Audience connection and the public/private

I am, at the moment, attempting to get some sort of piece (or idea of a piece) together to submit to the Accidental Festival, which is curated by BA students from the Central Speech of School and Drama. The theme for this year’s festival is ‘connection’, which obviously can be interpreted in many different ways but, after a conversation I had recently, has become prominent in my mind in a specific way.

I was having a very general discussion with someone about art when he told me about a friend of his, who had said that she didn’t like the theatre because she didn’t like encountering art in public (or something to that effect). I’ve never met this girl, which is a shame because as soon as I heard that I immediately wanted to pick her brains and ask her for more information (maybe a lucky escape for her) but the statement got me thinking about the unique relationship theatre has with its audience, and of how audiences experience different forms of art.

None of this is new – practitioners (and artists in other art forms) have always been concerned with the relationship their work has with the spectator, and I’ve be attempting to find ways to address the issue in every piece I’ve created in the last year. But I’d never considered it within the dichotomy of private vs. public and I wonder if it might be an interesting road to go down for my contribution to the festival. A similar discussion seems to have taken place between a few people on Chris Goode’s blog (an endless source of stimulation and inspiration): http://beescope.blogspot.com/2009/01/of-late.html - they talk about (if I’ve read it correctly) the possibility of creating a theatre space that can encourage the kind of quiet reflection and contemplation one usually finds in churches, and have a discussion over the nature of such an experience – whether it can be communal, an exchange between those present, as well as a solitary, introspective experience.

This is the kind of experience I hope for every time I go to the theatre, and would hope that it didn’t take a special kind of venue or theatre space to produce, but I do recognise that not enough performances facilitate such an experience, in which a spectator can feel like a vital part of the performance without having to take part in some tedious audience participation exercise (in which the spectator “matters”, as Chris Goode says), in which they are given the mental space to make their own reflections without feeling like they have detached themselves from the piece and the performers (i.e. my experience of watching Spectacular which I should maybe get out of my system at some point on the blog).

So…how to facilitate these connections between artist, work and spectator and space within the Roundhouse theatre? That is my next question. But coming back to the original concern: how can one make the experience of watching a performance in a traditional theatrical space feel private, even if the spectator is surrounded by many others and is inescapably in the presence of performers? Because this is also important: someone who craves a private spectatorship may view the liveness of theatre, in which each element present is existing and evolving live in front of the spectator’s own eyes, as an insurmountable barrier preventing them from really connecting (there’s that word again) with the piece and with the experience of being in an audience. I wonder if, in a situation in which the actual theatrical space cannot be manipulated, the answer lies in creating a performance that, through structure and style, mimics the response we want from an audience…

I recently went to see the Bobby Sands film Hunger – truly fantastic and if you haven’t seen it; check it out now. I won’t get bogged down in the politics of the film now as it’s not relevant here (and actually, I don’t think that it is a film that has a blatant political message, despite its subject matter). But what I found so compelling about the film was its use of long takes, most famously a 15-20 minute continuous sequence which contains most of the speech in the film, but also through a number of other notable scenes including one incredible one (my favourite scene) in which a prison officer cleans pools of urine from the prison corridor floor. The camera, motionless at the end of the corridor, displays the officer immersed in his task from beginning to end, without cutting away once. Now I love a long take, I mean, REALLY love a long take. It’s the musical equivalent of handclaps in songs – if it’s there, I automatically love the film/song a little more. And what I love about the use of the long take in Hunger is the demands it makes of the spectator. “Listen, watch, and pay attention” it seems to say, and I did, completely engrossed in the banal and fairly unpleasant task of the prison officer. Not only was I completely immersed in the actual action of the scene, in the character and what he was doing, but the simplicity and determined focus of the scene also gave me space to engage with the film as a whole, with the significance of what this man was doing and what my attitudes and thoughts were towards the entire film. What we need is the theatrical equivalent of the long take, something that compels the audience to engage, pay attention and reflect, to feel that connection to the piece: moments of respite from plot and spectacle, with give time to reflect and engage the brain yet still have something relevant to add to the drama and atmosphere of the piece. Moments that do not simply ask for reflection, but compel it by being reflective themselves.