Performing Arts: Audience as an Essential Element in the Production of the Theatrical Experience

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Performing Arts Audience as an Essential Element
in the Production of the Theatrical Experience
CMNS 488 Art WorldsCase Study 1

• By Carmen Hung
• Date 5th February, 2008

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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?

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Event Attended

• PuSh Festival (Jan 16th Feb 3, 08)
• Catalyst Theatre (Edmonton)
• Frankenstein
• (adaptation of Mary Shelleys novel)
• 25th February, 2008 (Friday)
• Vancouver East Cultural Centre
• (also in the audience is Mayor Sam Sullivan)

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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

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(Review) Art Audience
Creators
Art
Audience
Mediators
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Culture (bi-directional relationship)
Horizons of Expectations Theatrical Conventions
Interpretive Communities
Interactive Relations
Fictional Stage World
Fixed time for reception
Internal horizon of expectations (mise en scene)
Overcoding
Source Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences
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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)

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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

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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)

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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)

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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

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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.