One of the main questions arisen with this particular genre of experiential performance is the audience and their relevance within the piece.
- Are the audience relevant?
- Pretending they don’t exist, audiences aren’t there.
- What do they need?
- Is there a complex relationship between audience and performance
This is most relevant within experimental performance as we soon discovered by creating our piece, as we soon found for our performance to work and be successful it relied 100% on the audiences reactions and interpretations of what we performed. Audience needed to understand and believe the senses within our piece and become an actual part of it, instead of just sitting and observing, hence bringing down a fourth wall.
‘As questions of audience have become, to a certain extent, questions of identity (one of which is marked by the concept of ‘gender’) this has shifted attention appropriately to the cultural contexts for production and reception.'(Bennet, 1997 p265).
During the module we also came across gender, and Laura Mulveys perception of the male gaze, and researched into examples of how a performance can be portrayed in different ways according to you sex. From research, it is clear all men want to watch is women, She states that women become ‘resistant readers’ and perceive in play in whichever way they desire to “reading against the grain (or surface ‘meaning’ of the performance). (Bennet 1997 266).
She states women like to put themselves on display, showing example of power, communication and exchange. A good example of this comes from Marnia Abramovic, who totally depends on her audience for a successful experiment, whilst openly putting herself on display,
Within her piece, Rhythm 0, Marnia openly sits still and lets the public do to her what they choose, with items of both pleasure and pain. This signifies a woman of power, who is not afraid to risk herself for a successful performance, and to see how the participants react to the objects placed in front of them.
Overall it was really interesting to learn how an audience can make a big change to a performance, and often there would be no success without them present, or even in some circumstances, they are in fact the performance.
Rebecca Ward
Word Count 367
Works Cited
S Bennet-(1997) Theatre Audiences, 2nd ed . London -Routledge