course of an event, and thus potentially lose some sense of social
role and of otherwise apparent residual identifications with the role
of audience. Though ‘in the moment’ we might (conceivably, on rare
occasions) forget the audience-ness of our experience, it is the basis of
the relationships involved, and it will return in our reflections on the
experience afterwards. More often, however, we are aware of being audi-
ence members even while we are also participant-performers.
This sometimes obscured, sometimes self-evident, continuing audi-
ence role brings with it some attributes. As watchers and listeners – the
activities implied in the roles of spectator and audience – our point of
view and point of hearing has been altered so that we now watch and
listen from much greater proximity. We are closer to the action, when
perhaps we are standing in among performers and other audience-
performers. And we are intimately close to the action when action
is produced by our own body or voice. All performance manipulates
the audience’s perspective on the theatrical action, whether through
inherited conventions of theatre architecture and practice or through
innovative audience-performer arrangements, but audience participa-
tion puts us into this peculiar relationship with action that originates
 Accepting the Invitation 161

within our bodies, while we remain audience members of the event

as a whole.
These relationships have to be seen in their embodied aspects, because
the location of perception and action within the particular body of the
participant is especially important. And they have to be seen as time-
based and evolving, because of the temporal presence of the participant
in the moment of performance choices. The performance emerges from
our own body, and is sited in our body, the same site from which we
‘watch’ the performance. At the same time our social self is recognis-
able as the source of the performance: much of the emphasis of the
previous chapters has been on making choices and the action that we
witness emerging from our body is the manifestation of those choices.
As we have seen, a participant has at least made a choice not to refuse
to participate, but has often made a choice of something to offer to the
performance. Thus, the participant is simultaneously the performer, the
one who enacts the performance through choice, the performance that
emerges from their own body and the audience as they view it.
This is a complicated situation to be in, conceptually. But is this com-
plexity a product of conceptualising it thus? Is it not in reality a simpler
matter of interacting in a slightly modified frame, with a different kind of
self-consciousness, or on occasion a complete lack of self-consciousness?
Is it not the usual situation of the performer, whose role as audience to
their own performance fades into the background while the event is
under way? This chapter will show how this complexity can be a real and
significant attribute of the situation of the audience participant, and that
conceptualising it in this way is necessary to capture the range of different
kinds of ‘aesthetic distance’ that can emerge in audience participation.

Theatre audiences and feedback loops

Up to this point my argument has treated audience participants as social

beings more than as audience members (as a subset of social beings). It
is time to return to the situation of being an audience member. Paying
attention to the institutionally derived role of ‘spectator’ will allow us to
consider if and how that role changes when an invitation to participate
is accepted, and the significance of such a change. Erica Fischer-Lichte
describes how audible and visible reactions from audiences affect per-
formance in theatre:

Both the other spectators as well as the actors perceive and, in

turn, respond to these reactions. The action on stage thus gains
162 Audience Participation in Theatre

or loses intensity; the actors’ voices get louder and unpleasant or,
alternatively, more seductive; they feel animated to invent gags, to
improvise, or get distracted and miss a cue; they step closer to the
lights to address the audience directly or ask them to calm down, or
even to leave the theatre. The other spectators might react to their
fellow spectators’ responses by increasing or decreasing the extent
of their participation, interest, or suspense. Their laughter grows
louder, even convulsive, or is suppressed suddenly. They begin to
address, argue, or insult each other. In short, whatever the actors do
elicits a response from the spectators, which impacts on the entire
performance. In this sense, performances are generated and deter-
mined by a self-referential and ever-changing feedback loop. Hence,
performance remains unpredictable and spontaneous to a certain
degree. (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 38)

She notes how in the western tradition from the end of the eighteenth
century onwards audience feedback, and therefore participation in this
creative looping, was gradually disciplined, until the ‘performative turn’
of the 1960s began to not only allow audiences to once again make
themselves heard, but to self-consciously direct attention onto their
presence, and their activity. This initiated a new kind of feedback loop:

The pivotal role of the audience was not only acknowledged as a

pre-condition for performance but explicitly invoked as such. The
feedback loop as a self-referential, autopoietic system enabling a
fundamentally open, unpredictable process emerged as the defining
principle of theatrical work. (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 39)

Autopoiesis is a term drawn from cellular biology, formulated by

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to address the organisational
premises of living cells:

a cell produces its own components, which in turn produce it, in an

ongoing circular process. The word ‘autopoiesis’ was coined to name
this kind of continual self-production. A cell is a self-producing or
autopoietic unity. (Thompson 2010: 98)

The term has since been used as part of a definition of living organisms
in general, and is an important part of the enactive theory of mind
discussed in the previous chapter, in which minds are seen as just such
autonomous, self-producing systems. It suggests autonomy in the sense
 Accepting the Invitation 163

of self-generation, but not independence from the environment: evi-

dently cells, living beings and minds have to draw on resources from
their environment to do the work of producing and reproducing them-
selves. The implication of Fischer-Lichte’s use of the term is that per-
formance produces itself autonomously, in distinction from the creative
work of the performance makers who have set it in motion: perform-
ance makers and audiences become resources which the autopoietic
system of the performance draws on. Some problems with this defini-
tion of performance will be followed through later in this chapter, but
for now it indicates the emphasis that Fischer-Lichte wants to place on
the moment of performance itself, as its own point of origin, and the
inclusion of audience members in that origin.
In Fischer-Lichte’s account a feedback loop defines all theatre, but this
autopoietic character arrives with the ‘performative turn’, with three
processes consistently brought into playful experiments: role reversal,
the creation of community and mutual physical contact (Fischer-Lichte
2008: 40). As examplars of role reversal she cites Marina Abramovic’s
Lips of Thomas, into which audience members intervened to bring to
an end a series of acts of self-harm by the performer; the Performance
Group’s Dionysus in 69 and Commune, and Fusco and Gomez-Pena’s
Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West, 1992–1994, all well known,
perhaps even canonical works; and Christoph Schlingensief’s Chance
2000 – Campaign Circus ’98, in which participants made choices in a
chaotic parody of democratic process (Fischer-Lichte 2008: 40–50). In
all of these, the invitation to the audience member to take an active
choice-making part in the performance – what Fischer-Lichte calls role
reversal – acts as a ‘magnifying glass’ on the feedback system of perfor-
mance and their importance within it. More than this, by redistributing
power to these audience participants, this technique raises the feedback
loop to the level of autopoiesis.
This analysis stops short of examining the experience of the audi-
ence participant. She presents a striking articulation of the changing
aesthetics of contemporary performance where this kind of involve-
ment is invited, but her focus remains rigorously on the emergence of
the work, rather on the audience member’s experience of it, despite the
change in quality of experience that must follow from such an invita-
tion. Her theory positions audience participation as not just a change
in the degree of creative input in the previously established feedback
loops of theatre, but as a change in the kind of input. Her examples of
audience behaviour in autopoietic feedback are of a different order to
the audience behaviour in theatre that she notes in the long quotation
164 Audience Participation in Theatre

at the beginning of this section. She calls this kind of participation ‘role
reversal’, acknowledging that people have roles and that ‘reversing’
them is not trivial. To develop my own theory of the aesthetics of audi-
ence participation I will need to develop Fischer-Lichte’s model of the
feedback loop out of which the work of performance emerges, to show
how the change in the experiential dimension of the work is significant
not just to each audience member’s understanding, response and con-
tribution, but also to what kind of art work emerges.

A new horizon

I have proposed that becoming an audience participant involves per-

ceiving a horizon, and accepting a responsibility to act within that
horizon, to make choices and to perform those choices. But we need to
open out the concept of the horizon, a little further than it has been in
Chapter 1. We need to take account of individual and shared perspec-
tives, and those of participants before and during participation. And
we need to pay some attention to what a horizon contains for those it
appears to.
Gadamer refers to several different kinds of horizon, in his use of the
term to examine the hermeneutic process of understanding: historical
horizons, horizons of the present, the horizons of others. For his pur-
poses the word designates what is perceptible from a certain point of
view, and facilitates an understanding of how the historical conscious-
ness implicit in a text (its historical horizon) must be fused with the
perspective of the reader (their horizon). It is from this derivation that
the term ‘horizon of expectation’ comes to be used in reader-response
theory, and thence to find its way into the theory of theatre audiences.
But Gadamer himself draws on Husserl’s phenomenology, where the
idea of a horizon explicates how subjectivity has a ‘givenness’ that
works in tandem with the givenness of intentionally disclosed phenom-
ena, as described in the previous chapter. He shows how for Husserl:

there is such a thing as givenness that is not itself the object of

intentional acts. Every experience has implicit horizons of before
and after, and finally fuses with the continuum of the experiences
present in the before and after to form a unified flow of experience.
(Gadamer 2004: 237)

While the material world becomes real to us (is given) through our
being directed towards it (intentionality), it does so in a moment that is
 Accepting the Invitation 165

always facing both forwards and backwards, to memories of past experi-

ence and anticipations of the future. Gadamer will go on to use terms
such as ‘tradition’ and ‘prejudice’ to elaborate how a horizon facilitates
the understanding of texts, but his source, Husserl, is interested in
experience as an aspect of human being, more than in the hermeneutic
understanding of cultural objects.
My formulation of a ‘horizon of participation’ depends on the rela-
tionship between an understanding of a moment of experience and
its extrapolation into the possibilities for action that extend from that
moment. Action depends on understanding, whether at a conscious or
unconscious level, in the emergent process of mind as a meaning-mak-
ing system of Varela and Thompson. The meaning of every moment
of experience presses upon us to take action, even if that action might
appear as refraining from action. A horizon of participation is charac-
terised by such a pressure.
The temporality of Gadamer and Husserl’s horizons applies to the
horizon of participation too: it belongs to a particular moment, while
at the same time facing the past and the future. And as Gadamer says,
horizons are mobile and evolving. This is true for the horizon in its
literal form, as although if one glances at a horizon it appears to be
the static state of the border of visual perception, if one attends to the
horizon for any amount of time one will inevitably see changes; and
Gadamer’s intention is that the horizon changes as we move through
it. A horizon of participation that appears to us before accepting an
invitation may appear as a fairly fixed concept, but at, and from, the
moment of acceptance it is a constantly evolving perception, renewing
itself moment-by-moment. Being in a horizon of participation is a fun-
damentally time-based (and time-pressured) state of being.
This, then, may be the strict sense of a horizon of participation: an
evolving, individual understanding of the possibilities offered by an invi-
tation. But just as Gadamer opens his term out to elaborate what is shared
with others, or at other points what is owned by others and unknowable
to us, a more adaptable conception of plural horizons can help to unpack
the experience of participation. Additional useful aspects of horizons will
include the common horizon of a work or a form of work, implicitly
shared by those who have a common anticipatory understanding of its
form; the anticipation of an individual of a work, informed by this com-
mon horizon; the situation of the potential individual participant, when
projected by a procedural author designing a participatory event; and the
shared negotiation and exploration of possibilities by all of those inter-
acting in the relational space of the emerging work.
166 Audience Participation in Theatre

What does this theoretical approach to the horizon add to the

detailed discussion of influences on participant choice-making pre-
sented in the last three chapters? First it offers a connection between the
significance of a horizon, as an expression of expectation, experience
and the influence of institutional anticipation, and the in-the-moment
intentionality and affordance of embodied cognition, embedding both
of these processes in a Husserlian phenomenology. Second by placing
these two sets and sites of influence side by side it gives space for both
cultural determination and pre-noetic, unconscious bodily response,
while leaving room for ‘mind’ as a meaning and choice making process.

Weather on the horizon

Martin Welton, in Feeling Theatre (2012), styles the prevailing affect

within which performers do their work, and audiences receive it as a
kind of ‘weather’. Adding this image to the notion of the horizon of
participation suggests how the unpredictable element of bodily/emo-
tional affect has influence at a moment of invitation and afterwards.
The resources offered in a pre-participatory performance, those shared
resources called on in an invitation, might create an apparently well-
defined common horizon; but this horizon is made clear, cloudy or even
positively foggy by the affective state of the individual. A good mood
and positive outlook – enhanced, of course, by an adventurous attitude
to participatory art – makes the landscape of action contained by a
horizon appear accessible and welcoming. A sceptical or fearful antici-
pation of the event, provoked or influenced by unhappy circumstances
unconnected to it, makes the space of the horizon uninviting, an area
of dark motives, cold encounters and hidden horrors. Alternatively the
procedural author seeks to influence this internal weather, by operating
on the affective state of the audience as a whole, and of participants in
particular. The kinds of manipulation of states of mind and body raised
in the previous chapter whip up storms among a crowd, or warm an
audience to each other or to the performers, in readiness for interaction.
The processes of kinaesthetic and emotional empathy, of suggestion, or
of affectively stimulated anticipation will thoroughly change the expe-
rience of having a horizon.
Where this kind of affective weather is shared among an audience, or
an audience and performers, whether procedurally promoted, or arrived
at accidentally, we might speak of an event’s atmosphere, and attempt
to understand it in nuanced terms. As has been discussed in detail, the
actions of performers create affect, but less has been said about how
 Accepting the Invitation 167

space and environment, light and sound, affect us bodily, emotionally

and cognitively, and create the weather of the horizon. They too shape
our mood and incline us to act or refrain from acting, and sometimes
impel us to act in certain ways. Despite using a space-based metaphor
in the horizon of participation, I have had little to say so far about the
use of space in inviting and structuring audience participation. But
as McAuley tells us (2000: 5), theatre performance is essentially char-
acterised by a spatial distinction, and the appearance of one side of
this distinction to those on the other side of it, that is the imaginative
engagement of the audience with the scenography, is a key element of
the phenomenology of spectatorship. The collapse or the transgression
of this distinction does not negate the importance of space for audience
participatory theatre. Participation is a bodily activity, in which the
location of the body and its relationship to the organisation of space is
fundamental, and the experience of audience participation is an expe-
rience of changes in spatiality. It may take place within an audience
space, but in this case the audience space has been re-framed, and the
bodily response to this re-framing will be noticeable – when called on to
participate from their seats, people sit up, or stand up, or sink back; they
note the body language of those around them and assimilate themselves
to it or distinguish themselves from it; presence as part of ‘an audience’
is suddenly marked, and a demand is made to use the language of space
and bodily orientation to it, to comment on that presence.
In many cases the invitation to participate will be an invitation
to enter a performance space, and therefore a transgression of the
audience/performance distinction. Where this is true the moment of
entry into the performance space will be particularly phenomenologi-
cally charged, as the re-framing of activity, and the demand upon the
choice making of the participant will be so strongly marked by this
spatial invasion. Even when the ‘performance’ of the participation does
not begin immediately, when further instructions to the volunteer are
given once a participant has already taken the stage, the demand is felt,
a horizon of participation is already in operation, perhaps as a first-stage
re-framing of the audience’s role, but nevertheless a significant altera-
tion to their orientation to themselves and others at the event.
In other cases the space is an element in the horizon of participation in
a less oppressive way: space can constitute an invitation in and of itself,
it can help to define and suggest activity and roles to take. In an impor-
tant sense the space and its contents are identical with a large portion of
the horizon of participation: they are a horizon in themselves, literally
and in relation to potential action. Space offers its affordances: walls
168 Audience Participation in Theatre

define possibilities for motion, doors present opportunities for exit, fur-
niture and props are choices made manifest, corridors demand motion.
Environmental and site-specific participatory performance where audi-
ence participants are invited to wander freely make it especially obvious
that the nexus of space, bodies and time stimulates motion. Activity in
a space changes its character for us: waiting, moving quickly, returning
to the same space again and again, exploring, hiding, will all strongly
inflect the perception of a space and how it becomes part of a horizon
of participation. Moving into a crowded space or moving as a crowd
into a space, make different demands on us than moving into the same
space alone. But in other kinds of performance too, when participants
step into stage spaces, out of chairs and into school halls, into circles of
audience members in the street, bodies speak through space in the way
they orient themselves to it when still, and in how they move through
it. Space is, therefore, a key tool for the procedural author, as it is a key
part of the phenomenology of audience participation.
The horizon of participation is a spatial, embodied, time-based response
to an invitation (and henceforth a commitment) to act. Accepting an
invitation means moving into a horizon of participation where tempo-
rality and spatiality are reconfigured as affordances that press upon the
participant, initiating and shaping responsive activity. We experience it
as an atmosphere, and perceive it according to our mood, as much as we
understand it in response to a performer’s explicit activity.

Gaining roles and responsibilities

I have avoided categorising or enumerating distinctive kinds of partici-

pation for the most part, to avoid appearing prescriptive about what
kinds of participation are worthy of discussion, and because a list of
types of participation could soon proliferate to the point of absurdity;
but a useful distinction can be made between invitations to join a fic-
tional presentation and others. A horizon of participation that requires
acting of some kind has a very particular dimension to it.
The business of cooperatively presenting a fiction is highly elaborate
in whatever form it takes. It entails moment-by-moment agreement
about time, place, character, the relationship of characters to each other
and to the people playing them, conventions of being aware of some
people and not others, of being watched and denying it. But members of
a theatre audience will not have to learn or have described to them this
complex form – it can be taken for granted. The idea of theatrical fic-
tion is a common shared resource. The difficulties come when someone
 Accepting the Invitation 169

without the benefit of rehearsal is invited to take action within this

framework that either (a) effectively continues to present a consistent
fiction, or (b) achieves something within the parameters of the fiction,
while remaining consistent with it. In other words, the challenge might
be either to perform well, or to solve a problem, or sometimes to do
both.
In Chapter 1 I accounted for these two possibilities in terms of the
resources that the participant can draw on from other frames of social
interaction – their skills and experience in acting and or in specific
circumstances. But this is only marginally helpful when thinking about
what the experience of a horizon of participation of this kind is like, or
what it means, when a participant takes a role. Does the participant feel
something about how their prior experience is called on at the moment
of invitation, and as the interaction continues? Probably a whole vari-
ety of emotions and/or reflections will be prompted: relief that there
is relevant experience to draw on; anxiety that personal circumstances
may come into play; excitement at the opportunity to show off; anger
at the reality behind the fictional circumstances used to prompt partici-
pation; or resentment that real life has been used for this, manipulative
purpose. Though the difficulty of creating a performance might be
very real, the experiential character of audience participation, when a
performance of fiction is involved, will be less about the un-trammelled
‘immersion’ in and investigation of a fiction, than it will be about the
relationship of the audience participant to the performance task, and
the moment to moment imperative to produce something appropriate,
to satisfy the demand of the frame (in this it is very much in Goffman’s
territory), and to act, in both senses of the word. A closer look at this
kind of horizon will help to unpack some of the complexity of the situ-
ation of being simultaneously audience and performer.
The nascent genre of ‘immersive theatre’ amounts to only a small
corner of audience participatory theatre, and an overlapping category
rather than a sub-set; not all immersive theatre is audience participatory
(in my terms), and not all audience participation is immersive theatre.
But the implications of the term ‘immersive’ and of the expectations
that attach to the performances that earn the name are interesting in
relation to the question of accepting invitations to participate. It is the
implicit claim of immersive theatre that theatre has an inside to be
immersed in. Though we might speak of immersing ourselves in other
art works – in novels, films and plays – as a characteristic of a deep
and effective involvement, generally something else is meant when a
work is called immersive, especially in the emergent immersive theatre.
170 Audience Participation in Theatre

Pieces that allow audiences some combination of moving independ-

ently, exploring an environment, surrounding themselves or being
surrounded by the scenography or the performance, or interacting with
performers, are likely to be called immersive. The term designates audi-
ence experiences of proximity, flexibility and interaction, and regard-
ing the physical experience the term is very appropriate – an audience
inhabits and moves through the space of a performance rather than
sitting outside it, much as we might move through water rather than
floating on top of it. But more than this altered spatial relationship is
expected of immersive theatre– both practitioners themselves in their
promotional literature and critics who write about the work sometimes
suggest that audiences move inside the drama in some way. We are
invited to ‘join in’, to ‘be a part of it’, to ‘take part’. Perhaps this should
be read as the hyperbole typical of marketing any kind of leisure experi-
ence, but it begs questions about the work of the actor, the nature of
dramatic fiction and the process of artistic creation. These are questions
that are not to be fully resolved here, but I will attempt a brief outline
of the first of the three.
An audience participant who is ‘endowed’ with a role in a piece of
fictional theatre becomes, to some tiny extent at least, an actor. They
accept an obligation to support a fictional circumstance, and to present
themselves appropriately, to move forward with the fiction and move it
forward. This might be a matter of very simple call and response, in which
a group of children validate the actions of an actor-character from a fic-
tional point of view, or it could be the negotiation of a complex situation
in a piece of Forum Theatre – some levels of fictional framing proposed by
Jonothan Neelands were cited in Chapter 2. In immersive theatre this will
often be an unprepared, unscripted encounter with a performer within
their scenographic environment. If the implication of immersiveness is
correct, at this point the audience member is potentially most deeply
inside the theatrical event, and inside the drama itself. What kind of
inside is available to them at a moment like this? Answering this question
is a fairly swift process of elimination: Are they inhabited by or do they
inhabit the subjectivity of a fictional character, such that they perceive
the events as true? No. Do they gain a thoroughgoing understanding
of the fictional circumstance? No. Do they have an emotional insight
into the dramatic situation? Maybe. Do they enter into the business of
performing a fiction in the same way as the actors do? Again, maybe.
These tentative maybes hint at the potential awkwardness of the
encounter between an in-character actor, and an audience participant
who is being treated as also in-character. Sophie Nield notes her own
 Accepting the Invitation 171

embarrassment at being directly addressed by a character in Reverence,

at the Southwark Playhouse: ‘And as I stood there in my not-mediaeval
clothes with my not-mediaeval bright green handbag, it occurred to
me – who on earth is this monk supposed to think I am?’ (2008: 531).
She questions not what the performer is supposed to think – and
presumably the performer has some effective supposing rehearsed and
ready for this kind of encounter – but what the fictional character is
supposed to think, as it is just as much the audience member who has
to suppose the mental state of a character as it is the actor. But more
than simply confused about how to imagine the relationship between
a fictional character and a role of her own conjured up on the spot,
she seems troubled by how she is being asked to be present herself at
this moment, in the role of spectator, by the kind of investment she is
obliged to make at a moment like this.
Discussions of the emotional investment entailed in acting are often
framed by the polarity of Diderot’s famous essay The Paradox of Acting,
in which he claims that it is impossible for a great performance to be
given when an actor succumbs to ‘sensibility’, or an emotional involve-
ment in the performance. What is paradoxical is that the appearance
of being entirely swept away in the process of performance, of being
entirely at one with the role and its moment is one of the most com-
pelling facets of acting in the theatre, but that it is an impossibility; for
anyone so carried away, beyond a sense of themselves and their actual
circumstances, would not be able to accomplish the essential mechani-
cal business of acting – remembering moves, lines, entrances and exits,
maintaining an effective relationship with the audience, and so on. But
Diderot’s argument is a polemic, and as Martin Welton notes in Feeling
Theatre (2012) – not necessarily representative of his own views – he says
Diderot’s text is ‘mischievous’, when seen in the context of his other
writings on theatre (36). Diderot was at other points a ‘sentimentalist’
himself, an enthusiastic fan of emotional acting. As many have noted
since, the nature of acting is somewhere between the poles that Diderot
sets up; Henry Irving, in a preface to Diderot, said:

It is often said that actors should not shed tears, that real tears are
bad art. This is not so. If tears be produced at the actor’s will and
under his control, they are true art; and happy is the actor who num-
bers them amongst his gifts. (Irving in Diderot 1883: xx)

Actors may be immersed in something, but they are not in a literal sense
inside the story of the play. For Welton, they are inside a performance’s
172 Audience Participation in Theatre

‘affective ecology’, in which feelings are put to work by actors, as an

important part of their work, but not in so simple a way as a reproduc-
tion of the feelings of the characters they play. Early in his chapter on
‘Shows of Feeling’, Welton suggests that in a simplified form, the affec-
tive ecology has two territories:

It may appear, at first glance, that there are in fact two species of
feeling at stake here; firstly, the experience of empathy of a spectator
for a performer, whether they are presenting a character or not, and,
secondly, of a performer who wishes to communicate a shared sense
of feeling with their spectators. (Welton 2012: 25)

And while he is carefully sidestepping the idea that character-actor-

spectator emotions work in a straight line from one to the other, he is
highlighting the emotion work done by the professional performer, and
the intention to work on the emotions of the spectator. The previous
chapter approached facilitation in terms of empathy, from a different
perspective, but attention here is on the participant. Their emotional
work when in a performance is different of that of the actor, but they
would have to be seen as requiring a third species of feeling, one that is
very difficult to identify. The idea of emotional work comes from Arlie
Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling,
where she describes how increasingly work puts demands on us to have,
and to demonstrate that we have, appropriate feelings: to put our emo-
tions to work. The emotional play-time of theatre is something else, but
it still requires appropriate emotion work from us, at points.

For the audience, ‘vague flashes of feeling’ may perhaps therefore

be less to do with a psychological correspondence with either actor
or character, and more to do with the opening of a connection to
a broader affective ecology or atmosphere that is moved by them.
(Welton 2012: 49–50)

The lack of correspondence, recognised here in (presumably) conven-

tional audience arrangements, is perhaps even more evident when the
empathy invoked between the two roles is not a vicarious engagement
of one in the performed experiences of the other. But what the broader
affective ecology is, is more difficult to chart. Actors are affective work-
ers, and participants are not, in that they are not implicated in the econ-
omy of feeling in the same way; but nevertheless there is an economy
of feeling at work, where their feelings matter.
 Accepting the Invitation 173

While the paradox itself might be pressingly relevant to participants

in immersive theatre, for other participants, the job of the actor is rel-
evant in other ways. Acting is the task of maintaining a fiction. Modern
methods of acting have also adopted techniques that use tasks at a
moment-by-moment level to achieve this larger task more effectively.
In Stanislavskian ‘objectives’ for example, the proposition is that if
an actor engages in a task sincerely, especially one that involves goal-
based interaction with other actors, they will be more convincing to
an audience. Audience participants’ tasks will be diverse, and may
involve maintaining a fiction. But conceiving a horizon of participation
will entail perceiving tasks, targets, goals or aims of some kind. A role
defined by a frame, as conceived by Goffman, entails at least one key
task: maintaining the integrity of the frame.

Experiential learning

The experience of a fictional horizon can be understood a little better,

initially, through the ideas of experiential learning, which has special
manifestations in educational drama. As Neelands (1992: 6) says:

Learning in drama results from facing the challenge of behaving

realistically in a fictional situation and then being pressed by the
circumstances of the fiction, as it unfolds, into finding and using
appropriate vocal and active responses. It is this ‘realness’ of drama,
in which role-players give and receive (write and read) each other’s
messages simultaneously, which makes drama a unique form of liter-
acy. In conventional reading and writing activity, fictional situations
are unalterable, recorded and described; students are either fixed in
the role of spectator, observer or reader, or in the role of writer. In
drama the same fictions are entered into and lived as a ‘here and
now’ experience.

There are a number of echoes in this with the phenomenology of

accepting an invitation to audience participation: there is the challenge
of behaving appropriately; there is being pressed by circumstances as
they unfold to give vocal and active responses; and there is the giving
and receiving (writing and reading) of messages simultaneously. For
Neelands it is the ability to enter fictional situations that is important,
to treat them as if they are ‘here and now’, which makes educational
drama so effective, rather than the challenging, pressing and giving
responses. Fiction is often a factor in audience participation for adults
174 Audience Participation in Theatre

or children, adding much the same potential for experiential learning

as it would to classroom drama, but my proposal is that in audience
participation demands are made in the simultaneity of performance
and reception that comes with accepting an invitation and being a par-
ticipant. The ‘here and now’ of audience participation is often complex,
sometimes cripplingly so.
In classroom drama young people are given opportunities to sample
experiences from other times and places, or to try out behaviour that
would normally be unacceptable or risky. The focus is within the fiction
not outside it with an audience, and for audience participants this can
be more difficult to achieve, needing a careful procedural authorship
to create a horizon of participation that downplays the importance of
presentation. But participants can become invested in responding to the
demands of a fiction rather than in putting on a good show. Participation
in a fictional horizon will not entirely lose the benefit of experientiality
as it continues to allow participants to have ownership of the events that
take place in the drama. Participants who commit to the situation have
more chance of surprising themselves, and of creating unique events
that have grown out of their choices. A role-play that has been submitted
to is a situation in which actions proceed and have consequences within
the imagined world itself; the participants play their role concerned with
what will happen within this imagined world, and not with the world
that watches it from the outside. Committing to the situation allows the
events within it to matter, and therefore to become meaningful. In the
previous chapter I have accounted for some ways in which participants
can ‘lose themselves’ in performance, and a thoroughgoing commit-
ment to a fiction might suggest another kind of loss of self, in something
like the kind of acting ridiculed by Diderot. But what is at issue here is
not the kind of emotional labour needed to convince or capture the
imagination of an audience, but whether and how engagement with a
fictional situation is interrupted by self-consciousness.
Drama therapy is another field of practice where participatory prac-
tice is the norm, and the emphasis is almost exclusively on process
rather than performance. Phil Jones, like Neelands, is concerned that
the drama work puts demands on participants, but unlike Neelands he
derives one of these demands from an audience function. Responding
to Peter Brook’s famous formulation that the most basic criteria of thea-
tre is the meeting of an actor and a watcher Jones argues:

against Brook proposing that the function of the audience, or wit-

nessing, is present and crucial within Drama therapy group work, but
 Accepting the Invitation 175

that it manifests itself differently and has a different function than it

does in theatre. I would not say that Dramatherapy, by remaining in
a closed group situation, misses the ‘heat’ of the central encounter,
which he assigns to be the essence of theatre. Rather I would argue
that it is present in a number of ways, and provides an important
function in the Dramatherapeutic effect and the work of therapeutic
change within a group. ( Jones 1996: 110)

He uses the idea of witnessing in place of the separation of spectator/

performer roles. In dramatherapy:

• the client can function as a witness or audience to others work,

• the client can become a witness to themselves: for example by the
use of doubling or role reversal, or by use of objects to represent
aspects of themselves
• the client can develop the ‘audience’ as part of themselves towards
their experience, enhancing the capabilities to engage differently
with themselves and life events
• the experience of being witnessed within a dramatherapy session can
be experienced as being acknowledged or supported;
• the projection of aspects of themselves or aspects of their experience
on to others who are in an audience role (i.e. other group members
or the drama therapist) can help the therapeutic process by enabling
the client to express problematic material. ( Jones 1996: 111)

Thus, there are many, possibly simultaneous, ways of witnessing, or

being an audience to, dramatherapy work, and they could be applied
to the reflexive reception of audience participation. These are different
ways of viewing the material of experiential learning, but in the sec-
ond, third and fourth point, Jones suggests how the facts of watching
oneself and putting oneself on display become meaningful in another
way, because they are performances appropriate to the person per-
forming in some way. In these cases there is a real consequentiality
connected to the action, hopefully a positive one, but in a therapeutic
situation requiring care that traumatic experiences are not magnified
or reinforced. This is a return to the problem of risk and the perception
of risk, but now considering the consequentiality of the performance
as important as an experience, as well as for its utilitarian effects on
self-presentation. These effects are important outside the therapeutic
or ‘applied’ performance field, they can be used to create challenging
176 Audience Participation in Theatre

experiences for spectators at public performances. In Felix Ruckert’s

Hautnah:

‘Do you know what I like most of all?’ cooed Freund in my ear as she
leaned her body over mine and suddenly the lack of comfort in my
head was made flesh – should I respond? Was I expected to simply
sit back and watch without responding? Had I suddenly become a
participant in a new ‘contact’ improvisation? Was this still concert
‘dance’ or had it suddenly become a more traditional partner dance?
She danced very close, teasing me for an answer, and I gave up – ‘No,
I don’t know,’ I stammered out.
‘Dead animals,’ she told me and dropped to the floor. (Kattwinkel
2003: 6)

The experience of interpreting this overt, but ambiguous, invitation is

troublesome for this participant. The performance that is being offered
as a resource has sexual implications, it seems to refer to other dances
where women offer themselves to men, but also to ‘traditional’ partner
dances. The participant feels the heat, and the challenge of the situ-
ation, and is embarrassed to witness himself within an image of the
sexual-financial economy of the table-dancer.

Reflexivity and witnessing

The ‘meaningfulness’ – the amount of meaning – of the performance

itself is not necessarily dependent upon the freedom of the participant
to create it: it is possible for a restrictive procedure to suggest and
produce very important performances, and for a broad and open
horizon to suggest and produce banal or superficial ones: as I have
indicated, when Kay creates a very open horizon in his smaller-scale
shows, the performances can seem to say very little, when he closely
directs audience-performances at Glastonbury Festival, he produces
satire. Nevertheless, the experience of making choices (within what-
ever horizon) is meaningful in itself, and can enhance the meaning of
an event. Producing performances that are both free and meaningful
requires a synergy of intention and effort, of the willingness of the pro-
cedural author to open up to the unpredictable, and of the participant
to be bold and take risks in a performance. This is both how audience
participation can do harm, and how it can become important.
Agency in this model of audience participation is the faculty of both
being productive in relation to the determinations and opportunities
 Accepting the Invitation 177

of the horizon of participation, and of being active in controlling per-

formatives relating to a public self. This agency also represents a kind
of authorship, in that the actions produced become performances. The
authors of an action are both the participant and the procedural author,
but also – if context is as important as it seems to be – the society which
determines citational probabilities. All authorship and all performance
is citational in the way it draws on shared resources, but audience par-
ticipation cites and draws attention especially to the ‘self’, to the person
performing. It is in the citationality of audience participation that we
find a way into a particular dimension of its meaning. Just like other
kinds of authorship, the authorship of the participant has to be rela-
tivised: it is fundamentally contextual, rather than a matter of entirely
individual initiative or agency, but though the work of these perform-
ances does not result from a singular subject, it might seem to constitute
such a ‘motivating identity’ and in fact it will certainly be perceived as
doing so in many cases.
The riskiness of participation is intimately connected with this.
Whatever the meanings of the performances given, their performative
values, they are experienced as a step into public performance by the
participant. Though there is not necessarily a directly proportional
relationship between risk and agency, there are connections between
the perception of the investment of the self in a performance and its
apparent risk. This might be because a participant feels un-invested and
out of control, or it may be because they have invested significantly in
and have agency in a performance, and fear it will reflect on them. This
amounts to a kind of presence in the work, a recognition that it has real-
ity for the individual, it is not remote. The management of risk, as we
have seen, is a significant factor in audience participatory procedures,
and it arises as a result of performativity, and of the possibility of mis-
placed performatives that reflect badly on the performer.
I have discussed how Forum Theatre has a message that is implied
in its form, and how practitioners, such as Armadillo Theatre, com-
municate through the shape of their procedures as well as through
the performances given by their actors and participants. This is true
of conventional forms too, as Boal’s ‘Aristotle’s Coercive System of
Tragedy’ and McGrath’s A Good Night Out, for example, show. But in
audience participation it is very difficult for this form to be invisible –
we will pay close attention to the work that is done to make us partici-
pate, so that we will always be aware of our presence in the event, the
way that the performers relate to us, and the differences between
the participatory frame and the others in which we spend our time.
178 Audience Participation in Theatre

Audience participation in this sense is always metatheatrical. This is

another way of finding a failing in the Armadillo Theatre workshop
described at the end of Chapter 1 – the message of the form – that
the students could be tricked into making poor decisions – conflicted
with the message of most of their interactions – that the students had
made a commitment to stopping bullying in their schools. It is also
a way of seeing success in Kay’s work – the unsatisfying nature of the
performances draws attention to our inability to free ourselves both
in the performance and in our everyday lives. Procedures of audience
participation can be designed to accentuate the experiential or the
performative, to play up or play down self-consciousness. The sense
of reflexivity, of possible performances that will draw attention to the
social self of the participant, will be a significant part of the ‘weather’
of the horizon.
In Punchdrunk’s environmental productions (for example The
Tempest, Speak No More (based on Macbeth), The Masque of the Red Death)
the audience are masked and despatched separately into the derelict
buildings that house the performances. Following familiar characters
around, interacting with them, watching them perform scenes from
the plays, and exploring their environments, spectators remain anony-
mous, and partially invisible. Wearing identical canvas hoods with
blank plastic masks sewn in, it is easy for spectators to disattend crowds
of people gathering around a scene, or alternatively to stand and watch
a scene alone. When characters addressed spectators – for example, Lady
Macbeth, in her madder moments, would grab people and run through
corridors with them, whispering and shouting – they respond less self-
consciously, hidden behind the mask, than they might if openly visible
to an audience. It is possible, with these masks on, to identify people by
their clothing, but communication with them is inhibited by the lack
of visible facial expression and the muffling of the voice. Entering the
event alone also frames the work as a solitary experience, and makes
it more difficult to begin to interact with friends – it is necessary first
to find them in the maze-like environment. An audience is prevented
from doing what they would in another promenade performance: look-
ing at each others’ faces for reactions to the play, and laughing together
with nervousness when approached by performers. The result is that a
crowd does not form to the same degree, instead a string of – literally,
in this case – faceless strangers mill around, each having very individual
experiences. Even when a character interacts with a spectator – the
actor has to do an even greater part of the work than in other actor to
audience interactions, as the spectator is so restricted by the mask. The
 Accepting the Invitation 179

participant is hidden from view, becomes a part of the performance, but

with their identity hidden far more deliberately than is usually the case
through the framing devices of a participatory procedure. The process
of putting participants on display is interrupted, so that a participatory
performance can take place with a much more exclusive emphasis on
the experiential. At times this experientiality becomes an experience
of pure gaze, like the spectatorship of conventional theatre but with
more voyeuristic privileges. The small eyeholes in the mask exaggerate
the directedness and the disembodied feel of the gaze. We can detach
ourselves from the crowd and wander, or we can engage, with a peculiar
sense of licence, flirting with or stalking characters, playing at being
there, while feeling that we are not. Where, in for example Woyzeck,
Punchdrunk have constructed similar environments and set perform-
ances in them, but not given the audience masks to wear, the audience’s
behaviour is quite different – we speak to each other and to the charac-
ters in a very different way, with far more self-conscious laughter, and
tend to spend more time talking to each other about the scenes they see.
The experience is less immersive, and more self-conscious.
In other cases, rather than attempting to isolate either the experi-
ential or the performative, one is made to inform on the other, as for
example in Annie Sprinkle’s ‘Post Porn Modernism’ (see Jones and
Warr 2000: 110), in which the audience queued to inspect her cervix,
and she masturbated, in the presence of a theatre full of spectators. ‘In
the presence of’ is an important point here, these are private acts and
private parts, being shared as they would in pornography, but without
the anonymity that the consumer of pornography usually insists on,
and with the female performer resolutely in control. Queuing to peer
closely at Sprinkle’s sexual organs is an experience of physical proximity
and openness, but it is also an implication in a transgressive act, a dem-
onstration of willingness to transgress, a public embarrassment, and
unavoidable cause for self-examination. The transgressive and intrusive
aspect of this action is magnified by its public performativity.
Paul Heritage finds Etchells’ idea of witnessing apposite to a quite dif-
ferent context –writing about the performance of extracts from Romeo
and Juliet in a juvenile prison in Brazil, he notices how the spectator
becomes

a witness of something that can only be played by those people that

are in that room and that particular time. And because of this, the
call that performance makes is to feel the weight of things and one’s
own place in them. (Heritage in Delgado and Svitch 2002: 168)
180 Audience Participation in Theatre

Here the issues are weighty for those performing and for those who
watch – fellow inmates, service professionals, other young people who
have avoided the fate of those incarcerated. Their presence in the con-
text of the performance is enhanced by its presentational qualities.
The young prisoner is inescapably visible in Romeo (as the television
star is visible in the figure of Juliet). Where the performers in Forced
Entertainment playfully work at the borders of their own selves, both
exposing and disguising the mechanics of their artistic process, the per-
formers in Heritage’s Romeo and Juliet cannot help, try as they might to
hide behind Shakespeare’s characters, remaining present and exposed
as their everyday selves. That, in these conditions, they can commit
themselves to the public process is what makes this work more than an
exercise in literacy.

It is in that investment that we see the real consequences of perform-

ance that lie beyond the meaning of the play itself. Is that the moment
when we are drawn to become witnesses? When the line between
the performer and the task becomes so strong that we cannot resist
being pushed or dragged out of our desire to be merely spectators and
become the witnesses that will ensure this event has a life beyond that
moment? (Heritage in Delgado and Svitch 2002: 188)

Heritage is writing about the culmination of a workshop process, not

audience participation, but the features he and Etchells are noting are
powerfully present in most, not just some, audience participation.
Identification between spectator and participant, and the pressure on
the participant to perform well are much like the ‘direct lines’ that
Etchells seeks. Though much audience participation takes place in
applied theatre, and seeks either efficacy (direct and recognisable con-
sequences) or empowerment (development of confidence or skills), via
direct lines of empathy, identification or experiential learning, these
direct lines between audience participants and other spectators, exist
under the surface of all audience participation. They are a formal prop-
erty that audience participation brings to any style of performance,
potentially allowing it to have power beyond itself because of this for-
mal character rather than the content of its representations.
This is, then, part of the phenomenology of audience participation:
the complexity of reading our own performances and their potential
consequences, in conditions that are not of our making. The horizon
in which we operate may derive from the resources we bring to the
interactive frame of the performance, but only so far as those resources
 Accepting the Invitation 181

overlap with what the procedure of participation itself offers. Our

inhabiting and exploring this horizon is free and flexible only so far
as other participants and facilitating performers allow. The concept of
informed consent was discussed briefly in Chapter 2, and here we see
a mutated version of it: the audience participant who is self-aware (or
self-conscious) enough to monitor how they are manipulated in the
course of a procedure of audience participation may be crippled with
indecision or anxiety and unable to contribute anything they would
reflect on as worthwhile or a good representation of themselves. This
kind of conflict can be as important to people’s reluctance to participate
as the straightforward risk of public embarrassment. The complexity
of the audience-performer role is a threat as well as an opportunity for
learning and deep experience.

Self-awareness and self-forgetfulness

Daphna Ben Chaim’s Distance in the Theatre: the Aesthetics of Audience

Response (1981) shows how important experiments in the actor–audience
relationship were to the evolution of twentieth century theatre. She
charts how key figures – Brecht, Artaud and Grotowski – theorised and
practiced varying degrees of psychological distance, inflected by their
different attitudes to empathy and the value of involvement in dra-
matic fiction. She also draws attention to the dependence of this process
on other, everyday, phenomena, like self-awareness:

It should also be noted, as something clearly implicit in this concept,

that distance is neither simply an on/off condition nor exclusively
one of degrees but both: self-awareness for instance, either exists or
does not, but the self-awareness may be induced to a greater or lesser
degree. (Ben Chaim 1981: 76)

Ben Chaim is here discussing the self-awareness of the audience member,

as a capacity that could be manipulated by the theatre maker, as proposed
by Brecht. But from a different perspective perhaps, the self-awareness of
the audience participant can be worked with. This is something different
to the Brechtian proposition – that empathy and self-forgetfulness is the
norm in theatre, and something to be done away with in the interests
of a thoughtful and active response. As we have already seen, to make a
participant forgetful of self requires much work.
Before returning to this theme, I will give some more attention
to some problematics brought about by self-awareness when
182 Audience Participation in Theatre

encountering theatrical characters – and the actors playing them. As

Bert States puts it:

Even the most unsophisticated theatregoer can detect something else

in the characterisation, a superconsciousness that could be nothing
other than the actor’s awareness of his own self-sufficiency as he moves
between the contradictory zones of the illusionary and the real, vraisem-
blance and vrai, seeming and being – between Hamlet and what of him-
self he has allowed to be displayed as Hamlet. (States 1985: 125)

The reality of the actor, as opposed to the character, is ‘weakly

described’ (154), he says. The situation requires us – normally without
too great a difficulty – to hold both of these things in our attention
at once. Stanton Garner calls this a ‘rival phenomenality’, where the
stage space discloses itself in layers, because we are able to hold these
different modes in attention simultaneously. But it can get into trouble
if the actors, in acknowledging the presence of the audience, muddle
the separation of the two modes:

This rival phenomenality, of course, exists within the overall act of

theatrical display; in the layering and involvement of orientations,
the stage, one might say, discloses itself in the mode of for-the-actor-
under-the-gaze. But the authorising power of the audience’s specta-
torship does not eliminate the disruptive potential of the performer’s
own gaze or its destabilising operations within and upon the field of
performance. (Garner 1994: 47)

When an actor, in character, looks directly at a spectator, this gaze –

and the intersubjective response to it – can bring the presence of the
actor strongly into awareness. Often this is absorbed into the complex
of effects and affects of the theatrical moment, skilfully or fortuitously
enhancing the experience of the actor’s virtuosity, (as with Escolme’s
response to Mark Rylance’s Hamlet, quoted in Chapter 2). I have earlier
described this as a kind of intertextuality, treating the everyday ‘real’
persona and the performed persona of the actor as two related texts, but
States’ and Garner’s attention is on this awareness as phenomenology, as
something that is disclosed to our awareness. Intersubjectively, empathi-
cally and intercorporeally, we experience the performer, much as Fuchs
and De Jaegher say that tennis players are aware of each other, experi-
encing their intentionality, their directedness towards the stage world, as
the intentionality of the character in the dramatic setting. At the same
 Accepting the Invitation 183

time we are aware of their intentionality towards us as an audience, we

experience their directedness towards us, and we enjoy and celebrate it.
But a direct gaze can bring to consciousness more strongly – as many
other surprises, interruptions or realisations might – that the body we
are thus aware of is also that of an actor doing their job, directed towards
the staged world and the gathered audience through a different sort of
intentionality, that of a rehearsed set of actions and interactions.
But what does this duality bring to watching participants, as opposed to
rehearsed actors? Can the authorising power of the spectatorial gaze, as
Garner puts it, transform the participant into a body that we see whole-
heartedly according to the rules of the staged moment? States observes that
there are some kinds of performer that bring out the sense of their ‘real’
being more easily, animal performers particularly, but also child actors:
‘Who has ever seen a child on stage without thinking “how well he acts, for
a child!”’ (States 1985: 31); while Nicholas Ridout, in Stage Fright, Animals
and Other Theatrical Problems (2006) observes how these aberrant perform-
ers and performances draw attention to the nature of labour in theatre.
Audiences are likely to have similar thoughts about an audience partici-
pant: ‘how well he acts, for a volunteer’. Or of course something different
with the same premise: ‘he’s not very good, but only a volunteer after all’.
This ‘discrepant play of actualities’ (Garner 1994: 47) only occasionally
causes problems for the theatre spectator, and more often complements
the peculiar pleasures of live performance; it might do so more often for
the spectator of audience participation who has to make allowances. But
what about the discrepancies that arise out of watching a performance
while actually giving it oneself? Of course we do not actually watch these
performances, or only peripherally when we do. We experience them
bodily. So to unpick this we need to look more closely at embodied experi-
ence in itself, and in particular how we experience our own ‘self’. This is,
clearly, a complex business and a substantial field of enquiry in different
fields, including psychology, neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.
I shall develop some threads introduced in the previous chapter, from
contemporary cognitively oriented phenomenology.
Some of the ‘enactive’ characteristics of first-person experience were
discussed in the previous chapter, including its intentional character.
Intentionality is fundamental to the sense of self, too, in that it is pos-
sible to identify a self only because of directedness towards the world.
As Dan Zahavi puts it:

Life is, as Heidegger said, world-related; it is always already living in

the world and does not have to seek it out. My self is present when
184 Audience Participation in Theatre

I am worldly engaged; it is exactly to be found ‘out there’. (Zahavi

2005: 82)

It is not that we have experiences, and afterwards attribute them to a

self that is a feature of these experiences, but that the point of engage-
ment with the world is the point of origin of both experience and the
perception of being a self that can have experiences. It is possible to
misidentify one of these experiences, but not possible, (it is generally
accepted) to misidentify the subjectivity that is having the experience.
This is a notion of self and experience at a very basic level; the social
processes that produce a self (and self-understanding) of a particular,
historically situated kind, or through which we narrate our sense of self,
are numerous. Gallagher notes two aspects of this minimal sense of self:

Sense of self-agency (SA): The pre-reflective experience that I am the

one who is causing or generating a movement or action or thought
process.
Sense of self-ownership (SO): The pre-reflective experience that
I am the one who is moving or undergoing an experience. (Gallagher
2012: 132)

To the phenomenologist, this is at the heart of what it is to have subjec-

tivity. These are pre-reflective experiences because they occur without
the need to go looking for them; to have an experience is for something
to happen to us, or to cause or generate something to happen. The expe-
riences of audience participation will move between these two modes.
When in Zecora Ura’s Hotel Medea I put on pyjamas and get into a
bunk bed, drink hot chocolate and cuddle the toy that has been given
to me, I have a sense of self-agency; I experience myself causing these
events. I also have self-ownership, as these things happen to me, even as
I play a part in causing them to happen. When, in the same sequence, a
performer tucks the bedclothes more tightly around me, or later in the
performance I am pulled into motion by another participant to run away
from Medea, I have only a sense of self-ownership; these things happen
to me without, in this moment, my having initiated them. Most of the
discussion of this book has been about the social and cognitive origin
and structure of self-agency, and little has been said about the kinds of
events that are experienced as only self-owned. Both of these modes of
experience are intentional, we are directed towards them; in the above
example I am unhappy about being tucked tightly into the bed because
I would rather be watching Medea and Jason arguing in another part
 Accepting the Invitation 185

of the room; I feel surprise as the initiative of the other participant, led
by a performer, jolts me into motion. Intentionality gives the moment
and its action a quality.
At the most basic level, this is what it is to experience ourselves giv-
ing a performance, to ‘watch’ our performance as audience participants.
And it gives some insight into what is involved when the complexity
of the situation is taken into account. The horizon of participation
contains social and physical affordances that draw action out of us,
we choose our path from the landscape of opportunities presented
to us, but we do so on the basis of the activity that is made available
and called forth by this landscape. The experience of perceiving and
accepting an invitation is, at basis, an experience of self-agency, but it
will often contain moments when an intuition occurs that a route has
been pre-planned for us, that our actions have been pre-conceived. At
moments like this self-agency is inflected with something different,
with a feeling that it is diluted, an intentionality based on an awareness
of another’s influence in shaping our actions.
When I am offered a cup of hot chocolate by an actor playing a
nursemaid, I am intersubjectively involved with her to the extent that
I respond carefully to her offering of the hot cup, and with an expression
of my pleased surprise. These responses to the simple social affordance
of her offering of the cup are also informed by my awareness of her role
in the fiction, and my willingness to engage with her as a nursemaid,
sooner or later adopting something of the status-role appropriate to
the child that she has cast me as. But once I begin to understand that
something more complex – and interesting – has been engineered, my
intentionality towards this situation changes. As I realise that the role
of ‘child at bedtime’ conflicts with my desire (and my role as audience
member) to watch the dialogue between Medea and Jason, and that
this conflict has been designed into the scene, my attitude towards the
event changes. I become aware of the designed sequence of events – the
procedural authorship – as another intersubjective presence that I can
cooperate with or resist; my horizon of participation takes on different
‘weather’, or mood, and I view its opportunities differently. The self-
agency of each moment loses something of its pre-reflective character,
as the realisation of an overseeing subjectivity makes me reflect upon
my choices.
Of course I have portrayed the initial level of intersubjective engage-
ment with the invitation as having a very innocent character, as if
it is not normally inflected with an awareness of manipulation. It is
likely that at many if not most moments of invitation and during
186 Audience Participation in Theatre

participatory interaction, there will be an awareness of the oddness of

the situation, of a controlling intelligence beyond the action at hand,
and a level of suspicion about its motives and what might ensue. Much
of the time we might respond to an invitation, or experience our own
self-agency, with an intentionality based on uncertainty – ‘why should
I do this?’, ‘what am I supposed to do?’, ‘who am I supposed to be?’. This
is analogous to the gaze of the actor turning towards us, as observed by
Garner, and the peculiarity of our own presence in the situation being
brought to mind. In the case of participatory performance, this aware-
ness leads to the pre-reflective basis of self-agency being supplemented
by a reflexive awareness of our agency in negotiation with other forces,
both those that are present and embodied by performers, and those that
are intuited as belonging to the authorship of the procedure as a whole.
This level of self-awareness can be a threat to participation, though also
potentially an opportunity. It corresponds to the embarrassment felt by
Ridout when addressed directly by a performer, and by Nield when she
is required to play the character of ‘spectator’,1 and might undermine
both the quality of the experience and the inclination of the participant
to respond. But this kind of puzzlement might also be a productive
element of a procedure of participation, as it was in my experience of
Hotel Medea. Participants may engage with just this ‘ontological’ ques-
tion with a playfulness and adventure that enhances their experience.
Some people find it fun, to not know who they are meant to be, and
what they are meant to do, for a while; puzzles are, after all, a form of
entertainment.
I would maintain that the ‘innocent’ level of participation, char-
acterised by a straightforward experiential self-agency, is entirely
possible. A person can respond openly and straightforwardly to an
invitation, if their prior experience and habitus equip them with the
appropriate resources, and their awareness of other agencies does not
intrude too strongly. But there are other potential complications of
the first-person perspective, when we consider the group processes
described in the last chapter. The liminal state, which is described
as a loss of constraining social status, suggests a heightened sense
of self-agency as the possibilities for action are vastly extended. Or
conversely the loss of definition of the sense of self associated with
a state of communitas, or of crowd involvement, or of hypnosis,
can be interpreted as a loss of self-agency, and an awareness only of
self-ownership as initiative over action seems to originate elsewhere.
There is a different sense of self-forgetfulness suggested in Gadamer’s
Truth and Method, in which an encounter with a work of art is thought
 Accepting the Invitation 187

of as giving oneself over, to be played by the work, rather than to

have control over it:

being outside oneself is the positive possibility of being wholly with

something else. This kind of being present is a self-forgetfulness, and
to be a spectator consists in giving oneself in self-forgetfulness to
what one is watching. Here self-forgetfulness is anything but a pri-
vate condition, for it arises from devoting one’s full attention to the
matter at hand, and this is the spectator’s own positive accomplish-
ment. (Gadamer 2004: 122)

Though Gadamer uses the word ‘participation’ at points to describe

this phenomenon, he is concerned with how the apparently passive
spectator – in a conventional relationship with a work of art – is in fact
actively involved in this very positive surrender to the agency of the work
as an event of play. Like many other ontologies of art, there is a value
judgement to this: a work of art should achieve this, to qualify as such.
I prefer to use it descriptively, as a potential for participatory involve-
ment, where by surrender to the process of participation, one is played
by it, and becomes something different because of it, a change that is
available to reflection after the event. The irony of this is that this ‘giving
over’ of oneself can also be seen as a kind of passivity, as a loss of agency
in the midst of the event, in order to achieve its most powerful effects.

Autopoiesis, allopoiesis, heteropoiesis

Gadamer’s self-forgetful experience of an art work corresponds to the

autopoiesis of performance, in Fischer-Lichte’s thinking, to an emergent
process that is separate from its experience, meaning and understand-
ing, as perceived by the audience or participant. Her language makes
this distinction clear, for example:

The process of generating meaning in a performance reveals a

number of significant similarities to the autopoietic feedback loop.
As much as the individual participant co-determines the course of
the performance and is in turn determined by it, so the perceiving
subject undergoes a similar experience in its individual generation of
meaning. (2008: 155)

She is quite clear that understanding, in particular, is only partly possible,

and only in retrospect. The experientiality of the participant, and the
188 Audience Participation in Theatre

moment-to-moment meaning they derive from it, she sees as contribut-

ing to the emergence of the performance, as they drive the participants’
activity and contribution to the feedback loop. But a ‘hermeneutic’ proc-
ess of interpretation she sees as of marginal importance, and the pursuit
of an overall coherent understanding as a ‘sisyphian task’ (2008: 157).
Treating these things as extrinsic to performance as autopoiesis is consist-
ent with the strict sense of the term in cellular biology. We might look
upon audiences, participants and performers as part of the environment
of the autopoietic system, as with the self-sustaining process of a cell,
which is: ‘a thermodynamically open system, continually exchanging
matter and energy with its environment’ (Thompson 2010: 98). In this
sense performance – as an autonomous system – continually exchanges
resources with the people that contribute and respond to it.
We can see ‘allopoietic’ (Thompson 2008: 98) aspects of performance,
where it creates things other than itself, when it creates meanings and
understandings (however incomplete) that audience members take
away with them; and we can see ‘heteropoietic’ aspects when think-
ing of how performance is designed and produced from outside itself,
when thinking of what performance makers create and rehearse, and
what is designed by a procedural author. Most thinking and writing
about performance, perhaps, is concerned with the allopoietic and the
heteropoietic. But awareness of performance in its autopoietic aspect is
useful, especially when looking at audience participatory performance.
What it is in danger of neglecting, is that for the experiencing subject
performance is always also heteropoietic, having elements devised
elsewhere and introduced to us, and always also allopoietic, having ele-
ments which we will take away with us and reflect upon.
The kinds of self-awareness I have discussed in this chapter contribute
to both the autopoietic aspect and the allopoietic. Self-awareness can
interrupt, influence or encourage input into a feedback loop. And it can
be a significant part of what a person takes away from a performance,
when it is retrospectively treated as a work (or event) of art. I also propose
that attention to self-consciousness, in combination with attention to
agency, is the key characteristic of the heteropoiesis of procedural author-
ship – in other words, that these are the distinctive elements of which
designing and preparing for audience participation consist.

Tim Crouch: The Author and I, Malvolio

This is a play where the actors sit among the audience, wearing their
own clothes, called by their own names; where players, audience
 Accepting the Invitation 189

and author are lit by the same light, scrutinised by the same gaze.
This is a play during which audience members have read newspa-
pers and novels, built paper aeroplanes, performed Mexican waves,
sung happy birthday to one of their own, recited poetry, slow hand-
clapped, physically threatened actors, hummed out loud with their
fingers in their ears, muttered obscenities, shouted actors down, and
thrown copies of the text at the playwright. (Crouch 2011)

Thus, Tim Crouch reflects on the reception of his play, The Author, in
which he performs as a character called Tim Crouch, who has written
a controversial play with unhappy consequences for playwright, per-
formers and at least one member of the audience. The play constructs
a sophisticated relationship between performers and audience, often
provoking unusual audience activity, but none of the behaviour he
describes is directly invited by the play or the performers. It seems on
the surface to have been a collection of uninvited gestures of resist-
ance to the play, its content and its strategy of implicating them in
the violence described (but not shown) in the play, and the culture
of voyeurism it portrays. The play has received a great deal of criti-
cal attention – including a special edition of the journal Contemporary
Theatre Review, as well as finding some notoriety. Though I will make
use of some of the detailed exegesis that has built up around it to exer-
cise some of the propositions of this chapter, I will give as much space
to one of Crouch’s other plays, I, Malvolio, which has had much less
attention. I, Malvolio is a one-person show, again up to now performed
by Crouch himself; it was commissioned by the Brighton Festival, ini-
tially for school-aged audiences. In this play there is directly invited
audience participation, but not on the same scale as in the longer
examples of my earlier chapters. I want, at this point, to show how brief
moments of participation can play a significant part in framing audi-
ence experience of an event, as well as to explore how Crouch’s strategy
of metatheatrical implication – which is at work in both of these plays,
in different ways – makes use of audience activity, and of the reflexive
self-awareness peculiar to participatory performance.
Explicit invitations for verbal audience participation are made
throughout The Author, but though the form of words used remains
much the same, the horizon of participation offered changes drastically
as the play goes on. Its opening sequence is conversational, and creates
easygoing exchanges between an actor and several audience members,
but it progresses so that later direct questioning is much less likely to
draw responses. But while structured and invited participation fades out
190 Audience Participation in Theatre

of the performance, the intensity of involvement, and implication, of

audiences evidently increases, sometimes leading to the kind of inter-
ventions described by Crouch above.
At the start of the play ‘Chris’,2 appearing as an audience member,
speaks directly to the spectators sitting around him, describing his antic-
ipation of the performance, asking names and complementing people,
and sometimes drawing them into exchanges. A note in the published
text describes the appropriate tone:

There should be plenty of warm, open space in the play. The audi-
ence should be beautifully lit and cared for. When the audience is
asked questions, these are direct questions that the audience are
more than welcome to answer – but under no pressure to do so.
(Crouch 2010: 18)

But despite this warmth there is discomfort in this relationship from the
start, partly deriving from the lack of articulation of what the role of
the audience will be in the performance, and partly from Chris’s over-
solicitous attention: ‘What’s your name? That’s beautiful. You’re beauti-
ful! Isn’t ___ beautiful? Everyone? I’ll shut up. I’ll stop.’ (Crouch 2010:
19) The intensity builds until his ‘YOU FUCKING SAY SOMETHING!!!’
(23) is unlikely to draw a response. The other characters, who begin to
speak only after Chris’s opening conversation has reached this climax,
also speak directly to the audience, only occasionally explicitly address-
ing each other. When they ask questions they are more likely to be
interpreted as rhetorical: ‘Is this okay? Is it okay if I carry on?’ (24), or
‘Would you like me to sing for you? Would you?’ (29), though the ques-
tions are often repeated to encourage an answer.
The story told by the characters is of the impact of a play depicting sexual
violence, and the research and rehearsal process in which they visit con-
flict zones and watch videos of the murder of hostages. The descriptions
of violence are brief, though graphic, and it may be that the lack of per-
formed violence exaggerates the audience’s complicity in the use of such
material as a shock tactic in the theatre: we must either allow ourselves to
imagine what is described, or actively attempt not to. The effect might be
further enhanced by the variations on ‘Is this okay?’ offered throughout
the play. Each of the characters is damaged in some way by the process,
but though Chris, the audience member, is physically hurt in an assault by
a traumatised performer, it is the practitioners who suffer the most lasting
damage; it seems that the theatre as anything but a ‘safe space’ from which
to observe life, but more hazardous for its professionals than for audiences.
 Accepting the Invitation 191

The effect is intensely reflexive and metatheatrical, as the play appears

to critique theatre as an institution that is parasitic on real-life suffering,
while at the same time exploiting its power to bring such suffering to
life for audiences, and though this is only achieved through speech, its
effect as provocation seems not to be undermined. Audience members
are given a prominent role in the dramaturgy, through Chris as their
representative, through their initial conversational contributions, and
through the frequent textual appropriations of their approval for the
continuance of the performance. And Crouch the author-performer
appears as Crouch the author-character, defending the theatre’s right
and duty to shock and to bring the violence of the world into plain
sight, and ultimately confessing to an indefensible secret indulgence in
voyeuristic abuse.
As a procedure of audience participation it is unusual, generally mov-
ing from small contributions to none at all. The participation it is con-
cerned with is really the wider issue of an audience’s participation and
complicity in the culture of theatre, and its potential excesses. But it is
a procedure of participation, both in the way it deploys small amounts
of participation to enhance its effect on most audiences, and in how
it occasionally provokes performances of protest. Early in the play, the
stage directions read: ‘An audience member in the middle of a block gets up
and leaves. They are helped to leave by an usher.’ (Crouch 2010: 22) This
staging of one of the options available to audience members has often
not been the only walk-out; it gives permission for one of the few acts of
spectatorial disapproval conventionally allowed, helping some to take
this choice for themselves. This apparently masochistic licensing of the
audience to leave the show provides some immunity to accusations of
manipulation: if people are clearly able to leave, then those who stay,
and are made uncomfortable, have brought it upon themselves, per-
haps. But the resistant performances listed by Crouch show that many
people have wanted to stay, but also to demonstrate their discomfort
(by humming and covering their ears), their disapproval (by slow hand-
clapping), their boredom (by reading, or being mischievous with each
other), or their anger (by threatening the performers). Returning to
the typology of Chapter 1 we might call this uninvited participation,
but clearly it is of a peculiar kind, where what is uninvited is partly
expected, and mostly tolerated.
My own experience of the play was comparatively uneventful. The
audience were predominantly attending as part of a symposium on the
play,3 and so likely to be both forewarned about its style and content,
and as theatre students or academics not easily provoked. The collective
192 Audience Participation in Theatre

horizon of participation was shaped by this well-schooled understand-

ing of the games that can be played with audiences, and its ‘weather’
inflected by a cool tolerance. I felt a similar response to that created
by Ontreorend Goed’s The Audience: self-awareness in respect of my
implication in a performance that at times felt cynical, combined with
a sense that whatever I might do in response – invited or uninvited –
had been anticipated in advance, and would be absorbed into the event.
I, Malvolio also implicates its audience and satirises theatre spectator-
ship, but in a much gentler way. In it Crouch plays the character:

like a 1950’s ex-military man in some undignified postwar job, try-

ing to discipline a crowd of neds who laugh at him behind his back.
And the audience recognise the character too – gone from the range
of figures we are urged to respect, but still deeply present in a life-
denying corner of our psyches. (McMillan 2011)

He starts the play as if just emerged from imprisonment, at the end of

the plot of Twelfth Night, filthy, with horns on his head and a turkey
wattle under his chin, and a sign saying ‘turkey cock’ pinned to his
back. He speaks directly to the audience throughout, in some passages
recounting the plot of Shakespeare’s play with Malvolio’s sense of the
depravity of its events. But most of the text and action is concerned
with his self-justification, framed by the accusation that all of the
audience are as corrupt, lazy and cruel as his persecutors in Illyria. The
extended and intricate rants against the crowd are partly very plausible,
in the context of a piece of young people’s theatre: he berates us for
dropping gum, wrappers and chicken bones, for skipping church and
prayer, for having scuffed shoes and top buttons undone, and for laugh-
ing behind his back; they are also peppered with the obsessions of a
seventeenth century puritan, a disgust with sex, drink and indulgence,
and he associates the theatre with all of these ills.
Although Malvolio takes himself entirely seriously, Crouch’s text and
performance engineer streams of laughter, further motivating the char-
acter’s fury and despair. There is much basic visual comedy: when he
turns his back and bends to pick up Olivia’s letter, holes in his stained
long underwear reveal a bare bum; the ‘turkey cock’ sign is removed by
an audience member to reveal another reading ‘kick me’. The verbal
excess also leads to bathos and toilet humour:

So Toby Belch, my lady’s uncle, exploiting weakness in his grieving

niece, enters my lady’s house, treats it like a hotel, dances a caper and,
 Accepting the Invitation 193

like a wild animal, for all I know, poisons the ornamental fish pond,
puts washing powder in the fountain, sticks a traffic cone on the head
of the statue of the old count my master, defecates on the lawn.
Laugh, why don’t you? (Crouch 2011: 23)

The ‘kick me’ sign leads to an invitation for an audience member to do

just that, one of several opportunities written into the text for Crouch
to improvise around audience participation. Written into the text as ‘He
asks for “any takers?” An audience member kicks him’ (19), it allows a
minute or two of unscripted activity choosing the volunteer, and advis-
ing him or her to take a good run up, to use the side of the foot not the
toe, and then to ask the audience ‘Find that funny do you? That the
kind of thing you find funny?’ (19). Like the ‘Is this okay?’ of The Author,
rhetorical questions of this kind run through I, Malvolio, reinforcing the
implication of the audience in the discomfort and persecution of the
character. Crouch makes it impossible not to find Malvolio’s situation
funny, while simultaneously making his grounds for complaint very
clear.
Through the first two-thirds of the play Malvolio gradually prepares
to hang himself, he brings on a rope with a noose tied in it, he hangs
it over whatever scaffold or beam the performance space permits, he
places a chair under the noose and stands on it. He enlists the help of
two audience members, one to hold the rope, the other to pull away the
chair. After briefing the volunteers, he pauses to recite a poem, repeat-
edly interrupting himself to check that they are ready, with a firm grasp
on the rope to take his weight, legs braced to be able to pull the chair
quickly when given the word.
The complicity of these two audience members is of a different kind
to that which the audience as a whole have been drawn into, though
because of their participatory position it is more complex. Clearly,
Crouch the performer is not going to hang himself, whatever Malvolio
the character says. Yet when two young people4 stand on stage as
instructed, appearing ready to remove the chair from under his feet or
to take his weight on the rope, they have a choice about what to do and
how to do it. They can refuse and return to their seats, refusing to coop-
erate with Malvolio’s wish to end his life, but also refusing to work with
Crouch the performer. They can stay and perform their reluctance or
embarrassment, giving Crouch more opportunity to pause in his prepa-
ration and nag them to do the job properly. Or they can play along,
and appear eager to contribute to his demise. The ethical bind is light-
hearted, but real at the level of producing a response to the accusation
194 Audience Participation in Theatre

of spectatorial amorality that Malvolio (and Crouch, perhaps), has

made throughout the play. These participants find themselves perform-
ing actions they cannot help but feel compromised by, one way or
another, and they watch themselves giving this performance. The rest
of the audience enjoy their discomfort at the same time as waiting for
the outcome of Malvolio’s attempt, aware that their enjoyment of this
moment confirms all that he has said up to now about their cruelty and
decadence.
In both of these plays Crouch constructs a relationship between per-
formance and audience that is complex, at times blunt, at times subtle,
and in which participation or the potential for participation enhances a
particular kind of reflexivity in the audience experience. Though critical
responses to The Author have been ambivalent about its strategy, and
audience response evidently widely varied, Crouch is adamant about its
respectful treatment of those who attend it. He has grounds: for most
of the play the broad horizon of response available to audience mem-
bers is very clear, what is made ambiguous through the structure of the
play and the procedure of participation is what any response – private
or public – can mean in relation to the depiction of violence in the
theatre. I, Malvolio does something similar with respect to the cruelty of
laughter, and though its horizon is much narrower – in the participa-
tory moments and in the way Crouch skilfully builds and undercuts the
audience’s laughter – it has the potential to prompt similarly complex
reflections. The characters in both plays address the audience as an
audience rather than asking them to play roles in a fictional world, and
the plays themselves rhetorically address us as an audience too, making
us look back at ourselves and the things we choose to do in theatres
generally, and in response to their specific invitations.
5
Conclusion

The procedural author

The media of theatre include, in every case, the bodily presence and
active responses of audience members as individuals and as groups;
but when an invitation to join the action of a performance is made
and accepted, the audience participant becomes material of a differ-
ent kind, more carefully shaped and manipulated, more productive of
signs and affects, more complex as a site of perception and action. To
unpack some of this complexity (and inevitably only some of it) I have
examined the invitation itself, and described it as an authored proce-
dure. From this proposition I have asked what aspects of the participant
become manipulable material and how this happens, what kinds of
resistance and embodied engagement are likely to be at stake, and what
involvement in the action may feel like.
Treating this, as I have throughout, as a process that is deliberately
initiated by an artist or group of artists, is one element of asserting that
it has importance in aesthetic terms. People who invite participation are
making art when they do so. That participation is a shared creative proc-
ess, shared between theatre practitioners and the volunteers they invite
into their practice, changes its character as a process of authorship, but
does not fundamentally undermine it: what is authored, as well as any
performance that results, is the interactional space into which the audi-
ence member can step as a participant, if they choose to.
Authorship is generally a relationship of agency with regard to an art
object or a relatively defined art experience: a writer claims responsibil-
ity for a text, a painter for a painting, a performer for a performance. But
procedural authorship is agency at a remove; though a procedure might
be regarded as a kind of art object, it is only such a thing because it has

195
196 Audience Participation in Theatre

the potential to give rise to actually occurring performances. This might

be exemplified through a kind of borderline case. The instructions that
are the basis of some conceptual art, Fluxus scores for example, are
often treated as works in themselves. Some, like these pieces from Dick
Higgins’s Danger Music series, are impossible to realise, but evocative,
having a poetry in their language but also in their imaginary potential:

Danger Music Number Nine

(for Nam June Paik)
Volunteer to have your spine removed.
February 1962

Danger Music Number Twelve

Write a thousand symphonies.
March 1962
(Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn 2002: 50)

While others, like Ben Vautier’s Audience Pieces, are viable performances
too:

Audience Piece No. 7

The audience is requested to come on stage one by one to sign a
large book placed on a table. After signing, each is led away, one by
one, to the street. This is continued until all have signed and left the
theatre. Those left outside are not permitted to return.
1965
(Friedman, Smith and Sawchyn 2002: 108)

An impossible procedure is not a work of procedural authorship in

the sense we have been concerned with; it has no iterations, no actual
processes of performance arise from it, for all that it will work on the
imagination of the reader. The same might be said of a procedure that
is never put to an audience, so that its invitation is never made. I take
this firm stance with the concept of procedural authorship, not as part
of a manifesto for audience participation as a privileged practice, but
because it draws attention to what is in common across the work of
practitioners who choose to invite participation: that they work with
audience members as their material. This peculiar authorship is realised
when a practitioner takes the risk of making an invitation, and opens
the conversation out of which the action of participation will arise.
 Conclusion 197

The aesthetic theory

Framing the thesis of this book as an aesthetics of audience participa-

tion has been motivated by a desire to treat its particular practices and
experiences as equivalent to the other, non-participatory elements of
theatre performance. In other words I have attempted to treat audience
participation as art, and to explore what is entailed when we do so.
My main strategy has been to think of the audience participant, their
actions, and their experiences first as performances, and second as the
material or the media that are manipulated by the procedural author as
an artist. To ground these ideas more securely, it is helpful to explore
the idea of the material of art a little further, and to unpack a bit more
of what aesthetics has to offer the understanding of performance.
As Koren says, the words ‘aesthetics’ and ‘the aesthetic’ are used
in conflicting and confusing ways: to name a field of philosophy, an
approach to the theory of art, the properties of art works and everyday
objects, and many other things besides. The words present puzzles in
themselves when we try to discern what they refer to at any given point,
and substantial conceptual problems when we have located their point
of reference in a particular discourse. Halsall, Jansen and O’Connor,
introducing Rediscovering Aesthetics, acknowledge the problem of the
term they have chosen: ‘[d]ue to its polysemy, aesthetics can appear like
an arbitrary placeholder for a wide range of incommensurable issues’
(2009: 2). Clarifying the senses of the words that I will deal with, and
the associated issues, will help at this stage. First I will briefly set out
some ideas of the ontology of art that underpin the approach I have
taken in the book; second I will introduce a theory that develops ideas
of media and material; and third I will return to the problem of politics
in art, which features strongly in most accounts of participatory prac-
tice but which has mostly been neglected in this discussion, for all that
politically inflected social theory has played a major role in the devel-
opment of the ideas. In each of these issues, the question of what is
particular and proper to art, as opposed to other non-art realms of life,
returns in different ways.
In the last chapter I briefly introduced Gadamer’s ontology of the
work of art, in which an art experience provoked by a work leads to a
kind of truth event. This is a valuable concept for understanding art as
a highly subjective experience, in the most rigorous sense, as an event
that occurs at the level of subjectivity. However it sets dauntingly high
standards for a definition of art, which are unhelpful to an enquiry
such as this that has addressed many kinds of event, which do not have
198 Audience Participation in Theatre

ambitions of this sort, as well as those that may try, and fail, to reach so
high. Many other varieties of aesthetic theory are concerned with the
ontology of art at this level: what art ought to be, what its potential is,
what should be looked for to distinguish true art from mere entertain-
ment. The ontology of an art work that suits my purposes needs to be
broader and more open minded. It is part suggested in the assumption
running through this book, employed to define audience participation
as a set of practices that depend on an institutional assumption about
audiences. Just as, for us to recognise an audience (and whether an
audience is ‘participating’), it is necessary to know something about
the theatre, it is necessary in a broader sense to have experience of
the category of art to be able to recognise a work of art. This is the ‘art
world’ hypothesis put forward by Arthur Danto (1964), and implied in
a different way in Bourdieu’s discussion of art and culture. It asserts,
essentially, that a work of art is such a thing because it is named as
such by a network of institutions and their associated practices and
practitioners.
For much of the past fifty years or more, ‘aesthetics’ as an approach to
the key problems of art – including theatre and performance, along with
fine art, literature, music and other forms – has been out of fashion. It
has been associated with conservative and elitist values: a fixation on
beauty that is inherently sexist, the privilege of western high art, and
the importance of the ‘disinterestedness’ of art, that it is apolitical.
This traditional aesthetics, associated with Emmanuel Kant above all, is
based on an idea of the autonomy of art, and the possibility of distin-
guishing genuine works of beauty and genius from both inferior works
and things that should not properly be called art works at all.

Making special

Nevertheless, when we treat something differently because it is part

of a socially-constructed art world, that different treatment means
something. By marking off cultural space in which to attend to forms
of life – objects, appearances, actions and bodies, or events via the nar-
rative practices that make use of all of these forms – we allow them to
appear to us differently.
Ellen Dissanayake’s ethological approach tackles the institutional
character of art from a different direction, by considering why such
practices are ubiquitous in human culture, despite their many differ-
ences in their varied contexts. In Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes
From and Why (1995), she seeks an explanation in art’s adaptive benefits,
 Conclusion 199

as a predisposition towards behaviour of a definable type. Dissanayake’s

attention is not on the explanations offered for the place of art in any
society or by any philosophical or aesthetic tradition, nor is it on the
meaning of any piece of art. Instead it is on what is evidently generalis-
able at a species level, and meaningful in terms of species survival: in
other words, if ‘art’ is a propensity that belongs to all people, and is not
reducible to another phenomenon (sexuality, say, or play), then it will
have emerged and survived because our lives as individuals and groups
are more productive and durable because of it. If this assumption holds
true, then ‘art’ as an adaptive benefit becomes a need, and a behaviour
that will find its place whatever the human context. Dissanayake com-
pares this predisposition to animal behaviour – the pack behaviour of
wolves, for example – that is also compulsive, species-wide but not self-
evidently beneficial to the individual animal:

Recognising art as a biological need can give us not only a way to

better understand art, but by understanding art as a natural part of
us, we can understand ourselves to be part of nature. […] Art can be
considered as a behaviour (a ‘need’, fulfilment of which feels good)
like play, like food sharing, like howling, that is, something humans
do because it helps them to survive, and to survive better than they
would without it. (Dissanayake 1995: 34)

This may seem like an odd approach to turn to in relation to audience

participation – and it is not chosen because I want to show that audi-
ence participation is any more a ‘natural’ need or a species-wide behav-
iour than any other way of engaging with performance, but because
it is helpfully reductive. Dissanayake’s thesis that art consists of the
‘making special’ of objects or activities is reductive. It can be applied to
works that are simply decorative or that are provocative and political;
to performances that belong to ritual or high art traditions; to body
art, conceptual art, social dance, storytelling, advertising and theatre.
By locating an essential nature of art in this core criteria this approach
does not reduce their other values out of existence: whatever else has
accumulated around a tradition or a practice in its culturally and con-
textually specific history remains meaningful, in whatever terms are
appropriate to it. And whatever else can be achieved by an artist, an art
work, or by the engagement of an audience or spectator also survives
this reduction: making special gives a place for many kinds of activity
and all their various outcomes, because across all of its various manifes-
tations, it offers something valuable at a very basic level.
200 Audience Participation in Theatre

The benefits that human beings have derived from art (and accord-
ing to Dissanayake have done since the emergence of homo-sapiens as
a species, potentially even earlier) derive from a pleasurable sense of
mastery over objects and circumstances. This mastery arises in its most
fundamental form in patterning and elaborating, in the making of
tools, the decoration of the body, and ceremony and ritual; it requires
control over these materials, and the feeling of this control becomes
reassuring, ‘a means of working out anxiety and attempting to influence
the outcome of uncertain events or feared possibilities’ (Dissanayake
1995: 89). This mastery over feelings relating to uncertain situations is
evolutionarily important because:

the appropriation from nature of the means of subsistence often

includes psychological or emotional along with technological com-
ponents; the ‘nature’ that requires cultural control includes human
behaviour and feeling as well as the physical environment. Where
materialist thought is inadequate, I believe, is in not acknowledging
that means of enhancement (i.e., the control of human behaviour
and emotion […]) are frequently if not always intrinsic to the control
of the means of production. (Dissanayake 1995: 9)

Though symbolism and representation may derive from a different behav-

ioural source, and have uses in other systems such as ritual, belief and
play, they overlap with the need to make things special, and give rise to
the complexes of art making behaviour in different traditions and forms.
For Dissanayake the satisfying sense of mastery drives the pleasure to be
had from listening to well told stories as well as telling them, wearing
elaborate clothes and body decorations, as well as making them, and, in
post-traditional and technological societies, the accumulation and replay-
ing of recorded music, via record-collections, ring-tones and radio stations.
But this is not directly relevant to the discussion of audience partici-
pation, I include it to put Dissanayake’s ‘making special’ into its proper
context. What is relevant is that this model of art escapes the binaries of
author and audience, and the priority of the self-expression of the artist
that dominates the western tradition of aesthetics. The identification of
art as a behaviour does not depend on levels of quality, kinds of engage-
ment or arguments for autonomy, it also acknowledges that much of
what is important to art as it is made and experienced depends upon the
practice, institution and situation through which it is identified to the
groups of people involved. Making special reduces art to its most basic
behaviour, but it does not say that this is all there is to it.
 Conclusion 201

It also puts the manipulation of everyday, non-art material at the

heart of art behaviour, and is very liberal about what kind of mate-
rial can be thus manipulated: giving scope to describe not just the
bodies and voices of participants as material, but also their relations
with action via agency and point-of-view. As I have already suggested,
accepting an invitation puts a participant in a position of having to
respond, and thence having to view their own response as part of a
work of art. When we consider the way the artist shapes these dimen-
sions of experience – patterns them and elaborates them – then we must
acknowledge that they have been ‘made special’ in a deliberate way, and
have become aesthetic material at the most basic level.

Patterning and elaborating participation

Dissanayake notes the capacity that facilitates the pleasure derived from
a thing that has been made special, as ‘sensitivity to changes in tempo,
dynamics, size, quality, and so forth’ (Dissanayake 1995: 180), which
is exploited differently by the different art forms. With patterning and
elaboration as a foundation, she cites Leonard Bernstein’s observation
of how the shaping of music is analogous to the shaping of poetry, with
techniques comparable to antithesis, alliteration, anaphora, chiasmus
(192), and W.B. Stanford on how Greek drama can be described in terms
of ‘crescendos and diminuendos, accelerandos and rallentandos, scherzo
movements and maestoso movements, recurrent motifs and ingenious
variations’ (128). All of these operate not only on change and contrast,
but also repetition, and work on the expectations of audience members,
as patterns are established, elaborated and then altered. Patterning of this
kind, whatever the medium, entails a kind of stimulation:

The brain is prepared for or ‘expects’ certain prototypical features

once a pattern is suggested or given. Emotion results from delayed
and manipulated gratification of expectation, provided that devia-
tions from the anticipated pattern are not so small as to be predict-
able and boring or so large as to be incomprehensible and confusing.
(Dissanayake 1995: 162)

If an audience participant has become aesthetic material, then analo-

gous, if not identical, features should be observable in the attributes
that are thus brought into play. At the level of vocal and physical
action, there are often patterns and variations. Obviously when music
or dance is involved, bodies are put to work according to the dictates
202 Audience Participation in Theatre

of the form in a more general sense: when in Kneehigh’s Midnight’s

Pumpkin,1 (a version of Cinderella) the whole audience is invited to
take the stage to join in the choreography of the Prince’s ball, the pat-
terning and elaboration of their movement is that of social dance, with
an added frisson because of its setting. More importantly, sometimes
it is the invitation itself that has a pattern: panto’s call and response
games are based on repetition, as is the interjection of ‘stop!’ in a Forum
Theatre event. Whenever there is turn taking, or a formula for invita-
tion that is repeated, and accepted by a series of participants, there is
a repetition and variation involved. The audience – at Jonathan Kay’s
Know One’s Fool, for example, or at Las Furas Del Baus’ XXX – that sees
others take the stage before them and waits nervously to be singled out,
experiences each successive moment of potential embarrassment as a
crescendo of anticipation, leading to a climax when actually invited,
or either disappointment or relief when left alone. The rhythm of ‘you
say something’, ‘is this alright?’ and ‘shall I go on?’ running through
The Author, punctuates the other verbal patterns of the spoken text, and
also sets out a series of opportunities to respond, each with a different
inflection as the discomfort builds.
In other realms of experience, aesthetic manipulation is as much a
matter of contrast and combination, in Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics,
she observes that in the Japanese tradition: ‘The activity of eating […] is
not just a matter of consumption, but also of making aesthetic choices
concerning the best order for elucidating each ingredient’s taste and
texture’ (Saito 2007: 231).
The contrast between the agencies available to audience participants
and audience members is fundamental, and is perhaps where the most
subtle range and shades of feeling are manifested. The contrasts of open-
ness and closure, frustration, exhilarating freedom and entrapment of
Armadillo’s workshop, or the gradual but powerful erosion of spatial
and social differentiation in Villa Villa, work because they heighten the
sensation of self-agency, or its absence, by bringing the participant into
contact with many variations of it.

The aesthetic regime

In my introduction, I proposed that this book is an ‘aesthetics’ of par-

ticipation in the sense that it would defer political and ethical questions
pending a discussion of the character of participation as an artistic
material, because questions and claims of that kind have tended to
dominate discussion of participation at the expense of close attention
 Conclusion 203

to the substance of the work as it happens. I also promised to return

to politics, better equipped to make informed judgements about it; it
is time to make good that promise. Jacques Rancière’s argument in The
Emancipated Spectator was used as an example of a polemic in which
assumptions are made about participatory performance in order to jus-
tify a certain perspective of the possibility of artistic efficacy. Returning
to Rancière at this point I will articulate how the thesis of that essay fits
into his overall conceptualisation of aesthetics, showing how an alter-
native perspective can integrate participation into his view of political
art, and as a complement to this introducing a more precise formulation
of ‘the aesthetic’ than has been outlined in this chapter so far.
The foundation of Rancière’s approach to aesthetics is his conception
of the historical character of art as a system of ‘practices, forms of vis-
ibility and modes of intelligibility’ that allow us to recognise works of
art. The prevalent system he identifies as the ‘aesthetic regime’, which
in western culture superseded ‘ethical’ and ‘representative’ regimes of
art (Rancière 2009b: 28–29). The origin of this regime coincides with the
Enlightenment, when Baumgarten and Kant first began to formulate
the judgements evoked by art as having a distinct character based on
the art work’s autonomy from concerns for the good or the agreeable,
and subsequently the romantics’ (particularly Schiller’s) celebration of
the potential for art to create a new life-in-common, in other words to
have good effects. For Rancière the character of this regime is this para-
dox of simultaneous connection and disconnection. As Claire Bishop
(2012: 27) describes it, this regime is: ‘predicated precisely on a ten-
sion and confusion between autonomy (the desire for art to be at one
remove from means-ends relationships) and heteronomy (that is, the
blurring of art and life)’.
Although philosophical aesthetics has sought and failed to square this
circle ever since, and art practice has from time to time sought to escape
the paradox by either renouncing all claims for effect (as high modern-
ism did) or seeking to collapse the distinction between art and life (as
DADA and futurism did, in some forms), it continues to hold sway, even
over those forms of art that would deny it. Rather than being crippled
by this paradox, Rancière says, art derives its power from its ‘productive
contradiction’ (Bishop 2012: 29). Having faith in both art’s independ-
ence from worldly concerns, and its promise to make the world a better
place, creates spaces and opportunities for alternative ways of feeling
and understanding to arise.
He is very sceptical, however, of art practice (‘critical art’, Rancière
2009b: 45–60, 2009a, 25–50) that intends a direct connection between
204 Audience Participation in Theatre

its political aims and effects. Imagining that art works as a tool of this
kind reproduces the unequal ‘distribution of the sensible’ in which
there are people who are equipped to know and understand in a certain
way, and others who have to be led into understanding, as their place
in society determines their perceptive abilities. This is the basis of his
critique of the manipulation of aesthetic distance in The Emancipated
Spectator, where the conventional, stultifying practice of education and
the political theatre practitioners he identifies with it, reproduce such
a distribution because of (and in spite of) their ambition to share their
knowledge.
Instrumentalising art in this way misses the potential of its ambigu-
ous, paradoxical nature, attending only to its heteronomous, worldly
connections. To think through how art has effects that are not predict-
able, and therefore do not re-institute the relative power of the artist,
he puts the emphasis on autonomy in the process of response, which is
possible precisely because there is no direct connection between cause
and effect. He calls the process of response ‘aisthesis’, and notes an
‘aethetic cut’ between poiesis and aisthesis,2 and the belief that art can
bridge this gap is what leads to the stultifying and anti-emancipatory
critical art he abhors. The potential effect of aisthesis, when it is allowed
to take its own course, is reminiscent of Gadamer’s ‘truth event’ in art,
though with a particular emphasis on the shifting of sensory worlds, on
‘sensibility’ as the organisation of what is perceptible, that is important
to Rancière’s theorisation of aesthetics as a political phenomenon:

Aesthetic experience has a political effect to the extent that the loss
of destination it presupposes disrupts the way in which bodies fit
their functions and destinations. What it produces is not rhetorical
persuasion about what must be done. Nor is it the framing of a col-
lective body. It is a multiplication of connections and disconnections
that reframe the relation between bodies, the world they live in and
the way in which they are equipped to adapt to it. It is a multiplicity
of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change
the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible.
(Rancière 2009a: 72)

I would say that rhetorical persuasion and the framing of a collective

body are still political outcomes of many art events, which may be
enhanced by effects that are powerfully manipulated in art practice:
the patterning and elaboration of media that grabs and holds attention
and makes a message more accessible and compelling, the gathering of
 Conclusion 205

bodies and voices that engages suggestibility and group identification.

But in Rancière’s terms these are not aesthetic effects.
The imagery of ‘folds and gaps’ used in this passage suggests changes
in detail and nuance rather than grand transformations. The reference
to ‘the relation between bodies, the world they live in and the way
in which they are equipped to adapt to it’ also suggests Bourdieu’s
language of embodiment and disposition, of the relation of habitus to
field and capital. But Rancière is famously opposed to Bourdieu’s work,
seeing in the analysis of the structural exclusion of some classes from
cultures of education and art an attitude that reifies this exclusion.
Rancière’s work addresses the persistent inequalities of access, through
his idea of the ‘distribution of the sensible’, (2004: 12–19) but insists
upon the potential of the dispossessed to escape their allotted place in
the economy of perceptions, however unpredictably or fleetingly. Any
theory or policy based on the rigidity of inequality, and the responsibil-
ity of those in possession of knowledge and power to share what they
have with those who do not have it, is destined, in his thinking, to
reproduce and perpetuate inequality. Change in the distribution of the
sensible will come from below, and its unpredictability is the essence of
politics for Rancière.
To fully unpack the conflict between these two is a project for another
place, and would entail situating their work in the development of pro-
gressive theory in France since 1968. Both are relevant to the project of
this book, and so is the point at which they disagree. Bourdieu is the
theorist par excellence of the connectedness of art. For him all art is
political because it directly reflects and reproduces the class structure of
society: its claims to autonomy only serve to disguise this connected-
ness. His terms have been used in my argument primarily to articulate
how connectedness – of participants as situated social beings – runs
through audience participation at every point, but by combining it
with Goffman’s notions around framing I hope to have kept in mind
that these connections can simultaneously be bracketed off: not entirely
denied, but held in abeyance temporarily by the learned associations of
the practice at hand. The different manifestations of bodily and social
connectedness, and practices of disconnection, described in the preced-
ing chapters are perhaps too diverse to pull together too neatly, but
what Rancière offers is a theory which re-reads the role of autonomy in
aesthetics, giving it a political character. What he does not recognise is
that the kind of autonomy he observes can happen in audience partici-
pation, and I would assert that this can be better understood because of
what has gone before in this book.
206 Audience Participation in Theatre

For Rancière the spectator remains a spectator. The autonomy of

the art work is located in the autonomy of the one experiencing it.
This is the crux of whether a participatory spectator can be an eman-
cipated spectator in Rancière’s terms. What I have shown is that a
participant can be a spectator to their own actions in a variety of ways,
re-encountering themselves in ‘the forest of things and signs’. It is in
the sheer variety of experiential relationships to participatory action
that we find a kind of autonomy, in the potential for any of them to
become an encounter with oneself, facilitated by the distance that can
open up when subjectivity has become an aesthetic material.
The inclusion of the participant in the work cannot entail a direct
effect – though practitioners may attempt such direct effects and even
appear to achieve them. A procedure of invitation can move you and
manipulate you physically, but it cannot assume how you will experi-
ence this movement. It can emotionally manipulate you, or work on
your psychological capacity for suggestion, but must allow that after
the event you will do what you choose with the experience. In different
guises the argument of this book has always been about heteronomy
and autonomy, about the continuity of the participant’s social being,
and how it is connected to and marked off from an altered version of
itself in performance. The practices of audience participation temporar-
ily re-shape our social being, make it special, intensify it or bring its
contours into focus, expose folds and gaps in its surfaces and depths,
and perhaps, on occasion, allow us to perceive ourselves anew.
Notes

Introduction
1. For an interesting borderline example of this we might look to Shannon
Jackson’s account of artist Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in New
Orleans, in which Chan – an artist with connections and credentials in the
fine art establishment appropriated the form of the theatre for a specifically
situated project. (Jackson 2011: 210–238)
2. My point of reference is the essay of that title, first published in Artforum in
2007, and later reproduced in a volume of essays under the same title.
3. Helen Freshwater, in Theatre and Audience, says that ‘Although Rancière’s
challenge to the ingrained connection between passivity and spectatorship is
invaluable, his reading of theatre practice – limited as it is to Antonin Artaud
and Bertolt Brecht – presumes a determinism among directors and drama-
turges which has in many ways passed. In fact, a plethora of theatrical work
now foregrounds the need for active interpretation on the part of the specta-
tor, as it requires observers to make their own decisions about the significance
of actions or symbolic material’ (2009:16).
4. This proposition about political subjectivisation, and about politics and
democracy in general, runs through most of Rancière’s work, for example, in
the essays collected as Dissensus (2010), and is helpfully unpacked by Todd
May (2008) and Nick Hewlett (2010).

1 Process and Procedure

1. The ‘gaps’ or ‘blanks’ that are a crucial feature of literary text were theorised
by Wolfgang Iser (1974: 58): ‘with a literary text we can only picture things
which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge,
but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things;
indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the texts, we
should not be able to use our imagination.’ What we have in the opportu-
nity to imaginatively picture when watching performance is quite differ-
ent, as Susan Bennett (1997) has observed, nevertheless there are elements
‘unwritten’ that stimulate rich and varied responses.
2. For an early articulation of the techniques and priorities of TIE, which also
includes a perceptive typology of participatory strategies, see O’Toole (1976).
3. Grounded, by Eileen Murphy, toured schools in the North West of England
in 1991 and 1994, directed initially by Murphy, and by Joe Sumsion for the
second tour.
4. De La Guarda’s Villa Villa opened in London in May 1999, and ran for a year,
though a version of the same show had visited London two years previously
as part of the London International Festival of Theatre. From their origins
in the Argentinean avant-garde and the international festival circuit, they

207
208 Notes

became something like an international franchise – at one time with shows

running simultaneously in London, New York and Las Vegas.
5. Chapter 3 ‘Keys and Keyings’ and Chapter 5 ‘The Theatrical Frame’, of Frame
Analysis contain much more complex analyses of make-believe situations
and their special manifestations in the theatre: to be very brief about it,
Goffman shows how the definition of a situation can allow the transcrip-
tion of other situations that are defined very differently, but re-organised
to conform with the conventions of the ‘outer’ frame, the one that has not
been transcribed.
6. The relevance of Goffman’s reference to hypnotic suggestion will become
more apparent in Chapter 3, but his purpose is to suggest that the perform-
ance a person can give of something they apparently have no experience of
can be surprisingly complete. Whether the performance of a ‘compulsive
crime’ would be convincing to a habitual criminal or someone else with real
experience of the matter is another thing, the performance might be draw-
ing on resources that are remote from the real thing, from films, television
or literature.
7. Dance Bear Dance was performed at the Shunt Arches, Bethnal Green, from
September 2002 to May 2003.
8. ‘Something Beautiful’ was toured to schools in the South of England through
the mid-nineties, it had two characters played by actors, and a number of
supporting roles played by volunteers, usually invited on stage by less devi-
ous means. The acting area was a carpet in a figure of eight shape, marked
like a road, with students seated all around it and in the loops of the eight,
so that bringing a student onto the stage only took a moment. My own
involvement was limited to one tour, and this way of making an invita-
tion was my own, rather than the company’s. Keith Johnstone in Impro for
Storytellers, comes out against covert invitations: ‘“anyone seen improvisa-
tion before? Good, come up on stage.” Never “hook” unwitting volunteers
this way’ (2000: 371), as he is against all actions that might humiliate or
manipulate volunteers.
9. Jay Sankey feels that this is explained by an evident lack of respect for the
audience on the part of the performer, resulting in a reciprocal lack of respect
from the audience, the effect is a display of disrespect for the frame, as well
as the performer: ‘Some comics seem a little disrespectful of the crowd, other
comics seem unsure of their own abilities, and still other comics deliver
material about sensitive subjects in an overly cavalier fashion. Any and all
of these things can diminish the crowd’s primary respect for the performer,
virtually inviting hecklers.’ (Sankey 1998: 175, original emphasis)
10. This play toured schools and other venues in South East London in early
2002, to audiences of 11 to 13 year olds, the performance I saw was at
Deptford Albany in March of that year.
11. Goffman notes an interaction between habitus and capital that can be
expected in theatrical performance, if not in audience participation:
‘An individual who plays Hamlet must learn the part, but he need not be
taught theatrical English unless he is a high school Prince; presumably his
occupational role as a professional actor guarantees that he already knows
how to speak in that manner and can bring this capacity (alas) to any char-
acter he is obliged to project’ (1986: 290–291).
 Notes 209

12. Susan Bennett discusses the idea of disattendance and its importance to the
theatre event, (1997: 68), as does Goffman (1975: 144).
13. Kitchen was first performed in Berlin in 2007 and toured to London’s Soho
Theatre in July 2008.
14. This standard Forum Theatre rule allows an audience member to stop an inter-
vention that they consider unrealistic in the given circumstances, by shouting
‘that’s magic!’ (See for example Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman 1994: 226.)

2 Risk and Rational Action

1. There is a danger of ‘losing face’ by giving a bad performance, but also of
gaining esteem by giving a good one. Risk in these performances can also
be a chance to gain. Ideas such as Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’ can also help
to elaborate on the continuities and the perduring self that have been taken
from Frame Analysis to show how a performance is an investment. As in
other areas of risk in our lives, our financial dealings, and personal relation-
ships and so on, we take risks in performance when we see a possible benefit,
and can weigh it rationally against the possible loss. Nicholson, writing
about trust in classroom drama, acknowledges this: ‘the participants’ willing-
ness to involve themselves in (dramatic) action is dependent on measuring
the perceived advantages and disadvantages of entering into that particular
relationship of situation’ (Nicholson 2002: 88).
2. Invitation was performed at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios and Central
School of Speech and Drama in 2010.
3. Internal was first performed in Hasselt, Belgium in 2007, and toured inter-
nationally until 2011.
4. This kind of behaviour by facilitators is unusual, especially in the applied
theatres, where the tendency is usually to be helpful, respectful, and gentle
with participants. It is possible, however, it happens deliberately in stand-up
comedy, where volunteers can be derided, and in Jonathan Kay’s work; it
could also happen accidentally, if an observation was meant constructively
but perceived critically.
5. This incident, and the ethics of inviting this kind of socially risky per-
formance, is explored in my article: ‘Navigating the Ethics of Audience
Participation’ (White 2006).
6. See Weindling 2001, for an account of the derivation of the principles of
research ethics in the war crimes trials of the 1940s; the Nuremburg Code
is now seen as the basis of medical practice ethics internationally, but
originates in a response to the abuse of subjects in medical research in Nazi
Germany.
7. The misreading I refer to here is simply that the need for undergraduate and
postgraduate students to observe research ethics in their work was applied to
performance practice that was not research in the relevant sense.
8. Holstein and Gubrium 2000: 21 and 24 respectively. Cooley’s idea of the
‘looking glass self’, a characterisation of self-perception as constructed
through seeing ourselves as others see us, is manifest in some or the strate-
gies of experimental social psychology, for example, in confronting phobic
people with the object of their fear, demonstrating different reactions
210 Notes

when a mirror is present, and they can watch their behaviour. See Deaux,
Wrightsman and Dane, 1993.
9. My examples will be taken from different events, but particularly from the
2002 festival, and small shows at Camden People’s Theatre and Hoxton Hall
in the same year.
10. Have you ever seen a field of human fish? Two lanes of traffic stopped by a
crowd singing “Baby you can drive my car”? Remarkable things can happen
during a Jonathan Kay performance.’ Hoxton Hall (2002)
11. These were two of many ‘walkabout’ performances at Glastonbury 2002.

3 Irrational Interactions
1. The term has some currency, especially in studies of computer mediated
interaction – see for example, Bradner, Kellogg and Erikson (1999).
2. For example, Bergson (1935).
3. Provine thinks that laughter originates in tickling, the laugh-response to being
tickled is especially involuntary and though many of us, especially adults,
don’t like to be tickled we may still laugh in spite of ourselves. Tickling chil-
dren socialises them, teaches them to accept contact with those in the family
and the social group – as is the case with chimpanzees. The laugh in reaction
to tickling demonstrates that we know it is a non-threatening touch. Laughing
in the wider context shows that social contact is welcome and pleasurable. In
fact laughter has a role in making social contact pleasurable – studies have
shown that laughter even works as a pain killer.
4. ‘It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction
to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the
people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone,
including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll
aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, tri-
umphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it
buries and revives. Such is the laughter of carnival.’ (Bakhtin 1984: 11–12)
5. ‘Comedy is always racist: only the others, the Barbarians, are supposed to
pay.’ Eco, Umberto. ‘Frames of Comic Freedom’ in Sebeok (1984: 2).
6. Canetti tells of how crowds love destruction, especially the destruction of
representational images – statues – and the easily broken boundary markers
of houses – their doors and windows (Canetti, 1992: 20). Bill Buford gives
an account that echoes this: ‘The sound of the shattering windscreen – I
realise now – had been a powerful stimulant, physical and intrusive, and
it had been the range of sounds, of things breaking and crashing, coming
from somewhere in the darkness, unidentifiable, that was increasing steadily
the strength of feeling of everyone around me. It was also what was mak-
ing me so uneasy. The evening had been a series of stimulants, assaults on
the senses, that succeeded, each time, in raising the pitch of excitement’.
(Buford 1991: 91)
7. These spaces vary in size and configuration, some, like the replica
Shakespeare’s Globe, appear designed to increase the contact between spec-
tators, others, like newer cinemas, to give us more individual space. The
single arm-rest between two seats in most theatres is probably a function
 Notes 211

of pressure to increase audience size, but it has the effect of making us rub
shoulders (and elbows) with fellow audience members. ‘Every crowd has a
threshold; all crowds are initially held in place by boundaries of some kind.
There are rules that say: this much, but no more. A march has a route and
a destination. A picket line is precisely itself: an arrangement of points that
cannot be crossed. A political rally: there is the politician, the rally’s event,
at its centre. A parade, a protest, a procession: there is the police escort, the
pavement the street the overwhelming fact of the surrounding property.
The crowd can be here, but not there. There is form in the experience that
tends towards abandon. I have described the relentless physicalness of the
terraces and how they concentrate the spectator experience: that of existing
so intensely in the present that it is possible to disappear into the power of
numbers – the strength of them, the emotion of belonging to them.’ (Buford
1991: 192)
8. Reynolds in Duncombe (2002) and Measham, Aldridge and Parker (2001:
112): ‘The setting: the club, the dance floor, the posing and posturing, the
buzz of anticipation and excitement and, most of all, the music are all avail-
able to drinkers and abstainers; but with tablets and powders the fusion and
enhancement of the experience and endurance therein are uniquely ampli-
fied.’
9. ‘social psychologists have provided theories of argument-based persuasion
and have conducted extensive research to test these models. The earlier
theories emphasised the systematic processing of message content, whereas
later theories added the assumption that people are often not sufficiently
motivated to engage in message-relevant thinking and therefore base their
decision to accept or reject a persuasive message on heuristic cues or other
peripheral processes.’ (Argyle and Colman 1994: 16)
10. Some of these tactics are described in Schechner’s Environmental Theatre
(1994). The techniques are based on a performance space which was con-
tinuous with the audience space. Welfare State International describes the
use of food to involve people in an event (see Sue Fox in Coult and Kershaw,
1990: 126–137).
11. Villa Villa opened in London in May 1999, and ran for a year, though
a version of the same show had visited London two years previously as
part of the London International Festival of Theatre. From their origins
in the Argentinean avant-garde (the group’s name can be translated as
‘avant-garde’) and the festival circuit, they became something like an inter-
national franchise – at one time with shows running simultaneously in
London, New York and Las Vegas.
12. These took place soon after the collapse of Argentina’s military government
in the eighties, and were designed to shock passers-by and to remind them
of the oppression they had tolerated during the years of dictatorship. They
were often short interventions into everyday street life, for example, the
firing of a starter pistol as a cue for the performers to fall down, en masse,
on a street crossing, pause for a few moments; or a man on a stretcher being
carried through a shopping arcade surrounded by ‘secret police’, but carrying
a pig’s head on his lap.
13. This interview with Pichon Baldinu took place on March 2000, the text is
available from the author on request.
212 Notes

14. See, for example, the games ‘Blind Offers’ and ‘Yes, but…’ in Johnstone
(1981: 101–104).
15. Interviews with performers took place at the Roundhouse, Camden, London
in March 2000, in the afternoon before a performance. Interview texts are
available on request.
16. They were recorded in the bar at the venue after an evening performance on
the same day as the interviews with performers. All interviewees had stayed
in the venue after the performance, and were drinking, all were in groups of
three or more. The text is available from the author on request.
17. Another female performer spoke of audience members being ‘very aggres-
sive, getting big clumps of soggy paper and very violently and aggressively,
you know squashing it and pressing it into your face’.

4 Accepting the Invitation

1. ‘Someone is making claims on me and it’s not entirely clear who. On the
one hand, I feel obliged as a responsible and professional theatre-goer to
comply with the contract I am being offered. Look for look is the deal. To
turn my eyes away from his would be rude, and what’s more, a betrayal of
my own principles (those Brechtian principles of my youth). […] But who
exactly is it making this claim on me? Is it Samuel West or is it Richard II?
When the ethical claim of the face-to-face encounter is deployed in this
way, I feel I am entitled to know. And I am embarrassed because the utter
foolishness of the theatrical contract I have been going on with overwhelms
me.’ (Ridout 2006: 87)
2. The characters of the play take the names of the performers. In the published
text this includes Chris Goode, Vic Llewellyn, and Esther Smith, as well as
Crouch himself. In the original performances Goode’s role was played by
Adrian Howells.
3. The Author and the Audience took place at the University of Leeds on November
6th 2010 among its outcomes was the special edition of Contemporary Theatre
Review, 21:4.
4. The play is sometimes performed for adults, with a slightly modified script.
For younger audiences this sequence can be challenging, despite its black
humour, as Lyn Gardner notes after discussion with Crouch:

And the 11+ version? The thong was replaced by trunks, the buttocks
took a back seat, and no one mentioned cock unless it was firmly prefaced
with ‘turkey’. But, other than that, Crouch tells me, the text remained
exactly the same. To the point, in fact, where one girl started sobbing into
her dad’s shoulder at the sight of Malvolio with a noose in his hand […]
Had Crouch pushed it too far? When I spoke to him afterwards, he didn’t
reckon so, arguing that the world is full of adult things, and children deal
with them every day – guided by sympathetic, supportive adults, on hand
to help them make sense of it all. Crouch’s work for children presents the
adult world, and the guide too. So, on stage, when the girl started crying,
Crouch was able to step out of character, smile, and say: ‘It’s alright, it’s OK,
I’m not really going to go through with this.’ (Gardner 2009)
 Notes 213

Conclusion
1. Midnight’s Pumpkin was at Battersea Arts Centre in December 2012 and
January 2013.
2. Rancière has little to say specifically about aisthesis in everyday life, or the
different character of sensory responses to art and to nature. He does indicate,
however, that opportunity for discovering a different sensorium is relatively
easy to find; he quotes a passage on the life of a joiner in nineteenth century
France, from Gabriel Gauny’s Le Tocsin des Travailleurs, to describe how such
moments can arise:

Believing himself as home, he loves the arrangement of a room, so long

as he has not finished laying the floor. If the window opens out onto a
garden of commands a view of a picturesque horizon, he stops his arms
and glides in imagination toward the spacious view to enjoy it better than
the [owners] of the neighbouring residences. (2009a: 71)
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Index

Abramovic, Marina, 7, 120, 163 Bell, Clive, 11

Lips of Thomas, 163 Ben Chaim, Daphna, 4, 181
Rhythm O, 7 Bennett, Susan, 55–6, 58–9, 101,
aesthetic distance, 21, 161, 204 207, 209
aesthetic material, 5, 9–11, 19, 138, Bishop, Claire, 17–20, 92, 203
201, 206 Blackadder, Neil, 4, 7
aesthetics, 9–14, 20, 25, 27, 65, blanks/gaps, 58–9, 207
113–14, 163–4, 197–202, 202–6 Boal, Augusto, 15–16, 17–18, 20–1,
affect, 12, 115–16, 126, 131, 157, 22, 26, 41, 69, 82, 112, 177
166–7, 172, 195 Bolton, Gavin, 34–7, 95–6, 106
affordance, 123–5, 135, 154, 156, Bourdieu, Pierre, 12, 14, 51–3, 59, 65,
166–8, 185 103–4, 113, 124, 156, 198, 205,
agency, 5, 8, 26–7, 29, 32, 34, 53–7, 209
60, 62–4, 71, 73–4, 94, 104–7, Bourriaud, Nicolas, 17–18, 24–6
112–13, 114, 120–1, 124–6, 129, Box Clever, 41, 88
137–8, 145–6, 149, 157–8, 176–7, Something Beautiful, 41
186–8, 195 Buford, Bill, 136, 210
distributed agency, 137–8
shared agency, 129 Canetti, Elias, 133–40, 153, 210
see also self-agency capital (social, cultural, symbolic),
antagonism, 19–20 51–5, 65, 71, 103–4, 113, 156,
agonism, 92 205, 208, 209
aesthesis, 204 Cardboard Citizens, 87–9
allopoiesis, 187–8 Chase, Jonathan, 143
anchoring, 37–8, 44, 46, 49, 81 Cavell, Marcia, 25
appearance formulas, 37, 44–6, 60 citationality, 54, 124, 177
applied theatre, 13, 14–15, 16, 17–18, coercion, 69
23–4, 72, 112, 180 communitas, 128, 140–2, 147, 153,
Armadillo Theatre, 3, 27, 65–72, 87, 156, 186
120, 177–8, 202 control, 4, 8–9, 29, 31, 35, 51, 55, 58,
Armstrong, Isobel, 12–13 61–2, 69–70, 113, 131, 137–8,
Atmosphere, 81, 97, 150–2, 166–8, 172 156, 200
audience participation (definition), Crouch, Tim, 7, 16, 28, 188–94, 212
4–5 crowds, 132–8, 149, 186, 210–11
authorship, 31, 62, 72, 177, 195
see also procedural authorship Damasio, Antonio, 117–19
autonomy (artistic/aesthetic), 20, de Certeau, 53–4
22–4, 26, 37, 198, 200, 203–6 De La Guarda, 3, 7, 28, 33, 149–56
autopoiesis, 162–3, 187–7 Villa Villa, 33, 149–56, 202, 207,
211
Babbage, Francis, 86–9 definition of the situation, 34–6, 103
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 131, 135 de-individuation, 133, 136, 138
Baldinu, Pichon, 152–3 Dennett, Daniel, 63

221
222 Index

Dewey, John, 14 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 56–9, 83, 121,

Diderot, Denis, 171, 174 164, 165, 186–7, 197, 204
difficult-ating, 61 Gallagher, Shaun, 123–6, 137, 158,
disattendance, 101–3 184
disclosure, 122–4 Garner, Stanton, 182–3
Dissanayake, Ellen, 198–202 Giddens, Antony, 62–3
dramatherapy, 174–5 givenness, 164
Glastonbury festival, 107–11, 113,
Eagleton, Terry, 12 120, 154, 176
Eco, Umberto, 58, 131 Gob Squad, Kitchen, 64
elaboration, 201–2 Goffman, Erving, 32, 33, 34–40, 45,
embarrassment, 76–82, 88, 90, 93–4, 46, 48–9, 51–3, 57–60, 73, 77,
181 101, 103, 115, 158, 169, 173, 205,
embodiment, embodied cognition, 208, 209
115–16, 120–1, 129, 156–7 Gorilla Theatre, 50, 93
emotion systems, 119 Greenwich Young People’s Theatre
emotion, 71, 76, 83, 95–6, 115–20, (GYPT), Stop!, 43
126–7, 123, 155, 166–9, 171–2, Guattari, Felix, 24
200–1
empathy, 44, 86, 126–8, 152–3, 166, Habitus, 51–5, 65, 67, 71, 103–4, 124,
172, 180–1 156, 186, 205, 208
enactive theory of cognition, 120–2, Hahlo and Reynolds, 75, 95–6
156 Halsall, Jansen, O’Connor, 12, 19, 27,
Etchells, Tim, 106, 179–80 197
ethics, 72, 89–92, 94, 209 Hays, Susan, 53–4
experiential learning, 173–5, 180 Heritage, Paul, 179–80
heteronomy (aesthetic), 203–6
facilitators, facilitating, 32–3, 43–4, heteropoiesis, 187–8
49–51, 56, 61, 66–9, 75–6, 85–9, Higgins, Dick, 196
95–6, 126–7, 209 horizons of participation, 29, 55–9,
feedback loops, 161–4 62, 70–1, 78, 80, 83, 85, 89,
feeling, 12, 64, 76, 92, 97, 115, 148–50, 165–9, 173–4, 185, 189,
116–20, 122, 132, 155, 172, 192
200 horizons of risk, 81–4, 91
fiction, 168–74 Hotel Medea, 184–5
field, 51–2, 54, 59, 103–4, 156, 205 hypnosis, 128, 143–6, 186
Fischer-Lichte, Erica, 4, 23, 28, 161–4,
187 immersion/immersive theatre, 2,
Fluxus, 196 16–17, 169–70, 173
football crowds, 136 informed consent, 28, 71, 89–91,
frame analysis, 32–7, 39, 103, 208, 209 137–8, 181
frames (inner, outer, narrative, intentionality, 122–4, 127–8, 152,
involvement and presentational 164, 166, 182–6
frames), 32–3 intercorporeality, 127–8, 133, 136–7,
free will, 124–5 144
Freud, Sigmund, 144 interoception, 157–8
Fried, Michael, 23 intersubjectivity, 125–9, 135–8, 146–7,
Freire, Paolo, 54 150
fusion of horizons, 58 invisible Theatre, 41
 Index 223

invitation, 9, 15–16, 28, 30, 40–7, 49, Meltzer, Bernard and Jerome Manis,
53–3, 59–62, 64–5, 69–72, 78–9, 115
83–5, 114–16, 159, 165–9, 176, mirror neurons, 126
185–6, 195–6, 201–2 Munro, Jane, Invitation, 79
overt, implicit, covert, accidental Murray, Janet, 31
invitations, 40–1 museum theatre, 15
Irving, Henry, 7, 171 musicals, 15, 147
Iser, Wolfgang, 58, 207 mutual incorporation, 127–8

Jackson, Adrian, 89 Neelands, Jonathan, 45–6, 76, 170,

Jauss, Hans-Robert, 56–8, 62, 83 173–4
Johnstone, Keith, 18, 50, 92–4, 97, Nicholson, Helen, 97, 209
153, 208, 212 Nield, Sophie, 170–1, 186
Joker, 40, 49, 51, 66, 68–70 noema see pre-noetic
Jones, Phil, 174–5 Noland, Carrie, 157–8

Kaprow, Alan, 15–16, 47–8 O’Toole, John, 18, 49

Kattwinkel, Susan, 7, 17, 40, 60, 82, one-to-one theatre, 2
86, 92, 176 Ono, Yoko, 7–8, 45–6, 120, 97, 120
Kay, Jonathan, 3, 28, 78, 107, 120, ontology of the art work, 197–8
202, 209 Ontroerend Goed, 80, 85, 90
keyed frames, 36–7 Osofisan, Femi, 16
Kirby, 17, 45, 55
Kneehigh, 202 Paint Show, 146–7
Koren, Leonard, 10–11, 197 pantomime, 3, 8, 15, 40–1, 60, 79–80
Kuhn, Hans Peter, 15 participatory sense-making, 126
patterning, 201–2, 204–5
Las Furas Del Baus, XXX, 85, 98, 148, perceived risk, 76–7, 89
156, 202 performance see live art
laughter, 5, 30, 36, 128–32, 135, 194, performativity, 103–5, 177, 179
210 phenomenology, 121–2
Leipe-Levinson, 87, 91 plants, 86, 151
liminality, 106, 116, 128, 138–42 power, 14, 26, 32, 35, 41, 63, 145,
live art, 1–3, 10–11, 15–17, 20, 23, 55, 153, 163, 183–3, 204–5
92, 99 pre-noetic,124–5, 127, 137, 152, 156,
Living Theatre, 7 166
preparation, 29–31, 107, 144
M6 Theatre, 32 procedural authorship, 29, 31, 33, 38,
making special, 198–201 49, 74, 82–9, 138, 145–9, 195–6
Mason, Bim, 17, 42, 43, 97 procedure, 8–9, 29–72, 76, 78, 84, 89,
material, see media 98, 108–9, 114, 125–7, 143–4,
Maturana, Humberto and Varela, 149, 153, 176–8, 186, 195–6
Francisco, 162 Provine, Robert, 129–32, 149, 210
McAuley, Gay, 6, 167 proximity, 160, 170
McKellen, Ian, 99 Punchdrunk, 7, 15–16, 21, 48, 178–9
McConachie, Bruce, 119–20, 127,
155 Ranciere, Jacques, 12, 18, 21–5,
media/medium, 8–14, 25–16, 195, 203–6, 207, 213
197, 204 reflexivity, 28, 176–8, 194
224 Index

Reicher, Stephen, 133, 135, 138 ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, 21,

reminiscence theatre, 15 23–5, 203–4
resource continuity, 37–8, 47, 52–3 the human being, 37–8
Reynolds, Dee, 120, 128 theatre for development, 15
Ridout, Nicholas, 102, 183, 186, 212 Theatre in Education (TIE), 8, 11, 14,
risk, 35, 41, 73–97, 102–3, 108, 119, 18, 30, 65
142, 146, 159, 174–7, 196, 209 Theatre of the Oppressed, 14, 21, 65,
ritual, 5, 36, 77, 137–42, 148, 199–200 69, 77
Rocky Horror Show, 15, 96 Theatresports, 78, 79
Ruckert, Felix, 40, 60, 81, 176 Thompson, Evan, 121–2, 124, 188
Rylance, Mark, 100 Thompson, James, 13
transcribing behaviour, 45
Saito, Yuriko, 202 Turnbull, Colin, 141–142
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 122–3 Turner, Victor, 138–42, 153
Schechner, Richard, 15, 18, 139,
141–2, 147, 211 Unconnectedness, 38, 48–9
Seattle Public Theatre, 75
self-agency, 184–6, 202 Van Gennep, Arnold, 138–40
self-awareness, 181–9 Vautier, Ben, 196
self-forgetfulness, 181, 186–7
self-ownership, 184–6 warm-up, 95–6
semiotics, 98–101 Way, Brian, 17, 84
Shevtsova, Maria, 104 weather, 166–7, 185
Shunt, 16, 41, 43, 208 see also atmosphere
Sierra, Santiago, 20 Weinberg, Mark, 86
Smith, Peter and Sharp, Sonia, 65 Welfare State International, 17
Smith, Barbara, 92 Welton, Martin, 166, 171–2
social theatre see applied theatre Welsch, Wolfgang, 12
space, 167–8 Wilson, Robert, 15
spect-acting, 46, 50 Winston, Joe, 13
Sprinkle, Annie, 7, 179 Witnessing, 175–6, 179
state of mind, 114–15 Woolf, Janet, 13
States, Bert, 182 Workshops, 15, 96–7, 107
street theatre, 42–3
subjectivity, 24–6, 64–5, 104–5, 125, You, Me, Bum Bum Train, 79
164, 184–5, 206
synecdoche, 99 Zahavi, Dan, 183–4
Zecora Ura/Para Active, Hotel Medea,
tact, protective practices, defensive 16, 184
practices, 77
temporality, 164–6, 168