some thoughts on spectatorship

"You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see." (Lacan)

I've been thinking about our conversations concerning the responsibility we have towards an audience and how we me negotiate the contract established between performer and viewer. I've been meaning to read Jacques Ranciere's "The Emancipated Spectator" (a lecture he delivered in Frankfurt in 2004) for a while and now seems the perfect occasion.

In thinking through the roles of an audience he starts from two commonly held conceptions:
"The first one is that theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which has to be dismissed in favour of what it forbids: knowledge and action: the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion has been drawn long ago by Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks at shadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill through the medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. ..The most usual conclusion runs as follows: theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore we need a new theatre, a theatre without spectatorship. We need a theatre where the optical relation- implied in the word theatron - is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theatre is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theatre must be predicated on that acting power. Theatre has to be brought back to its true essence which is the contrary of what is usually known as theatre. What has to be pursued is a theatre without spectators, a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers."

I think that certainly the second concept has surfaced in some of our discussions. . . I'm off now to watch some of the states Donna and Gabi have been working through but will post later.