Transcript Performing Arts: Audience as an Essential Element in the Production

CMNS 488 Art Worlds
Case Study 1:
Performing Arts: Audience as an Essential Element
in the Production of the Theatrical Experience
By: Carmen Hung
Date: 5th February, 2008
Research Questions:
• What is theatre's place in the Art World?
• What does it mean for the performers that audience are presence?
• How does audience member 'participate' in the production of theatre?
• Does theatre reflect society/reality?
Event Attended:
• PuSh Festival (Jan 16th – Feb 3, 08)
• Catalyst Theatre (Edmonton)
• Frankenstein
(adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel)
• 25th February, 2008 (Friday)
• Vancouver East Cultural Centre
•
(also in the audience is Mayor Sam Sullivan)
Thesis & Definitions:
Theatre performance, while not necessarily mimicking life, is an artistic
experience produced collectively by both artists and the audience
•Play
•Drama
•Theatre
•Performance
•Stage
•Show
•Performing Arts
(Review) Art & Audience:
Creators
Art
Audience
Mediators
Culture (bi-directional relationship):
Horizons of Expectations
Theatrical Conventions
Interpretive Communities
Interactive Relations
Fixed time
for reception
Fictional Stage World
Overcoding
Internal horizon
of expectations
(mise en scene)
Source:
Susan Bennett,
Theatre Audiences
Audience as Active Participant in Theatre:
“The audience is, in effect, one of the theatre artists; because theatre is a
"living" art, because actual performers appear before actual audience
members, the audience is an active participant in the live performance;
as a participant, the audience experiences the performed work and
responds in an immediate and emotional fashion; via that response,
the audience directly affects the performance and, in fact, becomes a
creative partner in the living art of theatre.”
Paul N. Campbell (1984)
How Theatre Move Audience:
“The spectators are always in their senses and know, from the first act to
the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only
players”… But stage move audience through being generalized: it
represents to "the auditor what he himself would feel if her were to do
or suffer what is there feigned to be supposed or to be done. The
reflection that strikes the heart is not that the evils before us are real
evils, but that they are evils in which we ourselves may be exposed.“
Samuel Johnson
“Meaning” & Spectators:
“The idea that any meaning can "belong" to the work is refused: the very
process of its becoming is foregrounded as being the spectator's work.
The performance thus force attention to process, to the ‘event’
occurring between spectator and presentation”
Nick Kaye (1994)
Socially Formed Ideas & Values:
“The Audience, like the artist, have ideas and values which are socially
formed and which are similarly mediated. As the artist works within
the technical means available and within to the scope of aesthetic
convention, so audiences read according to the scope and means of
culturally and aesthetically constituted interpretive processes.
Janet Wolff (1981)
Theatre in relation to the Readings:
• Art-making as a Collective Activity
(Consensus & Conventions)
• Art as measure of Civilization, Technological
& Social change
• Art not as Transmission Model
• Mimisis
• Artistic genius & Art world as socially
constructed
• Audience as Reception/Consumption
vs. Production/Creation
Reference:
Bennett, S. (1990). Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and
Reception. Routledge.
Campbell, P. N. (1984). Form and the Art of Theatre.
Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Shepherd, S., & Wallis, M. (2004). Drama/Theatre/
Performance. Routledge.
Styan, J. L. (1975). Drama, Stage and Audience.
Cambridge University Press.