Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Yourself! 2019001319, 9780367187965, 9780429198274

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Funding note
1 Immersion and spectatorship at the interface of theatre, media tech and daily life: an introduction
PART I: Mobile audiences
2 Unexpected encounter: on installation art as immersive space
3 Doggies, masters and the end of the European Union: on immersive theatre installations by SIGNA and Thomas Bellinck
4 On the impossibility of being together
5 Bordering and shattering the stage: mobile audiences as compositional forces
6 Structures of spectatorship
PART II: Researching spectatorship
7 Keep it real
8 Participatory audiencing and the committed return
9 Immersive art – immersive research?
10 Parsing ‘commitment’: the multiple valences of spectatorship
11 The case for empirical audience research
PART III: Questions of power – politics of affect in immersive performances
12 Feminism, audience interaction, and performer authority
13 The promise of participation revisited: affective strategies of participation
14 Capturing complexity while being pressed for time
15 Immersive guilt factories
16 Dark immersion: some thoughts on SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs

Citation preview

Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances

At present, we are witnessing a significant transformation of established forms of spectatorship in theatre, performance art and beyond. In particular, immersive and participatory forms of theatre allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary immersive performances. Split into three parts, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances, respectively, focuses on various strategies for mobilising the audience, ­methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre, and thematising new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. Poignantly capturing experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Theatre and Performance Studies, Media Studies and Philosophy. Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies and a co-­ director of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Theresa Schütz is a theatre scholar and research assistant working in the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Sophie Nikoleit is a theatre scholar and research assistant working in the CRC “Affective Societies” at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Routledge Studies in Affective Societies

Birgitt Röttger- Rössler is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

Routledge Studies in Affective Societies presents high-level academic work on the social dimensions of human affectivity. It aims to shape, consolidate and promote a new understanding of societies as Affective Societies, accounting for the fundamental importance of affect and emotion for human coexistence in the mobile and networked worlds of the 21st century. Contributions come from a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, cultural, media and film studies, political science, performance studies, art history, philosophy, and social, developmental and cultural psychology. Contributing authors share the vision of a transdisciplinary understanding of the affective dynamics of human sociality. Thus, Routledge Studies in Affective Societies devotes considerable space to the development of methodology, research methods and techniques that are capable of uniting perspectives and practices from different fields. 2 Image Testimonies Witnessing in Times of Social Media Edited by Kerstin Schankweiler, Verena Straub and Tobias Wendl 3 Affective Societies Key Concepts Edited by Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve 4 Analyzing Affective Societies Methods and Methodologies Edited by Antje Kahl 5 Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances Commit Yourself! Edited by Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Affective-Societies/book-series/RSAS

Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances

Commit Yourself!

Edited by Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Kolesch, Doris, editor. | Schütz, Theresa, editor. | Nikoleit, Sophie, editor. Title: Staging spectators in immersive performances : commit yourself! / Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019001319 | ISBN 9780367187965 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429198274 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Participatory theater. | Performance art. | Spectators. Classification: LCC PN2049 .S664 2019 | DDC 792— dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001319 ISBN: 978 - 0 -367-18796 -5 (hbk) ISBN: 978 - 0 - 429-19827- 4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Funding note

vii ix xi xv xvii

1 Immersion and spectatorship at the interface of theatre, media tech and daily life: an introduction 1 D oris Kol e sc h

Part I

Mobile audiences

19

2 Unexpected encounter: on installation art as immersive space 21 Barbara G ronau

3 Doggies, masters and the end of the European Union: on immersive theatre installations by SIGNA and Thomas Bellinck 35 Be njami n W i h stut z

4 On the impossibility of being together 52 A c on v e rsation be tw e e n pe rforma nc e artist Signa   Kö st l e r a n d T h e r e sa S c h ü t z

5 Bordering and shattering the stage: mobile audiences as compositional forces 59 Li e sbe t h Gro o t Nibbe l i n k

6 Structures of spectatorship 72 K e rsti n S c h a n kw e i l e r

vi Contents Part II

Researching spectatorship

79

7 Keep it real 81 A c on v e rsation be tw e e n pe rforma nc e artist Ju l ia n   H e t z e l a n d T h e r e sa S c h ü t z

8 Participatory audiencing and the committed return 88 M att h e w R e as on

9 Immersive art – immersive research? 103 S t e fa n i e Huse l

10 Parsing ‘commitment’: the multiple valences of spectatorship 116 Ja n e l l e R e i n e lt

11 The case for empirical audience research 136 A n tj e K a h l

Part III

Questions of power – politics of affect in immersive performances

141

12 Feminism, audience interaction, and performer authority 143 J e n Harv i e

13 The promise of participation revisited: affective strategies of participation 159 Gar e t h W h it e

14 Capturing complexity while being pressed for time 170 A c on v e rsation be tw e e n sc e no graph e r Mona   e l   Gamma l a n d T h e r e sa S c h ü t z

15 Immersive guilt factories 178 T h e r e sa S c h ü t z

16 Dark immersion: some thoughts on SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs R ai n e r M ü h l hoff

198

List of figures

2.1 Werner Tübke, Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland, 1983–87, oil on canvas, 14 × 123 m, Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen 22 2.2 Hotel Savoy by Dominic Huber/blendwerk, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin 30 2.3 Hotel Savoy by Dominic Huber/blendwerk, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin 31 3.1 Wir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA, Wiener Festwochen, Frederick von Lüttichau 36 3.2 Wir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA, Wiener Festwochen, Amanda Babaei Vieira 37 3.3 Wir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA, Wiener Festwochen, Ivana Sokola 37 3.4 House of European History in Exile by Thomas Bellinck, Brussels 39 3.5 House of European History in Exile by Thomas Bellinck, Athens 40 3.6 House of European History in Exile by Thomas Bellinck, Vienna 40 4.1 Das Heuvolk/The Hay People by SIGNA, Mannheimer Schillertage, Ensemble 56 7.1 The Automated Sniper by Julian Hetzel 83 8.1 Alex responding to For MG: The Movie by Scottish Ballet 96 8.2 Teigan responding to Echoa by Compagnie Aarcosm 97 9.1 Waveform 1 108 9.2 Waveform 2 110 10.1 Fight Night by Ontroerend Goed, Aurélie Lannoy, Angelo Tijssens, and Charlotte De Bruyne 123 12.1 Sam Kennedy, Lucy McCormick and Ted Rogers in Triple Threat 151 12.2 Lucy McCormick in Triple Threat 151 14.1 Rhizomat by Mona el Gammal, Waiting Room 171 14.2 Rhizomat by Mona el Gammal, Laboratory 174

viii  List of figures

15.1 Guilty Landscapes, episode II by Dries Verhoeven 181 15.2 Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory by Julian Hetzel, pop-up store 188 15.3 Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory by Julian Hetzel, Dr Hennie Spronk 189 All graphic recordings in this volume by graphicrecording.cool.

List of tables

8.1 Michael responding to Hush by Rambert Dance Company 99 9.1 Transcription 1 108 9.2 Transcription 2 111

List of contributors

Mona el Gammal studied scenography at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Her graduation work, the narrative space Haus Nummer Null/ House Number Zero, was awarded the Cologne Theatre Prize in 2013 and was included in the Berliner Theatertreffen’s ‘Stückemarkt’ in 2014. She realised another narrative space, Rhizomat, in 2016 as a commission from the Berliner Festspiele. She has also worked with the artistic collective SIGNA and the Barcelona theatre company La Fura dels Baus, among others. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink is Lecturer and Researcher in Theatre Studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies of Utrecht University. She is a coordinator of the Master’s Programme in Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy, and also teaches in the BA Media and Culture Studies and the RMA Media, Art and Performance programmes. Previously, she worked as a dramaturge, assistant director and dramaturgy teacher. Liesbeth is a co-founder of the Dutch Platform-Scenography, an open-source platform for scenographers and dramaturgs, and has published in Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research and in Mapping Intermediality in ­Performance (ed. Bay-Cheng et al., 2010). Her recent book is entitled No­ madic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage (2019). Barbara Gronau is Professor of Theatre Theory and History at Universität der Künste Berlin and a coordinator of the DFG graduate school ‘Knowledge in the Arts’. Among her main areas of research and publication are intersections between fine arts and theatre (Theaterinstallationen. Performative Räume bei Beuys, Boltanski, Kabakov, Wilhelm Fink 2010; How to Frame. On the Threshold of Performance and Visual Arts, Sternberg Press 2016), theories of agency and performance (­Performanzen des Nichttuns, Wien 2008; Ökonomien der Zurückhaltung, Transcript 2010; both with Alice Lagaay), as well as epistemologies of the aesthetic (Szenarien der Energie, Ästhetik und Wissenschaft des Immateriellen, Transcript 2013). Jen Harvie  is Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at Queen Mary University of London. Her monographs include Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2013), Theatre & the City (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), Staging the UK (University of

xii  List of contributors

Manchester Press 2005) and The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Per­ formance (co-author, Routledge, second edition 2014). She has co-edited Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (University of Manchester Press 2010) and The Only Way Home Is Through the Show: Performance Work of Lois Weaver (Intellect and the Live Art Development Agency 2015). She co-edits Palgrave’s series Theatre & with Dan Rebellato. Her current work examines UK feminist theatre. Julian Hetzel is a performance and visual artist, as well as a musician. He studied at Bauhaus University Weimar and DasArts in Amsterdam, where he graduated in 2013. His works operate at the intersection of theatre, installation art and media, and have been featured at festivals throughout Europe. Recent projects include Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory (Steirischer Herbst, Graz 2016), The Automated Sniper (Something Raw Festival, Amsterdam 2017) and All Inclusive (Frascati Amsterdam, 2018). He is currently based in Utrecht. Stefanie Husel teaches Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz and is the coordinator of Mainz University’s Research Centre for Social and Cultural Studies (SoCuM). Her dissertation project was supervised interdisciplinary by Hans-Thies Lehmann and sociologist Stefan Hirschauer and resulted in a book published in 2014 (Gren­ zwerte im Spiel. Die Aufführungspraxis der britischen Kompanie ‘Forced Entertainment’. Eine Ethnografie, Transcript). Stefanie Husel has also published on issues such as the framing of theatre performances and research methods. She has assisted frequently in rehearsals of Forced Entertainment and accompanied the group as a participant observer for about ten years. Antje Kahl is a postdoctoral researcher working in the CRC Affective Soci­ eties: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin, where she holds the special position of a project nomad. She received her PhD from Technical University Berlin in 2013 with a thesis titled Tote Körper. Zum Bedeutungswandel des Leichnams in der gegen­ wärtigen Gesellschaft am Beispiel der klinischen Sektion und der Bestat­ tung (Berlin 2013). She has co-edited several volumes, most recently The Politics of Affective Societies: An Interdisciplinary Essay (with Jonas Bens et al.), Transcript 2019. Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a co-director of the DFG-funded CRC Affective Soci­ eties: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds, where she heads the research project on ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theatre’. Her research interests include theory and aesthetics of theatre, voice and acoustic culture, and affect and emotion theory. Her innovative research has received various awards, among them the Essay Prize of the German Society for Theatre Studies and the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Science Foundation.

List of contributors  xiii

Signa Köstler is the founder of the artist collective SIGNA, which she leads with her husband Arthur Köstler. SIGNA is known for their large-scale immersive performance installations, which always require the audience’s interaction. In 2008, their production Die Erscheinungen der Mar­ tha Rubin/Ruby Town, devised for Schauspiel Köln, was selected as one of the ten best theatre productions of the year and invited to theatre festival ‘Theatertreffen’ in Berlin. Their most recent production was Das Heu­ volk/The Hay People (2017) for Nationaltheater Mannheim and Das halbe Leid/Half the Suffering (2017/18) for Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg. Rainer Mühlhoff  is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘Changing ­Repertoires of Emotion’ in the CRC Affective Societies: Dynamics of So­ cial Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin, where he is working at the crossroads of theories of power, affect and subjectivity. He received his PhD in philosophy in 2016 from Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis entitled Immersive Macht. Das Subjekt im Affektgeschehen. Sozialtheorie nach Foucault und Spinoza (Campus 2018). Matthew Reason is Professor of Theatre and Performance at York St John University (UK). His research engages with a number of areas including: audiences to theatre and dance, theatre for young audiences, applied theatre, performance documentation, reflective practice and cultural policy. He co-founded the International Centre for Arts and Narrative in collaboration with York Theatre Royal and is research associate with Imaginate. Publications include Documentation, Disappearance and the Representa­ tion of Live Performance (Palgrave 2006), The Young Audience: Exploring and Enhancing Children’s Experiences of Theatre (Trentham/IOE Press 2010), Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Contexts (co-edited with Dee Reynolds, Intellect 2012), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary ­ indelof, ­Routledge 2016) and Performance (co-edited with Anja Mølle L the forthcoming collection Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact Across Theatre, Music and Dance (co-edited with Nick Rowe, ­Bloomsbury 2017). Janelle Reinelt,  Emeritus Professor of Theatre and Performance at University of Warwick, was President of the International Federation for Theatre Research (2004–2007). She has published widely on politics and performance, receiving the ‘Distinguished Scholar Award’ for lifetime achievement from the American Society for Theatre Research (2010), and an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2014. In 2012, she was awarded the ‘Excellence in Editing’ prize together with Brian Singleton for their Palgrave book series, Studies in International Performance. Recent books include The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retrieval (with Gerald Hewitt, Cambridge University Press 2011) and The Grammar of Politics and Performance (with Shirin Rai, Routledge 2015). She co-edited with Maria Estrada-Fuentes a special issue of the Cultural Studies journal Lateral, entitled Leveraging Justice, and a

xiv  List of contributors

collection of essays with Bishnupriya Dutt and Shrinkhla Sahai, Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Kerstin Schankweiler  is a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘Affective Dynamics of Images in the Age of Social Media’ in the CRC Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin. She received her PhD in art history in 2012 from Trier University with a thesis entitled Die Mobilisierung der Dinge. Ortsspezifik und Kulturtransfer in den Installationen von Georges Adéagbo (Transcript 2012). She edited the volume Im Maschenwerk der Kunstgeschichte. Eine Revision von George Kublers ‘The Shape of Time’ (with Sarah Maupeu and Stefanie Stallschus, Kadmos 2014), and she is also one of the editors of the review journal sehepunkte. Theresa Schütz is a theatre scholar and research associate and PhD candidate working in the CRC Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexis­ tence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin. Within the framework of the research project ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theatre’, her dissertation focuses on the aesthetics of reception as well as effect aesthetics and politics of affect in contemporary ‘immersive theatre’. Since 2013, she has also written regularly for the German theatre periodical Theater der Zeit. Gareth White is Reader in Applied Theatre and Community Performance at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. His research focuses on questions of participation and aesthetics, and is published in a number of articles, chapters and monographs, including Audience Par­ ticipation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and Applied Theatre: Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Methuen 2015). He is also a teacher and theatre director specialising in participatory practices, in the main teaching on BA Drama, Applied Theatre and Education (DATE), while also contributing to Central’s MA and PhD programmes. Benjamin Wihstutz  is junior professor for Theatre Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz. Before being awarded his PhD in 2011 at Free University Berlin, he had been working for the CRC Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits for eight years. His key research areas are the politics and aesthetics of contemporary theatre, theory and history of the spectator, taste and public around 1800, as well as performance and disability. He is the author of the books Der andere Raum: Politiken sozialer Grenzverhandlung im Gegenwartstheater (­Diaphanes 2012) and Theater der Einbildung: Zur Wahrnehmung und ­Imagination des Zuschauers (Theater der Zeit 2011) and has edited the volumes Disabled Theater (Diaphanes 2015, with Sandra Umathum), Sowohl als auch dazwischen: Erfahrungsräume der Kunst (Fink 2015, with Jörn Schafaff) and Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology (Routledge 2013, with Erika Fischer-Lichte).

Acknowledgements

Books are the results of a multifaceted commitment; they come into being because many people are committed to making them happen. We are very grateful for the commitment of our contributors who participated in the international conference Commit Yourself! Strategies of Staging Spectatorship in Immersive Theater at Freie Universität Berlin in November 2016 and who provided excellent contributions to the present volume. Our special thanks are due to the artists Signa and Arthur Köstler from SIGNA; Mona el Gammal; Nina Tecklenburg from Interrobang; Julian Hetzel; Tim Tonndorf from Prinzip Gonzo; Hans-Günter Brünker; and Alicia Agustín, Houïda, Antje Prust and Daniel Cremer from Talking Straight, who supported and enriched our conference, guided discussions into new directions and shared their practices, thoughts and concepts in performances, talks and interviews. Tiziana Beck and Johanna Benz, two graphic artists from graphicrecording.cool, supported our conference by providing a variety of excellent graphic recordings. A selection of 19 drawings brings an illuminating visual dimension to the texts and interviews included in this volume. We are thankful to Thomas Oberender from Berliner Festspiele and Martin-­Gropius-Bau Berlin for collaborating on immersion and immersive arts with us, and also to Cornelius Puschke for the discussions in the context of the ‘Schule der Distanz No. 1’. For their invaluable help and assistance in organising our conference and in producing this book, we thank Olga Bohl, Marisa Burkhardt, Kristin Flade, Johanna Groh, Jos Porath, Katharina Rost, Tatjana Schwegler and Thore Walch. Jessica Piggott contributed significantly to this book with her careful and meticulous translations and considered copy-editing of all contributions. This book grew out of the activities of the research project ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theater’, hosted by the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin. It is always a pleasure and an inspiration to work with our committed fellow researchers at

xvi Acknowledgements

the CRC Affective Societies and we are grateful to the CRC and its staff for always providing help and support. We are also thankful to our colleagues from the Institute of Theater and Performance Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, namely Matthias Warstat and the time he has given to our ongoing exchange and in-depth cooperation. We would also like to express our gratitude to the German Science Foundation (DFG) for generously funding our research project, our conference and this publication. Last but not least, we thank Elena Chiu and Emily Briggs from Routledge for their encouraging support throughout the production process. Berlin, November 2019 Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit

Funding note

This volume grew out of the research activities of the research project ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theater’ at the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1171 Affective Societies: Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mobile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), initial funding period 2015–2019.

Chapter 1

Immersion and spectatorship at the interface of theatre, media tech and daily life An introduction Doris Kolesch

Three recent immersive settings in art A few steps take the visitor from the Norwegian island of Tautra to London. From there, it’s only another few metres to New Delhi. Or Sao Paulo. Or ­Beijing. This compressed trip around the world takes place in the courtyard of the London Museum Somerset House, where British artist Michael Pinsky has designed five accessible geodetic domes, each of which uses i­ ngenious technology to simulate the air of Tautra, London, New Delhi, Beijing and Sao Paulo with scientific precision. Air in the Tautra dome is clear, clean and fresh, while the stinking, filthy haze of the New Delhi dome makes it hard to see. A few metres away, the aggressive fumes of the Sao Paulo dome make visitors’ eyes water. The installation is called Pollution Pods—and it addresses the problem of worldwide environmental pollution not with facts, not with concentrations of toxicity and its impact on human health. Instead, it transports the visitor directly into the air of Sao Paulo, Beijing and New Delhi, allowing air pollution to be experienced immediately, while also, with the air of the Norwegian island of Tautra, demonstrating the palpable difference between clean and dirty air. The goal of this short-term, aesthetic immersion is completely didactic. The website of the Somerset House states: It is estimated that the average Londoner, exposed to the current levels of pollution, loses up to 16 months of their life, while for a resident of New Delhi, pollution could cut short the life of a resident by around 4 years.1 Pollution Pods aim to make the rather intangible, frequently abstract and enduring problem of global pollution concrete by turning it into something you can experience physically and connecting it to an affective reaction. With this, Pinsky’s work raises the question: ‘Can art make real for us that which stays abstract in average values, precise facts and modeled scenarios?’ (Habekuss 2018, p. 36).

2  Doris Kolesch

Scene change: art project DAU Freiheit (DAU liberty) provokes bitter arguments throughout the summer 2018, well beyond Berlin. Together with film director Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the Berliner Festspiele wants to host the world premiere, which would involve such renowned artists as Marina Abramović, Tom Tykwer, Romeo Castellucci, Massive Attack and Teodor Currentzis. Further stops are planned for Paris and London. The vision: in the neighbourhood of Mitte, in the once divided city of ­B erlin, an area will be sealed off with a replica of the historical Berlin Wall. Access to this artistically framed but nevertheless real parallel universe would not occur via ticket sales but through visa application. Cell phones would be handed over at the entrance and visitors would have to submit to an individualised trip consisting of diverse activities and events, from film screenings, concerts and performances to public discussions, one-on-one conversations and much more. The heart of the work as a whole was to be Khrzhanovsky’s film, which almost no one has seen yet and which nonetheless has been glorified in an almost cult-like fashion by cineastes. Between 2009 and 2011, the director filmed material about the physicist, Nobel laureate and propagandist of ‘Free Love’ and new ways of living, Lev Landau, known as Dau. In Landau’s hometown of Charkow in the Ukraine, Khrzhanovsky reconstructed the man’s scientific institute, ­Landau’s laboratory and Lebensraum, in painstaking detail, complete with historical costumes and props. For more than two years, several hundred people lived, worked, ate and slept on site as part of a secluded community in a quasi-totalitarian, quasi-Stalinist regime. Anyone who wanted to smuggle in a cell phone, anyone who wasn’t punctual or anyone who tried to use social media was severely punished or barred from the community. Filming went on for two and a half years—and not with a script and countless rehearsals. It was rather a kind of documentary of life on set. The DAU Freiheit project in Berlin was pursued with the utmost secrecy, but it ended prematurely because applications for the necessary government permissions were submitted too late and thus denied. The Berliner Festspiele contextualised the planned art action, which was to take place in the historically loaded time window of mid-October to 9  November (the day the Wall fell), as follows: ‘DAU opens a historical echo chamber, which, 29 years after the fall of the Wall, offers the chance to have a socio-political debate about freedom and totalitarianism, surveillance, co-existence and national identity’.2 Quite a tall order for art. In comparison to the Pollution Pods, here too immersion in the fictional but nonetheless real existing and accessible parallel world of Dau Freiheit is to have a didactic, even enlightening effect: namely, by instigating a sociopolitical debate on the grand issues of our time. This is to be achieved not through deliberation, not through the exchange of opinions, positions or arguments, but rather via immersion in a totalitarian parallel world— via immediacy rather than distance.

Immersion and spectatorship  3

As part of this introduction I would like to sketch one final immersive situation. Das halbe Leid/Half the Suffering, by Danish-Austrian performance ensemble SIGNA, invited theatre visitors as ‘workshop participants’ to attend a course on empathy by spending an entire night, from 7 pm to 7 am, with performers playing homeless people and other social outsiders. With the help of (performers acting as) homeless people acting as mentors, the audience was to learn how to take part in the suffering of an/other. The fictional narrative framing the event was that the course was hosted by a charitable and purportedly humanistically minded organisation called ‘Half the Suffering’, who also maintained the space as a homeless shelter. Throughout this performance, concrete aesthetic and para-aesthetic formats were consistently invoked and brought together in heterogeneous, sometimes contradictory combinations. There was the form of site-specific installation in their use of the disused Heidenreich & Harbeck factory in Barmbeck, Hamburg. There was the form of durational performance, of fake institution and of diverse settings reminiscent of therapeutic treatments such as talking, art or physical therapy. In addition, various institutional frames such as charitable organisation, school or reformatory were invoked and staged. As a whole, the performance did not simply represent social situations, did not just play them out in front of the spectator, but rather allowed for, even provoked, various concrete social situations between visitors and performers, as well as among audience members themselves. In thinking about spectatorship in immersive performances, there is one characteristic of Das Halbe Leid/Half the Suffering that, to me, seems particularly worthy of consideration. Generally, theatrical representation stands apart from other arts on the basis of a particular distinction, namely in its supposed lack of distinction from the deeds and actions of daily life. While literature acts through the medium of language, while painting makes use of colour and form and while film shows two-dimensional projections of moving images, theatrical representation occurs through the medium and material of human existence—as aesthetic-anthropological reflections have pointed out since the beginning of the twentieth century. In such accounts, the quality differentiating theatre from daily life rests firmly in theatre’s ‘as-if’, that is, in the sense that actions are represented as opposed to being actually carried out. Art and performance forms like the three mentioned at the beginning of this introduction undermine this distinction in particular, and not just on the side of the performers, but also and especially on the side of the spectators who have been activated and mobilised as participants. In these performances and installations, I, the spectator, do not simply observe the performers as they portray certain happenings. Instead, those happenings are simultaneously part of a situation in which real actions are carried out—a situation in which the activities, behaviours, reactions and emotions of the spectators become an integral part of the performance event.

4  Doris Kolesch

Immersion and immersive performances Given the increasing prevalence and popularity of immersive performances, I would next like to identify similarities and differences between quotidian and aesthetic experiences of immersion, as well as to analyse established concepts of immersion. Additionally, in the following I enquire into the seismographic significance of immersion for our contemporary society and its attendant and fundamental changes to the spectator’s position, role and activity. Immersive situations and settings are not limited to aesthetic forms like theatre, performance art, film, videos, computer games and virtual-­ reality applications. They are an enduring aspect of every imaginable field of society and culture: from military use of immersive scenarios for war preparation and soldier training (Magelssen 2014; Alvarez 2018); to medical applications, various educational contexts like museum pedagogy, or the communication of diverse inventories of knowledge and experience; to economising strategies in the spheres of advertisement, consumerism and work; to the experience and entertainment industries (Bieger 2011). My hypothesis, in light of these diverse applications, is that immersion’s potential and our fascination with it are both rooted in how immersion represents a specific modality of experience, one that implies the fluidification of boundaries and (temporal) spaces. Immersion has to do with how we experience, understand, conceptualise—and sometimes fantasise about the blurring or even annihilation of—the boundaries between subject and media, between observer and surroundings, broadly understood. I would therefore suggest we treat immersion as a consistently relational concept, and thus attend especially to the thresholds, passages and transitions between different surroundings, environments or even worlds. Immersion derives from the Latin verb immergere, meaning originally the plunging or submersion of a body or object into a liquid, hence the figurative sense of becoming enveloped or engrossed in a certain situation. While in the German-speaking world, the term ‘immersion’ has only recently appeared in common usage, in English it has long been used to describe full absorption in (artificial) worlds or symbolic systems. Classic examples of immersive experiences include, for instance, Christian baptism or models of language acquisition that place a person in a foreign-language environment. In recent decades, discourses and theories of immersion were particularly virulent in relation to film, video, computer games, virtual reality and other media-technological developments. Of course, I must emphatically emphasise that immersion is by no means a sign of our current moment, and it is certainly not a characteristic unique to advanced media technology. On the contrary, we can be fully immersed in the substantially ‘old’ medium of a book, just as we can lose track of time and surroundings when contemplating a painting. These last two examples of the book and painting demonstrate the necessity of differentiating various forms and dimensions of immersion, especially

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because the term has been used to refer to the most diverse media contexts. As Burcu Dogramaci and Fabienne Liptay note, In the broadest sense, “immersion” describes a sensation that can equally arise while reading a book, watching a film, visiting an exhibition, or playing a computer game, namely, the impression of being placed in or surrounded by the space artificially created by the respective medium. This impression can be summoned by addressing both our perceptual apparatus as well as our imagination – two examples of entirely different modes of aesthetic experience. (2016, p. 11) Against this backdrop, experiences of immersion can be fundamentally described as mental-psychological or perceptual-physical situatedness (or both) in artificially and/or media-generated worlds. These two variations of immersion can be distinguished as follows. First, the more mental-­ cognitive dimension of immersion has always shaped the aesthetic practices of illusion-­making and deception. Characteristic of this kind of fictional immersion is that ‘a majority of the recipient’s attention is drawn away from the surroundings and directed entirely toward the artifact’ (Voss 2009, p. 127). Second, we can distinguish perceptual right up to full bodily experiences of immersion, such as those produced in immersive theatre, but also in immersive worlds of employment, consumerism and entertainment. In this variant, the observer, spectator or user represents an active and constitutive element of the environment in which they find themselves. The three examples mentioned initially all belong to this second type. For a number of years now, performance formats that call for the audience’s involvement, active participation, even partaking have become commonplace. Buzzwords like participation, interactive theatre, but also immersive theatre dominate the debates about this trend and polarise spectators and critics alike. These forms call to their audiences: join in, get involved, become active, you’re responsible for making the most out of your evening at the theatre. The dissolution of the boundary separating art from life, the aesthetic from the quotidian—a trope that has mobilised artistic fantasies and practices since the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century—appears to have finally come to fruition. Spectators equipped with cell phones, radios or headsets are led through a city or theatre building, following the directions of an unknown voice (as in the walks by LIGNA, Rimini Protokoll or Janet Cardiff and George ­Bures Miller). Or else they can climb into the set to eat and chat together with the performers and other spectators, such as in Showcase Beat Le Mot’s Cooking in Crisis. She She Pop’s Warum tanzt ihr nicht? (Why aren’t you dancing?) calls on visitors to dance with the performers, although they also leave space for the indecisive to stay standing in a corner, watching the others dance—which, of course, does not promise a solution to the dilemma

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‘to join or not to join’ if it evokes embarrassing memories from bygone school dances. In other productions, spectators can become a theatre audience, at once ironically distanced and legitimately involved, as they observe the events, rules of play and ways of behaving at a real Daimler-Benz shareholder meeting, such as in Rimini Protokoll’s Die Hauptversammlung (Shareholders’ Meeting). Theatre visitors can, as in the production The Money by Kaleider, either be present as silent witnesses or, as benefactors, help decide what to do with the box-office proceeds, although being a supposedly uninvolved silent witness comes at a higher price. Finally, in the works of artist collective SIGNA, who have been evolving and exploring the immersive potential of performative installations in bold and innovative ways for over a decade, visitors are assigned different roles and positions at the beginning of each production, for instance as a patient in Ventestedet (Waiting Room, 2014) or in Söhne und Söhne (Sons and Sons, 2015) as new employees at a firm of the same name, sent through various departments and graded, as if at an assessment centre. Immersive theatre forms often activate urban spaces that were not established as places for art, such as empty factories or office buildings. They combine performance models from theatre, installation and performance art with pop cultural elements from film, television and the entertainment industry, but also from the world of employment, the healthcare system, psychological practices, the justice system and bureaucracy, and the sex industry. In densely atmospheric and thoroughly designed spaces, accessible parallel worlds are generated. They are staged so completely as to create a perceptual impression not only visually, but also acoustically, olfactorily, gustatorily and materially, in terms of used objects, materials and textures. Visitors often spend several hours in these worlds, during which they can (and sometimes must) interact with performers and other visitors. Put succinctly, we could formulate a concept of these diverse forms and characteristics of immersive theatre as follows. Immersive theatre mobilises (in the most encompassing sense) the spectator, and it does away with the stage as a clearly delimited, special place: it totalises the stage. The title of this volume, Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances: Commit Your­ self!, calls both these aspects to mind. For the multitude of immersive experiences offered by both art and daily life in the digital age, the role of space, spatial positioning and thus also bodily situatedness is central. In comparison to ‘classical’ forms of immersion in painting, film or literature, we can single out one particularity of current and especially successful immersive forms in both art and culture as the combination of perceptual and psychological immersion: a combination of corporeal-physiological and mental-cognitive experiences of boundary dissolution (Entgrenzungserfahrungen). These immersive formats and situations thus undermine established understandings of space as a delimited, container-like location, as well as the fixed perspectives and positions

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that accompany such understandings. These formats and situations fluidify spaces, boundaries and perspectives, as illustrated in the following example from the mediatised culture of daily life. Pokémon Go In summer 2016, reports began to accumulate about young (and not so young) people behaving peculiarly. Smartphones in hand, they trekked through train stations and pedestrian zones, gathered in markets and town squares, blocked bridges and sidewalks, and stormed businesses, sometimes churches, and other buildings both public and private. It wasn’t a new form of protest, nor was it a demonstration for a particular political or social cause. It was simply Pokémon Go players in search of ‘Pocket Monsters’, a.k.a. Pokémon. In the late 1990s, Pokémon was one of the most successful video games for Nintendo Gameboy, having now sold more than 200 million copies. These little monsters had their own television series, multiple films and an exceedingly successful card collecting game. Now Pokémon Go had mobilised the cute monsters and the players too: using GPS, smartphones registered the exact location of the user and, with the help of augmented reality technology, used active phone cameras to overlay a view of the real world with images of the little monsters waiting to be captured by the player. Players could only see Pokémon in their proximity. For all intents and purposes, the virtual monsters reacted to the real environment, for instance, with water Pokémon tending to appear close to rivers and lakes. In Düsseldorf, the Girardet Bridge had to be temporarily closed to traffic due to the number of players. In Lower Saxony, there were reports that teenagers absorbed in the game had strayed onto military training grounds and, with eyes glued to their displays, got themselves into a shooting drill with live ammunition. And in the USA—a country never lost for a little didactic advice—an illuminated sign informed highway drivers: ‘POKEMON GO IS A NO-GO WHILE DRIVING’. The more or less droll anecdotes of everything that can happen while playing Pokémon Go (from traffic collisions to trespassing to stumbling upon a corpse!) are legion and spur on the discursive hysteria and media hype that has always accompanied technology-­produced experiences of immersion, whether created by the panoramas and dioramas of the nineteenth century, the films of the twentieth century or the virtual reality of the recent decades.

Immersion as symptom of neo-liberal capitalism Exemplary of countless further examples, Pokémon Go shows that immersion has become a central component in the all-encompassing mediatisation of our lived reality. The arts often anticipate technical, media and social

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developments, testing them out in experimental settings, but from a cultural historical perspective, immersive spaces and situations were first anticipated in sacred spaces, and then, beginning in the nineteenth century, primarily in spaces of consumerism. Literature of the period testifies to the fascination and intoxication felt by contemporaries of the first department stores, as they invited customers to positively surround themselves in the excess of products on offer and display. A reason for our current fascination with immersion is undoubtedly its connection to the newest technologies, such as the Oculus Rift virtual-reality glasses, available to the general public for purchase since 2016. Immersive techniques and experiences have been accompanied by one consistent accusation: that they stupefy and manipulate. Regardless of whether the immersion in question is that of a cinematic world, the ­atmosphere of a shopping mall or a computer game strategy, the perceiving and experiencing subject is in many cases described as one not really capable of eluding immersion’s seductive pull, or even someone rendered wellnigh impotent in the face of it. I am deeply sceptical of this position, although I also have no wish to harken back to ideas of the supposedly autonomous, sovereign and potent subject. It is undeniable that the critical potential of an aesthetics of immersion is yet to be developed. A starting point in our networked, globalised world could be that artistic configurations of immersive spaces can sensitise us to the fact that there is no longer some Archimedean-like point for a world view, no singular correct position from which to see the whole. It can sensitise us to how entangled the plurality of legitimate perspectives and positions is, to how some of those positions are even in conflict with one another. The ­familiar condemnation of immersion is rooted in a thoroughly dominant conceptual tradition that regards immersion as an extension, even totalisation, of aesthetic illusion. This ignores an alternative conceptual understanding, one particularly established in theatre and media studies, which posits immersion not as unreflective absorption, not as a naive amalgamation with a world formed through media, but rather precisely as the interruption of aesthetic illusion. I would like to emphasise this understanding of immersion as an interruption of aesthetic illusion, insofar as a moment of distance, of rupture, seems to me to be indispensable to the experience of deep submersion, of intensive immersion. In other words, I conceptualise immersion not as a supposedly total absorption in an environment constructed in one way or another, but rather precisely as the dynamic of oscillating between embeddedness and distance, of submersion and surfacing. Hence, my emphasis on immersion as an experience of a threshold, of a transition. Nevertheless, part of the discursive mythology surrounding immersion tends to emphasise one-sided experiences of being absorbed in another world while often downplaying the moment of distance and consciousness of framing essential for that experience. It is especially in artistic contexts— and this is perhaps one of their (self-)reflective strengths—that a simplistic

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indulgence in illusion, a readiness to be seduced and surrender to the pull of illusion without distance, does not provide an adequate explanation of immersive situations and experiences. Immersion is much more about a subtle choreography of diving in and surfacing, about the play of illusionment and disillusionment. Next to their perceptual intensity, a distinguishing characteristic of many contemporary immersive experiences is also their physical-corporeal dimension, whether it creates disorientation, dizziness, shock or (the impression of perfect) bodily control. Here again there are media- and genre-specific as well as historical distinctions to be drawn. Extra-aesthetic immersive worlds of consumerism, employment and computer games primarily seek to promote feelings of self-assurance, subjective potency, sometimes even narcissistic hubris. In contrast, artistic designs tend with striking frequency to bring the dystopian, unsettling and jarring aspects of immersion to the fore. Their peculiar nature and virulence stem precisely from their capacity to conjure and point out—to make experiential—the fragile and opaque interface between art, mediating technologies and daily life. But both artistic and technical developments alone seem inadequate to explain the contemporary fascination with immersion. Why is it, then, that immersion is currently so attractive and omnipresent that billions of dollars and Euros are being invested in immersive applications in areas as disparate as the military, technology, science, education, (social) media and entertainment? The seismographic significance of immersion for the present cannot, I think, be reduced to a quality often ascribed to immersive situations: that of a quasi-anticipatory obedience towards the demands placed on the subject by neo-liberal capitalism. As accurate as considerations of immersive theatre’s neo-liberal dimensions are, they fail as an explanation. Adam Alston argues, for instance, that these artistic formats in some ways provoke and train subjective skills like risk-taking, decision-making and taking responsibility for one’s own experience, and that audiences are ultimately rehearsing economically and socially hegemonic forms of narcissism and neo-liberal entrepreneurial participation: ‘Immersive theatre encourages opportunism, the perception of personal autonomy and favours those who have the capacity to act upon it’ (Alston 2013, p. 137; see also Alston 2016). With this, Alston joins the culturally pessimistic choir of those who equate immersion with the loss of critical distance and thus with the loss of critical capacities of reflection and judgement. As explained above, however, if immersion is not simply to be understood as the extension and totalisation of aesthetic illusion, but rather as its interruption and rupture, then immersion would be conceptualised less as a total, overwhelming spectacle of absorption or amalgamation, and much more as a way of making the observer conscious of their specific point of observation, of drawing attention to their critical relationship to a representation and its formal, genre- and media-specific conditions. With respect to contexts of artistic mediation, Burcu Dogramaci and

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Fabienne Liptay write: ‘we understand immersion as the result of a complex framework of reception within which the interface functions as the actual site of historically shifting relations between media und users’ (­Dogramaci & Liptay 2016, p. 10).

In the thick of things (instead of across from them) From my perspective, these ‘historically shifting relations’ are both characterised and generated by two related and far-reaching developments in the last decades, which, in conclusion, I would now like to identify and consider for their impact on spectatorship: 1 For one thing, we are dealing with the slow emergence of an as yet unclear new model of the relationship between humans and the world. If, since the Enlightenment at the latest, a surveying gaze and rational, calculating, supposedly disinterested kind of observation were dominant, then the recent decades have seen the thorough thematisation and critique of this perspective’s one-sidedness and problematic nature from a plethora of positions and fields. A few, typical examples would include the growing interest in emotional intelligence, a new emphasis on empathy, intuitive decision-making, and affective relations and resonance not only in human relationships, but also in political, economic, scientific and educational contexts. It seems to me that from scientific, political economic and cultural studies perspectives, there are three phenomena that have in the last decades fundamentally shaped our view of the world and our attempt to position ourselves in and with it: climate change, globalisation and postcolonial thought. Characteristic of all three is that they do not formulate and explain from, nor can they be shaped by, an outside perspective that lays claim to a supposedly singular and all-seeing positionality. Instead, they accept and embrace positionalities situated within a multiply networked complexity, characterised also by an openness to the simultaneity of multiple, diverse ways of seeing. Of course, in light of numerous contemporary challenges, we have in no way overcome the dichotomous dualisms that structure our thoughts and deeds, but there does seem to be a clear growth in awareness of the interdependency and reciprocal complexity of subject and world, of the familiar and the foreign. 2 That great, rational and distanced overview that is announced time and again and that constantly falls short is closely related to certain cultural techniques and technologies. For instance, if in earlier centuries these were the perspective drawing with a single vanishing point and the bird’s-eye view, then the start of the twenty-first century offers a paradoxical, highly realistic and absolutely phantasmagoric continuation:

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the combination of Google Earth (overview) and its capacity to zoom in from above on and into concrete locations of a political event, a military conflict, a natural catastrophe or a social situation (immersion). With this comes the paradoxical promise of overview and simultaneous embeddedness, of critical distance and perceptual, affective and corporeal immersion in a situation. From my perspective, this complex constellation makes immersion—in daily life as in art—so attractive. It promises insight through contact, competence and mastery not by increasing but, on the contrary, by eliminating distance. It promises, paradoxically, to simultaneously separate and make fluid medium and world. These are the contours of immersion’s potential, which ought neither to be demonised nor glorified tout court or independently of situation and context; immersion and its implicit politics must be observed with attention to gradations of difference. The various influences of immersion on the positioning, role and activity of spectators and audiences are the subject of this volume.

Staging spectators The fundamental change in spectatorship in and through immersive processes must be situated in a broader diagnosis of our contemporary context. In their study of reception processes, sociologists Nicolas Abercrombie and Brian J. Longhurst find that in contemporary society, each and every public is an instance of what they term ‘diffused audience’. Being part of an audience is no longer reserved for select situations and locations (such as theatres, auditoriums, cinemas or sport arenas); rather, it is a nearly permanent condition (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998). In Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (Society of Singularities), Andreas Reckwitz also stresses: ‘In the mode of singularisation, life is no longer simply lived; it is curated. The subject of late modernity performs (according to demand) his special self before others who become the audience’ (Reckwitz 2017, p. 9). Thus, according to Reckwitz, being an audience is endemic in a society of singularities—a society that he characterises as affective. We all are and act, always and everywhere, as spectators and audience because ‘the special’ must fundamentally integrate the real or imagined gaze of the audience or the real or imagined gaze of other co-performers/spectators in the production of Specialness and Singularity. Against this backdrop, it is particularly significant that contemporary theatre productions are increasingly playing with the involvement of their audiences. Immersive and participatory forms of theatre in particular allow audiences and performers to interact in a shared performance space. Audience members are no longer only spectators and listeners; they are invited to be multisensory active witnesses, participants, accomplices or

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co-­performers. By inviting them to join the action, immersive and participatory forms of theatre not only reconfigure conventional relationships between spectators and performers, but also transform the spectator and their role as spectator into central themes. Staging Spectators in Immersive Performances discusses forms and concepts of contemporary spectatorship and explores various modes of audience participation in theory as well as in practice. The volume also reflects on what new terms and methods must be developed in order to address the theoretical challenges of contemporary forms of theatre and performance. After all, current performances are not alone in their rethinking of the audience and its freedom of action. Theatre and performance studies must also develop correspondingly new and different understandings of the audience and its activities as integral elements of any performance. The first part of the volume, ‘Mobile Audiences’, focuses on how audiences move and on various strategies for mobilising them. How can we analyse new modes of active, physical movement in performance spaces? What impact do they have on the participants’ freedom and power to act? Furthermore, the influence of new media technologies raises the question: how have spectators’ perceptual habits changed and what impact do those changes have on audience expectations for contemporary theatre forms in a world on the move? The contributions of Barbara Gronau, Benjamin Wihstutz and Lisbeth Groot Nibbelink emphasise above all the relevance of spatial aspects and configurations for mobilising the audience. Their focus is less on the topics that have, until now, tended to dominate debates, such as participation, capacity and freedom to act, and manipulation of the spectator. Instead, they focus on environments, both as a concept and artistic genre, and ‘nomadic’ movements and perspectives, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. In Chapter 2, Barbara Gronau traces forms of spatial transgressions from the panorama, through the art actions of the avant-garde and neo-avantgarde, up to theatre installations. She defines the latter as complex performances of architecture, media, materials, sounds, objects and subjects in a spatial setting through which the spectator must move. She then differentiates the various forms of movement, such as paths and routes through the space, the strolling of the flâneur or even getting lost. On the basis of SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs and Thomas Bellinck’s House of European History in Exile, Benjamin Wihstutz’s chapter considers spatial positionings that appear as displacements—not only of objects but also, and above all, of perspectives and frames. Signa Köstler of the performance collective SIGNA speaks with Theresa Schütz about her attitude towards spectators as well as her experiences with audience reactions and how SIGNA performers deal with them. She situates these experiences in the context of an overarching motivation to explore human coexistence.

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In Chapter 5, Lisbeth Groot Nibbelink highlights the flexible constellations of performers, spectators and space in immersive theatre forms. Using three different works as examples (No Man’s Land by Dries Verhoeven, A Game of You by Ontroerend Goed and Cinema Imaginaire by Lotte von den Berg), she explores how performers, spectators and space ‘enter into composition with one another’ in each. Moreover, she locates the double potential of immersion in these works as their capacity to prompt the spectator’s self-reflexivity and generate affective bonds between spectator and both the subject matter and performers. Offering an art-historical perspective, Kerstin Schankweiler traces how the ‘beholder’ became a topic in the visual arts in the 1960s, when museums faced mounting criticism for processes of hybridisation and the questioning of institutional norms. She notes that, in theatre as well, the spectator seems to become a topic of debate when established forms of spectatorship slowly begin to disappear. Against this backdrop, she suggests understanding immersive theatre as a form of institutional critique that questions the framing and structuring of theatre as an institution. The second part, ‘Researching Spectatorship’, focuses on methodological questions for research on being a spectator in immersive and participatory forms of theatre. How can we develop new methods in order to grasp complex, relational performance situations? How can we integrate observations of and by audiences and empirically gathered evidence in performance analyses? And how might this broaden theatre and performance studies approaches oriented towards reception and the aesthetics of effect? What methodological impulses from other disciplines can be adapted for audience research? Part II begins with artist Julian Hetzel in conversation with Theresa Schütz as he reflects on ‘different grades of spectatorship’ and the relationship between spectating and witnessing in his works The Automated Sniper, Still, Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory and The Benefactor. Hetzel discusses his understanding of art and the role of the artist, as well as how his work attempts to forge connections between different and usually separated contexts and worlds. In Chapter 8, Matthew Reason does not ask what performances do to spectators but rather what spectators do to performances. In the context of his participatory audience research, he develops the concept of the committed return, which enables the spectator to affirm their own reception experience, to make it part of their own total experience and to enter into dialogue with it. In the face of the challenges posed by immersive performances for theatre studies, Stefanie Husel makes a case for an approach that is itself both immersed and distanced in order to research spectator experiences. Using empirical and ethnographic methods, she analyses Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess—a performance that is more postdramatic than immersive— to show how precisely synchronised the audience’s actions and reactions are with the events on stage and how coordinated spectator behaviour is with

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both the staged actions and the audience as a whole. Her contribution shows how broad and diverse audience participation can be, even in a rather classical performance, thereby drawing attention to how problematic it is to over hastily ascribe special forms of participation to immersive in comparison to conventional performances. So too does Janelle Reinelt’s ‘Parsing “Commitment”’ join with many other chapters in this book in emphasising that no sharp line can be drawn between traditional and immersive performances, pointing out both the opportunities and limitations of conceptual ordering and classifying. Until now, spectator experience has primarily been a matter of conjecture and speculation. Reinelt, however, reports on her research project ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’, which she carried out as part of the British Theatre Consortium in the framework of a Cultural Value Project for the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Using Ontroerend Goed’s Fight Night as an example, her chapter demonstrates the productivity of joining qualitative and quantitative research methods, especially in the field of audience research, such as through audience surveys conducted both immediately following a performance and two months later. While directly after a performance, the audience tended to emphasise sensory, affective and physical intensity and quality, surveys on the same performance conducted two months later tended to highlight the cognitive dimensions of theatre and its capacity to stimulate ideas. As a future agenda for audience research, Reinelt opts for a mix of methods, which would offer the opportunity to move beyond the individual reception experience of the informed theatre scholar that currently dominates analyses in theatre and performance studies. Sociologist Antje Kahl brings Part II to a close with a similar perspective. She emphasises the potential of empirical audience research, stressing at the same time that the relationship between theatre studies and sociology is not to be seen as a one-way street, but rather that both disciplines can learn and profit from each other reciprocally. Theatre and performance studies can draw on both the qualitative and quantitative methodologies of social sciences, and sociology stands to gain by bringing the performative methods of theatre studies into the social sciences. The third part, ‘Questions of Power – Politics of Affect in Immersive Performances’, thematises new modes of partaking and ways of spectating in contemporary art. The contributions in this section offer an aesthetic analysis of effect (Wirkungsästhetik) within the context of contemporary experience industries, which conceptualise the spectator as a prosumer who is systematically made responsible for achieving their own profound experience (of self)—an experience both promised and deferred. Is a recipient who consumes what they themselves produce still actually a recipient? What does the increase in delegated performance formats mean for production and working conditions in the field of art? How much pressure and how

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much freedom are contained in the imperative to participate? Furthermore, Part III raises the question of whether immersive theatre forms train their participants in the sense of rehearsing neo-liberal techniques of self-staging and self-optimisation, or if they create an opportunity for critical reflection on these very mechanisms. What role do affective dynamics play in a theatre of experience that involves the spectator in social interactions in which they are simultaneously actor and spectator of their own behaviour (and role)? Do contemporary immersive theatre forms have an inherent political potential, in the sense that they offer an experience that subjects power relationships, reality constructs, and one’s own involvement in normative, symbolic and affective regimes to a critical gaze? Using examples of two feminist performances, Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else (2013) by Adrienne Truscott and Triple Threat (2016) by Lucy McCormick, Chapter 12 takes up how, in these performances, it is precisely the limitations of certain forms of audience participation that enable the performances to sensitise spectators to democratic values and the necessity of fighting inequality. Jen Harvie analyses how both performances not only win their audiences over as accomplices in the fight against gender inequality but also demonstrate how the audience is itself complicit in quotidian forms of misogyny. In Chapter 13, Gareth White analyses the complex affective processes that can be triggered by participatory performances. Anagram’s Nightwatchers and Jamal Harewood’s The Privileged serve as examples for unravelling and exploring the specific being together of performance, of how bodies interact with other bodies. In a conversation with Theresa Schütz, artist Mona el Gammal discusses her narrative spaces, such as House Number Zero and Rhizomat, which she emphatically understands as laboratories for the future. In these spaces, visitors have to leave their comfort zones for extended periods of time. With Rhizomat, Mona el Gammal also experimented with an online forum that aimed to supplement and expand the actual performance experience. Theresa Schütz begins her remarks on ‘Immersive Guilt Factories’ by differentiating immersive theatre from immersion as a cultural phenomenon and technique of control. Accordingly, her analysis of Dries Verhoeven’s Guilty Landscapes, episode II and Julian Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory is less concerned with questions of artistic genre than with immersion as a specific form and modality of (aesthetic) experience. Her chapter asks: by means of what aesthetic strategies does each work provoke feelings of guilt? What specific kinds of guilty feelings are produced, and what do these feelings say about the relationship between subject and society? In pursuing these questions, she shows that immersion cannot simply be defined as the state of being enveloped in an artificially created situation, but rather that it also allows one’s own embeddedness in emotional and socio-economic power regimes to be graphically showcased and reflected upon. In their

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provocation of feelings of guilt, Verhoeven’s Guilty Landscapes and Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory thus also carry with them a cognitive and (self-) reflexive dimension of emotional re-enactment. Chapter 16 with Rainer Mühlhoff’s thoughts on ‘Dark Immersion’ brings Part III on ‘Questions of Power – Politics of Affect in Immersive Performances’ to a close. In response to SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs, he considers immersion not in terms of the spectator’s experience, but rather raises the question of how performers might become immersed in the represented world: can it be that, with time, the institutions, asymmetries and power structures represented in SIGNA’s performances transgress beyond the limits of the fiction for the performers, thus becoming part of their psychological and affective reality? This volume has its roots in an international conference that was organised by the research project ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theater’ under my leadership and as part of the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies. Dynamics of Social Coexistence in Mo­ bile Worlds at Freie Universität Berlin.3 From the perspective of the social sciences and humanities, the Collaborative Research Center Affective So­ cieties, funded by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), investigates the specific affective and emotional dynamics linked to the diverse mobilities and dissolutions of borders in contemporary societies. What significance do these dynamics develop for actors and their coexistence in both communities and societies? With the key concept of affective relationality, the Collaborative Research Center focuses on relational and situational aspects of feeling phenomena. This corresponds to a shift in accent away from the individualistic approaches that dominate large parts of current neurological and psychological research on emotions. The notion of affective relationality is highly significant for theatre and performance studies because a theatrical situation—the specific ‘being together in performances’, to quote Gareth White—consists of complex networks of affective relationalities. Thus, immersive theatre can be considered as an exemplary arena, as a laboratory for the mobilisation, hybridisation and transformation of repertoires of emotion under contemporary conditions. Against this backdrop, concepts of immersion are highly relevant because they allow us to poignantly grasp and analyse experiences that can be viewed as manifestations of affective relationality in the strongest possible sense. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote in his famous Critique of Pure Reason: ‘Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’. We could reformulate this insight for theatre and performance studies as follows: theoretical concepts without close contact to artistic practices and aesthetic experiences are empty, aesthetic intuitions without theoretical concepts are blind. This explains why we inserted interviews with the artists Signa Köstler from renowned artistic collective

Immersion and spectatorship  17

SIGNA, Julian Hetzel and Mona el Gammal in our volume to enter into or continue a dialogue between art and scholarly research. This interest in bridging the gap between artistic practice and academic discourse also resulted in the collaboration with Tiziana Beck and Johanna Benz, two graphic artists. Their concise drawings, one preceding each chapter, act as a visual counterpart and comment on the scholarly texts and interviews. Translated from German into English by Jessica Piggott.

Notes 1 Available at: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/michael-pinskypollution-pods. 2 Comprehensive information about DAU Freiheit was available on the website of Berliner Festspiele until October 2018 (see https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/ de/aktuell/festivals/dau_freiheit/dau_freiheit_1.php). Since November 2018, this page is no longer available. 3 My thanks go to the German Science Foundation (DFG) and the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin for funding the research project ‘Reenacting Emotions. Strategies and Politics of Immersive Theater’. It is always a pleasure and inspiration to work with our committed fellow researchers at the CRC ­Affective Societies. I also want to express my gratitude to my research associates Theresa Schütz and Sophie Nikoleit whose commitment, competence and enthusiasm are crucial to the success of our research project.

References Abercrombie, N & Longhurst, B 1998, Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Perfor­ mance and Imagination, Sage, London. Alston, A 2013, ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’, in Performance Research vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 128–138. Alston, A 2016, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Par­ ticipation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Alvarez, N 2018, Immersion in Cultural Difference. Tourism, War, Performance, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Bieger, L 2011, ‘Ästhetik der Immersion: Wenn Räume Wollen. Immersives Erleben als Raumerleben’, in G Lehnert (ed), Raum und Gefühl. Der Spatial Turn und die neue Emotionsforschung, pp. 75–95. Transcript, Bielefeld. Dogramaci, B & Liptay, F 2016, ‘Introduction’, in F Liptay & B Dogramaci (eds), Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, pp. 1–17. Brill Rodophi, Leiden. Habekuss, F 2018, ‘Ein Iglu voller Delhi’, in Die Zeit no. 19, 3. Mai 2018, p. 36. Magelssen, S 2014, Simming. Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Reckwitz, A 2017, Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. Voss, Ch 2009, ‘Fiktionale Immersion’, in G Koch & Ch Voss (eds), ‘Es ist, als ob’: Fik­ tionalität in Philosophie, Film- und Medienwissenschaft, pp. 127–138. Fink, München.

Part I

Mobile audiences

Chapter 2

Unexpected encounter On installation art as immersive space Barbara Gronau

Magic realism and the panorama I vividly remember my first aesthetic immersive experience. It took place in a small East German town called Bad Frankenhausen in Thuringia. Propelled by its dying breaths, the German Democratic Republic unveiled its first and only monumental panorama painting – ironically just a few weeks before it would cease to exist for good. Over the course of more than 12 years, painter Werner Tübke from Leipzig had created one of the world’s largest panel paintings on a canvas that spanned 1,722 square metres and weighed several tons. The work entitled Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland (Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany) had been commissioned by the socialist state in an attempt to align itself with the historical tradition of the anti-feudal movement of the early modern period.1 Nowadays the painting is considered an important part of European cultural heritage and attracts millions of visitors every year.2 A state-commissioned battle epic in the form of a monumental panorama painting is hardly ripe with the promise of innovative aesthetic effects, especially as the immensity of scale as an example of socialist realism’s visual vocabulary had been disavowed by the 1980s. Upon visiting the round building that houses the painting, however, one witnesses a startling transformation: that of a painting transforming into magical space. After the visitors climb the stairs and enter the inner space of the rotunda, they find themselves surrounded by carpet-muffled nothingness, stepping into a space that might euphemistically be described as a drab lecture room. But as they take a seat in the middle of the room to listen to a guide’s explanations, all the while wondering where the painting might be, the lighting changes and with it the whole room. Soon the visitors find themselves enveloped in complete silence and darkness. Within the next 60 seconds, the wall begins to glow, and shapes, colours and human forms appear, merging into an overwhelming panorama. Contrary to expectations, the scene surrounding them does not show armed peasants or historical battle tableaux, but rather a panoramic (in both senses of the word) depiction of the early modern period. Historical figures like Martin Luther, Erasmus von Rotterdam

22  Barbara Gronau

Figure 2.1  Werner Tübke, Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland, 1983– 87, oil on canvas, 14 × 123 m, Panorama Museum, Bad Frankenhausen. Source: © VG Bild-Kunst

and Thomas Münzer are portrayed alongside allegories of religion, biblical motifs and violent scenes. It is impossible to impose a linear narrative on the painting – instead the gaze wanders from one mysterious figure to the next, delaying any conclusive attempts at sensemaking. Stylistically Werner Tübke was inspired by Breughel and Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, and he, too, placed his bets on a ‘magical’ rather than a socialist ‘realism’ (Beaucamp 1992, pp. 53f.) (Figure 2.1). The Peasants’ War Panorama was able to achieve what it had set out to do – to orchestrate an effective and engaging encounter with history in a fascinating way. By renouncing the heroism prevalent in nineteenth-century historical painting, the work manifests a mysterious and allegorical condensation of history. Through an act of optical illusion, the room opens up. A  theatrical staging that makes the invisible visible: out of the dark, the painting takes centre stage. Visitors are surprised to find that there is something there in the darkness, something that has in fact been there all along even though they did not notice it before. The painting in Bad ­Frankenhausen is aesthetically relevant less in the sense of successfully creating a perfect illusion than in its clear aim to cognitively activate and engage its visitors. The work does not target passively absorbed spectator subjects – instead, it offers an incentive to ask questions and explore.

Notes on the history of installation art The panorama is generally understood as one of the earliest formats of immersive art. Over the course of 200 years, the perspectival panorama

Unexpected encounter  23

painting has been the medium through which the fundamentals of immersive aesthetics have found expression. Complex technological processes transport an artistically created world into the here and now, bringing it to life in a 360 degree space of illusion.3 Recurring themes include distant landscapes and major historical events, and so the panorama merges colonial phantasms with historical narratives, manifesting them in an expansive architecture. It is a medium that oscillates between ‘art, education, political propaganda and entertainment’ (Grau 2001, p. 60), interlacing spatial and temporal aspects in the process. Throughout the twentieth century, the ‘desire to be in the picture’ (Grau 2000) that reveals itself in panoramas has resulted in experimentation with innovative space-related strategies of visualisation and representation. Especially film and the computer have transpired as heirs to the illusionistic legacy of the medium. Early twentieth-century theatre, too, saw the emergence of new spatial concepts that were looking to expand the traditional proscenium stage into the auditorium, or abolish the separation of actor and spectator altogether. Adolphe Appia’s stagings in Hellerau (1912), Friedrich Kiesler’s Raumbühne (Space Stage, 1924) or Walter Gropius’ Totaltheater-Entwurf (Total Theatre Concept, 1926) are examples of attempts to do without the rigidity and closedness of traditional stage forms. The theatre avant-garde was questing for dynamic spaces that would allow for expansive physical movement, mass choreographies, film projections and complex light designs. With the neo-avant-garde movements in the latter half of the twentieth century, these tendencies evolved into a more radical ‘rediscovery’ of space as a zone of movement, confusion and exertion of political influence. Tracking a development from the critique of ostensibly neutral White Cube spaces in the 1960s, to more performative processes finding their way into art forms like Happening, Fluxus, Actionism or Body Art, fine arts and theatre appear to be merging more and more. Whether it took the form of an ‘action’ (Viennese Actionism), ‘event’ (Fluxus movement) or ‘situation’ (Situationist International), at the centre was always the artist as active agent in a scene, usually infused with a certain level of criticality. It was not only the artists but also the audience who were to rise above their position as silent witnesses and evolve into actively participating co-performers, as contemplative meditation was replaced by physical address, sensual seduction, latent threats or active involvement as new modes of experience. The American artist Allan Kaprow was fittingly direct in his 1966 programme to do away with the audience altogether: ‘[…] audiences should be eliminated entirely […]. A group of inactive people in the space of a Happening is just dead space. […] Movements call up movements in response, whether on a canvas or in a happening’ (Kaprow 1966, p. 195f.). In an attempt to reanimate the ‘dead’ audience space, the audience are thus invited to participate in activities like writing, eating, trading or converting museum or urban spaces. Participation as a risk factor simultaneously

24  Barbara Gronau

potentiates the event-like character of every artistic encounter and will often lead to internal or external conflict. In light of this, Kaprow lamented: ‘the [visitors] came in and talked and moved about and sometimes were even aggressive and pulled things down and broke them…[finally] they ruined the composition’ (Kaprow, cited in Blunck 2001, p. 115). The longing for transgression manifests most distinctly in the work with new spaces that employs three primary strategies to achieve said transgression. First, the totalisation of the room, achieved through the dissolution of the separating dispositif that is the fourth wall in theatre, and through the expansion of classic object art into space-consuming works. In his aesthetic programme Was ich will (What I Want), Wolf Vostell describes it in the following words: ‘Art as space. Space as environment. Environment as happening. Happening as art. Art as life’ (Vostell 1970). In this context totalisation should be understood primarily as proliferation of the object. A  sculpture becomes a multimedia arrangement, and fixed stage sets are replaced by installations or pathways that only become accessible by one’s own movement in the space. Second, the contextualisation of the space and its inherent social, political and historical dimensions: that is an intense demand for criticality of the supposedly neutral exhibition spaces is born from the formation of Institutional Critique. By including non-art spaces, such as those used in land or site-specific art, the incontestable status of institutional spaces as the exclusive sites of artistic practice is called into question. Whether deserted landscape, public space or scenic tableau – space is no longer simply the neutral backdrop but rather becomes a subject for staging, reflecting and critical thinking. Early testament to a readiness for the designing and sculpting of surroundings is found in the formation of environments in the mid-1950s, when especially American artists withdrew from the symbolic space of the painting and ventured into real ambient space instead, experimenting with a totalisation of forms of artistic expression. In keeping with the motto ‘Go in, instead of look at’ (Kaprow, cited in Reiss 1999, p. 24), many environments are conceptualised as situations that span the entirety of the space, aimed at physical participation. They are characterised by ‘tactile-kinaesthetic modes of perception’ (Blunck 2001, p. 21) that may extend to the audience’s manifest actions. Environments are generally quiet situations, existing for one or for several persons to walk or crawl into, lie down or sit in it. One looks, sometimes listens, eats, drinks or rearranges the elements as though moving household objects. Other Environments ask that the visitor-participant recreate and continue the work’s inherent process. For human beings at least, all of these characteristics suggest a somewhat thoughtful and meditative demeanor. (Kaprow 1966, pp. 183–184)

Unexpected encounter  25

Kaprow’s creations are immersive insofar as they consider themselves ‘Total Art’: all artistic elements including colours, materials, light, sound, etc. come together and synergise, conveying themselves spatially and in total absence of hierarchical structures (Kaprow [1958] 1993). The audience are a part of the environment, and they effect a change in it through their clothes, their voices, their movements and actions in the space. In this case, immersion means involvement or even sharing in the work. A key difference between an environment and purely visual immersion aesthetics like the panorama is that the former requires the audience to have tactile-kinaesthetic experiences, and at times even perform actions. It follows that Kaprow equates the spatial form of the environment with Happenings’ action art, considering them two sides of the same coin, namely ‘extension’.4 Unlike (film-making’s) technical immersion aesthetics that are geared towards an awestruck subject who is overwhelmed by the spectacle, the artistic principle of the environment is borne by emancipatory intent. The audience is empowered rather than incapacitated. In this context creative authorship is a collective act and includes the participating members of the audience. In Allan Kaprow’s words, ‘Audiences should be eliminated entirely. A group of inactive people is just dead space’ (Kaprow 1966, p. 188). Abolishing the role of silent observer is done to turn performances into platforms for training democratic behaviour and direct participation.

Performed spaces: theatre installations With experimental, postdramatic forms of theatre on the rise, and installation art having become more established in the final 30 years of the twentieth century, performance formats that I have described as theatre installations (Gronau 2010) have developed and evolved. Theatre installations are all performances that stage architecture, media, materials, sounds, objects and subjects in a spatial setting that must be extrapolated by members of the audience moving through it. These spaces agglomerate media, materials and forms that are traditionally attributed to distinct art forms and perform the hybrid results. The audience move within installation-like or otherwise scenographically transformed spaces constructed with objects, seating, video screens, loudspeakers, props and scenic or architectural elements, and as they traverse the space they encounter performers engaged in play or dance, telling stories or simply being silently present yet engaging the audience in their actions. In some cases, the setting takes the shape of an obstacle course where different stations are connected via paths; in other cases, the rooms are more like labyrinths or otherwise closed-off worlds. Whether members of the audience pass from scene to scene or move freely, the performance comes to be through the movement of the audience in the space, and is bound to the direct interaction with the architecture, the landscape and the performers within it.5

26  Barbara Gronau

Though not all of them necessarily subscribe to the term, a large number of artistic works can be described as theatre installations, which are in turn distinguished by their different patterns of movement. The systematisation I propose puts the focus less on the respective production’s institutional or discursive framework than on its audience’s movement patterns or physical involvement.

Passing through: routes or station-by-station Numerous theatre installations are organised as pathways: members of the audience follow a sequential spatial arrangement that demands that they go from place to place, scene to scene and story to story, whether on their own or in a group. The fluid linear movement pattern does not necessarily follow a stepby-step narration as it was the case with station-by-station stagings of the Passion of Christ during the Middle Ages. In contemporary theatre installations, the audience will rarely find more than fragments or confusing, even contradictory, remnants of a narrative as they pass through a course. In Christoph Marthaler’s production Strasse der Besten (Street of the Best; Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin 1996) for example, actor Graham F. Valentine led an audience of approximately 30 people through the Volksbühne theatre while reciting texts from Germany travel guides and old theatre programmes. His performance was based on a ‘master of ceremonies’ who guides the guests through unfamiliar experiential territory, in this case the backstage, basement and passages of the old theatre (Dermutz 2000, p. 76). A radical version of this kind of theatre pathway is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s The Ghost Machine (Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin 2004), a hybrid of performance, room installation, video and sound experiment. One at a time, members of the audience are handed a hand camera and guided through the hallways and auditoriums of the old Hebbel theatre by a voice speaking into their ear via a microphone. The imperative to sync up events caught on camera with ones taking place in real time in the theatre resulted in a disorienting play oscillating between haunted house and paper chase. Beyond challenging the audience’s imagination, The Ghost Machine is directly entwined with the question, ‘What is theatre and where does it begin?’ (Lilienthal 2005). On the one hand, immersion here is the result of the technical dispositif that is able to merge the live space and the recorded space in my perception; on the other, it creates an arc of suspense over the course of which different parts of the story can eventually be resolved – the effect of this delay, however, is a tension that is not actually dispersed in final cohesion.

Strolling: expanse and scope A common type of theatre installation follows a system of simultaneity that is not bound to linear direction of movement. Instead, the audience find

Unexpected encounter  27

themselves in a delineated area that they must explore on their own, and the mode of delineation may range from more to less obviously noticeable: while in some cases the boundaries will be the architectural walls of a building, in others the audience moves within the symbolic boundaries of an urban district. What remains is the task to access a site as a theatre space via its passages and paths. The blurring of the lines between stage and audience space can often have confounding sensory effects. The audience is unable to shake the question of whether what we are experiencing is staged at all, and thus if and how we ought to respond to it. Works that turn urban space into their stage can be particularly confounding, as the site’s lifeworld characteristics dominate the experience of the performance.6 An example of this is Matthias Lilienthal’s theatre format X-Wohnungen (X-Apartments) that merges urban setting and theatre in this exact way, turning the audience into flâneurs who take situationist strolls through different zones that are interconnected by passages. According to Lilienthal, the presumed authenticity of such spaces, however, is owed to a type of voyeurism […] that can tip over into something unpleasant at times, motivated by curiosity and the search for a strange and exotic reality. But that isn’t the full extent of it: voyeurism is merely the access point, and soon the project throws the audience back onto themselves and their own structural privilege. (Lilienthal 2003, p. 12) When this happens immersion can turn into (in)voluntary experiences of intimate closeness. Theatre formats like X-Wohnungen transform the city into the stage, and are examples of how difficult it is to discern where the boundary between art and non-art truly lies. The immersion that these formats are able to effect is simultaneously and continuously being tested. They present an opportunity to examine and investigate the workings of the everyday within the perimeters of play, and to reflect the manifest rules of social communication.

Getting lost: nest and labyrinth While the rules of sequential and simultaneous action structure the audience’s patterns of movement into a spatio-temporal narration (as fragmented as they may be), labyrinth-like theatre installations adhere to a nestable logic. Such a logic foregrounds the interconnectedness of architectures or landscapes, simultaneously staged as the collision of different conceptual frameworks. In the case of the collective SIGNA (Signa and Arthur Köstler), their installations are artificial worlds in vacant lots, factories and warehouses that

28  Barbara Gronau

uncannily mimic closed-off microcosms like prisons, hospital wards or isolated village communities. Their installation Die Erscheinungen der Martha Rubin (The Rubytown Oracle; Berliner Theatertreffen, 2008) was much like a model town made up of driftwood shacks, trailers, a cafe, a  peep show and a dive bar. The audience entered this town as tourists – they had their passports checked and stamped before being made to watch an educational video – and rather than mere observers, they were directly addressed as co-performers of a performance with obscure rules. The blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, members of the audience and ‘real’ performers, dramatised and real situations that took place is exemplary of SIGNA’s total simulation machine. Last but not least, Christoph Schlingensief has created a series of theatre installations with elements from action art, installation art and film. He often works with spatial forms including the modular system or the nesting system, as for example in Kaprow City (Volksbühne am Rosa-­ Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin 2006) where stages were erected on the theatre stage. Schlingensief’s Animatograph is the prototype for such room-in-room constructions – a work for which Schlingensief brings video, revolve and installation together in a multimedia arrangement that integrates the audience spatially and medially, aiming for a ‘fusion of actor and audience in the space’ (Schlingensief 2005a, p. 6): I want to have the audience on the stage and lead them around. The people must be able to walk around. The monopoly of someone who is comfortably sat in their seat, observing, must be done away with. The audience must embark on an exploratory trip. All orientation is lost on the outward journey already, and when they arrive they lose whatever might be left of it […]. On the one hand you enter under the guise of total safety; on the other hand you feel a certain uneasiness toward what might happen. (Ibid.) The fact that the artist understands the Animatograph as a ‘living organism’ that ‘the audience rides about and lives on, and becomes a part of’ (Schlingensief 2005b) highlights the ways in which contemporary theatre installations continue in the tradition of neo-avant-garde discourses of transgression.

Unexpected encounter and the art of commitment In moments of tactile-kinaesthetic experience, sensory submersion, participation and playful activation, spatial layouts like those mentioned above allow for the audience to have an immersive experience. As the space unfolds as an arena of action, they encounter surprising situations that undermine

Unexpected encounter  29

all sense of security and confront them with the unexpected. It is in destabilising moments like these that the audience might glimpse the space’s truly explosive artistic potential – namely when the work’s frame, the rules and the roles of the performers are no longer knowable, it gives rise to new ways of questioning the role of the audience themselves. The reason for this is that modes of participation differ from interpreting at a distance because the former includes a certain element of risk that has a bearing on audience and performers alike. Both sides experience the performance as an encounter with an unfamiliar counterpart whose judgements and behaviours are not always predictable. The audience find themselves confronted with the issue of having abandoned the safety of low-lit auditorium anonymity, exposing themselves in front of not only the performers but the other members of the audience as well. The artists, on the other hand, can never be sure if the desired interaction will take place, and if it does, of the way that it might come about. It follows that participatory art forms are less a friendly playing with one another, and more of a potentially adversarial balancing of roles, frameworks and rules: what should I do? Do I really want to do that? Where are the limits? Who has control? The combination of installation-like spaces and the promise of participation have been present in theatre since the 1990s, executed by artists including SIGNA (Denmark/Austria), Ontroerend Goed (Belgium), Punchdrunk (UK) and Shunt (UK) who orchestrate a calculated play that employs the promise of intimate interaction between performers and audience, turning theatre into a space of unexpected encounters. Immersive theatre is born from the convergence of practically contrary production principles, namely illusionism and participation, the pleasure of make-believe while being involved oneself. The artistic potential lies in the tension that arises between these two paradoxical currents in art and theatre history. Questions concerning the role of the audience must be posed in new ways, too: does immersive theatre promote the audience’s full absorption and incapacitation, or is it rather a new and highly reflexive mode of aesthetic play? What experiences do the audience make and how are they framed? What opportunities does immersion present, and where are the limits? I want to close by describing an unexpected encounter that demanded a commitment to participation from me as an audience member – I was to take part in a performance with rules that were initially unknown to me and would unfold over the course of the action. Swiss artist Dominic Huber had built his multistorey installation HOTEL SAVOY into Berlin’s Hebbel theatre in October 2011 where members of the audience could take up lodging for hours at a time.7 Based on Joseph Roth’s novel of the same name, the installation consisted of a hotel’s various rooms and inhabitants, which the audience had to explore by climbing, crawling and knocking their way through the space. Some of the characters I met on my explorations included a beautiful nightclub singer who was eager to have a drink with me, a crew of tattooed men who wanted to play cards for money and a lying fortune teller.

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Eventually I found myself in front of a door, surrounded by the smell of food. I pushed it open and stepped inside a tiny apartment where three people were crouching on the ground, cooking. When I entered one of them got up, looked straight at me – and both of us froze: I had studied at the Institute of Theatre Studies with this woman who had been cast to play a Chinese illegal immigrant living in the squalid hotel. She kept her composure and invited me to join her in the upper bunk of her bed. I momentarily considered declining the offer but was quickly overcome by the feeling that I had a certain responsibility for the success of her performance, and so I climbed up. I was uncomfortable being in a sleeping space, and the dissonance was heightened by the fact that Miu would only speak to me in her mother tongue Chinese, making it impossible for me to either engage in a verbal exchange with her, or even have a quick private chat about the performance. Instead, I was sitting across from a character in whom the familiar and the unfamiliar had merged in confounding ways, constantly forcing me to (re)consider my stance towards her and triggering within me an ongoing switching between the role of theatre audience and a hotel guest. Rescue came in form of a game within the game: after a little while Miu brought out a wooden box filled with printed blocks of wood that she divided up between us while explaining the game to me in strict Chinese: I soon found myself playing Mahjong for the first and only time in my life. Concentrating on the rules of this game alleviated the pressure of the narrative action because I had discovered the clearly defined role of ‘player’ for myself. Whether my opponent was feeling particularly gracious, or whether I somehow did everything right (while not understanding what I was doing) – in the end I won, and left the small cookshop in my newly found role of the successful gambler.

Figure 2.2  H otel Savoy by Dominic Huber/blendwerk, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin. Source: © Dorothea Tuch

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Figure 2.3  H otel Savoy by Dominic Huber/blendwerk, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin. Source: © Dorothea Tuch

If immersive theatre relies on a silent commitment entered into by the different performers with each other, the aforementioned example might be read as an instance where the new agreement voids an other, older commitment between myself and the performer temporarily. Everyday ­commitments structured by regulations to do with a commonality of language, social manners and moments of distance remain as a foil to the encounter. They are replaced, however, by a stronger, theatrical framework that opens up a relative freedom only possible in the context of play; against the backdrop of this freedom and while being observed by a third party, two people can encounter each other as others. The performance bears characteristics of an experimental setting that is not aimed at reducing people but rather at an expansion of, or at least an experimentation with, their personality spectrum. The question of emotions is relevant insofar as involvement cannot be explained with the overwhelming illusionistic power of a technically perfect setting. I believe one of the greatest potentials of the research project Reenacting Emotions 8 lies in its ambition to understand events that take place in the context of an immersive production as driven by primarily emotional responses – rather than looking only at action or narration. But immersion is not synonymous with emotional access, and perception is not inherently coupled to feeling. In other words, instead of constant empathy and emotional absorption, it is the moment of disturbance, confusion or fear that is crucial in understanding the productions, as well as their dra­maturgical  evolution. Recording, understanding, describing and

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considering these emotional aspects of the work as a part of the analysis is the challenge faced by the field of theatre studies today. Translation from German into English by Jos Porath.

Notes 1 Numerous armed conflicts between revolting peasants and the royal army occurred in South and Central Germany from 1524 to 1526. The 1525 Battle of Frankenhausen, led by Thomas Münzer, was one of the bloodiest and marked the beginning of the end of the Peasants’ War. The revolting peasants were the first to fly the rainbow flag. See Vogler (2008). 2 Werner Tübke: Frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland, 1976–1987, measurements: 1400×12300 cm, Panorama Museum Bad Frankenhausen. Available from: http://www.panorama-museum.de/de/ [1 September 2017]. 3 Wolfgang Kemp refers to the panorama as a ‘site of the present’ (Kemp 1991, p. 82). 4 ‘Environments and Happenings are similar in essence. They are the passive and the active sides of the same coin that adheres to the principle of expansion’ (Kaprow [1966] 2003, p. 865). 5 Thomas Oberender mostly uses the term narrative spaces for room installations, though he will sometimes refer to scenes where medial or object-like traces appear instead of performers in some of his examples. Which forms and genres of narration are referred to in these instances is never specified (Oberender 2015). 6 See Sabine Schouten (2006) for a detailed account with particular attention paid to the atmospheric aspects. 7 Project website and press reviews available from: https://www.blendwerk.ch/­ hotel-savoy-berlin/ [1 September 2017]. 8 See project website for further details: http://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/­ teilprojekte/B/B03/index.html.

References Beaucamp, E 1992, ‘Zauberberg in Thüringen. Werner Tübkes Panoramagemälde über die Bauernkriege in Thüringen’, in kritische berichte vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 47–58. Blunck, L 2001, Between Object and Event. Partizipationskunst zwischen Mythos und Teilhabe, VG Kunst, Bonn. Dermutz, K 2000, Christoph Marthaler. Die einsamen Menschen sind die besonderen Menschen, Residenz-Verlag, Salzburg & Vienna. Grau, O 2000, Die Sehnsucht im Bild zu sein – zur Kunstgeschichte der virtuellen Re­ alität, Diss. Humboldt University, Berlin. Grau, O 2001, Virtuelle Kunst in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Visuelle Strategien, Reimer, Berlin. Gronau, B 2010, Theaterinstallationen. Performative Räume bei Beuys, Boltanski und Kabakov, Fink, Munich. Kaprow, A [1958] 1993, ‘Notes on the Creation of a Total Art’, in J Kelley (ed), Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Allan Kaprow, pp. 10–12. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Kaprow, A 1966, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings, HN Abrams, New York.

Unexpected encounter  33 Kemp, W 1991, ‘Die Revolutionierung der Medien im 19. Jahrhundert: Das Panorama’, in M Wagner (ed), Moderne Kunst I, pp. 75–93. Rowohlt, Reinbek. Lilienthal, M 2003, ‘Das voyeuristische Erschrecken. Zu Idee und Konzept von X-Wohnungen’, in A Schultze & S Wurster (eds), X-Wohnungen. Duisburg. Theater in privaten Räumen, pp. 9–12. Alexander Verlag, Berlin, Germany. Lilienthal, M 2005, ‘Playing Roulette with Reality. Ghost Machine at the Hebbel-­ Theater, Berlin.’ Available from: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/ ghostmachine.html [1 September 2017]. Oberender, T 2015, ‘Was ist denn hier passiert?’, in Monopol – Magazin für Kunst und Leben, February, pp. 76–81. Reiss, J H 1999, From Margin to Center. The Spaces of Installation Art, MIT press, Cambridge, MA. Schlingensief, C 2005a, Der Animatograph – Odins Parsipark, Programme, Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg, (eds). Available from: http://www.schlingensief.com/ downloads/parsipark_programmheft.pdf [15 November 2017]. Schlingensief, C 2005b, ‘Presseerklärung Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg’. Available from: http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt.php?id=t053 [1 September 2017]. Schouten, S 2006, ‘Was die Tasse zum Fliegen brachte. Zur wirklichkeitsgenerierenden Funktion atmosphärischer Einfühlung’, in E. Fischer-Lichte & B Gronau et al., (eds), Wege der Wahrnehmung. Authentizität, Reflexivität und Aufmerksam­ keit im zeitgenössischen Theater, pp. 48–57. Theater der Zeit, Berlin. Vogler, G (ed) 2008, Bauernkrieg zwischen Harz und Thüringer Wald, Steiner, Stuttgart. Vostell, W 1970, Aktionen: Happenings und Demonstrationen seit 1965, Rowohlt, Reinbek.

Chapter 3

Doggies, masters and the end of the European Union On immersive theatre installations by SIGNA and Thomas Bellinck Benjamin Wihstutz Two examples Wir Hunde/Us Dogs is a performance installation directed by the a­ rtist couple Signa and Arthur Köstler, aka SIGNA, that took place within approximately 20 rooms peopled with 51 performers. It was part of the 2016 programme for the Wiener Festwochen and ran from mid-May until mid-June. Every night 70 paying audience members had the chance to familiarise themselves with the fictional association Canis Humanus and to get to know its members, a community of masters and doggies. Doggies are dogs in human form, born in the wrong body; marginalised creatures who have found refuge with Canis Humanus. The fictional framework for the visit is an open day organised by the association in light of its uncertain future: in the scope of their visit, Canis Humanus’ guests meet its dying founder Count Sigbert Trenck von Moor personally, and can inform themselves about the possibility of adopting a doggy. After climbing the stairs to the great hall, the evening sets off with everyone being greeted by the Count’s accountant who runs them through the house rules and customs. The guests are then invited to move around the installation freely, visit the doggies and their masters in their apartments, participate in workshops such as ‘Are you a Master?’ or ‘Songs from a Doggy’s life’, and encouraged to keep their assigned appointments in the kennel – a basement that reeks of smoke and singed liver where the doggies are trained before they are fully admitted into the community. A visit to the kennel often results in disturbing situations that push the guests’ limits. During my appointment the two resident doggy trainers request I assist them in the particularly unruly doggy Pax’s training. After a growling Pax (played by Frederik von Lüttichau) is led out of his small cage, I comply with my orders and pull down his underwear while he is being restrained violently. I then help bind the naked man to a steel spring bed. When Pax hurts himself on the springs, causing his back to bleed, the kennel master intervenes and sends Pax back to his cage.1 Certainly not all encounters with doggies and masters are this transgressive, and participants are not forced to play along or perform actions. It is

36  Benjamin Wihstutz

an option to remain in a largely observant role throughout, for example by spending hours having coffee or sipping advocaat with one of the seven families while taking in the somewhat rundown surroundings. As with all SIGNA performances, the interiors are curated with immense attention to detail: from wall paper to toilet paper, furniture to tableware, curtains to pillowcases, everything is meticulously coordinated, and dog motifs permeate the decor – ‘waist-high porcelain retrievers, barking puppy robots, shot glass with images of Lassie’ (Biringer 2016). Focusing one’s attention on these carefully selected objects highlights that it would be a mistake to limit SIGNA’s immersive theatre to interaction or participation. What makes the performance installation so captivating is the complex interplay of fictional narrative framework, highly detailed scenography and encountering the characters portrayed by the performers. All three aspects are characterised by a remarkably heterotopian and heterochronous quality: objects as well as characters appear strangely at odds with the times while still being perceived as utterly real. SIGNA do not direct plays; they create an experiential space that transports the guests to a different time and place.2

Figure 3.1  W ir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA , Wiener Festwochen, Frederick von Lüttichau. Source: © Erich Goldmann

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  37

Figure 3.2  W  ir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA, Wiener Festwochen, Amanda Babaei Vieira. Source: © Erich Goldmann

Figure 3.3  W ir Hunde/Us Dogs by SIGNA , Wiener Festwochen, Ivana Sokola Source: © Erich Goldmann

38  Benjamin Wihstutz

Domo de Eŭropa Historio en Ekzilo – House of European History in Ex­ ile by Thomas Bellinck is a fictional museum about the former European Union (EU), staged in a former court building as part of the Wiesbaden Biennale 2016. One enters the lobby and is assigned a queue number. Displayed on the wall behind the reception counter is a large map of the 31 member states of the EU dated 2020 – Great Britain is not indicated on the map, Scotland is. Text panels placed throughout the exhibition state that the EU disbanded sometime around 2020. The visit seems to take place in the 2050s or 2060s, and the museum has fallen into slight disrepair, almost like a piece of history that has itself been forgotten, its rooms emanating an outdated and nostalgic, perhaps even post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Every five minutes a visitor enters the exhibition, alone. One follows a fixed course through endless hallways, basement rooms and storage spaces, gazing at objects in glass cabinets, diagrams and maps of the European institutions, and laminated photographs. On display are old busts and signs that are now obsolete: a European board game, photographs documenting the signing of the Treaty of Rome and of the Nobel Prize ceremony, a five Euro note as an exhibit of the once-common currency, as well as a pile of Brussels regulations that is as high as the ceiling. Aesthetically the exhibition display is more reminiscent of a museum from the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s than a building from the future, and this mixing of past and future can also be found on the text panels and signs. Like the title of the production, all written information is printed in Esperanto first, and German and English second. The exhibit labels and signage indicating the way to the toilets and the route through the exhibition are written only in Esperanto, a utopian language that has been all but forgotten.3 Thomas Bellinck’s first staging of the museum in Brussels in 2013 highlighted his work’s ironic poignancy: the artist had originally conceived of the museum as a parody of the actual House of European History in Brussels, the planning and building of which as a museum of successful European integration was approved in 2011. While the opening of Brussels’ new museum in May 2017, eleven months after the Brexit referendum, was received by the public with mixed feelings,4 Bellinck’s House of European History in Exile has only gained in relevance and currency. After realising versions of the museum in Brussels, Rotterdam, Athens and ­Vienna, reality caught up with Bellinck for his Wiesbaden edition. He made a decision to bring current political events like the Greek Depression and Brexit into the exhibition, and to adjust the dates accordingly. A panel entitled ‘Return of the Past’ reads: In 2016, Britain organised a ‘referendum’ – a direct vote – on the issue of whether or not it should stay in the Union. In 2019, after 43 years of full membership, it became the first Member State to officially pull the plug. That same year, the European Parliamentary Elections saw

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  39

a sweeping victory for Eurosceptical, anti-parliamentary, nationalist, separatist, populist and extremist movements from across the Continent. Project Europe’s oldest adversary had awakened: the Europe of the Sovereign States. The expansive former courtroom is stacked with more than 3,000 framed record cards referring to lobby organisations from Brussels – are they the ones on trial for Europe’s failings? The museum does not provide answers. How did things play out after the fascist and right-wing populist parties seized power in Europe? What became of Spain after the Basque country and Catalonia seceded? What happened in Germany when Bavaria left? How did the left-wing protest movement fare? Was the mid-twenty-first century a time that brought forth new ideas and utopias of European unity? Did certain regions develop unprecedented needs? We are left to speculate about the answers (Figures 3.4–3.6).

Immersive theatre In her book Immersive Theatres, Josephine Machon points out that the term immersive ‘was initially assigned to and theorised around computer technologies and telematic environments in the 1980s’ (Machon 2013, p. 58). In order for the concept of immersion to remain fruitful for contemporary theatre, it must be decoupled from the old, and integrated into a new context that takes it back to its verbatim meaning, namely to plunge or submerge.5 After all, the immersive effect produced by film or virtual reality does not

Figure 3.4  H ouse of European History in E xile by Thomas Bellinck, Brussels. Source: © Denny Willems

40  Benjamin Wihstutz

Figure 3.5  H ouse of European History in E xile by Thomas Bellinck, Athens. Source: © Thomas Bellinck

Figure 3.6  H ouse of European History in E xile by Thomas Bellinck, Vienna. Source: © Thomas Bellinck

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  41

rely on its audience being actually submerged but rather on a kinaesthetic illusion made possible by technology such as movie rides or a head-mounted display (HMD).6 In immersive theatre, on the other hand, the metaphor of being submerged refers to a spatial enveloping that takes place not just in the imagination, but actually in a physically real space that crowds the audience. As Marvin Carlson notes, in this space the members of the audience are neither obsolete, nor are they on equal footing with the performers,7 but they are deprived of their own autonomous space. While a film camera can effectively only suggest that a train is coming straight at its audience – to use the famous albeit disproved example of the Lumière brothers’ first film screening8 – in SIGNA’s world I move through actual space and come into contact with actual performers/ characters who speak with me, touch me and prompt me to play along with them. The effect is, literally, immersive: the experience is real while at the same time remaining tethered to a certain level of ‘as-if’. This ‘as-if’ has no bearings on the fictional framework which creates the illusion, but instead it relates to the level at which an audience member is engaged. It is through this playing along that they become fully immersed, and any ‘as-ifs’ are dissolved into genuine perception and feeling: with SIGNA I am actually physically involved, feel fear, pain, stress or other emotions that have an immediate and somatic effect. At the same time, the transformation that takes place when a performer or a member of the audience takes on a fictional role and thus becomes a participant differs greatly from participation in Performance Art or Happenings with no fictional framework. Exactly how it is different becomes clear on side of the performers: while they will push themselves to their physical and mental limits including harming themselves or others (see above), they cannot leave the fictional plane and thus never break character; especially in interaction with members of the audience it is of utmost importance that the fiction remains wholly intact at all times. As performers and guests encounter each other in character and within a fictional framework, immanent arenas for play and interaction open up, instigating a kind of play with no rules. Aside from a few concrete guidelines for proper conduct that exist within the circumference of the fiction, for example treating the doggies ‘appropriately’, the rules are opaque and unknowable to members of the audience. Wir Hunde/Us Dogs is more state of play than game, though the play aspect is far from a reliable factor here: it remains unpredictable throughout, and the stability of knowing that actions have less consequences when they occur within a performative space – an assumption that is commonly inherent in acting and performing – is called into question time and again.9 Even the performers cannot fully rely on the rules and limits of play. All participants find themselves in an exceptional state reminiscent of what Giorgio Agamben describes as ‘a zone of indistinction’ (Agamben 2005), characterised by the precariousness of its external boundaries and legal structure.10

42  Benjamin Wihstutz

In her book Das Drama des Prekären, Katharina Pewny connects the term precarious to ancient Roman jurisdiction where Prekarium means granting a right ‘in response to a plea and [that] can be revoked’ (Pewny 2011, p. 25); not a legal claim but a status that is ‘legally unprotected’ (ibid.). In the case of Wir Hunde/Us Dogs, it is not only the ‘as-if’ status and the rules of play that are precarious. The characters, the members of Canis Humanus and especially the doggies in their animal-human hybridity who have been ostracised by society embody precarious existences. Spaces like the kennel reinforce the precariousness of the situation, taking it one step further even by confronting the audience with ethically questionable situations first-hand. Wir Hunde/Us Dogs further investigates the precariousness of the human status by centring the question of anthropological difference. The programme accompanying the performance installation includes a short text by the historian Paul Münch in which he discusses the relationship between human and animal. Münch published a book entitled Tiere und Menschen. Geschichte eines prekären Verhältnisses (Animals and Humans: A History of a Precarious Relationship) in the late 1990s in which he explains how this relationship changes in accordance with historical circumstances, and especially as a means to apply the concept of ‘difference’ to human beings (Münch 1999). Whether in cases of women, indigenous people with disabilities or Jews – defamation, ostracism, prosecution and systemic discrimination of humans apply the principle of anthropological difference. Taking on the role of either master or doggy in SIGNA’s performance installation is always also a reflection of a history of subjugation and oppression. As such, it taps into an artistic frame of reference that famously includes Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; the film which SIGNA previously adapted as a performance installation of the same name in Copenhagen in 2010. To classify Bellinck’s House of European History in Exile as immersive theatre is initially more challenging. Aside from a few passive attendants, there are no performers or dramatic characters. Much like in SIGNA’s case, his museum is not installation art either, since Bellinck, too, works with the entire building rather than a single room. The building manifests as an institutional space in two particular ways: site-specifically as a former court building, and as the fictional museum House of European History in Exile. Next to the fiction, however, it is the production’s temporal structure that highlights its theatricality. After acquiring a ticket for a particular time slot (which of course is also quite common with overcrowded art exhibitions), an audience member enters the rooms on their own in five-minute intervals, and so their course is less of a tour through an exhibition than a temporary experiential space. Dorothea von Hantelmann understands the concept of experiential space as distinct from the exhibition’s dispositif, namely a mechanism which relies on the traditional separation of the work and its original context, as well as the exhibit and its beholder (von Hantelmann 2013, 2014). Bellinck’s

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  43

museum deliberately imitates a traditional exhibition space where the displays are arranged chronologically – he situates the formation of the EU in the basement, following a spatially upward trajectory into the present moment of crisis and towards a future of dissolution. At the same time, this dramaturgy is entwined with each audience member’s individual experience of walking through rooms that immerse them in an unspecified, fictional, dystopian future. When Michael Fried disparagingly referred to Minimal Art as ‘theatre’ in the late 1960s, he was referring to the temporal and imaginative scope of the form that, to him, embodied the end of art.11 For Fried, the scandal on hand was the temporalisation of fine art which took its viewer’s own temporality under consideration and directly addressed them as audience; Robert Morris connecting his sculptures with the theatre term situation and Tony Smith comparing the desired effect of his works to a night-time drive across the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike – without ‘lights or shoulder markers’ (quoted in Fried 1967, p. 157) – are examples of this shift. While Bellinck’s antiquated museum aesthetic with its glass cabinets and maps could not have less in common with stripped back Minimalism, I find Fried’s reference to theatricality useful when speaking about Bellinck’s museum as an example of immersive theatre. After all, the real question is if, and if yes how much, the individual objects themselves matter, and whether the tour of the exhibition as a sequence of situations is not of greater value. ‘The experience alone is what matters’ are the words Fried uses in reference to Smith’s highway narrative (Fried 1967, p. 158). No matter the extent to which the exhibits might amuse or rouse reflection in the visitors, the central aspiration is to immerse the visitors in an other space and time. As with SIGNA, Bellinck’s museum functions as a dystopian experiential space that is thoroughly fictionally charged, despite all of the contemporary sociopolitical aspects of the work.

Situations and environments While Bellinck’s sequence of situations follows a largely linear dramaturgy, SIGNA’s performance installations mimic topological structures, that is, systems that emphasise the simultaneous and relational occurrence of rooms and times. No one person can conceive or even experience Wir Hunde/Us Dogs in its entirety, though every audience member will know the feeling that their own decisions influence, even change, the experiential space they are in. In this respect SIGNA’s work might even be more museum-like than Bellinck’s – it unfolds in accordance with the audience members’ individual exercise of their freedom of movement and follows only a basic time structure (in relation to other works, Wir Hunde/Us Dogs had a comparatively tight frame). Situations occur not in accordance with a predefined order but rather they depend on the respective volition of the participants: do I attend

44  Benjamin Wihstutz

the workshop on the third floor? Or would I rather visit the Marmelstein family? Do I accept Sweety’s invitation to follow her behind the sofa into a dark elevator? Do I seek out an encounter with the dangerous wolves living in the kennel? Do I utilise the taser gun I am handed? Audience members are permanently confronted with the need to make decisions, and the resultant possibility to gain experiences. While no one is coerced to behave in a particular manner, everyone has to make decisions over and over again. Do I partake in a situation, or do I walk on? Do I observe passively, or do I intervene? The situational threshold, spatial as well as temporal, triggers a second of hesitation, a moment to pause and think, but rather than a boundary which might evoke a stance of resistance, the threshold invites the audience member to cross it. In this sense, as Walter Benjamin remarks in his Arcades Project, ‘the threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle [threshold] is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology ought not overlook these senses’ (Benjamin 1999, p. 494). It follows that the threshold relates to the potential for transformation in a spatial and temporal sense; Victor Turner and Erika Fischer-Lichte have applied this understanding of thresholds as liminal spaces to ritual theory (Turner 1969) and theatre studies (Fischer-Lichte 2008). According to Turner, the liminal phase of a ritual can be understood as a cultural ludic space in which values, norms and symbolic orders are negotiated and confirmed, and through which ‘new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols’ are made available (Turner 1969, p. 95). In an artistic context, however, Turner uses the term liminoid to differentiate the playful and negotiable characteristics that allow for the possibility of declining the offer and passing by the threshold inactively, from the liminal phase as a firmly rooted component of ritual (cf. Turner 1974). Phenomenologist Bernhard Waldenfels posits that the ‘offered experience’ thus ‘gets left behind like an unclaimed present (or a bomb that has not been ignited)’ (Waldenfels 2004, p. 67). In a short essay titled ‘Pour un Theatre des Situations’ from 1973, Jean-Paul Sartre examines the concept of the situation in a way that explores the possibility of decision-making; he describes a situation as the fundamental human experience of being in an unsecured sphere, which he characterises as oscillating between ‘freedom and facticity’ in Being and Nothingness (1956). A Theatre of Situations would have to the­ ecision-making matise the existential circumstances affecting free will and d in situations enacted on stage. The playwright must find universally valid ‘situations-limites’ that correspond to contemporary concerns and questions (Sartre 1973, p. 20). By creating transgressive and precarious situations, SIGNA create such a Theatre of Situations for the twenty-first century, with the difference that we the audience are not merely observing liminoid situations but rather that we find ourselves in the middle of them.12 When considering the concept of the situation from the vantage point of the Minimal Art movement and in a fine art context, it appears that a

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  45

wholly different concept might be more applicable to SIGNA’s performance installations, namely that of environment, readily dismissed by Minimal Art. Allan Kaprow and other artists from the Fluxus movement used the term to describe rooms that were furnished with objects and remnants from Happenings and Actions – installation art avant la lettre, you might say. As opposed to a situation that was understood by the Minimal Artists as an encounter with an aesthetic object and the space surrounding it, a guest entering into an environment from the late 1950s to the early 1960s would find themselves surrounded by a plethora of objects that immerse them in a different reality and manipulate their perception. It appears that the concept of environment is applicable to both Wir Hunde/Us Dogs and House of European History in Exile. Without subscribing to art history’s sharp distinction between the two terms, considering them further nevertheless opens up two distinct perspectives, both of which are of great relevance in the discussion of the given examples of immersive theatre. With an understanding of SIGNA’s and Bellinck’s works as environments, the attention is on the experiential space and the fictionality which in turn influences the scenography and dramaturgy that precede encounters taking place within it. If, on the other hand, I consider them as sequences of situations, this invokes the performative and contingent dimension of the works, and allows audience involvement to be understood as an interplay of ‘freedom and facticity’, to use Sartre’s words.

Display and displacements The common understanding of the term display denotes a carrier or device for the visual presentation of data or images to be found, for example, in phones or computers. The term can also be applied to non-technological dimensions of depicting and exhibiting, for example in museums. In this context, display does not refer to the exhibited object itself but rather the presentation. It might pertain to architectural characteristics of the space, features and equipment like pedestals, barrier tape or lighting, as well as the spatial placement of the exhibited objects (McGovern 2013). The strong emphasis on presentation and the implicit separation of subject and object make for a clear contrast to the concept of immersion, suggesting that perhaps the term will be of little use in the outlined context. In Thomas Bellinck’s work, however, engaging with museum displays is obviously a significant part of his creative process; with some historical difference, the anachronistic exhibiting in glass cabinets and showcases, the antiquated maps and panels, come together in a belated gesture of Institutional Critique by making visible a politics of presentation in a museum context. By doing so, they are referencing questions of political presentation and representation, especially the representation of the EU and its institutions.13

46  Benjamin Wihstutz

Has the EU’s political (self-)representation gotten stuck in the 1970s, and is that aspect of presentation and representation part of the problem? The French etymology of the word ‘display’, in the sense of déplier meaning to unfold or evolve, connotes a performative and processual dimension. In this sense, a display may be understood as a presentation-­arrangement that simultaneously generates a situation for the observer, causing a possibility and an experiential space to unfold for her. In the cases of SIGNA and Bellinck, these unfoldings/displays are not positioned in a space designated for presentation per se, but rather they function within a fictional framework. The Lassie shot glasses, the Putin toilet paper, but also the sofas, wallpapers and showcases are inscribed with meaning via the fictional and dystopian frames that members of the audience also enter into when they visit the respective productions. The display and with it the exhibition-like feel (including SIGNA’s doggies and masters who can be understood as exhibits, too) are accompanied by a distinct sense of ­displacement – a displacement that does not shift or remove an object as in the context of Institutional Critique but rather one that makes the recipient the focus of a shift that takes them to another place. Visiting either of the performance installations is experienced in the mode of displacement on part of the audience, enabling them to become fully immersed in the environment where they find themselves confronted with a wide spectrum of situations. The displacement they experience has a spatial as well as a temporal dimension, which is particularly noticeable in Thomas Bellinck’s work. Even the term ‘Exile’ in the production’s title implies displacement. The House of European History is not where it once was; or could it be that not just the House but rather European History itself has been exiled? As a visitor I find myself not in my old beloved Europe, but rather in an uncertain future that only knows this Europe from a museum.14 This spatio-temporal shift is reflected in Bellinck’s choice of site, too: a former courthouse in Wiesbaden, the former Ministry of Labour in Athens, an empty bureau in Brussels – the museum is staged in spaces that have a past but no future, institutional buildings gutted of institutions. In this sense, the House of European History in Exile is a site of loss and grief. In a TV interview, Bellinck states: From the beginning I thought that if I build something like this it needs to feel like a mausoleum. We are burying something that is actually still there, but we are pretending as though it wasn’t. We’re doing this to open the doors to new ideas. We go through dystopias in order to contemplate new utopias. I call it constructive pessimism.15 When reflecting on this idea of constructive pessimism in earnest, it becomes clear that the Thomas Bellinck’s experiential space is more than a site in the here and now where Europe’s future past is staged in an ironic fashion.

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  47

Rather the experiential space that is the House of European History in Exile exists on a reflexive plane which refers to the past and the present of the ­European project, as well as potential futures and new utopias. By functioning as a displacement, the museum opens doors to different times and places that are no longer sequential in a linear manner – instead, they are arranged in different constellations by each audience member. Theresa Schütz’s argument that SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs is political not because of the transgressive experiences but rather because it opens up a space for critical self-reflection (Schütz 2016) can be extended to Bellinck’s museum: beyond its immersive qualities, the experiential nature of the space endows it with critically reflexive qualities that relate to the politics of presentation and representation, the way we encounter and deal with history, as well as dystopian and utopian aspects of the European project as we know it. With both SIGNA and Thomas Bellinck, the displacement of the involved members of the audience brings forth new possibilities for action and ­experience – a potential that is thus able to transform the respective production’s dystopian dimension into a utopian one.

Conclusion With SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs and Thomas Bellinck’s House of European History in Exile, I chose two very different examples of immersive theatre that are both exceptional in their strategies of staging. As I have shown, they share certain characteristics, though: Both take their participants to another time and place, and both follow a clearly discernible dramaturgical thread. Each production oscillates between an enveloping environment and open, precarious situations that generate a range of potential experiences to be accepted or refused, especially in the case of SIGNA. By investigating the concepts of display and displacement in this context, I have broached another area characterised by a reflection of modes of presentation contingent on political and institutional influences on the one hand, and a spatio-temporal shift and linked utopian quality on the other. The aim of the chapter was to demonstrate that forms of immersive theatre do not exist solely in a theatre, performance and/or theatre history context. Instead, it is worth placing them into relation with recent fine art history, especially as its complexity lies in being able to encompass aspects of performing and exhibiting in equal measure. The concept of immersion is only truly fruitful when an effort is made to understand how it relates to other aesthetic concepts including situations, environments, displays and displacement in the context of the outlined examples. It is by these means that we are able to conclude that the function of the audience in immersive theatre productions (different as they may be) is not only to become a performer but also to be a recipient of a spectrum of frameworks and settings, and thus pregnant with possibilities to act out one’s role. Translation from German into English by Jos Porath.

48  Benjamin Wihstutz

Notes 1 Methodologically, SIGNA’s immersive performance installations pose new challenges for theatre studies scholars. On the one hand, the ‘dramatic action’ unfolds simultaneously and in several different places at once. Consequently, audience members experience only a segment of the performance at a time, and no single analysis can ever be all-encompassing. On the other hand, even intersubjective audience-performer encounters that take place in the same room will result in very different and individual experiences, and so any performance analysis must consider subjective impressions (in this case my own). To achieve a broader scope, this phenomenological approach would have to include comparisons of other audience members’ impressions, as well as relating it back to production-aesthetic aspects (for example the directorial method in working with the performers, the weighting of scripted plot versus improvisation, and how the participating audience members are guided and steered as flow in the scope of the performance). 2 SIGNA’s installations are notably akin to Michel Foucault’s heterotopias insofar as they represent ‘other spaces’ that exist outside of the societal everyday while retaining a certain connection to it. Whether a psychiatric hospital or a BDSM nightclub, a special-education facility, a village run by a fortune teller that is under military occupation or a religious community, SIGNA’s spaces can be understood as what Foucault describes as ‘counter-placements or abutments’ to society; ‘actually realised utopias’ of sorts where a culture’s other spaces are represented, offset or reversed. See Foucault (1986). For more on applying the concept of heterotopias to SIGNA’s work, see Wihstutz (2012, pp. 98–113), and for a discussion of the theatre as heterotopia, see Wihstutz (2013). 3 In 1887, Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of the utopian language Esperanto, dreamt of ‘overcoming the natural indifference of mankind, and disposing them, in the quickest manner possible, and en masse, to learn and use the proposed language as a living one, and not only in last extremities, and with the key at hand’ (See Zamenhof 2006). 4 In his inaugural speech of the House of European History, Former EP President Hans-Gert Pöttering, expressed his proper concerns when he said “The House of European History is intended to help citizens to step into the future wisely and with confidence, a future which, from today’s standpoint, looks likely to be troubled and full of threats.“ Quoted from the official press release of the European Parliament on May 4, 2017. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/ en/press-room/20170504IPR73468/european-parliament-opens-the-house-of-­ european-history-on-6-may-2017 (accessed April 17, 2019) 5 For a discussion of the different meanings of the term immersion, as well as the relation between an aesthetic of immersion and theatre history, see Doris Kolesch (2016). 6 For a discussion of filmic illusion, see Curtis and Voss (2008). 7 It should be mentioned that Carlson’s implicit criticism of Machon’s argument which refers to Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator is problematic insofar as Rancière decidedly does not argue in favour of audience being transformed into participants. It follows that thus it makes little sense to reinterpret his essay as a case for immersive theatre. In fact, Rancière claims that the audience does not need to be activated but are already emancipated per se, if they have the capacity to observe, imagine and associate freely. Rancière attributes the audience’s emancipation to their freedom and capacity for egalitarian aesthetic contemplation – in line with a less radical, more conventional understanding of audience reception. Cf. Carlson (2012) and Rancière (2009).

Doggies, masters and the end of the EU  49 8 It was claimed that the audience panicked and stormed out of the cinema to escape the approaching train – a legend created to promote the film. See Gunning (1994). 9 Theatre scholar Andreas Kotte distinguishes theatre from games, competitions and cultural performances that have real consequences. See Kotte (2014). 10 Cf. Agamben (2005), as well as Matthias Warstat’s application of the term to political theatre (Warstat 2008). 11 As for Fried, theatre is in fact the negation of art: ‘And theatre is now the negation of art’ (Fried 1967, p. 153). 12 In regard to postdramatic forms of theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann also speaks of situations, although he ascribes the term less to an art historical discourse and more to Gadamer and Goffmann. The emphasis on general openness and contingency of situations can be found in his work, too. See Lehmann (2006, pp. 104–107). 13 Elsewhere I established a correlation between Bellinck’s work and Institutional Critique strategies, showcasing another of the fictional museum’s facets (after all, institutional critic Marcel Brodthaers’ most famous work is also a fictional museum). See Wihstutz (2018). 14 A wholly different dimension to understanding the concept of displacement: after the Second World War, the Allied Forces referred to forced labourers and prisoners of war who would not be able to return to their homeland without external support as displaced persons. Without wanting to equate the audience at a SIGNA production with forced labourers, their situation bears a certain relation to the precariousness and dystopian environment that SIGNA’s audience will experience. You are displaced – far away from home, you find yourself in unfamiliar, often rather oppressive surroundings, and despite the fact that you retain autonomy over your own decisions at all times, you feel dependent on the performers. 15 Interview with the director. Kulturzeit-Gespräch mit Thomas Bellinck 2016, television programme, 3Sat, Germany, 2 September. Available from: http://­ www.3sat.de/mediathek/?mode=play&obj=61232 [5 September 2017].

References Agamben, G 2005, State of Exception, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Benjamin, W 1999, The Arcade Project, trans. by H Eiland & K McLaughlin, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Biringer, E 2016, ‘Mach Mensch! Wir Hunde – In Wien laden Signa zum Tierschutz-­Engagement ein’, review 13 May. Available from: https://­nachtkritik. de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12560:wir-hunde& catid=38:die-­nachtkritik-k&Itemid=40 [5 September 2017]. Carlson, M 2012, ‘Immersive Theatre and the Reception Process’, in Forum Mod­ ernes Theater vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 17–25. Curtis, R & Voss, C (eds) 2008, ‘Immersion Edition’, in Montage AV vol. 17, no. 2. Fischer-Lichte, E 2008, The Transformative Power of Performance, SI Jain, (trans), Routledge, London & New York. Foucault, M 1986, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 22–27. Fried, M 1967, ‘Art and Objecthood’, in M Fried (ed), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, pp. 148–172. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Gunning, T 1994, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in L Williams (ed), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, pp. 114–133. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.

50  Benjamin Wihstutz Kolesch, D 2016, ‘Immersion und Theater’, blog post, 22 September. Available from: https://blog.berlinerfestspiele.de/theater-und-immersion/ [5 September 2017]. Kotte, A 2014, ‘Play is the Pleasure of Being the Cause: On the Comparability of Scenic Sequences within the Playing Culture’, in W Sauter et al. (eds), Play­ ing Culture: Conventions and Extensions of Performance, pp. 39–62. Rotopi, Amsterdam. Lehmann, HT 2006, Postdramatic Theatre, Routledge, London & New York. Machon, J 2013, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Per­ formance, Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke. McGovern, F 2013, ‘Display’, in J Schafaff, N Schallenberg & T Vogt (eds), Kunst – Begriffe der Gegenwart: Von Allegorie bis Zip, pp. 43–48. Walther König, Cologne. Münch, P 1999, ‘Die Differenz zwischen Mensch und Tier’, in P Münch (ed), Tiere und Menschen: Geschichte eines prekären Verhältnisses, pp. 323–347. Schöningh, Paderborn. Pewny, K 2011, Das Drama des Prekären: Über die Wiederkehr der Ethik in Theater und Performance, Transcript, Bielefeld. Rancière, J 2009, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, in J Rancière (ed), The Emancipated Spectator, G Elliott, (trans), pp. 1–24. Verso, London & New York. Sartre, JP 1973, ‘Pour un théâtre de situations’, in M Contat & M Rybalka (eds), Pour un théâtre de situations, pp. 19–21. Gallimard, Paris. Schütz, T 2016, ‘Unter Hundschen’, in Theater der Zeit vol. 11, pp. 24–26. Turner, V [1969] 1995, The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure, Transaction, New Brunswick. Turner, V 1974, ‘Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’, in The Rice University Studies vol. 60, no. 3, pp. 53–92. von Hantelmann, D 2013, ‘Erfahrungsraum’, in J Schafaff, N Schallenberg & T Vogt (eds), Kunst– Begriffe der Gegenwart: Von Allegorie bis Zip, pp. 67–72. Walther König, Cologne. von Hantelmann, D 2014, ‘The Experiential Turn’, in The Walker Living Collection Catalogue, Vol. I. Available from: https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/ performativity/experiential-turn/ [5 September 2017]. Waldenfels, B 2004, Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Warstat, M 2008, ‘Ausnahme von der Regel. Zum Verhältnis von Theater und Gesellschaft’, in C Weiler, J Roselt & C. Risi (eds), Strahlkräfte. Festschrift für Erika Fischer-Lichte, pp. 116–133. Theater der Zeit, Berlin. Wihstutz, B 2012, Der andere Raum. Politiken sozialer Grenzverhandlung im Gegen­ wartstheater, Diaphanes, Zurich. Wihstutz, B 2013, ‘Other Space or Space of Others: Reflections on Contemporary Political Theatre’, in E Fischer-Lichte & B Wihstutz (eds), Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology, pp. 182–197. Routledge, New York. Wihstutz, B 2018, ‘Zur Theatralität von Institutional Critique’, in I Scheffler & H Plegge (eds), Umräumen, pp. 97–116. Athena-Verlag, Oberhausen (forthcoming). Zamenhof, L 2006, Dr. Esperanto’s International Language: Introduction and Com­ plete Grammar (1887), transl. R.H. Geoghegan, Available from: http://www.­ genekeyes.com/Dr_Esperanto.html [5 September 2017].

Chapter 4

On the impossibility of being together A conversation between performance artist Signa Köstler and Theresa Schütz

Theresa Schütz:   In

your opinion, what term is most suitable for the reception end of your works? Spectators, visitors, participants, co-­performers, guests, or accomplices? Signa Köstler:   Visitors. TS:   Off the top of your head, can you recall a peculiar, jarring, or shocking scene or situation that you experienced with a visitor? SK:   That’s a difficult question. I’m often asked this question and I always tend not to answer it because I’ve really had so many special encounters. And it would be difficult to describe what ‘special’ actually means in such moments. But I’ll try to give an example anyways. In one of our early works, a non-stop performance that took place in a park, I remember how a homeless person kept passing by. He usually stayed on the periphery, didn’t say much, and seemed almost threatening. He sat next to our trailer during the nights too, and slept. In one scene, we dug a grave with the help of the spectators. We couldn’t make any more progress at a point because of these really strong roots in the earth. That’s when he simply stood up, went into the trailer, grabbed two big knives, jumped into the hole, and started hacking the roots to bits. For seven hours, really, he was at nothing but hacking and digging with these knives, a whole day. Then he’d gotten it done, went back into the trailer, and emptied a big bottle of Eau de Cologne. As reward. He stuck around afterwards. Something like that is, of course, very special. But there are also always conversations with visitors that although they take place within the fiction, you can sense are really about something, something deeply existential. And of course, in a certain way it’s fantastic. I remember another non-stop performance that we did in the Ukraine, in which a lot of people from the gay and lesbian scene took part. They slept in the installation along with us, and without being intrusive told us a lot about how they live, what difficulties they face, what injustice they experience as a result of their sexual orientation. They spoke about abuse and self-harm issues, and so their themes also became part of the performance. Such encounters are really special

On the impossibility of being together  53

moments that you don’t forget. And then there are also the unpleasant experiences. When visitors get so deep in the fiction that they find it hard to let go at the end and then, for example, start to stalk us. TS:   The encounters you’re talking about evidently happened more frequently in non-stop versions of your performance installations, that is, in those that were less limited in terms of a time frame, and where locations were chosen that were more openly accessible, insofar as they provided fewer institutional thresholds or conventional barriers. In contrast, your more recent projects (Söhne und Söhne/Sons and Sons, Wir Hunde/Us Dogs, Das Heuvolk/The Hay People) had a more strongly marked ‘art’ frame, not least because of the institutional connection. And I have the impression that an increasingly homogenous target audience is forming. Let’s set aside, for example, the festival pass holders who ‘strayed’ into your performance installation Wir Hunde/Us Dogs at the Wiener Festwochen (I’m recalling a dapper older couple at the premiere who very politely asked Arthur Köstler, alias Patritz Trenck von Moor, what this all was, since they actually thought they were going to have an evening of theatre). Those sorts of visitors aside, a cult following, or fandom is developing, which, it seems to me, is less about the narrative and fiction, and much more about that special experience, an experience of being pushed to your own limits. They also seem to see your collective as an embodiment of something they’d like to be part of. Of course, there is also a variety of visitors seeing your work for the first time. They generally seem very open, well educated and they represent a spectrum of ages. SK:   First of all, it’s of course clear that the homeless man I mentioned earlier wouldn’t have travelled to Mannheim for the Schiller festival. That wouldn’t be possible. And it’s a shame that not everyone can simply drop by. But for that, it’s also safer. And, yes, the audience types are accurate. You only missed the artists, critics, and academics, who are a large, though diverse, group of their own. One thing you can say for sure is that visitors of all ages in the German-speaking world are much better at letting themselves engage in our work than, for example, people in Denmark. In my preparations with the performers, though, I tend to refer to these types less than the different recurring behavioural patterns we see from visitors. And how to recognise visitor sensibilities from body language and conduct so that we can work with them within the fictional world. TS:   What concrete techniques do you give your performers in regard to certain ‘expectable’ reactions? And how do you prepare, above all, those performers who don’t have much experience, those interning with you and who might not have any acting training? SK:   Over the years I’ve been able to observe that humans are a social species and usually react in certain ways. For example, people who are insecure tend to react either with passive-aggression or caginess. So we talk about how to identify this from visitors’ body language, and

54  Signa Köstler and Theresa Schütz

how, with really simple techniques, you can, for instance, deescalate the ­situation – whether through eye contact, through touch, your own body language, or mirroring. You could call this, if you’re so inclined, techniques of manipulation. Even though this is a complex, difficult term. It’s important that we do this for the audience. We practise these techniques together with each other and with an internal test audience. The difficulty is in keeping the whole textual background, the web of fiction, in your mind and thus being capable of responding to the visitors’ impulses. It takes a lot of practice. And we usually start with test runs really early on, also because it turns up the pressure. In my experience, that’s how you learn the most. TS:   There are also visitors who divulge a lot of personal details in your performance installations, so much so that it affects the performers on a human level, despite the dense web of fiction and despite all professionalism. Do you have certain methods for dealing with this, psychological exercises or the like? SK:   Such things happen in real life, too. For us, we’re not only protected because we’re playing a role, but also because we’re part of a group. The strongest and most important thing we have is the group, and that’s also why my absolute priority is that the group is harmonious, that we trust one another. The performers talk openly with each other, pass on experiences. That’s also why our gatherings are so important. TS:   Out of character? SK:   Yes, out of character. We always have a gathering before the performance and another afterwards. And it always follows a specific sequence. It starts with the question: ‘did anybody have a catastrophic evening? It’s okay to admit it’. Because, as a group, we have to catch this immediately. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often. Then comes the question, ‘Did anybody have a fantastic evening?’ This is always really lovely, and we celebrate it. Then we move on to ‘feelings’. In this section, you can talk with the group about how the performance went for you and ask about really practical things. This is where you learn, for instance, that it’s absolutely not ‘catastrophic’, or even necessarily bad, if a visitor cried – that maybe they wanted to because something inside them was set free. Overwhelming the audience is, after all, part of our calculations. And you often see that it’s actually good when the audience reacts strongly. For me, it’s important that the performers are able to deal with it. But when they find themselves thinking ‘this is getting under my skin, I’m having nightmares and can’t get distance’ too often, I’m alarmed and take action, which means either I get them to play differently, focus less on provoking involvement, or even get them to be part of the action in a different room. When casting, I’m already making sure that interested performers know how to keep things separate, that they are stable and harmonious. This also means that, with us, smoking

On the impossibility of being together  55

pot is an absolute taboo, and other drugs anyways. I have zero tolerance there. I know some people think that’s not the case, but no, it would be the death of our project. The mind has to be sharp and clear; otherwise it’s too dangerous. TS:   And how do you handle your multiple roles as author of the narration, of the fictional web of characters, as director, and as performer? At what point do you manage to let go and dedicate yourself fully to your character and her embodiment? SK:   Not until the premiere. Until then, I have to watch. That’s why in the last years I’ve also usually had my own very separate playing area. Because if I move through the rooms too much, I see other performers primarily through director’s eyes, which makes them unnecessarily insecure. And at some point, you just have to trust. TS:   Let’s return to the audience, and, as we touched upon earlier, to the specific audience for Heuvolk/The Hay People in Mannheim. I found one moment at the premiere incredibly exciting – when we all arrived at the church and the closing ritual began. The room was thick with suspense: would someone receive the sign from Jake and join the heavenly ascent by stepping forward and removing their clothing for ablution? And a young woman did actually start the process. More followed, and two men finally joined at the end. And I honestly have to say: I was shocked. Not because of the nudity, but by the act, which – within the fictional world – was incomprehensible to me. Because it was more than clear that this was a sect-like community that complied with everything their deceased leader preached. For me, it can only be that a desire, distinct from the fiction, must have moved people to join the community in these ritual gestures. Did you or your group expect this to work? And what do you make of what happened in the church? SK:   Taking all the performances together, a total of 120 visitors did it. And I think there are various motivations for doing it. I think some do it because they would like to be actors, and perhaps some do it as a gesture to prove to themselves how ‘bad ass’ they can be. The pull that this community exerts is also an important point. In comparison to much of what goes on in the world, this sect was positively harmless. You can’t forget that point, and I don’t think everyone goes through our works so analytically. Many simply see ‘okay, here’s a community, here is love, here are people who listen to me, and that does something to me’. And some just let themselves fall into the experience on a sensuous level. And of course, this resonates with the fact they know it’s art and they feel safe when such ‘real-unreal effects’ arise. During this scene I was up in the gallery, but the performers who were below often described how people cried, shook, how they were simply overjoyed in this situation. That they stayed in this embrace, sweating and savouring, and the intensity kept growing.

56  Signa Köstler and Theresa Schütz

Figure 4.1  D  as Heuvolk/The Hay People by SIGNA , Mannheimer Schillertage, Ensemble. Source: © Erich Goldmann TS:  

And did you expect the finale of Heuvolk/The Hay People to play out like this, that so many visitors would be able to engage in this way? SK:   No, not that so many would participate. But you never know that. With Söhne und Söhne/Sons and Sons, for example, you only had to lay yourself under a sheet, and still many refused. But it’s about something else too: as soon as few do it, others join. That’s what I meant before about humans being social and herd animals. TS:   Could this also be the manifestation of a new search, or even yearning, for the experience of community and the sensation of belonging, even if it’s ‘only’ within the sphere of art? SK:   Yes, I believe humans are intrinsically lonely and always crave connection. And the world today has become so unmanageable. And I believe in this unmanageability and personal loneliness, you crave something that’s within hand’s reach, that seems authentic, and that maybe has something that so-called reality perhaps doesn’t, and that’s actually the paradox. That the artistic simulates an authentic reality that then seems more real than what’s actually real. It’s a more concentrated – more ­condensed – reality that we present. After all, life consists of encounters, moments of danger and desire. TS:   In one way, your works only function with an intense commitment from your visitors: only if I actively participate, take an interest in the characters’ biographies, if I’m prepared to divulge something personal, allow myself to be vulnerable or taken in – only then will I have an intense experience. And then there are also always scenes of strong physical or psychological violence within the fiction, towards which I want to or must

On the impossibility of being together  57

take a position for ethical, personal, or group dynamic reasons. Doesn’t this form of spectator involvement carry great responsibility on your side? SK:   We have certain strategies for deescalating and internal code words, in case situations get out of control. Otherwise, the responsibility lies with the visitors themselves. We make our work for the audience. It’s very much about mirroring and pulling people out of their comfort zones. In regard to intervening in violent situations: I’m often surprised how few intervene directly. But I also don’t judge them, since most know that it’s fiction – even if they sometimes forget. It would also be really difficult for us to perform if everyone was always immediately intervening. With us, you have the opportunity to take a little tour of humanity’s dark corners, and to see how to find paths to compassion, concern, or conduct. TS:   Does the term ‘immersion’ or the label ‘immersive theatre’ say anything to you? SK:   To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me at all. Some call our work ‘total theatre’, others ‘ambient theatre’, and now immersive theatre. Basically, it doesn’t even matter to me if you call it theatre or not. TS:   And what kind of spectator are you when you see performances or participatory art forms? SK:   I read a lot and see a lot of films, especially documentaries. For me, psychology is also a major inspiration for our work. I rarely go to theatre. And if I do go to other performance installations, then there’s a good chance the performers know me, and that’s unpleasant for both sides. TS:   I’d like to return to the quality of the worlds you create in your performance installations. With a few exceptions – for instance, Wir Hunde/ Us Dogs – all of the worlds a SIGNA visitor enters have something very dystopian about them. It’s always constellations of power and violence, exploitation and submission. Do you ever have a desire with your form to give into a utopian vision? SK:   I have certainly thought about it. Admittedly though, I actually have an incredibly dystopian mindset. Maybe our collective is the utopian. Of course, it’s no paradise, we’re all people with our own problems and dark sides, but the really beautiful thing for me is how the most diverse people can be together like this. I feel that there’s also a lot of love and beauty to be found in some works. For me, this is really a human tragedy: this being together, but then also always the impossibility of being together, when mechanisms of power or exploitation in people make it impossible. This conundrum occupies my thoughts: how can we humans finally manage – on the sociopolitical level as well – to live well with one another? And, at the core, this is also what our works are always about: to experience the striving for, and also the failure of it. We’re actually currently working on our new project, Das halbe Leid/Half the Suffering in Hamburg, and here you could call the idea utopian: how can one join in solidarity with those who suffer, and what would a society that managed to do so be like? This conversation took place on 13 August 2017 in Hamburg. Translation from German into English by Jessica Piggott.

Chapter 5

Bordering and shattering the stage Mobile audiences as compositional forces Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink Mobile audiences, mobile perspectives Over the last decade, many participatory and immersive performances casted spectators in an ambulatory role. Spectators could be seen drifting across immersive, sometimes labyrinthine performance installations, or navigating through urban environments, guided by performers, audio tapes, iPads, cell phones or other mobile devices. These performances often rely on a certain interactivity of the spectators, which also instigates debates about the pros and cons of participation, or the amount of freedom and/or manipulation in interaction (Freshwater 2009; Rancière 2009; Bishop 2012; Machon 2013; White 2013; Alston 2016). In this contribution I present another approach to (mobile) audience engagement, by introducing a perspective that attends to ways in which immersive theatre mobilises the relationships between performers, spectators and spaces, which creates a dynamic that also impacts ways of analysing the artistic strategies of immersive performances. This ‘mobile perspective’ is derived from my book Nomadic ­T heatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage (2019). In this ­ book, I introduce the concept of ‘nomadic theatre’ to analyse how ambulatory performances and performative installations mobilise spectators, performers and spaces, and how these movements also mobilise ways of theorising contemporary performance. From the outset, it is relevant to emphasise that ‘nomadic theatre’ does not designate a genre, but is rather employed as an analytical concept. My approach to the nomadic is to a large extent based on the work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Drawing on their approach to nomadology, the nomad is not a romantic figure; the nomad has not much to do with the idea of being without a house or without roots, or a wandering without aim. For Deleuze and Guattari, nomadism emerges when norms or standards are disturbed or deviated from: when laws, contracts, conventions, institutions, ideologies and other forms of stratification are interrupted, changed and questioned. The nomadic is intrinsically connected to the ‘undoing’ and

60  Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink

distribution of territories and, hence, to processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Employing ‘nomadic theatre’ as an analytical concept is to ask what kind of territories are in play within the theatre, and which patterns of de- and reterritorialisation emerge. In immersive theatre, physical ‘territories’ such as the stage and auditorium are often subjected to a process of deterritorialisation. These physical territories are also connected to certain ideas about theatre, to specific understandings of the relationship between performers and spectators, and to values assigned to the spaces, sites and situations through which performer-spectator encounters are realised. Territories, therefore, are also conceptual entities, charged with theatre conventions. These conventions do not disappear when territories become mobile – they just tend to materialise differently. This particular approach also informs my suggestion, to be further explicated below, to make a distinction between ways in which spectators are spatially positioned within immersive works, and the ways in which they are addressed by an artwork. The concept of nomadic theatre understands territories in immersive theatre as being involved in an ongoing process of making and remaking. Performers, spectators and spaces are engaged in a continuous reconfiguration of spatial relations – hence, they form flexible, variable constellations that in each performance are articulated in a particular way. It is this idea of a constantly changing constellation that I use to think of mobile spectators not so much as immersants, actors or performers, but more as agents involved in processes in which they enter into composition with performers and spaces. The flexible performer-spectator-space constellation provides a model for analysing staging strategies in immersive performance environments, and helps to inquire whether it is immersion alone that takes place in those environments. In order to sustain my arguments, I will first present a few key points with regard to analysing immersive theatre, and specifically point to the role of spectatorial address. This will be followed by a brief analysis of works by Dries Verhoeven, Ontroerend Goed and Lotte van den Berg. Through this discussion, I seek to expose mobile audiences as involved in processes of continuous repositioning, in which spectators border and sometimes shatter the stage, adjust perspectives and reassess perception patterns. In those acts, mobile audiences become compositional forces who actively co-construct and shape the performance event.

Immersion – into what? Immersion describes the sense of being engulfed by a performance environment, or an experience of being absorbed into a performative s­ ituation. We can trace immersive theatre back to the aesthetics of Wagner, to Artaud’s idea of a total theatre or to Schechner’s environmental theatre (Vanhoutte &

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Wynants in Bay-Cheng et al. 2010, p. 47). Immersion is not a new phenomenon; however, the term seems to have gained in popularity in the slipstream of digital culture, alongside the emergence of virtual reality simulations, video games, interactive CAVEs (brief for cave automatic virtual e­ nvironments) and so on. We tend to speak of immersive theatre whenever a spectator or participant is placed within the artwork or performance environment. But what is it, actually, that we get immersed into? In response to this question, I would like to raise two key points. First, being ‘in’ the artwork does not necessarily imply that a spectator is emotionally absorbed by the events. What tends to get conflated in the term ‘immersive theatre’ is the distinction between how a spectator is spatially positioned (‘in’ the artwork), and how a spectator is addressed and responds to that address. In my view, this distinction is rather vital if we would like to arrive at a fuller understanding of the dramaturgical strategies employed in immersive works and the ways in which we might analyse the effects and affects generated by these strategies. In this respect, it is useful to cite Gabriella Giannachi, who strikingly discusses the role of alienation in virtual CAVEs. CAVEs are probably the ultimate icons of immersion. Giannachi observes that, in order to create a sense of immersion, CAVEs often employ the strategy of distancing the player from everyday reality: ‘The main characteristic of a virtual-reality immersion is not so much its skill in simulating the real, but rather to estrange the viewer from the real’ (Giannachi 2010, p. 126). She even evokes Brecht by suggesting that CAVEs could be seen as a ‘place of Verfremdung, and therefore ultimately of reflection’ (ibid.). Giannachi’s remarks are quite relevant, since they open up a way of investigating immersion not only in terms of experiences of absorption or engulfment but, on the contrary, raise awareness for the role of (self)reflexivity within immersive situations. This strategy of ‘distancing’ is also recognisable in works that are a bit closer to home. As an example, I’ll briefly mention Die Erscheinungen der Martha Rubin/The Ruby Town Oracle (2007–2008) by the Danish collective SIGNA.1 In Ruby Town, spectators enter a village, situated in a ‘temporary autonomous zone’, a settlement with approximately 22 houses, caravans, shops, a peepshow and adjoining military quarters. Visitors to the performance are addressed as visitors to the village, a powerful strategy of drawing them into a drastically fictional world. SIGNA went to some length (literally) to make the visitor forget the outer world; Ruby Town lasted for nine days and the performers stayed in character for the total length of the event. I am inclined to argue, however, that this performative installation also invites self-reflexivity on the side of the spectator, since the visitor is constantly involved in choice-making processes. Ruby Town presents a highly politicised world where the military guards and controls a community of outsiders. In order to enter the village, and hence the performance, one has to accept the military’s terms and conditions. When in the village, other choices are to

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be made: will you remain a tourist, or dive into a world full of subversive behaviour? What will you do, or not do, when a villager is severely beaten by another, when invited to attend the peep show, or asked to assist in a smuggling routine?2 On the basis of Giannachi’s observations and SIGNA’s Ruby Town, we might begin to see that immersive environments may have other goals than creating a sense of engulfment or absorption. A second point of attention relates to how we understand the changing role of the spectator in immersive theatre. Due to the fact that spectators are actively engaged in immersive environments, they are often referred to as performers, actors or spect-actors – a term coined by Augusto Boal – and occasionally as characters. I find those qualifications a little problematic, since they shift the attention away from the dynamics between performers and spectators, and tend to downscale their mutual differences. However interactive or immersive a performance may be, the performers arrive at the performance fully prepared – even when knowing the event will rely on improvisation – whereas spectators tend to follow instructions or guidelines. Spectators do not rehearse. They regularly feel uneasy, especially at the start of an immersive performance; they may wonder what is expected of them, where to go or not to go, or whether they are doing it ‘right’. Instead of turning the (potential) uneasiness of spectators into a reason for critically rejecting participatory or immersive theatre, we can take this awkwardness as a cue for changing performer-spectator relationships; sometimes it functions as a way of preparing the base for new modes of engagement. Framing spectators as performers or actors does not help to analyse the possible (dramaturgical) functions of difference, nor to inquire into ways in which spectators are addressed. This is why I prefer the term ‘spectator’; however much the role of the spectator may change.

The spectator as a medium To approach immersive theatre as a flexible performer-spectator-space constellation conjures up associations with installation art. Immersive theatre often bears resemblance to installation art, in the sense that many art installations require visitors to enter a space, to move around, to do something in order to make an installation ‘work’ or to provide input in order to complete the work. Such works literally ‘install’ the spectator within an environment or situation. The ‘installation’ is notoriously difficult to define; in fact, the most stable characteristic seems to be that of indefinability. Installation art often occupies an in-between position, situated in-between (art) disciplines, genres or mediums. For the purposes of this chapter, I understand installations as the type of works that rely on the physical presence of a visitor or spectator within the work, which also underlines the process-character of the work; installation is by default a time-based art. Placing the spectator within the artwork disrupts the convention of frontality. Instead, the

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installation offers partial perspectives, foregrounds the relationship between the viewer and the artwork, and hence collapses subject-object distinctions (Bouchard 2009, p. 168). Since visitors or spectators are so distinctively part of the artwork, art critic and scholar Claire Bishop has suggested that we might look at the visitors themselves as the defining element of installation art. In her book Installation Art: A Critical History (2005), she proposes to define installation art along the lines of spectatorial address, as a fruitful alternative to the attempt of locating characteristics in the material features of a work. For Bishop, the various modes in which installations address the visitor and understand the relationship between viewing and subjectivity could be a way to envisage the medium of installation art (2005, pp. 8–10). Bishop’s focus on spectatorial address aligns with my argument; therefore, I will briefly discuss her propositions. Bishop divides her book into four chapters, each attending to a different modality of experience. Moreover, she argues that these modalities each presuppose an alternative subject model; that is, they present a different understanding of what constitutes subjectivity. First, Bishop distinguishes the dream scene, which relies on a psychological approach to the subject. These installations involve spaces that evoke memories or sensations of being drawn into someone else’s world or into a dreamlike landscape. Often these spaces use many props and objects to create ‘lived spaces’ like a bedroom or a living room, such as in the work of Ilya Kabakov (pp. 14–17). A second category is that of heightened percep­ tion, pertaining to installations that primarily address the visitor through the senses, since they focus on visual, aural, tactile or olfactoral aspects of perception. Discussing the work Olafur Eliasson, among others, Bishop connects these installations to a phenomenological model of the subject (pp. 76–80).3 Third, mimetic engulfment relates to modalities of experience that involve a strong sense of disorientation and displacement. Here, the idea of a decentred subject emerges, a subject that is without clear-cut orientation points. Bishop refers to environments that seem to lack a solid size or shape, due to a play with scale, light or mirrors, or, as in the work of James Turrell, through immense darkness and tactics of colour deprivation (pp. 84–87).4 The fourth and final modality is named activated spectatorship, where visitors are primarily conceived of as political subjects; they are invited into situations in which they have to act or make choices or they are confronted with processes of inclusion or exclusion, like in the work of Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn (pp. 120–127). SIGNA’s Ruby Town comes closest to this modality. Bishop’s modalities are quite useful for analysing immersive theatre events as well. They are, however, grounded in a context of the (visual) arts, and they focus on the relationship between the artwork and a viewer. In a theatre performance, the encounter with the artwork usually involves another living entity: the performer. Along with the performer, other theatrical

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conventions and, subsequently, other modes of spectating and (partly) varying modes of address come into play.

Triangulating the vectors Theatre has a rich history of addressing audiences, in terms of how audiences are placed in space and how they are addressed by performers. The perspective stage, the fourth wall convention, naturalist acting styles, theatrical transparency: all these means indicate that audiences, whether ‘en groupe’ or singled out, do not just look at or participate in a performance. They are addressed in a specific way, and as such they are also positioned through address. They are perhaps confronted, seduced or invited to accept a particular way of reasoning; they can be treated as guests or as outsiders, as sensitive bodies, as citizens and so on. In Visuality in the Theatre, ­Maaike Bleeker lucidly analyses the function of address in the theatre. Address entails an invitation for spectators to adopt a particular point of view from which to look at what is being presented on stage. This point of view, or ‘subject of vision’, mediates between the viewing subject and that which is seen on stage (2008, p. 80). This does not imply that spectators always accept or identify with the presented or implicated perspective. In fact, Bleeker’s theory helps to explain how experiences of frustration, annoyance or displacement are precisely the product of a collision between the viewing subject and the ‘subject of vision’. Bleeker presents her analysis mostly in relation to performances with a conventional stage-auditorium divide. As mentioned above, when looking at the relationship between performers, spectators and spaces through the lens of ‘nomadic theatre’, one can start to see how in immersive theatre the segmented separation of stage and auditorium changes into a threefold, flexible performer-spectator- space constellation, not unlike star systems in which planets and stars constantly move in relation to each other. In such a constellation, the relations of performers, spectators and spaces evolve through particular, changing configurations, which also impacts the ways in which modes of address may change and shift during the performanceas-­process. Since immersive works often draw on individual trajectories and/or personal experience, descriptions of such works (either in reviews or in scholarly analysis) tend to focus on personal experience instead of their dramaturgy. Although the subjective element cannot entirely be avoided, in my view it is still possible – and relevant – to regard these performances as the (emerging) result of dramaturgical strategies. Often, the ‘meaning’ or significance of these works resides precisely in the way these constellations are organised, structured and configured, and how spectators are being addressed and positioned by such configurations. Apart from the stars and planets, the notion of constellation stems from a particular observation made by Deleuze and Guattari as they describe the characteristics of nomadism by means of a comparison of Go and Chess.

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Both are board games, but they are based on a different logic of organisation. For Deleuze and Guattari, Chess is governed by a ‘state logic’ in which the game pieces have pre-allocated functions, whereas Go operates through principles of nomadism, where game pieces acquire their function in relation to other pieces, based on the formation of temporary constellations (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, pp. 389–390). Chess pieces have ‘bi-univocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural’ (2004, p. 389). Go pieces, instead, have situational functions, derived from their position within a particular arrangement of pieces. They perform functions such as ‘insertion, […] bordering, encircling, shattering’ (ibid.), which are all examples of de- and reterritorialisation. The situational logic of Go can also be seen at work in many performative installations. I am not implying that performers and spectators are exactly similar to Go pieces. The Go game, instead, provides a model for analysing situational relationships, in which spectators border and sometimes shatter the stage, and where performers and spaces become entangled vectors of spectatorial address.

Constellations at work In order to demonstrate how modes of address materialise in flexible performer-­spectator-space constellations, I will briefly analyse three performances in which the spectator is distinctively placed within the work, and where the modes of address also direct the attention towards the spectator’s position within that work. The first example is No Man’s Land by Dutch scenographer and director Dries Verhoeven, a performance that premiered in Utrecht in 2008 and toured internationally in subsequent years, each time slightly adapted to the local context. In this performance, a single spectator is taken on a walk by a migrant. While following the performer-migrant through an urban district, the spectator listens to an audio tape which conveys experiences of living as a migrant in that specific country. Analogue to the situational strategies in Go, a performance like No Man’s Land distributes performers and spectators into an open space without strict borders, in which theatrical territories – the stage and the auditorium – and the urban environment all mount to a shattered, deterritorialised stage. In No Man’s Land, these compositional elements serve to address precisely the relation between the migrant-performer and the spectator. The spatial set-up and the personal tour suggest that the spectator will get to know the migrant and will be allowed to ‘dive’ into his or her life. But the audio script is counteractive to this impression. Via the headphones, one hears an actor who speaks on behalf of the migrant, and also addresses the thoughts and reflections one may have as a spectator. This brief description runs the risk of creating an impression that this mediating voice is an act of (neo)colonialism. The audio tape, however, is

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constructed in a very clever way; it also includes this potential neocolonial reading of the situation and ultimately has the effect of ‘backfiring’ on the spectator. Through these conflicting modes of address – the tour takes one ‘in’, the audio-tour asks one to reflect on what being ‘in’ actually ­entails – the spectators are invited to experience and reflect on their own, often unconscious, ways of perceiving and thinking about migrants. Instead of organising a ‘true encounter’ with a migrant, the performance’s emergent dramaturgy is that of facilitating another type of encounter, namely one that focuses on the experience of collaboratively traversing and engendering the work. This strategy of redirecting attention to the perceptual process of the spectator is a recurring theme in the work of Dries Verhoeven.5 In A Game of You by the Flemish company Ontroerend Goed, my second example, the performer-spectator-space constellation is configured rather differently. In this performance installation, single spectators travel through seven rooms, in which they sometimes encounter a performer and nearly always themselves: in each of the rooms there is either a mirror, a transparent window (through which one can see another room, sometimes an exact copy of the room one is in) or a video screen with a projection of another ‘immersant’ (who is seated in the first room of the installation). Starting with a mirror in the first room, spectators are consecutively asked to look at themselves, and to reflect on that mirror image in a second and third room. The fourth room is a video room, where spectators are asked to describe a person who is presented on screen and to give this person a name. In the fifth room, the events themselves get mirrored: when answering a ringing phone, spectators are called by someone they just ‘invented’ in the video room. The sixth room is the ‘engine room’, showing behind-the-scene logistics and the connections between the various rooms. This insight continues in the seventh and final room – which is now revealed as the other half of the first room (concealed by the mirror in the first room), where one ends up next to a performer. This performer closely studies the immersant in the first room, and will later on appear in the second room, mirroring the immersant’s behaviour. A Game of You is an exquisite example of a spatialised dramaturgy: these rooms are deeply entangled in one another, by means of the mirrored set-ups and reappearances of performers and (invented) persons. Moving from one room to another, the address gradually shifts from looking, reflecting and projecting, to ‘seeing through’, understanding the construction and finally recognising how it all ‘works’. The entanglement of rooms subsequently reflects the interference of ‘looks’ and looking, of judging oneself and others, of projecting ideas and of the values implicated in those acts of looking. In Cinema Imaginaire (2014) by Dutch theatre maker Lotte van den Berg, my last example, the act of looking generates again a different constellation. Van den Berg takes the spectators to a square in the city. She asks them to identify themselves with the lens of a camera – a camera that can be operated in various ways: zooming in and out, moving around, following a

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specific pattern of colour, object or movement, observing from a distance or being very intrusive. Through these viewing exercises (aka camera instructions), the participants create a series of imaginary film sequences – which they share with one another in the second part of the performance. The ­performer-spectator-space constellation here involves a radical changeability of the ‘performers’ who appear before the ‘eye of the camera’: passers-by, consumers, cleaners, a security agent, a dog, shopping bags or patterns in the pavement. Cinema Imaginaire follows a logic of procedural dramaturgy: the work comes into existence through doing, by means of spectators who follow and try out certain instructions and create self-adapted ‘scripts’.6 All participants thus compose their own film; a film about the city, about distance and proximity, about human behaviour or colour patterns – always in dialogue with the unpredictability of the city square. The qualities and capacities of a film camera infuse the primary modes of address in this performance: the spectators are invited to engage with acts of seeing and investigating, with adjusting one’s position, filter or scale of perception, with looking more closely, with seeing things in perspective. Within the context of Van den Berg’s oeuvre, it is not coincidental that she takes the participants to a city square; such squares are usually used by people with various social and cultural backgrounds, and they also symbolise public space. To observe closely, to exercise openness, to gather new perspectives, to re-­ position oneself in relation to others: these are all recurring themes in Van den Berg’s work.

To enter into composition By mapping the changeable configurations of performer-spectator-space constellations, the emergent dramaturgies of these immersive performances come to the fore. In all three works, there is a sense of an ongoing composition, a composition of relationships, of positionings in space, of address and response to address. The role of performers, spectators and spaces is not fixed. Instead, these roles are in a continuous state of becoming. In the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, the notion of becoming is often accompanied by another word, which serves as a kind of ‘orientating vector’: ­becoming-woman, becoming-minor, becoming-animal. In the same line of reasoning, we could speak of becoming-performer, becoming-spectator and becoming-space. It is precisely in this ‘becoming-other’ that we can see how performers, spectators and spaces enter into composition with one another. In order to show how ‘becoming-’ is a compositional act, a little detour is needed. A well-known example from Deleuze and Guattari is their analysis of the becoming-wasp of the orchid and the becoming-orchid of the wasp. They argue that such a becoming does not work through imitation or resemblance but through a capturing of code. This nuance seems incarnated in precisely this little hyphen, so to say. The orchid and the wasp do not change into one another; instead, they evolve in relation to one another.

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Deleuze and Guattari qualify those encounters between two heterogeneous elements as a process of entering into composition with the other (2004, p.  289). An expression like ‘becoming-animal’ refers to an act of entering into composition with those qualities, desires or capacities in oneself that are shared with animals. Let me clarify this by citing an example found in an unexpected place. In his inspiring book Six Drawing Lessons, artist and (animation-)filmmaker William Kentridge discusses, among many other things, the intimate relationship of human and animal bodies. Although Kentridge does not use the term becoming-animal, we might recognise a Deleuzian mindset in his analysis of statues of men on a horse – statues which narrate of conquest, leadership, command, or victory. Kentridge subtly observes that the horse is not only the right scale for showing the ‘magnitude’ of man, but also that the horse creeps into the man’s bodily posture: A man standing on a chair or table is ridiculous. On a pedestal, we begin to let him grow. But put the man on a horse, and preferably the horse on a pedestal, and you have a hero or a tyrant, or at any rate, someone who has made a name for himself. A horse fits so snugly under the legs. It feels not just connected to the person, but part of him, an extension of the person to show who he really is. We make the horse part of us […] But more than that, we absorb horseness into ourselves, an uprightness of posture. We make the horse part of us […] We suck in the energy and strength of the animal, then sit up straight, to show we are worthy of the transfer of power. (Kentridge 2014, p. 142, my emphasis) Posture, strength, energy, power: this uprightness could well be seen as an act of entering into composition with our own ‘horse-ness’, of activating elements in ourselves that align with horse. Actually, Kentridge estimates the horse a little higher than the man, observing that in many equestrian statues, the moral good of the horse is transferred to the posture of the man. To get back into our own orbit: an expression like ‘becoming-spectator’ describes the act of entering into composition with those aspects that r­ elate to spectating, like watching, listening, feeling, sensing or sense-making. These activities are of course pertinent to any performance, yet in some ­i mmersive works, like the three examples discussed, they become vital dramaturgical elements. Put in other words, they become compositional forces that ignite self-reflexivity on the side of the spectator. In No Man’s Land, there are many occasions in which the performer and spectator stand still and look into each other’s eyes, while both listening to the audio tape. I would like to regard this encounter as a becoming-spectator of the performer, and a becoming-performer of the spectator. The spectator does not become or transform into a performer, but enters into composition with those aspects and functions that we usually relate to performing in the

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theatre: to present oneself to another person, to be looked at. In turn, the migrant-performer looks and listens and thus cuts across the usual area of expertise of the spectator, on his or her own terms. The goal is not to arrive at new positions, but rather the negotiation itself. In No Man’s Land and many other ambulatory performances, performers and spectators are engaged in becoming-space as well, as they enter into composition with space by means of way-finding, navigating, guiding, or by jointly maintaining the coordinates of a fluid theatre space. In A Game of You and Cinema Imagi­ naire, the becoming-spectator of the spectators themselves is foregrounded. Of course one could argue that in A Game of You, the spectator becomes a character in a fictional universe of another spectator. But since the fiction is so openly constructed, and the performance is so transparent in making the spectator an accomplice in this construction, the primary agenda of this installation, and also the other two examples, seems to be one of inviting awareness of what ‘looking’ actually entails, of asking how one looks at oneself, how one looks at others and what ideas, norms or values are implicated in those acts of looking.

Performance ecologies Although they use various modes of address, all three performances render spectatorship an integral part of the performance, and point to spectatorship itself as a specific kind of performance. In my view, these works ignite a sense of self-reflexivity on the side of the spectator, while at the same time creating affective relationships with the performances’ subject matter. In No Man’s Land, the combination of being confronted with one’s prejudices while walking the streets together opens up a space to deal with the topic of migration on an affective level. Instead of staying caught in the contract in which a Western spectator meets the migrant-other, a sense of shared space and time emerges. A Game of You playfully alerts one to that absurd game we all play, that game in which we constantly judge ourselves and others by means of our projections. This playful address also induces a certain mildness towards oneself and others. Related to this, after visiting Cinema Imag­ inaire, it felt as if my eyes had become sharper and softer at the same time. The combination of being placed within an immersive environment which also induces a heightened sense of self-awareness is in my view a powerful strategy of these immersive works. Baz Kershaw, in The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, describes a similar twofold movement, which he terms the ecology of performance. In his analysis of Teatro de los Sentidos’ The Labyrinth (1996), Kershaw observes how the disruption of perceptual habits and the absence of a hierarchically ordered space simultaneously produced a sense of self-awareness and of social and environmental connectivity (Kershaw 1999, p. 213). It is precisely this twofold connectivity that is also activated through the dramaturgical strategies

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of No Man’s Land, A Game of You and Cinema Imaginaire. By engaging spectators as compositional forces, these works ignite (self)reflexivity, while also creating affective bonds with the societal environments in which these works themselves are so deeply immersed.

Notes 1 More recent works by SIGNA are discussed elsewhere in this volume. See ­C hapters 3, 4 and 16. 2 For an extensive analysis, see Groot Nibbelink 2019, pp. 141–165. 3 Performances like The Smile Off Your Face by Ontroerend Goed or Het Sprook­ jesbordeel by Toneelhuis also allude to this modality of experience. See Groot Nibbelink 2019, pp. 115–140. This also applies to the work of Enrique Vargas/ Teatro de los Sentidos. 4 Teatro de los Sentidos’ Labyrinth uses similar strategies. See Kershaw (1999). 5 For an extensive analysis, see Groot Nibbelink 2019, pp. 31–58. 6 Such activities also relate to Gareth White’s notion of procedural authorship; see White (2013, pp. 29–32, 83–89, 146–149).

References Alston, A 2016, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Par­ ticipation, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke. Bay-Cheng, S, Kattenbelt, C, Lavender, A, & Nelson, R (eds) 2010, Mapping Inter­ mediality in Performance, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. Bishop, C 2005, Installation Art: A Critical History, Tate Publishing, London. Bishop, C 2012, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London. Bleeker, M 2008, Visuality in the Theatre: The Locus of Looking, Palgrave ­MacMillan, Basingstoke. Bouchard, G 2009, ‘Haptic Visuality: The Dissective View in Performance’, in A Oddey & C White (eds), Modes of Spectating, pp. 163–176. Intellect, Bristol. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F [1980] 2004, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo­ phrenia, B Massumi (trans & intro), Continuum, London. Freshwater, H 2009, Theatre & Audiences, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Giannachi, G 2010, ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Virtual Reality’, in J Collins & A Nesbitt (eds), Theatre and Performance Design: A Reader in Scenography, pp. 123–127. Routledge, London. Groot Nibbelink, L 2019, Nomadic Theatre: Mobilizing Theory and Practice on the European Stage, Bloomsbury, London. Kentridge, W 2014, Six Drawing Lessons, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Kershaw, B 1999, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, Routledge, London. Machon, J 2013, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary ­Performance, Palgrave, Basingstoke. Rancière, J 2009, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London. White, G 2013, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, ­Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Chapter 6

Structures of spectatorship Kerstin Schankweiler

In response to the chapters in this section, I will provide some brief input from my disciplinary perspective as an art historian. What first caught my attention were the numerous references to the history of art, especially to installation art, in the individual contributions. Barbara Gronau’s chapter contextualises immersive theatre within a history of immersive aesthetics and installation art, ranging from panorama painting to environment. Similarly, Benjamin Wihstutz considers the history of visual art as an important reference for immersive theatre practices and draws on the concept of environment as well as Michael Fried’s notion of theatricality. Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink takes Claire Bishop’s study on installation art into account and applies the strategy of ‘activated spectatorship’ – identified by Bishop as one modality of spectatorial address and the presupposed subject model in installation art – to the immersive theatre productions she is considering. Why these references when it comes to immersive theatre and mobile audiences? In what follows, I will briefly elaborate three possible explanations that might also shed some light on the relationship between the role of the viewer, the aesthetics of installation art and immersive theatre. First, I will introduce how the beholder of artworks has been referred to in art history, which I believe is similar to how audiences have been conceptualised in theatre and performance studies. Second, I will elaborate on the viewer’s participation and self-reflection in installation art and the cross references to theatre within this discourse, and third, I will address the issue of institutional critique.

1. The modes of ‘spectatorial address’ that Groot Nibbelink focuses on in the context of immersive theatre have also been important in the branch of art historical research called aesthetics of reception. One of the main representatives of this analytical perspective in German art history is Wolfgang Kemp. In the 1980s, Kemp adopted the aesthetics of reception approach

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that had been developed in literary studies at the end of the 1960s for his discipline, thus shaping an idea of a structure of viewing that is inscribed in a work of art. Both art history and theatre studies have a commonality in that the empirical viewer hardly plays a role in research. For the three authors writing on ‘Mobile Audiences’ in this volume, it still doesn’t seem to be an option to include empirical viewers. Similarly, in art history ‘the beholder’ (mainly of paintings) is conceptualised as an idealised figure that is addressed in its function, which is regarded as immanent to the work. For example, a painting can structure perception through certain pictorial elements and the composition: that is, through reception specifications such as the perspective in the picture, mediator figures, the use of ‘blanks’ that invite the viewer to fill them in, but also means of distancing and non-­ recognition of the viewer. Kemp summed it up in the mid-1980s with the title of his publication Der Betrachter ist im Bild (The Beholder is in the Picture). The inscription of the beholder is turned to self-reflexivity of representation. However, since the 1960s at the latest, the concept of the artwork itself has been put up for negotiation in artistic practice and art history alike, and feminist as well as postcolonial perspectives have revised an idealised and unmarked concept of ‘the beholder’. In his more recent book, Der explizite Betrachter (The Explicit Beholder), Kemp tries to catch up with this development. He states that art since the 1960s has been calling out to its model beholder: ‘be a participant!’ – quite similar to the title of this volume. In contrast to the implicit recipient, the beholder is now explicit, in the sense that he/she is directly addressed and invited to participate physically. ‘The beholder’s share’ and the conversion from internal relations to relations outside the work generally represent an enhancement of the viewer’s function’ (Kemp 2015, p.  65, my translation). Kemp investigates this changed function of the ‘beholder-­participant’ in works of Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Ólafur Elíasson and others. He ultimately concludes that contemporary participatory art practices, the different forms of which he sometimes negotiates under the more pejorative terms ‘event art’ and ‘participatory art’ (‘Mitmach-Kunst’), are no more than ‘applied aesthetics of reception’ (Kemp 2015, p. 145, my translation). Kemp’s examples are opposed to other views of participation, which include the refusal of culturally coded attitudes of reception as a productive possibility. Irit Rogoff, for example, identifies the concept of ‘looking away’ in contrast to normalised spectators (Rogoff 2004). The art museum is structurally very similar to the theatre in that it provides a strong framework that defines a space for aesthetic experience and determines the role of the audience or viewers. Therefore, it has always been considered remarkable when these roles are undermined and questioned, or even become the subject matter of works of art. It is noteworthy that the aesthetics of reception, which established the viewer as a third constitutive factor of art historical analysis (alongside artist and work), was introduced at a time when artistic practices were experimenting with and

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scrutinising this very factor. This is probably quite similar in theatre studies, where the audience becomes the object of research in the moment of its apparent dissolution.

2. The authors in this section frequently refer to installation art, especially to environment and site-specific art. Installation art has been regarded as an art form that has assigned the viewer a new, more active role. This active role is not merely understood as interactivity but reflects the aesthetic practice of watching itself. The notion of installation art has transformed implicit modes of art reception into a technical constellation in space, a specific spatialised (and therefore also temporalised) art form that cannot be perceived in a conventional manner (like a painting, for example). Like the mobile audiences in immersive theatre, the viewers of installation art become physically mobilised: they have to move around, go through or enter the work, in such a way that the boundaries between the work and the viewer’s environment dissolve. Due to these new forms of ‘staging’ works of art (as well as their reception modes), there have been many cross references between installation art and theatre from early on. If for recent theatre productions installational aspects seem to gain relevance, it is also worthwhile to mention that the notion of theatricality is central to discourses around installation art practices – due to Michael Fried’s seminal essay on the theatrical quality of Minimal Art, of which he was very critical (Fried 1998 [1967]). In her book Ästhetik der Installation (2003, published in English as Aesthetics of Installation Art in 2012), German philosopher Juliane Rebentisch includes a detailed discussion of the concept of theatricality as a crystallisation point of discourses around installation art. Rebentisch’s reading of Fried reads like a description of immersive theatre: for Fried, the theatricalisation of the viewer means he/she is ‘infected’ by the ‘stage presence’ of (minimalist) art objects, in a way sent on to the stage him-/herself and made into an actor (Rebentisch 2003, p. 70, my translation). While Fried criticises this as a subjection of the work of art to the viewer, Rebentisch states that there can be no non-theatrical art in Fried’s sense of the term. She explains ‘that the accomplishment of […] installation art consists in reflecting, in the medium of art, the generally constitutive dependence of aesthetic objects on the performative perspective of the one who aesthetically experiences it’ (ibid., p. 76, my translation). The viewer – or spectator – of installation art perceives him-/herself in an indeterminate relationship to the aesthetic object and thus reflects on his/her part or role in this relationship. Hence, aesthetic experience itself comes to the fore and emerges reflexively. This self-­reflection is also at work in immersive theatre productions where the audience is forced to question its traditional role as (more or less) passive onlookers and is now conceptualised as ‘spect-actors’ or ‘prosumers’.

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3. Participatory art in my discipline is usually mentioned in the same breath with institutional critique. Institutional critique can be concerned with the ‘institution’ of art itself, in the sense that the very notion of art and its normative parameters are questioned; it can also be concerned with art institutions that determine art reception, primarily the museum. Institutional critique can be described as the critical analysis of the historical and socio-political institutions of art and their interdependencies with artistic production and the perception of artistic works. Moreover, the institutional absorption of institution-critical and participatory art, an ‘institutionalization of institutional critique’ (Graw 2005), and the canonisation of these practices have been an important issue in critical art historical discourses.1 Against this backdrop, it is striking to me that immersive theatre does not seem to be institution-critical in this sense (or at least it is not discussed in that way) despite the many commonalities it has with institution-critical art, such as viewer participation, site-specificity, or abandoning the conventional institutional framework by using other locations. The art movement of Land Art, for example, took place outside the context of galleries and museums. Not least as a reaction to the increasingly prominent commodity value of art, ephemeral works were mostly created in vast landscapes, making completely new demands of the audience. Immersive theatre, too, often takes place in spaces that have not previously been used for theatre productions. Playing at these alternative venues already begins to unsettle the audience because, unlike in classical theatres, the audience does not know from the outset where to go and how to behave. Along these lines, perhaps immersive theatre could be read as an inquiry into the workings of theatre and its institutions in general. The performances of SIGNA, discussed in several contributions in this volume, elevate institutions and the power structures inherent in them to their core theme. By staging the performance as the closed system of an institution (a mental hospital, a night club, an enterprise, etc.), SIGNA shows yet another level of addressing the framework in which we are socialised. Thus, the role and function of the audience in relation to the performance becomes the blueprint for how we are programmed to act in hierarchical institutions and social situations. This says just as much about the normativity and regularity of institutions as it comments on the problematic nature of being an audience in the theatre. All of this points to the fact that a perspective on the role of the audience, especially in a historical view, provides a means of conceptualising something I would call ‘structures of spectatorship’ – in reference to Raymond Williams’ notion of ‘structures of feelings’ (Williams 1977, pp. 128–135): each constellation of spectatorial address in theatre performances sets limits to the possibilities of the audience experience or action, and lends it contours. At the same time, these constellations are lived social relations and

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are thus changeable. In order to make the transformation of these structures and orders analytically comprehensible, immersive theatre is a promising field of experience and study.

Note 1 Artistic practices considered as institutional critique are often site-specific. ­Miwon Kwon, for example, offers a critical approach to site-specific art and its critical impetus in times of the ‘biennialisation’ of the art system since the 1990s. See Kwon (2000).

References Fried, M 1998 [1967], Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Graw, I 2005, ‘Jenseits der Institutionskritik. Ein Vortrag im Los Angeles County Museum of Art’, in Texte zur Kunst no. 59, September 2005, ‘Institutionskritik’, pp. 40–53. Kemp, W (ed) 1985, Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsäs­ thetik, Reimer, Berlin. Kemp, W 2015, Der explizite Betrachter, Konstanz University Press, Konstanz. Kwon, M 2000, ‘One Place After Another. Notes on Site Specificity’, in E Suderburg (ed), Space, Site, Intervention. Situating Installation Art, pp. 38–63. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London. Rebentisch, J 2003, Ästhetik der Installation, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. Rogoff, I 2005, ‘Looking Away – Participations in Visual Culture’, in G Butt (ed), After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, pp. 117–134. Wiley-­ Blackwell, Malden, MA. Williams, R 1977, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York.

Part II

Researching spectatorship

Chapter 7

Keep it real A conversation between performance artist Julian Hetzel and Theresa Schütz

Theresa Schütz:  

In each of your performance installations that I’ve been part of up until now, I as a spectator felt myself really staged; staged in the sense of being an integral part in one-on-one situations on the one hand, and in the sense of a somehow clear intention towards the prospective impact on me as an audience member on the other hand. Let’s first focus on your work The Automated Sniper. You’ve decided – due to guidelines of the producing theatre – to create two versions, a so-called ‘theatre version’ and an ‘installation version’. How did you and your team think about the different ways of staging the spectators in these two arrangements? Let’s start with the theatre version… Julian Hetzel:   In the development of the project The Automated Sniper, we’d discussed the relation between the spectators themselves a lot. In the theatre version, we have volunteers who are entering the game booth and, let’s say, they have to get their hands dirty by playing along. So, the audience gets involved on different levels. There are different grades of spectatorship. What we’d discussed as a big question of our research was the question of: where is the line between a spectator and a witness, by also tackling the subject of warfare, drones and witnessing violence at a distance. In the theatre version, we watch others doing something raw [editor’s note: they have to shoot paintball bullets towards the white canvas and fragile sculptures and also to shoot the two performers on the stage who’re framed as enemies in the game]. There is this parallel with the Milgram experiment which we’ve also discussed a lot during the rehearsal process. To point to the installation version, all the audience members are treated equally because everyone has to enter the game booth. Everyone is invited to play the computer game in a one-on-one situation in front of the screen, getting instructions from the headphones. In the second level, each audience member enters the empty auditorium where they are confronted with the stage and realise that the actions they performed through the game pad had their concrete impact on the stage. And in this installation version every spectator is invited to experience it.

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But as I said the whole project deals a lot with different grades of spectatorship. Because in the theatre version we have these two guys, Claudio Ritfeld and Bas van Rijnsoever, on stage making art, watching themselves while creating art, and watching the audiences looking at art in the white cube while becoming themselves part of the artwork on stage. Caspar David Friedrich is in this case a big reference for me. He invented the ‘Rückenfigur’, or figure seen from behind, in his landscape paintings by adding a spectator as a kind of projection screen for the viewer or gallery visitor. So, you have somebody through whose eyes you could perceive the natural imagery in order to have an amplified experience of this landscape. And I think it’s a bit similar in gaming and the format of the first-person shooter game we’ve chosen. The ‘eye’ of the gun, of the weapon, becomes your eye. You’re in control of the gun and you adopt the perspective of the eye of the camera too. TS:  In the first part of the theatre version – and you’ve mentioned it ­already – you establish a strong metanarrative of watching, framing and evaluating art as art. That’s why, for me, the first volunteer from the audience is just someone who participates in the collaborative creation of this emerging painting on the back wall on stage. The third volunteer is the one who receives ‘the mission’ to target the bodies of the performers and to shoot them with the paintball bullets. That’s when the analogy between automated sniping in games and in warfare becomes evident. What I found really intriguing was my own underestimation of the impact the paintball bullets have on the performers’ bodies, which is not least because of my own lack of experience with this popular game version of paintball. Do you think that the volunteers know or reflect on what they are doing in this situation? JH:   The bullets come with a very high pressure. They were shot onstage, onto the objects, so it becomes pretty much obvious that they do have an impact. You understand quickly that this machine we’ve built is not just a toy. The guys wear these Plexiglas shields in front of their faces to protect their eyes. They also wear protective layers, like scuba diving suits, like a very thin layer of neoprene. But they got bruised anyway. Because they need to have a certain freedom of movement, some small areas of their bodies remain unprotected. So, they are getting bruised in every show. Of course, we’ve tried to lower the threshold, that’s why we start with this ‘arty-farty’ impulse of ‘let’s make a nice painting, let’s contribute some colour to this artwork…’ It’s in fact a way to seduce or to misguide the audience in order to get them to this point where somebody is pressing the trigger. In the try-outs it actually happened that people refused to shoot the performers and then it really became a whole different game; it became a thriller about to what extent Anna, the voice, would be able to deal with this resistance. By asking the audience to shoot ‘only’ the shoulders or the feet, it became about testing the audiences’ limits. That’s where the ethical questions came up here very obviously.

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Figure 7.1  T  he Automated Sniper by Julian Hetzel. Source: © Thomas Lenden TS:   Did people in the auditorium try to intervene? JH:   No, so far it did not happen. TS:   In the theatre version, there is one scene in which

Claudio Ritfeld gives his colleague Bas van Rijnsoever a piggyback while hiding himself under a Beuysian blanket of felt. Then, this kind of iconic ‘art giant’ steps forward in front of the first row and gives a priest-like speech about an art which has to be political, revolutionary and evolutionary. In order to include also your former works Still – The Economy of Waiting, Schuld­ fabrik/Guilt Factory and The Benefactor in our conversation, I’d like to ask you about your conception of art. I’m still not sure about it, because for me this scene could be interpreted either as a cynical comment or – ­combined with the song at the end of the performance – as a sincere emphasis on the political impact of making art. JH:   That is a tough question and I have to find a way in… First of all, the entire statement is indeed a quote from Joseph Beuys. And I love Joseph Beuys. Besides that quote, we’re using a lot of other references from art history and also from international warfare. The human sculpture of the hooded man, for example, alludes to Guantanamo and the linked images of our cultural memory. The art of producing images, of shooting photographs is therefore also an analogy with which we worked in The Automated Sniper. The question for me is also to what extent art could really have an impact in society. What I try with my work is not giving any answers but asking questions. The older I become the more I learn about the world and the more difficult it becomes for me to take up a clear position towards reality.

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Because the more I know, the more I understand that my position concerning what is right or wrong is constantly being put in question by other realities I get in touch with through travelling or reading. Suddenly my own belief system is falling apart or needs to be reconsidered. I think I’d like to answer the question in this way: I like to challenge the audience. I like to open up questions about responsibility, about ethics, like in Still: how do we treat people who’re living on the street? By redirecting these questions to the audiences, everybody has to negotiate these questions or situations. I think this is what I’m trying to do again and again. In fact, I hardly document the part of the audience, on how do they relate to it, do they believe it’s real or not or what it really does with them in the end. But – in the case of Still and the last room with the homeless people – there are a lot of stories circulating concerning what had happened in this room. People had breakdowns, others started crying or left the room quickly – but often something happened, because they have been pushed to a limit and they understood that they are alone with this other person in this small room. This is not about mirroring. I mean the question of cynicism and whether I exploit certain people or situations for the sake of the art or for my own madness is relevant, but I hope the question doesn’t remain in the foreground. I really don’t see it as a cynical comment. In my past I was engaged in political activism; I have always been first row in protest movements. But at one point, as I understood that solidarity is not enough, I stopped and questioned my own responsibility. At the same time, I was surrounded by people who really felt an urgency, who witnessed the Arab spring in Egypt for example, who were traumatised. I met artivists who use art as a valve, as a tool or as a mission to deal with this pain, with aggression or anger. And then I was wondering about my source of motivation as an artist. We also had a lot of discussions during my studies and often the reproach of being a hypocrite, heterosexual, white German came up, like: ‘who are you to address these questions?’ Therefore, I think it’s really a different thing if you work as an activist in the arts or as an artist following certain political issues by turning the knife in a wound. This effort to create friction in the mindset of the spectators is what I’m trying to do. The performance should have an impact on people; they should leave and keep chewing it over. TS:   I think the impact of your works bears on your artistic decision to combine the white cube-aesthetic as a spatial framework of your installations with the embedding of ‘real’ persons or facts. I refer to the fact that at the end of the performance installation Still, the audience doesn’t take a seat in front of an actress who’s playing a homeless person, but in front of a real homeless woman (from Hannover in my case). In Schuld­ fabrik/Guilt Factory the soap is not fake, but had been really produced with human fat. And in The Automated Sniper, the audience is following

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a Skype-conference with Akram from Irak, who is a sophisticated gamer and who’s invited to play one level of this live-staged, first-person shooter game on stage. A kind of coquettish question might be: do you mistrust fiction? Do you think the situations would not work if actors were playing the scenes, as they do in, for example, SIGNA’s immersive theatre formats? JH:   I’m really influenced by Duchamp’s concept of a ready-made. If you take this as a basis and if we all agree that a urinal could be considered as art, we could use the concept in both directions: from the art world into the public sphere and the other way around. The core of my work is to confuse the audience about the context. I try to connect worlds that do not ‘normally’ match. It’s like fitting something round into something square. There will always be confusion or irritation. By changing the context of the subject, by inviting a homeless person into the performance or by going with performers into public space, doing something which is not considered appropriate by just lying on the street (like for example in Sculpturing Fear), you create ruptures that produce impact. One ingredient for me really always has to be a real fact. That’s why Akram is part of The Automated Sniper – he’s live on stage, mediated by the screen, and he’s able to control this device we’ve built live from a distance, and I’m not interested in faking this situation. And it’s the same with my project The Benefactor where I donate 2,000 euros to an orphan, to a four-year-old girl in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It obviously makes a difference if you fake this or if you do this for real. You meet people, you become part of their history and vice versa. In a way, I need the reality to feed my projects. This is the key to my work, that I insist on doing it for real. It’s a collaboration of the arts and reality. TS:   Taking this broad conception of art, I’d like to come back to your strategies of staging spectators. And so – you’ve just mentioned it – I’d like to speak about your project The Benefactor, which, aside from occasional lecture performances, as a format doesn’t need an audience anymore. JH:   Most of my works are really coming from a concept. I start with a basic idea on a topic which I’m tackling and then I reflect on a concept and on how to translate this into an artistic form, because in the end you want to share it with other people, with the audience. In the case of Still, everything had been built upon the idea of what should happen in the last room, thus the encounter with the ‘real’ homeless people in the context of thinking about, through art, the several ‘economies of waiting’. All the rooms of the Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory had been built according to the idea of this human soap. And The Benefactor came out of the conceptual idea to transfer cultural money into development aid. TS:   And within these conceptual ideas that form the particular starting points for each performance installation, do you also conceptualise an

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exemplary or ‘ideal’ spectator? The question is pointing towards the role or the function of the spectator as a visitor, recipient and respondent in your performance installations and potential effects. JH:   For sure, if you build one-on-one situations, you focus on the invitation for spectators to interact and to experience the encounter. Essentially, after the concept and the format, thinking about the audience is the second step towards the creation of the work. How could they be addressed? How could we stimulate them to relate or to interact? What are the options? We also work a lot with try-outs, inviting test audiences in advance. What I understand more and more is that there seems to be a certain range of reaction. Sixty or seventy percent of reactions you could, in a way, foresee. And there are also of course the unexpected reactions. I mean, you meet them in a certain moment in their life and whatever they are carrying with them, they bring it into the situation and it becomes part of the work. For sure, you cannot foresee these special triggers during the conversations, even if you have thought about a lot of options. And I’m often really surprised by the creativity of the audience too. Most of them have some expectations; they want to receive something and are also willing to collaborate. But if you work in public space, it’s a completely different setting. There is no agreement on collaboration support. It’s rough. And if you don’t present something pleasing, it becomes a permanent collision. My ideal spectator is just a critical spectator who supports the idea. Without a certain empathy, without a certain will to collaborate, to question or to play, you will probably have a hard time. And this concerns both sides. If you as a spectator remain really passive and not open, really little will happen. It’s like animating a stone. Therefore, I need a certain commitment, a certain contribution and openness from the spectators in order to make these moments with impact happen. And I think I’m getting better in preparing the audience for these moments, in seducing them in a way. But anyway, you cannot choose your audience. And it really depends on the context, on where you’re allowed to place the installation in the city, like in Munich next to the opera or in Argentina. Each context also influences the way of ‘reading’ the work and sometimes the context might be bigger than my work is and then it becomes hard to maintain the integrity of the project, because it could be exploited or it just falls apart. That was also an important lesson for me. How could you create concepts that function in a specific field? Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory, for example, works with a lot of Christian codes and it will probably only create a productive friction in a society which understands and shares these codes. This conversation took place on 9 March 2017 in Amsterdam.

Chapter 8

Participatory audiencing and the committed return Matthew Reason

The experience had me I am standing in the upstairs foyer of the Martin-Gropius-Bau arts centre in Berlin, awaiting the beginning of Lundahl and Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room.1 A man steps forward and fits a pair of headphones over my ears, cutting out the background hubbub of the museum around me. I am momentarily conscious of feeling exposed in a public place. A moment later I feel movement near my head and a pair of opaque snow goggles is slipped snuggly over my eyes, leaving me unable to see anything beyond a diffused glow of white light. Unable to see, unable to hear the voices or footsteps of those around me, I am isolated within the vibrating bubble of my own consciousness. Suddenly, I hear a voice through the headset, I feel a hand clasp my own, and the experience begins. For the next 30 minutes, I am taken on a sightless tour, guided into rooms, led from space to space, making both a literal journey through the building and an imaginative one through a fragmented narrative that is played over the wireless headphones. A hand, sometimes two, takes mine and leads me, directs me, propels me – slowly at first, gaining my trust, instilling confidence, and then with greater fluency and speed until I am following my invisible guide rapidly, without hesitation and with complete commitment. There would, I quickly realise, be little point doing otherwise. For while surrendering control to the guiding hand of a complete stranger (complete to the extent that I never get to see his or her face) might seem like a major step, might feel like trust very quickly given, the nature of the work accelerates this commitment in two key ways. First in its projection of a sense of care: there is no sudden rush into uncomfortably fast movement, instead a steady accumulation in a manner that encourages trust. Second, and equally importantly perhaps, is a sense that if I resist or doubt then everybody is in for a miserable time. I, as a participant, would be miserable, lagging back, stumbling, continually worried about walking into something or banging my head when made to duck low. Additionally, and significantly given the sense of responsibility that audiences often report towards performers, my invisible guides would be miserable: frustrated at their inability to gain my trust and the lack of flow in the resulting interaction.

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For the duration of the performance, for a sightless 30 minutes, I commit myself. I listen to the audio, attempting to following a haunting narrative and seductive voice. Truthfully, however, the most affectively powerful element of the experience is the very act of letting go – the act of commitment itself. I allow my guide to take me wherever they take me, I invest, I immerse, I implicate myself entirely into the work. There is a pleasure to this, a pleasure in submission, yet already I feel a tension and a loss of agency that stops me from taking full enjoyment from the encounter. When the experience is over, the snow goggles and headphones are removed. I am in a different room, although in the same museum, and my smiling host from the beginning thanks me and directs me to the exit. I am returned to everyday life, to the damp streets of Berlin, and to the requirement of once again having to take responsibility for my own actions and movements. Symphony of a Missing Room is an experience – in many ways an engrossing and exhilarating experience. I am tempted to reach for cliché and describe it as an out of body experience, but perhaps the reverse would be more apposite. It is an out of mind experience. For as I walk away from the Martin-Gropius-Bau, I am suddenly very much aware that although I committed myself to the work, something feels incomplete. It is as if somebody has kissed me, but I failed to kiss them back. Or somebody shook my hand, but my arm remained limp. Or perhaps like hearing something of great importance – a confession, a poem, a prayer, a call for help – but not registering it consciously until I had left the room and turned the corner. You know that feeling? The feel of it being only after that you begin to catch up with yourself and start to wonder what happened… I committed to the work, I invested in it, participated with it, immersed myself into its world, I enjoyed it – but as I walk away I realise that it feels less like I had an experience; and more like an experience had me. What had not happened – or had not yet happened – is what I will conceptualise in this chapter as the committed return. To develop this proposal I will first travel through ideas of theatre as exchange and theatre as experience in order to construct a new understanding of participatory audiencing. That is, how do spectators participate in the doing of their own experiences? To illustrate what I mean by this I will detour away from Symphony of a Missing Room – which acts more as a provocation for this chapter than its focus – and consider four examples of spectator responses to performances that have emerged from my own participatory audience research. These, I propose, allow us to witness tangible instances of participatory audiencing, and to see how, through invested acts of spectatorship, audiences make a committed return to both the performance and their experience of the performance.

Theatre as exchange There is a lot about theatre that appears unidirectional – a one-way flow of stimulus from the work to the audience, more akin to a broadcast than a conversation. Yet, theatre is often conceived as a reciprocal and

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multidirectional exchange between performer and spectators. Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, for example, describes theatre as ‘what takes place between spectator and actor’ ([1968] 2002, p. 32). The most easily graspable elements of this exchange are the most tangible: laughter, gasps, boos, applause, the occasional standing ovation or demonstrative walkout. It is, however, possible to see less demonstrative acts of audience engagement as part of this exchange. Perhaps even silence represents a kind of return – particularly because silence in large groups is otherwise so unusual – as vital to the exchange as the act of listening is to a one-on-one conversation. For some – for some artists, some audiences, some critics, some ­academics  – there exists a dissatisfaction with such limited audience/­ performance interaction. Silence. Attention. Occasional laughter. Dutiful applause. This all seems rather small beer, rather passive and well behaved, rather disempowered. It doesn’t seem much of an exchange. A fairly explicit manifestation of this dissatisfaction is found in Caroline Heim’s 2016 book Audience as Performer, which celebrates both the rowdy audiences of ­Victorian-era theatres and emerging forms of twenty-first-century audience participation (including cultures of fandom, audience co-creation, audiences as critics, etc.). Heim presents these historical practices as examples of political and creative audience empowerment in direct contrast to what she describes as the staid, cowed and controlled spectatorship that became the standard throughout the twentieth century. Twentieth-century audiences, she suggests, fell into a ‘stupor’ and needed to ‘break out of their inertia’ (2016, p. 80). It is the pursuit of a more fundamental and reciprocal exchange between audience and work that, at least in part, underlies the contemporary growth of participatory art practices. Whether framed in terms of ‘immersive theatre’, ‘dialogical art’ or ‘relational aesthetics’, there exists a simultaneous desire to demand more for audiences while also requiring more from them in return. Nicolas Bourriaud, for example, describes how the purpose of the relational artwork is ‘to invent possible encounters’ and ‘create the conditions for an exchange, the way you return a service in a game of tennis’ (2002, pp. 22–23). There is in Bourriaud’s proposition an almost romantic exposition of the democratic and emancipatory potential of relational art practices. Inevitably such celebration opens itself up for radical critique, not least in that there must necessarily be various degrees of intersubjective participation, not all of which are equally emancipatory. For example, while Symphony of a Missing Room constructed a possible encounter and required participation in a manner not unlike a game, it is important to think about the limitations of the act of audience interaction it facilitated. Useful here is Grant Kester’s description of dialogical art: The possibility of a dialogical relationship that breaks down the conventional distinction between artist, art work and audience – a relationship that allows the viewer to ‘speak back’ to the artist in certain ways, and in which this reply becomes in effect a part of the ‘work’ itself. (1999/2000, p. 3)

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Reading this, and thinking about my experience of Symphony of a Missing Room, I wonder about the extent to which my interaction with the performance was complicit, perhaps even passive, as I immersed myself into the experience. I may have been part of the work, but was there any opportunity to ‘speak back’? The work was clearly participatory, and could not have happened without my active involvement. However, the extent and nature of the exchange is in some ways as limited – very different, but equally ­prescribed – as that of the conventional audience that Heim condemns. Indeed, the status of the participant/audience in Symphony of a Missing Room could fit very accurately Jen Harvie’s description of how contemporary participatory performances position spectators as ‘infinitely replaceable supernumerary extras’ (2013, p. 43), with the invitation being to commit absolutely to the relatively narrow enactment of a particular role. In committing myself to this work, therefore, I gained and lost. I gained the affective experience of placing my trust into the hands of an unknown stranger; I lost full autonomy over my experience and the meanings of that encounter. This is what I mean by my claim that while the experience had me, I had no opportunity to have the experience.

To have an experience The difference might seem moot – I had an experience; the experience had me – but in many ways it goes to the root of concepts of an exchange and questions concerning the relationship between the self and the world around us. It has both ethical and phenomenological implications – the relationships between which are almost in tension. Thinking first in terms of the embodied and phenomenological, the distinction connects to what Rhonda Blair describes as one of the main areas of philosophical disagreement within the field of affect theory – concerning how affective and emotional experiences should be understood and ‘whether they are primarily bodily or consciously registered’ (2013, p. 141). For writers such as Brian Massumi, the description ‘the experience had me’ is apposite and accurate to the manner in which affective experiences are ‘prepersonal’ (2013, p. xvi). That is, they take place before and beyond the grasp of our reflective, reasoning, self-experiencing mind. As a prepersonal intensity, affective experiences are primarily bodily and not under an individual’s conscious control. By the time ‘I’ attempt consciously to grasp and have my own experience, it is already too late. My experience of Sym­ phony of a Missing Room, therefore, was embodied, rather than cognitive: something that had impact upon me, but also simultaneously escaped me. There is something attractive to this description, validating those elusive experiences of theatre and dance that exist in the performance encounter between body and body but which escape our ability to think or speak about our experience. Yet, while evocative of the phenomenological experience, there are considerable ethical and political challenges to this description,

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including to our sense of who we are and how we relate to both ourselves and others. In terms of my own encounter with Symphony of a Missing Room, I was left with a sense of lack, of something missing. This lack – I would suggest – is both affective and cognitive; both felt and thought. It remains an unreciprocated kiss, an unresponsive handshake an unreturned conversation. It is as if part of me – and what makes me me – has been left behind. Other researchers, in part responding to Massumi, have sought to produce a more integrated understanding of affective experiences, something I’ve explored in full in a recent chapter titled ‘Affect and Experience’ (2016b). Here, I discuss how Ruth Leys critiques the model of affect theory presented by Massumi in terms of its fundamental re-establishment of a neo-Cartesian split between mind and body. Leys points out how affect theory presumes a separation ‘between the affect system on the one hand and intension or meaning or cognition on the other’ (2011, p. 443). Margaret Wetherell also explores ways in which affective and cognitive processes might be conceived as an assemblage, writing that ‘any strongly polarised distinction between controlled versus automatic processes, or conscious verses non-conscious, is probably too simplistic’ (2012, p. 65). Importantly, Wetherell describes how while most brain activity is likely unconscious, when the situation demands it is possible to ‘pay sustained attention’ to such affective experiences in a manner that is transformative: paying attention strongly amplifies the patterns of activation, and is correlated with the experience of consciousness. It is likely then that much of what goes on non-consciously […] can be made conscious given enough time, information and context. (2012, p. 65) The value of this description is that it returns us to an integrated sense of being and experiencing. It aligns with Vivian Sobchack’s articulation of a phenomenology of perception as being an ensemble, in which the material condition of being human necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble. Thus we matter and we mean through processes and logics of sense-making that owe as much to our carnal existence as they do to our conscious thought. (2004, p. 4) An understanding of the incompleteness of my experience of Symphony of a Missing Room, that sense of lack and of something being left behind, rests in these descriptions of experiencing within and through the ensemble of one’s entire being. My participation in the work entailed me surrendering my agency, resulting in a failure to enable a reciprocal exchange between myself and the work. Perhaps, however, in Wetherell’s description of paying

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sustained attention – correlated, as she writes, with the experience of ­consciousness – it is possible to retrieve and complete this experience, to restore that lack through a committed return. It is this concept that I want to explicitly foreground and conceptualise next.

The committed return By committed return I am not, specifically or necessarily, talking about a physical or tangible response from the spectator to the artist/performer. Rather, like Wetherell’s description of paying sustained attention, the committed return concerns the spectator’s relationship to their own experience of the work. It represents the manner by which spectators have agency and make their experiences their own. Through the committed return, spectators absorb the experience into their lived experience, making it – to use John Dewey’s term – ‘choate’. This follows Dewey’s distinction, in Art as Experience, between the ‘inchoate’ flow of experiences – that is of things that simply happen to happen to us – and the composed, reflective and complete nature of ‘an experience’ (1935, p. 35). The difference then is between the inchoate experience that just happens to happen and the choate experience marked by a committed return. This concept finds parallels with Jacques Rancière’s emancipated spectator, who ‘participates in the performance by refashioning it in her own way’ and is empowered to make their own interpretations, to ‘compose her own poems with the elements of the poem before her’ (2011, p. 13). What is not entirely apparent in Rancière’s description is whether it is necessarily the case that all spectators are inherently emancipated in all experiences – with emancipation being the inbuilt position of spectatorship per se. His statement that ‘being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform into activity’ (p. 17) – cautioning against a quest for active participation in which spectatorship becomes lost in a form of ‘consumerist hyper-­a ctivism’ – suggests that emancipation is inherent and automatic. However, the notion that all acts of spectatorship are always emancipated runs against our own experience of the world. We know to our cost that spectatorship can become dulled, controlled, manipulatory, passive. While there might be some performances that resonate with us, that linger in our consciousness, there are many more that are routine, quickly forgotten or inchoate. In a previous paper (Reason 2010a), I have borrowed the concept of ‘countersignature’, from Jacques Derrida by way of John Caputo, to consider how art – at least some art – seems to provoke or require a response. The countersignature represents a ‘return’ from the spectator, a signing off to the experience. As Caputo writes, Texts, if there is anything to them, elicit, call for, and provoke other texts – ­responses, commentaries, interpretation, controversies, imitation, forgeries,

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plagiarisms, echoes, effluences, influences, confluences, translations, transformations, bald misinterpretations, creative misunderstandings, etc. (1997, p. 189) A developed and sustained manifestation of this proposal can be found in Katja Hilevaara’s concept of ‘memory response’, which she presents as a structure that enables responses that do not critique or evaluate a work but produce new performative acts. To produce a performative memory response for Hilevaara is to ‘elaborate the work, embellishing and reaching past it, augmenting what is already there’ (2017, p. 40). To this end, a ‘memory response’ has a set of four loose and fluid rules: 1 Remember a performance moment that delights you. 2 Linger with the moment. 3 Make a short performance act in response to this moment using only your own personal experiences and everyday objects. 4 Document it. (p. 41) In an echo of Goat Island’s model of ‘creative response’, one of Hilevaara’s inspirations, this process entails a transformation of the ‘memory response’ into a new performative creation. Certainly, the new artworks that Hilevaara produces are evidence of a supremely committed response; there is no doubt this is emancipated spectatorship. Hilevaara’s proposal essentially incorporates processes of inspiration (a moment that delights you), of paying sustained attention (a lingering) and of doing (a mediating act through which we do our lingering). Hilevaara structures this process through performance, but it might equally be through other doings that require us to pause, slow down, reflect and linger on our memories and our experiences – that require us to project our experience outside of ourselves, and thereby begin to know it better for ourselves. Such processes hold the potential to enable Wetherell’s description of paying sustained attention to experience in order to bring it into our consciousness and reflective knowing. In the participatory audience research I have undertaken with spectators, this process of spending time with an experience through a mediating activity has been a recurring feature. It has been most transparent when I have invited spectators to draw something they remembered from a performance (Reason 2010b), or when they have been asked to write poems in response (Reason 2012), or made collages or memory maps. It can also be present, however, in conversation, which is a performative process where meanings are not merely uttered, but made and brought into being (Reason 2016a). Through inviting spectators to linger and spend time with their experiences, there is the potential to enter into a genuinely emancipated and

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participatory relationship with the performance and the experience of the performance. By genuine, rather than tokenistic or abstractly conceptual, I mean that it enables spectators to become self-aware of the meaning and impact of their emotional, imaginative and memorial lived experiences. It is this which for me represents a committed return: a process through which a spectator becomes more fully participatory with their own experience. The following pages present examples of the committed return, illustrating moments of lingering, of paying attention, of realisation and articulation. The examples traverse a range of audience research techniques, including extracts from interviews, memory exercises, and drawing- and creative writing-based workshops. The responses presented are from child and adult spectators. To provide one through line, all the examples are in response to dance performances.

Example 1 Alex. Responding to For MG: The Movie For MG: The Movie is a 30-minute piece of minimalist contemporary dance, choreographed by Trisha Brown and performed by Scottish Ballet. A central feature of the work is a single dancer standing completely still in the centre of the stage for the duration of the performance while other performers move, cir­ cle and arc around him. Taking part in a workshop exploring the performance through visual art, Alex explores his experience to this central, stationary fig­ ure in a drawing made with chalk on black card (Figure 8.1). Alex:  

I wanted to suggest, the thing of him being rigid and bits of him are being brushed away every time. Because his natural inclination must have been to kind of follow that movement. Everything around him must have been telling him to turn, and the whole thing relied on him being rigid. It’s like a joke, what’s an easy job when you’re on stage? I was just thinking it was so important that he remains completely completely still. Which made me really tired just watching the other girl running round [laughs]. That semi-sprint style, that bleep test thing. But his kind of stillness was just as important I thought. It framed everything that everyone did on the stage while he was there. Just the idea of his resistance to the movement being as important as the movement. I just wanted to look at him. I was trying to get it all really white. Cos I want to err, almost as if it was made of sand maybe and bits were being brushed off with the movement coming by and kind of twisting him but he remains rigid. It was the stillness more than the movement that I really liked. I mean I haven’t seen very much dance, I would actually like to start seeing more. I really, really enjoyed it, but I couldn’t really take in; it was just kind of sensory overload, if you know what I mean.

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Figure 8.1  A  lex responding to For MG: The Movie by Scottish Ballet. Source: Matthew Reason

Example 2 Teigan. Responding to Echoa Echoa, devised and performed by French company Arcosm, is a highly physical dance/percussion performance. A scaffolding structure provides platforms at different levels for a range of drums, marimba and xylophones, with the dancers and musicians using the instruments, the scaffolding and their own bodies to create a combined movement and soundscape. Teigan (aged 8) attended the per­ formance with her class and took part in a visual arts workshop in which she was invited to ‘draw something you remember from the performance’ (Figure 8.2). Teigan:   There’s a lot of pressure. Matthew:   A lot of pressure? On you to do the drawing? Teigan: Mmhmm. Matthew: I am sorry, why is there pressure? Teigan: Because I can’t draw tables, I can’t draw some of the stuff, it’s pretty

hard. So you are trying to get it just right? So you’ve got the two different drum kits, and you’ve got all the different tables. And you’ve got the

Matthew:

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Figure 8.2  T  eigan responding to Echoa by Compagnie Aarcosm. Source: Matthew Reason

person standing right on the top of the right one, she went right on the top, and what’s the bit here? Teigan: That’s the bit where they are nervous? Matthew: The bit where they are nervous? Teigan: Yeah, look [pointing] that’s angry and sad, that’s sweet, that’s nervous… As she continues to talk about her drawing Teigan points to the different colours she has used to draw the musical notes, explaining how they represent the different emotions she associated with different moments in the performance. Those in the top right-hand corner (reddy purple in the original) were ‘sweet’, and associated with a scene where a male and female dancer moved slowly together on a high table. The notes in the top left (blue in colour) were the sadness that came across in some melancholic xylophone playing. Those down towards the front (yellow) were happiness provoked by a scene when the performers were playing drums in dancing unison. Teigan then explained that when she was watching each bit she was feeling the same emotions: happiness, sadness, sweetness and so on.

Example 3 Michael. Responding to Hush Hush, choreographed by Christopher Bruce, performed by Rambert Dance Company, features six dancers in Pierrot-esque circus costumes who present

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a quirky and playful reimagining of family life. With music by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, the performance has a light and humorous quality (Rambert describe the piece as ‘light hearted and affectionate [it will] lift your spirits and keep your toes tapping’). Michael took part in a creative writing workshop in which he was invited to explore his experience of the work through poetry. Memory unspools from us. We’re a troupe of clowns distracted by the buzzing of an invisible wasp,

We’ve discovered the secret: we’re not really animals but facsimiles of animals. We are broken machines,

clapping our hands in the vague direction of the noise unaware of the cassette player squatting like an elephant in the corner.

have always been broken machines, though we played at being real for so long we were beginning to believe it ourselves. Please,

Our bones must be electric: even as we sit here perfectly still, our shadows convulse on the walls behind us.

you who loved us, don’t feel cheated. Console yourselves with the thought that if there is a last laugh here, we’re not the ones having it.

In this piece of writing by Michael, a creative writing student for whom this was his first experience of watching live dance, there are moments that are clearly recognisable to somebody who had seen the performance, the distracting buzzing of an invisible wasp, the grotesque crowds at once both comic and horrifying and the general tone and atmosphere. All this, however, is transposed through the prism of language and Michael’s own poetic imagination. Some of the results include a noticeably darker emotional palette and a stress upon dystopian imagery of people as machines or animals. Expressed in a poetic register, the language is memorable – ‘our bones must be electric’ – arresting – ‘squatting like an elephant in the corner’ – evocative – ‘we played at being real’. The result is at once interpretative, telling us what Michael thought the work was about, but also and more significantly affective, inviting us to feel something akin to how it made him feel.

Example 4 Nick. Responding to Romeo and Juliet Scottish Ballet’s version of Romeo and Juliet is choreographed by Krzystof Pastor to music by Prokofiev, with the classic narrative ballet placed in a stripped back twentieth-century setting. Nick took part in a post-performance discussion group, part of which involved creating a ‘memory diagram’ focused

Participatory audiencing  99 Table 8.1  M ichael responding to Hush by Rambert Dance Company ‘Street fights’ technique in a choreographed way –flowing moves that reflecve a real ‘brawl’ environment

Source: Matthew Reason

around a particular moment in the performance. He selected the scene where Mercutio kills Tybalt. Some of the fight scenes really stick in my mind. They were so engaging, my whole attention was on that, I have no idea what else was happening. It was like a fight between two completely different men, one macho and almost looking aggressive in his dress and in his hairstyle and everything and the other one was playful but still fighting, almost toying with him and almost smiling and laughing as he went about fighting. The ebb and the flow of the fights, not just in the two characters but also in the way that the rest of the crowd flowed with them as well. The sense of almost an erotic tension between the two at times as well and, actually, some of the almost street-fighting techniques that they used. It was very much… Some bits were almost brawl technique but yet it all flowed from one to the next, the way it was choreographed.

Nick:

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Return to Symphony of a Missing Room My purpose in presenting these examples is less to analyse what these spectators say about the performances, which is variously interpretative, emotional, affective and evaluative. Rather I am interested in how they represent concrete examples of audiencing – that is the doing of spectating – each one presenting an act of reflecting, engaging and responding to their own experience. Each is an act of what I have termed the committed return, in which they as spectators enter into participatory dialogue with their experience and with themselves through the liminal space between audience and performance. Illustrative of this, in one post-performance visual arts workshops, a participant described the process as ‘starting a dialogue with my image’, pointing us towards how aesthetic experiences are not only something that participants have and retell, but are also made and brought into being by processes of paying sustained attention. Experience here isn’t only had, but also made. As a conclusion I return to Symphony of a Missing Room, and my reflection on leaving the performance that an experience had me, but I had not (yet?) had an experience. I have proposed that my partial alienation from my own experience was produced by a sense that it was not in fact my own, that I was merely a functionary within it. I was not participating as an irreducible ensemble (Sobchack) but as a replaceable supernumerary (Harvie). If theatre represents an exchange, then in this instance there was a lack of a space – space here being variously metaphorical, physical, mental, dramaturgical, temporal – through which an exchange (a spectatorial return; a committed return) could be made between myself and the work. My final call, therefore, is that amongst our consideration of participatory performance (or those closely connected forms of immersive or interactive performance) we also need to consider what might be implied by participatory audiencing. A consideration of participatory audiencing requires us to shift from thinking about what performances do with (or do to?) audiences, but instead about what audiences do with and do to performances.

Note 1 First performed in 2009, Symphony of a Missing Room has been presented in a series of museums in Europe. As a company, Lundahl and Seitl are known for producing work that is focused around impacting upon viewers’ and participants’ perception, often through immersive practices. Indeed, they describe the transformation of perception as being the intangible medium of the work, which is created ‘inside the immaterial realms of conscious experience’ (www.lundahl-seitl.com).

References Blair, R 2013, ‘Introduction: The Multimodal Practitioner’, in N Shaughnessy (ed), Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brian and Being, pp. 22–34. Bloomsbury, London.

Participatory audiencing  101 Bourriaud, N 2002, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Reel, London. Caputo, JD (ed) 1997, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, Fordham University Press, New York. Dewey, J 1935, Art as Experience, Minton, Blach and Co, New York. Grotowski, J [1968] 2002, Towards a Poor Theatre, B Barba, (ed), Routledge, New York. Harvie, J 2013, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Palgrave, Basingstoke. Heim, C 2016, Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, Abingdon. Hilevaara, K 2017, ‘Orange Dogs and Memory Responses: Creativity in Spectating and Remembering’, in M Reason & AM Lindelof (eds), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, pp. 34–47. Routledge, Abingdon. Kester, G 1999/2000, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’, in Variant 9, available from: http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue9/Supplement9. pdf [20 July 2017]. Leys, R 2011, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, in Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 434–472. Massumi, B 2013, ‘Notes on the Translation’, in G Deleuze & F Guattari (eds), A Thousand Plateaus, pp. xvi–xix. Bloomsbury, London. Rancière, J 2011, The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, London. Reason, M 2010a, ‘Asking the Audience: Audience Research and the Experience of Theatre’, in About Performance no. 10, pp. 15–34. Reason, M 2010b, ‘Watching Dance, Drawing the Experience and Visual Knowledge’, in Forum for Modern Language Studies vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 391–414. Reason, M 2012, ‘Writing the Embodied Experience: Ekphrastic and Creative Writing as Audience Research’, in Critical Stages 7, np. Reason, M 2016a, ‘Conversation and Criticism: Audiences and Unfinished Critical Thinking’, in D Radosavljevic (ed), Theatre Criticism: Changing Landscapes, pp. 236–54. Bloomsbury, London. Reason, M 2016b, ‘Affect and Experience’, in M Reason and AM Lindelof (eds), Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, pp. 83–96. Routledge, Abingdon. Sobchack, V 2004, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley. Wetherell, M 2012, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, Sage, London.

Chapter 9

Immersive art – immersive research? Stefanie Husel

Immersive art and distance I would like to get started by casting a glance at a part of Berliner Festspiele’s programme: it opened in Autumn 2016 with Mona el Gammal’s Narrative Space Rhizomat, Lundahl & Seitl’s museum tour Symphony of a Missing Room, the exhibition Talking is not always the solution by Omer Fast, and the discursive-performative weekend ‘Schule der Distanz No. 1’ at Martin-Gropius-Bau. A description of Mona el Gammal’s Rhizomat1 states: Mona el Gammal’s Narrative Spaces are filled and charged with stories and information. Texts, objects, smells, sounds and lighting moods reveal a story that the viewer can process individually. He/she does not observe with detachedness but is right in the thick of it and puts the fragments of the story together him/herself.2 The description emphasises two characteristics, which I’ve marked in italics: the loss of distance and the individuality of the art event’s perception, which goes hand in hand with this kind of immersion. The work of Lundahl & Seitl, Symphony of a Missing Room, which was also shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in 2016 as part of the Immersion programme, takes these characteristics to a temporary extreme: here, visitors are blinded and deafened to any real-world surroundings. They will only see and hear what the installation provides for them – a total sensory Immersion that automatically leads to a total individualisation of the receptive process.3 For such kinds of complete immersion, Bruno Latour found a beautiful metaphor in his book Reassembling the Social. There, he writes about the nineteenth-century attraction of the panorama: Panoramas, as etymology suggests, see everything. But they also see nothing since they simply show an image painted (or projected) on the tiny wall of a room fully closed to the outside. […] Full coherence is their forte – and their main frailty. (2005, p. 197)

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It is the immersion itself that prevents a distanced look since, as Latour puts it, being ‘inside the panorama’ will present you with the panorama’s coherent display – but it will not reveal the plywood, the roof battens, and the cardboard that were used to build the panorama (Latour 2005, p. 197). Latour uses the metaphor of the panorama in order to show how randomly most scientific and academic approaches act in painting big pictures or in telling ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard), in which they let their public immerse. It is their coherence that makes Latour’s ‘panoramas’ suspicious and frail – the more persuasive a big picture looks, the less the experienced spectator will (and should) trust its display. Interestingly, Oliver Grau also takes the panorama as a starting point to describe immersion – only his aim is to introduce immersion as an art-­ historical concept (Grau 2002, p. 52ff). Likewise, Grau stresses that immersive art strategies tend to completely surround their recipients; they tend to destroy distance and thus completely overwhelm any kind of distanced spectatorship. Of course, Grau also argues that there will always be a kind of undulation: artistic strategies will oscillate between the attempt to overwhelm their recipients and the opposing production of distance. Nevertheless, I would like to argue that there is one major difference between the panorama-like big pictures in science and politics, which were criticised by Latour, and even the deepest and most intense immersiveness that performing and live art have recently presented to us: immersive artworks, in stressing immersiveness to an extreme degree, will always in one way or the other comment on immersiveness, and, in doing so, transgress it. By using the very frailty of ‘the panorama’, these artworks bring it to the edge of collapsing: the inside of the ‘panorama’ will be shown, but at the same moment, we will also be reminded of the plywood and cardboard backstage. In this regard, immersive art seems – on the one hand – to honour the promise of the artwork’s autonomy: any ‘heteronomous’ (Adorno 2002, pp. 376–377, 384–386) moment of the receptive process can be forgotten in immersive worlds. On the other hand, the existence of the ‘heteronomous’ can be staged in a very effective and impactful way in immersive artworks – as soon as they suddenly allow a glance behind the scenes, they abruptly kick you out from your immersed condition, producing a kind of shock. If we accept the first assumption – that immersive art allows a very intense illusionistic and individual experience – it seems clear that traditional aesthetic approaches have been rendered obsolete here: hermeneutically looking at an artwork and theoretically assuming the impacts of that work on an ideal spectator will simply no longer make sense since there will be at least as many artworks as recipients. Additionally, the second assumption – that immersiveness provides the arts with a very powerful way of reminding us of art-specific ‘backstages’ – also calls for a special kind of research: one that puts its own perspective at stake, one that asks for contexts, for practical circumstances, for materiality, for all that heteronomous ‘plywood’. Again speaking with Latour, I would like to stress that immersive art reminds us

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to ask: ‘in which movie theatre, in which exhibit gallery is it [the coherent big picture – S.H.] shown? Through which optics is it projected? To which audience is it addressed?’ (Latour 2005, p. 187). I would like to suggest another metaphor to describe the different levels, or localities, of immersive artworks: one could also speak on the one hand about playing-activities that let participants immerse themselves in their own aesthetic world and, on the other hand, of the game, which has to be maintained within the real world (i.e. by the enforcement of rules). Erving Goffman proposed the use of the concept of ‘Gaming’ to describe the latter in his early essay ‘Fun in Games’ (Goffman 1961). To speak of play/play­ ing and game/gaming points in the same direction as the ‘panorama’ does, but it focuses less on the display of information than on social practices – ­ playing-activities let you immerse completely, whereas gaming activities build the conditions for immersion. Using this second metaphor, one could say that immersive art presents us with awesomely seductive plays – played worlds – that, in the meantime, remind their players that somewhere gaming activities will be going on (of course, only some of the ongoing g­ aming activities will be shown – just as much as is necessary to produce an effective little shock, but not so much as to destroy the immersive playing situation). In Happy Hour, an immersive theatre game created by performance group machina eX, the characteristics of immersive artworks I’ve mentioned become obvious since, in this work, visitors will control the actions of actors by playing a game.4 It is a Live Escape Game. This normally means that players have to release themselves from a closed room – only in the case of Happy Hour, it is an actor that has to be freed by the spectators. Via a computer interface, he or she will receive suggestions by audience members: what to try next, which tool to use, etc. The actors thus become a kind of avatars for their spectators or, better, for their players. During the playing activities of the audience, the actor will be seen on video, but the playing visitors will also hear that the actors/avatars are situated in a room very close by. They will hear their steps, hear them stumbling over props, maybe hear them falling. In this way, a very strong feeling of the actions that keep the game going on is produced. And should the game be mastered by its players, the freed actor will come out of the closed room to sit with the former players in the bar, having a drink, becoming one of them, and maybe discussing the impacts of the artwork/game/play with them in a distanced manner. Keeping all that has been said in mind, there are two opposed research quests that immersive artworks present. First, immersive art seems to ask its recipients to – completely – commit themselves. This means, also for trained and/or accustomed recipients, that immersive artworks fail to capture the performance adequately from the perspective of an ideal or distanced spectator. Especially when it comes to questions of spectatorship itself, immersive art seems to call for immersive research, for a kind of research that is prepared to commit itself, to be part of the panorama, to really play the game, and thus to become able to report a very individual and intense experience.

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The second claim will demand of any kind of academic reflection: put yourself and your commitment into perspective. Get out of the panorama. Look at its backstage. Report about cardboard, plywood, including. Describe the context, describe the rules and the circumstances of the game. Matters will be complicated further by what I have described above: we can suppose that many immersive artworks will present their recipients with carefully prepared moments of shock, with little glimpses into the backstage (i.e. the meeting with the freed actor in machina eX’s mentioned piece). For academic reflection, this means that our work should not stop merely at frenetically mentioning these moments – no matter how fascinating or genius they may have been. Rather, we should also try to find out about circumstances, contexts, and (gaming) activities that made these very moments possible.

A detour to non-immersive theatre But how would such immersed and distanced – maybe even multiply ­distanced – research possibly look? How could it be performed, and how could it be conceptualised? I would like to address these questions with a digression to ‘good old theatre’ – to non-immersive performative formats. Therefore, I will use the fruitful connection to the sociological method of ethnography: a well-known research method that corresponds with the mentioned claims since ethnography promises to travel between immersion and distance, between ‘going native’ and ‘coming home’ (Breidenstein et al. 2013, p. 44). This is why I would like to present some material on ‘audiencing’ practices.5 I gathered this material within an ethnographic study I did on and with British theatre company Forced Entertainment. During this study, the receptive process in Forced Entertainment’s performances formed an important part of my interest. What I would like to show using this material is the very long way I travelled from being an immersed audience member, to distancing myself and to writing about ‘audiencing’ practices, my research field, and the performance situation during which my material was produced. Forced Entertainment’s shows are often highly reflective towards the theatre situation – the aesthetics of the group are typical for what Hans-Thies Lehmann calls ‘postdramatic theatre’ (Lehmann 2001). In Bloody Mess, ten personas from apparently different performance traditions gather on stage and try to produce a great theatrical event – only they don’t quite seem able to agree on what a great theatre event should look like. The result is a very funny and very intelligent ‘bloody mess’ – one that reflects on theatre traditions, on audience expectations, and on watching theatre as a social practice. In my study, I addressed this work and thereby tried to use the same diligence in description for every part and every practice that formed its performance situations. This means that I also wanted to describe the practices of audience members: what was I, as an audience member, doing? What did the others do? It soon became apparent that analysing these actions not only from my individual insight but also from a distanced perspective

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proved to be a real problem. The performing situation of Bloody Mess is structured quite traditionally, with the spectators sitting in the dark. As such, filming myself and other audience members turned out to be impossible, not only for reasons of privacy, but simply because of the lighting requirements. Questioning other audience members also seemed awkward: first, because the artists, Forced Entertainment, felt uncomfortable with the idea, and second, because my search targeted audience practices, so I did not want to rely on things that could be explicitly stated by spectators. I was aiming rather at their tacit knowledge. That is also why I set the idea of questioning aside and decided to conduct audio research: I placed a recording device with a 360-degree microphone up over the heads of an audience in Leeds, during a performance of Bloody Mess in 2008. The device recorded the sound that the audience made, fully and spatially. I recorded the performance on stage, which later helped me to reconstruct what had happened in which moment. I was very excited when I listened to the audio records for the first time. And it was a strange experience. The first thing that became noticeable was that the audience was laughing much more often than I remembered – it nearly laughed all the time. Sometimes the laughter seemed very intense. Oddly, as an actual audience member during the performance, I had not noticed this at all. Apparently, being part of the situation not only meant to laugh very loudly, but in the same moment, to also dismiss the resulting noise completely and to all together obtain the illusion of a serene and attentive audience – at least for me. This was just the sort of tacit knowledge I had been looking for – so, from this moment on, my work on the audience practice in Bloody Mess focused foremost on laughter. Before moving on, I would like to focus on this visualisation of the recording by inserting a transcription of what I heard in a scene. This clip stood out since, at its beginning, the audience was quite silent – compared to other moments during the play. The recorded sequence occurred around 20 minutes into the performance time of Bloody Mess. The context of the scene is the following: a female character called Cathy is playing a dead person, lying on the floor. Meanwhile, a strange kind of performance is going on around her; it could be considered a rock-gig, an enacted music video, or even a sports event – all of this is accompanied by the rock song ‘Born to Be Wild’, played at a very high volume. This bewildering collage, which goes on for the length of the song, doesn’t lend itself to making coherent sense to the spectator. The following transcribed example starts just as the song ends. In the transcription (Table 9.1), I tried to make visible the exact moments when the audience became audible; that’s why I wrote audience utterances between the lines of Cathy’s text and added brackets to roughly show the beginning and ending of the laughter. The transcription made visible for me that the audience is laughing here, mostly quite briefly in moments when Cathy comes up with something new and funny, that is, when she says things that are a little absurd within the situation, but still intelligible.

108  Stefanie Husel Table 9.1  Transcription 1

Source: Stefanie Husel

And something else became clear: not only is the actress careful to be ­ udible – for instance by waiting for a moment for loud laughter to die a down – but the spectators also listen carefully and seem to hush themselves as soon as Cathy starts to speak anew. One can make this visible, in an even more precise way, by using a quite technical graphic called waveform – that is, a picture derived mechanically from the taped sound (Figure 9.1). I coloured the peaks: black ones stand for sounds that mostly came from stage, grey are the ones that mostly resulted from the noise of the auditorium. The big black endings of the graphic indicate the loud songs that were played at the beginning and end of the scene. We can find a very simply structured audible order during the scene: stage utterance – laughter – stage utterance – laughter… and so on.

Figure 9.1  W aveform 1. Source: Stefanie Husel

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This example highlights my second impression on first listening to the record: the audience’s sound seemed so precisely timed – it left an impression like in those TV sitcoms, when canned laughter is played in. Laughter would arise immediately after some funny action or reply on stage, and would die down as quickly as it occurred in an almost orchestrated way, as soon as any new stage activity was presented. The recorded audience acted in a highly coordinated way, just as if it too had rehearsed beforehand. Again, I had the impression that I had discovered some tacit knowledge of audience members that I had not hitherto considered. These first two impressions formed the basis of my further questioning of the material: given the intensity of audience’s laughing activity, how was coordination performed within the situation? Linguist Gail Jefferson has described the highly ordered nature of laughter; in her article ‘An Exercise in the Transcription and Analysis of Laughter’, she scrutinised the role of laughter in everyday conversation. Let’s also take a quick detour into her essay. One of Jefferson’s examples is a chat among three friends. One is telling a story about an absent person who grows orchids in his spare time, or, as the speaker puts it, who is ‘playing with his orchids’. One of the listeners acts like mishearing the speaker in favour of some explicit provocative content (‘playing with his organ’). Still, he does not speak this out loud, but manages to bring the ‘organ’ into the conversation by throwing in the question ‘With iz what?!’ and by producing ‘suppressed laughter’, as Jefferson puts it. A third contributor to the conversation then explicates the naughty content; only she masks her explication by performing ‘bubbling’ laughter. Jefferson transcribes it as follows: ‘Heh huh, hh PLAXN(h)Wh)IZ O(h)R’N ya:h I thought the same’ (Jefferson 1989, p. 29). What becomes obvious, because of Jefferson’s careful transcription, is that only the naughty part of the uttered words (‘playing with his organ’) has been masked by laughter. The rest of the pronounced words come out quite clear. Interestingly, the whole conversation never actually names the filthily misheard content clearly, but still all contributors enact their funny mishearing together, and they do it with and in their practice of laughing. Thus, laughter – this is what Jefferson emphasises with her example – does not function like an all natural or wild bodily outburst, as it had been discussed in earlier conversation analysis. Rather, laughter expresses social sense, and it enables a very fine coordination of conversation partners. In their laughter, the people in the example inform each other about their state of knowledge and about the level on which they operate in their collective attempt of making sense. Taking this conception of laughter into account, the activity of the audience I had taped seemed even more an important fact to focus on. When, in the example above, character Cathy starts to freak out, she is very clearly audible; the audience produces its laughter almost orchestrated around the character’s text. But soon after, spectators become more agile: in several short moments, Cathy even has to shout over their uproar if she wants to keep her performance convincingly (see transcribed text, lines 4, 9, and 11). One could interpret these facts as follows: while the spectators seem to monitor Cathy’s freaking out in its first moments carefully, and maybe

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with a grain of doubt, they start to perform that they perfectly understand the irony and playfulness of the scene by laughing more loudly and wildly all together as the scene goes on. My argument becomes clearer if we look at another example from the recorded show. Only five minutes later in the performance, almost the same scene is happening again on stage. Character Cathy’s colleagues have played another high-pitched rock song while performing bewildering stunts. When the song is over, Cathy starts to complain again, but now, something else is happening. Another character, dressed in a plushy gorilla suit, is stumbling dizzily over the stage, which looks quite funny. Here is the waveform resulting from that recorded moment:

Figure 9.2  W aveform 2. Source: Stefanie Husel

No matter how similar the action on stage was, the behaviour of the audience changed profoundly from the one recorded moment to the other. The grey waves in the picture show the – extremely loud – laughter of the spectators, which was dedicated to the stumbling gorilla. Their sound was so intense that Cathy’s shouting, which still took place during the whole moment shown, could not be heard or transcribed – so there is no transcription to be shown. Only at the very end of the scene (which you can see in the far right of the waveform) does the noise from the auditorium quickly die down. In this moment, the gorilla character takes off its mask and starts to speak: something new is happening, and, in an instant, the audience grows silent and pays attention to what this character has to say. Angry Cathy, on the other hand, does not interest the spectators any longer. The audience has learned from the scene before that her shouting could be widely ignored – and this new knowledge is performed to each other in the collective practice of laughing (and in hushing down quickly, shortly thereafter). I would like to complete my detour to Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess by one last example from the taped performance. It is derived from a scene where two male characters ask the audience to do a collective ‘beautiful silence’. However, instead of letting the silence begin, the characters will, for around ten minutes, recite a whole list of possible silent moments. They say for instance: ‘We could do the silence of a starry summer night’, ‘We could do the silence, that happens if you zap through TV-channels and then, accidentally, hit the mute button’, and so on. The individual items of this

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list of ‘beautiful silences’ are always framed by the same action: one of the characters tells his little silence scenario, and afterwards, the second one will answer: ‘Yes! That is beautiful!’, no matter what the story was about. The transcription inserted encompasses the last ‘beautiful silence’ in this long list: Table 9.2  Transcription 2

Source: Stefanie Husel

At the beginning of the sequence, character Davis speaks the typical formula that denotes a new scenario (‘What if we do the kind of silence that…’). During these already-established moments, spectators are still rustling around, but when the short narration really begins, they immediately fall quiet. When the theme of the narration – euthanasia – becomes clear, very loud laughter follows; there are even small exclamations mixed in like ‘Ho! ho… oh NO! …’ (see transcription, line 2). This reaction is dedicated to the kind of story that will obviously be told, and which sarcastically contradicts the rule of the game to label beautiful silences. By laughing (and shouting out), audience members clearly show each other that they understand both – the rule and its sarcastic breach. The laughter seems to say, in a playful way: ‘Oh dear… we know what you’re up to…!’ Character Davis starts anew, while the audience is still laughing (see also line 2). While Davis specifies his narration, the audience falls silent, listening carefully; still, a subtle laughter stays in the background, and rises now and then, as the

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narration accumulates moments that fit into the expectable, black-humorous attitude: it’s the family’s mother, lying in a coma… the kids are crying… When the ‘new girlfriend’ of the father is mentioned, the narration’s set-up for cynical fallouts is perfected. The audience is commenting this moment with enthusiastic laughter – and even with a small applause (see line 5). After that, character Davis proceeds quickly and mercilessly, just like his narrated protagonists do: the family’s mother is euthanised. This moment is told in a very sensual way, almost only via sounds (‘…hhhhhhhhh… hhhhhh’, see lines 7–9). No more dark humour, the dying is enacted as a silent last breath. The audience that had been so agile until this moment seems fully immersed, committed to the change of atmosphere. It enacts a deep (and beautiful…) silence. Then, after the story ends comes a moment when the second character on stage, Jerry, casts a glance into the auditorium. It seems like he knows that they know that he is supposed to say: ‘Yes, that’s beautiful!’ This is when, even before the character starts to speak, the audience laughs out loud, just as if spectators wanted to reassure character Jerry: ‘Yeah, go on! It is all right. You may speak your formula, we know how to take it’. Not only has the audience learned through the performance its special ‘gaming-rules’, but it also actively shows that it is willing to go along. Spectators even seem to communicate with the stage and to answer its offers in a playful way. I would like to sum up what I have learned from listening to that audio recording of an audience in a Bloody Mess performance. First, even in quite traditional theatre settings (e.g., with an audience sitting in the dark) like the taped one, one can find audiences that are very lively and active – and sometimes very loud. The spectators recorded performed a whole range of audiencing practices; they did not just passively ‘sit around’. Given the fact that I had been part of the recorded crowd, it occurred to me that these practices most likely had been performed without people being explicitly aware that they did so – at least, I wasn’t. Second, the vivid audience utterances I had taped seemed to form a ‘detailed order’ (Jefferson quoting Sacks, see Jefferson 1989, 25). The laughter, even if it was very loud and sometimes even kind of aggressive, never interfered with the action on stage in a way that the latter became incomprehensible. In analysing that order, I was able to detect that spectators reacted very sensitively to what happened on stage; they even seemed to learn quickly about the rules of the game that the piece provided. Third, it wasn’t only reactions to the stage I found in the taped audience laughter. Rather, the audience seemed to coordinate its action collectively; every single contributor to the collective choir of laughing seemed, in any moment, to reassure himself and the others about the status of the (and their) performance, as if they said to each other ‘Yes, this is still funny’, ‘Whoohoo, now it is becoming a little bit too much’, etc. As conversation analyst Gail Jefferson was able to show with her example of three chatting friends, and in this case too, collective laughing proved to be quite a fine communicative instrument – not only a bodily outburst or

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a guided reaction. Last, but not least, the audience I audiotaped seemed to communicate not only between each other, but it started to communicate collectively with the stage. The more it became familiarised with the performance’s situation, the more it began to ‘play along’ and seemed increasingly to answer the characters on stage playfully. To analyse this receptive situation in such a detailed way, I had to distance myself from my actual experience of the situation, in which I had been an immersed audience member myself. I managed this task by using a whole range of technical and conceptual support: after many failed ideas of how to grasp my own and my fellow spectators’ audiencing practice, I taped only one of the sensory channels that had existed during the actual situation. Then, I listened to the result with a great distance in every ­respect – ­spatially, temporally, situative, and socially. Furthermore, I contextualised the findings within theories on similar situations; I even used further technical translations (waveforms, transcriptions). Thus, besides my own phenomenological insight into the unique performance situation, I used empiric material plus a broad range of academic concepts and practices to distance myself, to actively alienate the situation I had lived through in an immersed fashion. This is why I call my approach ethnographic – it oscillated between ‘going native’ and ‘coming home’, between being a deeply immersed audience member in the scrutinised situation, and becoming a distanced stranger, writing about the situation. In this way, I tried to explicate the former tacit practical knowledge that had enabled me to be a normal audience member in the first place.

Immersive research? I have now written a great deal about the empirically based and ethnographically inspired audience research I did during my Forced Entertainment project. With this excursion I wanted to show some possible future directions for analysing audiencing practices in immersive art forms. First of all, to gather the experience immersive arts present us with, we will need to really immerse ourselves in these works and become part of their elaborated worlds, to loosen our connection to everyday life for a while and to dip into the depths they offer their visitors. This also means that we will have to collect a range of completely singular and subjective experiences, buried deeply in our body-memory. Thus, the beginning would be to give up on any distancing attempt. But then, to make our experience, that is, all the gathered body-­knowledge, accessible to research, we will need to alienate it to ourselves again, s­ omehow – and this can become quite a task. How can we distance ourselves? How can we put our experiences at stake? One way to approach such an alienation of bodily experience could be the use of empirical material, for instance by capturing audio data, video data, and the like. In doing so, precisely those characteristics of data collection

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could be employed that normally tend to be rejected by theatre scholars: of course, technically derived records of performative situations will always alienate what happened; they will never be able to reproduce what an artistic situation ‘really’ was about – but they could become great instruments in distancing ourselves from our ‘immersed’ experience. Since, trying to interpret collected data and attempting to analyse, to translate, what we see and hear on tape in relation to what we experienced as audience members or immersed participants might help us to reveal the emergence of our experience. Therefore, what I am suggesting is not to confuse technically derived data and data analysis for glimpses into any objective reality. Rather, I would like to suggest that such detours could help us analyse our own way of experiencing, understanding empiric material rather as ‘capta’ than as data, as something gathered rather than something given. Maybe one also could label my suggested way as ‘augmented phenomenology’, a kind of phenomenological reflection which, playfully and sometimes even ironically, takes detours to a form of data collection that normally would be associated rather with scientific approaches than with the humanities.

Notes 1 For more information on Rhizomat: https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/…/im mersion16_veranstaltungsdetail_187033.php. Further information about the programme Immersion you may find here: https://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/ aktuell/festivals/immersion.php [16 March 2018]. 2 Available from: https://goo.gl/A2rZ3H [2 May 2017]. 3 Available from: https://goo.gl/m3DgS8 [2 May 2017]. 4 Available from: http://machinaex.de/project/happy-hour/ [2 May 2017]. 5 ‘On Audiencing’ was the intriguing issue title of Sydney University Press’s theatre periodical About Performance, no. 10 (2010).

References Adorno, T W 2002, Ästhetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. Breidenstein, G, Hirschauer, S, Kalthoff, H, & Nieswand, B 2013, Ethnografie: Die Praxis der Feldforschung, UTB, Stuttgart. Goffman, E 1961, ‘Fun in Games’, in R McGinnis (ed), Encounters: Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction, pp. 15–72. Bobbs-Merrill, Indiana. Grau, O 2002, Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion, MIT Press, Cambridge. Jefferson, G 1989, ‘An Exercise in the Transcription of Laughter’, in TA van Dijk (ed), Handbook of Discourse Analysis: Discourse and Dialogue, pp. 25–34. Academic Press, Michigan, MI. Latour, B 2005, Reassembling the Social, Oxford University Press, New York. Lehmann, H-T 2001, Postdramatisches Theater, Verlag der Autoren, Frankfurt/M.

Chapter 10

Parsing ‘commitment’ The multiple valences of spectatorship Janelle Reinelt

I was invited to contribute to this volume because of a research project I directed on spectatorship in 2012. Since the raison d’être of immersive theatre is the experience of spectators, the search for strategies to e­ ngage— indeed commit—audience members may lead to some of the relevant findings of our study. This research, commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK) as part of its ‘Cultural Value Project’, was an explicitly political project aimed to intervene in ongoing UK policy debates about how to value aesthetic experiences in times of austerity and precarity. Additionally, it led to issues of how we undertake performance analysis, scholarly description of performances, and methodologies for writing about performance. Immersive theatre has its own unique challenges for such analyses, methods, and what counts as evidence. I would like to start by positing three ongoing problematics concerning immersive theatre that are prerequisite to a discussion of immersive theatre spectatorship.

The problem of definition Definition is primarily a problem of inclusion and exclusion, what does and does not count as immersive. A number of scholars have attempted to establish working definitions or at least delineations of immersive theatre, but somehow, they are not completely satisfying (at least to me). Josephine Machon, who published the first comprehensive look at immersive theatre in 2013, provides a Brecht-like list of contrasts between ‘traditional theatre’ and ‘immersive theatre’. Like many sets of binaries, this schema clearly privileges one term over the other and does justice to neither. For example, the last contrast Machon offers concerns the post-show experience. For the traditional theatre she writes, ‘You leave the theatre through the foyer. The performance was good or it was bad. You know you have seen a piece of theatre’ (Machon 2013, p. 54). For immersive theatre, Machon writes: You leave the space and are aware that time has condensed or elongated over the duration of the event. The experience bleeds into the real world,

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you are aware of attending to detail, sensation being heightened as you wend your way home. You are exhilarated, disturbed, perhaps tired. You are unsure whether that was theatre, art, festival, gig, game, party, therapy. You know you want to do it again. Or you know it demanded too much of you and you will never do it again. (Machon 2013, p. 55) Initial and perfunctory feelings of imagined traditional theatregoers who evaluate the performance as either simply good or bad are hardly exhaustive. Furthermore, the choices given for the immersive experience are either to want to do it again, or not—because we are told it ‘demanded too much of you’ (ibid.). However, one might not want to do it again because it did not demand enough: what was experienced seemed pedestrian or trivial or, alternatively, offensive in some way. In other words, these contrasts are loaded in favour of only one term, and even then do not offer a full range of possible judgements by spectators. Jumping ahead to a later argument, let me just assert that the only way to see what the actual array of responses might be would involve substantial audience research. Machon’s working definition of immersive theatre utilises three categories: immersion as absorption (fully engaged or caught up in the experience), immersion as transportation (when the experience creates another place, an ‘unworldly world’), and total immersion (combining the first two categories and the ability of the spectator ‘to fashion her own “narrative” and journey’). While this taxonomy is generally helpful in understanding the nature of immersive experience, it is quite broad and would allow a number of so-called traditional theatre experiences to make a claim to immersion. Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris argue in A Good Night Out for the Girls (2012) that some women, attending popular musicals they call ‘chick musicals’ such as Mamma Mia, seek to get away from real-world misogyny by surrounding themselves with other women and girls who attend these sorts of shows in large numbers and become caught up or absorbed in the world of the play. They take away from the experience their own empowering feelings and thoughts and some shared affect that circulates around the theatre like contagion. Because this production comes from commercial culture, and is a traditional theatre experience, I doubt most scholars of immersive theatre would accept Mamma Mia as immersive. However, Aston and Harris would probably have something important to offer to any discussion of definitions, and would also complicate the often presumed distinction between popular entertainment and avant-garde performances, which immersive theatre performances are usually seen to be.

The problem of politics The problem of definition is made more important by its connection to the problem of immersive theatre’s politics. For a number of scholars who have

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argued that immersive theatre is part of an experience economy associated with late capitalism and neo-liberalism, these experiences can cultivate a self-referential narcissism or a hyper-individualism that is consonant with anomie and distraction. In Fair Play (2013), Jen Harvie has analysed particularly well how audience participation can become implicated in a celebration of individualism complicit with neo-liberalism’s atomisation of the individual as the key economic unit of production and consumption. Using the concept of the ‘prosumer’ borrowed from Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), Harvie considers the experience of choosing your own path at a Punchdrunk performance of Faust or downloading an audio performance-walk to ‘do’ in your own time, such as Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice (Case Study B), as forms of prosumerism that tailor the performance to individual desires, but also emphasise the providing of services or experiences to yourself in such a way that you may actually displace other workers. Along with other scholars such as Claire Bishop, Shannon ­Jackson, and Nick Ridout,1 she has recognised how immersion can be a form of ‘outsourcing’ (Harvie 2013, p. 47). However, it is not only the objective impact of immersion on the economy that is in question—it is also an issue of how it produces subjectivity, and how it can incubate the neoliberal subject. In one of the best books on immersive theatre, Adam Alston explains how audiences are affected by total immersion, emphasising the role of production: Productive participation [is] a feature of immersive theatre aesthetics that stems from demands that are often made of audiences – demands to make more, do more, feel more, and to feel more intensely – and enquires into the meanings and values of productive participation. The term ‘productive participation’, then, really names a romanticism, modification and enhancement of an audience’s inherent productivity, rather than a discrete category of audience engagement. (Alston 2016, pp. 3–4) Moreover, his book approaches the intensification of audience productivity from a political perspective, tracing connections between modes of involvement and empowerment in immersive theatre and the economic and political contexts in which they occur. Therefore, analysing affect in the experience of spectators, both as created by the artists but also through their transactions with other audience members, is essential to identifying the political effect of the whole event.

The problem of knowledge Of course, Josephine Machon and Adam Alston are, notwithstanding Alston’s critique, avid fans of immersive performances. (And I myself do not

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believe that immersive theatre is inherently reactionary!) Jen Harvie takes a balanced approach to weighing up the pros and cons of a range of different immersive UK performances, critiquing the company Punchdrunk, for example, or Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd’s 2010 You Me Bum Bum Train, but praising as politically progressive shows such as Roger Hiorns’ Seizure (2008) and Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001). In terms of epistemology, however, claims made for immersive theatre are often based on internal feelings, sensations, perceptions, and ideas or cognitions attributed to spectators. Yet the spectators are usually only indirectly represented by the scholars and artists involved, and comparative information among spectators is scant. Thus, verifying the claims of what is actually experienced is difficult, if not a bit circular.

Parsing commitment In these circumstances, it is worth pursuing for a few paragraphs the meaning of commitment in the title of this book: Commit yourself! What does it mean to ‘commit’? A number of dictionaries offer a negative first meaning: to perpetrate or carry out a crime or immoral act. This does not seem to offer anything positive to our inquiry about immersive theatre, although I can imagine some critics taking up this meaning! Another definition is to transfer or consign something to a particular place as in to commit to memory, or commit to prison. Again, this does not seem to quite apply, although with memory, it certainly could. However, another major meaning is more helpful to parse the term’s formulations: although the English Oxford Living Dictionary also prefers perpetrating something negative as its first definition, its second definition is ‘[To] Pledge or bind (a person or an organization) to a certain course or policy’. As sub-definitions, they offer ‘to be dedicated to something’ or ‘to resolve to remain in a long-term emotional relationship with someone’ (English Oxford Living Dictionary n.d.). I think these offer some rich possibilities for thinking about what is required of spectators at immersive performances, and perhaps also of scholars who write about them. To pledge or bind oneself to immersion must mean to enter the performance on its own terms without holding back or maintaining a critical distance. It is an interesting question whether or not this kind of commitment is essential to the form. I am thinking of Machon’s categories of absorption and other- worldly transformation. If one does not become fully absorbed, or enter completely into the world on offer, is the spectator committed? Or rather is there not a way in which choosing to involve oneself in the performance, even from a certain critical distance, is commitment enough to be counted as a genuine spectator? I am particularly partial to this question as it most often describes how I have attended immersive theatre. When I saw Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man, for example, I was on guard, quite

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analytic, and determined not to participate in anything I did not find valuable. How important is it to commit to the premises and rules, whether they involve wearing masks, or more complex interactions in one-on-one performances—questions about disclosing oneself, or physical contact with others, for example, in the work of someone like Adrian Howells?2 (I pose these questions without answering them definitively because they merit deliberation and nuance, and do not have a one-size-fits-all answer.) As for the other two meanings—to be dedicated to something or to resolve to remain in a long-term relationship—if we consider these metaphorically, perhaps they indicate that commitment means embracing the invitations offered by the performance to enter into the spirit of play or the other-worldly world created, and to remain faithful to the spirit of the immersive offering. These might map well onto Machon’s categories of absorption, transformation, and total immersion where absorption may be linked to the pledge to bind oneself to immersion, and transformation to the resolve to remain within the performance fiction or set-up, possibly for a long time, since many immersive performances have a durational component. Looked at in this way, we can begin to imagine a protocol for the committed spectator. These actions of commitment could be articulated for a particular performance event and spectators could be studied to see whether or not the commitment was met. However, I would argue that these kinds of commitments are also at stake and desirable in most traditional forms of theatre as well. Andy Lavender has recently argued that theatre after postmodernism is a ‘theatre of engagement’. While he considers more forms than only immersive theatre in his book, his definition of engagement and description of what it entails seem very close to the notion of commitment we have been considering. Lavender writes: ‘Engagement’ also suggests a mode of involvement on the part of individual spectators […]. Relevant markers on this particular spectrum include participation, corporeal interaction and experiential encounter. ‘Engagement’ in these latter instances is not just an attitude but also an act. You are engaged because this is required of you, body and mind. The term thereby also conveys a sense of commitment […] it indicates a process of offer, decision and mutual accord. (Lavender 2016, p. 27) To conclude the first part of this discussion, we can review and pull together these somewhat disparate points. With respect to the categorisation of a theatre performance, the distinction between traditional and immersive may be plagued by degrees of ambiguity. We should avoid too-easy categorisations and also pay attention to the politics of genre attribution, resisting

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the ghettoisation of immersive performances within so-called avant-garde practices, but also recognising that many of the markers of immersive performances may be found in unlikely, even traditional, places. As to whether particular immersive theatre pieces are politically problematic because of the kinds of experiences they construct and the subjects they co-produce, I am arguing that robust audience research can bring informed evidence to an analysis of political impact, and that too often there is no concrete empirical research to back up impressions and theoretical claims. And finally, commitment may be a necessary attribute of spectators at immersive theatre, but it is furthermore a desirable action for any theatrical spectator (as Lavender argues) in this time after postmodernism when detachment, irony, and contingency have been increasingly replaced by personal experience, affect, intensity, and social mediatisation.

What can empirical research show? As I already indicated, my entry into spectatorship research came about through a specific attempt to contribute to public policy debates in the UK. Between 2006 and 2014, I was living and working in the UK where I witnessed first-hand the depredations of the economic crisis and the coalition government’s neoliberal impact on discourses around public funding for the arts. The infamous policy document, the Treasury Green Book (2003), basically seeks to convert all values to monetary equivalents, and at this time was becoming prominent in debates about cultural value.3 With regard to the cultural value of the arts, key questions would include how much someone was willing to pay for a particular cultural experience, say a dance concert or a museum exhibition, to determine how valuable it was. There were two dominant lines of opposition to this metric, both of them rather tired: the intrinsic value response, often favoured by artists and humanists, argues that the arts are valuable in themselves, essentially containing value; the instrumental response argues that the arts do good—improve school performance, comfort the sick, help people in prison, and many other things.4 The problem with the first approach is that it is an ad hominem argument: ‘it’s good because I say it is, and any bloody fool can see it is’. The second approach is more complicated because it is a liberal and altruistic argument about what art can accomplish that is of benefit to humans and society more broadly. How can one fault that? However, if there was no evidence possible for the first argument, the evidence for the second has often not been as robust as it needed to be: if some prisoners who had art classes were still recidivist, then how could you establish that the activities had real value to their rehabilitation? To be sure, the problem here is that often funding agencies want spectacular results when it is only reasonable to have modest results, but part of the problem too is that the experience of the workshop,

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class, or performance is only valued on this model for what it produced in particular targeted behaviours instead of what it might mean or feel like, in a number of complex and ambiguous ways, to the overall well-being of the person attending these events. Social historian Geoffrey Crossick criticised these alternatives as too narrow, as well as several other binaries such as elite vs. popular or amateur vs. professional. Together with Patrycja Kaszynska, Crossick directed the ‘Cultural Value Project’ for the AHRC, an ambitious three-year effort inaugurated in 2012 in order to change the national conversation and standards of evidence for what constitutes cultural value. The project funded 72 research projects including ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’, which I directed. In the Call for Proposals, Crossick and Kaszynska declared the need ‘to begin by looking at the actual experience of culture and the arts rather than the ancillary effects of this experience’.5 Several times in the document, phenomenological methods were stressed; the notion that starting with individual experience was the best way to build up evidence was an assumption of the over-all project. We, meaning me and five colleagues, were a small think-tank called the British Theatre Consortium (BTC), and we had run a number of theatre conferences bringing together theatre professionals, academics, and the general public to discuss matters of mutual interest to the theatre community writ large.6 We thought the Cultural Value undertaking was tremendously important and that we could design a project that would help respond to its challenge. The result was ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’, in which we proposed to seek a new understanding of the processes of value attribution through the phenomenal experience of ‘being there’. To quote our application, ‘We seek to understand how these experiences coalesce and intermingle with the experiences of others to produce additional values, thus going beyond the aggregate of individuals to highlight how cultural activity might contribute to public value’. And in order to do that, we inevitably were involved in audience research. (It is also hopefully obvious why this investigation is pertinent to immersive theatre research as well.) We partnered with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic, and the Plymouth Drum (the smaller performance space of the regional ­Plymouth Royal Theatre). We selected nine productions, three at each theatre, that were seen by our primary spectators and five more that were seen by a smaller cohort more than a year previously. Thus, we studied a total of 14 shows in different categories (new plays, adaptations, experimental shows, and classics), surveying our subjects before, shortly after, and two months after they attended the performance in question; and a separate cohort was asked about memories from a year previous. In all, 317 spectators took part in our study. We asked the theatres to help us access their ticket-buying

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patrons for these productions, and we invited them to participate in our study. Our methods were surveys, interviews, and creative workshops; thus, both quantitative and qualitative approaches were utilised. Some spectators agreed to be interviewed, and we carried out 35 semi-structured interviews and ran three creative workshops, one at each theatre, for those 11 who were willing to attend. We had three goals in mind for this work: (1) to highlight the processual, unfolding experience of ‘being there’ at a theatre event; (2) to trace the individual networks and connections that linked specific performances to the larger sociality of people’s lives; and (3) to explore the role of memory over time in creating or sustaining (or degrading) the value of the theatre event. These goals seem to me to be of significant possible value to the study of immersive theatre as well since so much of the experience of immersion is processual, associational, and contextual. In the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on the findings of our project concerning individual networks and connections that linked specific performances to the larger sociality of people’s lives. I will draw my examples from the one case study that was clearly an immersive performance experience, Fight Night by the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed.

Figure 10.1  F ight Night by Ontroerend Goed, Aurélie Lannoy, Angelo Tijssens, and Charlotte De Bruyne. Source: © Yvon Poncelet

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Survey and interview findings7 All three surveys asked about networks of association: for example, did the subjects talk to others about the performance? Did they associate the play with their own lives or the times in which they lived? Did talking with others change their own view? Was this social aspect important or ancillary to the value of the event? We asked what spectators valued about theatre and how they ranked this particular event. The spectators who viewed shows over a year before were asked similar questions, but their surveys highlighted the questions about memory and value. The most important findings confirmed that indeed, substantial majorities of audiences made associational links to their lives and to the larger world in which they lived—two-thirds connected the experience of the plays with their own lives (67%), and an even larger number (84%) connected their experience with the wider world. By the time of the third survey, two months later, these margins had shrunk a bit: 52% of respondents reported a connection with their own lives, while 67% reported making connections with the wider world. For the subjects who had seen their performances a year beforehand, the results went down further: 46% associated with their own lives, while only 36% now connected it to the larger world. It interests me that while the wider world was the strongest in the short-term associations, it is the personal connection that maintained over time. I can speculate on the reasons for this—perhaps the connections to personal matters sustain themselves over time more vividly, but to be able to conclude that would take a good deal more longitudinal research. The survey results about these associations are very general—the wording was designed to cover a variety of ways of making associations rather than capturing specifics, but there were patterns we were able to see. Associations are often based both in the stimulus and in the experiential consciousness of the spectator. Interesting for the immersive focus of this volume, the immediate surveys after the performances showed that for most spectators, combinations of emotional, sensory, and intellectual stimuli register the impact of the theatre experience. Within the same set of responses, we found imagery and visual descriptions alongside discursive ideas about what the performance meant and/or comments on the staging and acting. The spectators provided ample evidence of an embodied act of receiving and processing the experience across all the surveys, whether or not it had immersive elements. They could and did describe associational connections to their own lives, tie-ins to real-world current events or what they take the world to be like today, and applied their performance experience to other experiences they have had or recognised others as having. As a whole, it was clear that the sensual immediacy of theatre is the primary positive value that was identified by the spectators close to the time of experience. Acting, production details, aspects of liveness, music, embodied sensations all contribute

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to this sense of the event as a richly affective experience. The answers are themselves immersed in values connected with sensuous engagement, and this was true across our categories. The value of sensual immediacy was also confirmed by answers to other questions. Spectators were asked what particular moments or lines from the performance they remembered. Seventy-seven percent of the audience answered with a description that either (a) explicitly referred to the emotional, affective, sensuous quality of a moment, e.g.: ‘The use of sound to start and end acts made people jump’ (Happy Days, Samuel Beckett); ‘the moment when the Host stood alongside the other candidates. It stands out because it made me feel cross’ (Fight Night, Ontroerend Goed); or (b) incorporated subjective, affective states into their descriptions of these moments, e.g.: •

‘Repeated scene of Claire spilling/throwing cup [of] tea… […] First time quite surprising and sudden, second time predictable, but still a change of mood’ (The Events, David Greig)

•

‘The image of 5 cloaked actors stood on the stage, each smiling at you in an individual way. There was a feeling of “Who are they? What’s going to happen next?”’ (Candide, Mark Ravenhill)

Two months later, our surveys tell a slightly different story, however. The value most commonly identified is the theatre’s opportunity to stimulate thinking and generate ideas and debate, which had surpassed ‘acting’ and ‘production’. ‘Text’ is more valued in the memory of the production while ‘music’ has become less so. There are new values of ‘relationship’ (meaning the value the performance has had to some personal relationship of the respondent) and ‘social’ (referring more broadly to the social experience of the theatre event). Of course and not surprisingly, of our 14 productions, some were more vital than others in provoking audiences to think about the wider world: David Greig’s The Events was a fictional response to the Breivik massacres in Norway, and Doug Lucie’s Solid Air imagined an encounter between two well- known musicians from the 1970s, John Martyn and Nick Drake, and Tony Blair. It is immediately apparent why spectators easily associated these materials with politics, current events, or past memories of 1970s Britain, while audiences for Beckett’s Happy Days or Shakespeare’s Hamlet tended to say they were ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’. Fight Night, by Ontroerend Goed produced at the Plymouth Drum, afforded an opportunity to study a participatory, in fact immersive, performance and its effect on spectators. Although I might argue that elements

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of Greig’s The Events produce immersive effect, only Fight Night really fulfils the three aspects of immersion/absorption theorised by Machon.8 Although somewhat difficult to describe the content of the performance, it is important to give an idea of how it operated. Fight Night is rather like a reality show: ordinary people (the spectators) are directly involved in the action, which is somewhere between a popularity contest and an election. Spectators vote on their favourite characters/candidates (played by actors), and there are winners and losers. Like elections, the voting is political and assumptions about democratic power are tested. Like theatre, there is awareness of role-playing and ambiguity about the overlap with reality. The Belgian company designed the performance to take place in a boxing ring; a series of ‘rounds’ ensues. Towards the end, when some audience members became fed up with manipulation and less than satisfactory choices, they were allowed to opt out—to give up their voting rights and quit the ‘system’. However, when they did so, the rest of the audience voted them out of the hall, off the stage, out of the theatre. This turn of events was quite shocking for most of our informants. Of all our shows, this one had the youngest people (aged 16–25) in attendance. Asked why they had chosen to attend the show, most mentioned seeking something different, experimental, or they already knew about the work of the company (two spectators were themselves from Belgium and followed the company on tour). Everyone agreed the performance was ‘about’ politics, voting, and democracy. For some, it highlighted the personality contest aspect of voting—one person said they had voted on the strength of the green dress the candidate was wearing—while for another group of spectators, it seriously challenged them to think about how persuasion works, how people, including themselves, form judgements, and wield power in voting or not. Listed below are a series of comments provided by spectators that indicate how they were responding to the show. The questions put to them were about associations with their personal lives and the real world. • • • •

‘As someone who tries to vote on issues and policies, I was a bit shocked to find out how easily I cast my votes on the basis of personality. But it probably won’t change my behaviour at the next election’. ‘It reminded me of the situations in Egypt and Syria, the either/or vote or what can happen if you decide that the structure doesn’t give you a voice’. ‘Only the obvious: our current political system is oriented towards populist voting and short term-ism and it relates to that’. ‘The moment when all those kids who had just renounced their right to vote went onto the stage, then out of the theatre. I wanted to shout at them, “You have no idea what you are doing! You’re just children!! Do not give up on our democratic system yet. People died for your right to vote!!!!!”’ (obviously one of the older patrons, but also one of the more committed or immersed).

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This body of people discussed the performance widely and remembered it vividly two months after seeing it. Following up with an interview will highlight the response of one of our younger subjects and offer his feelings about the experience.9 He did not know anything about the performance beforehand, and came to it with friends who had urged him to go. He was somewhat ill at ease, especially at the beginning of the interview, perceivable in a nervous laugh that accompanied his comments. He was asked about how he decided to attend the show and how it compared to his expectations. He said: I had no idea what it was about. I hadn’t been told anything. I hadn’t been given a description. I didn’t get given a blurb. I was just told the name which (laughs) which I forgot until I arrived. So I arrived at the show and it was Fight Night and I didn’t have a clue what it was going to be […] so I didn’t really have any expectations. The only ones I, I would have, would have been about Fight Night which I assumed was some sort of boxing or physical performance and it turned out to be something completely different which I must say I was a bit disappointed at (laughs) initially. I was expecting some high octane very loud musical production and it turned out to be something much more sedate, but it in fact ended up being much more philosophical which I find much more stimulating (laughs).10 Later in his interview, he was asked the question of how going to a performance affects him, and he answered: What most affects me? Ok, that’s interesting. […] I guess why do I go to the theatre. I think I think really I go to the theatre […] because I want to find out about myself and I’ve only just (laughs) that’s not something that I consciously think when I go in it’s something that I’ve just sort of come up with or realised. And his sum-up of why theatre is valuable is as follows: So the value it has. I think it, to use a sort of dramatic adjective, I guess it has spiritual value in the sense that the education that I’m receiving is not one about y’know physics or mathematical questions but about myself and broader questions of my life and should be (...) er how my life fits in with those of others, so it, so it has a spiritual dimension and a and a social dimension and a philosophical dimension which I you know which I think are much more important than questions of finance or personal economy or academic questions even. With the interview example I have tried to catch the very specific associational chains that individuals make between their theatre experiences

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and other aspects and relationships in their lives and to the world as they perceive it. The particularity of the paths is what is interesting and I think compelling as evidence of cultural value, but also of other things—perhaps indicative of immersive involvement. However, to be truly convincing, there needs to be a number of examples. The conclusion I draw about methodology is that both quantitative data and qualitative evidence are essential to really catch the phenomenological experiences of people as spectators and the values that emerge from them. Quantitative data offer a variety of answers to generic questions while qualitative evidence captures nuance, individual affect, meanings based on private histories or contexts—and in general fleshes out the reception of the spectator. For the purposes of this volume, a different set of questions would have been more interesting: ones tailored to get at some of the problematics of immersion. Individuals could have been asked about their perceived levels of absorption, questions requiring them to answer in terms of a scale of some items that might indicate how they committed or not to the performance. I would have wanted to ask if they felt they were caught up in the action to the point where they felt strong emotions (maybe anger, impatience, or excitement)—and they could be asked how this manifested (sensations like sweaty palms, raised voices, or temperature in the hall). They could be asked about what affected them most or how they related to the space, or many other things. A lot of these items could have been worked into a survey, but the kind of interview in the Fight Night example would also be really valuable, tailored to elicit comments about how the spectator experienced the immersive aspects of the performance, and how this relates to other theatre experiences or perhaps museum and installation events. The design for the interview protocol could be tailored to specific concerns of scholars of immersive experience.

Politics and immersion Returning to the political appraisal of immersive theatre, and the important question of whether immersive theatre is an effect of neoliberal culture pure and simple or has some progressive potential, I turn again to Adam Alston who has addressed this question in depth. Basically, his strategy is to separate the technology or apparatus of the theatre performance from its immersive aesthetics. In his chapter on the UK’s Theatre Delicatessen, he highlights a pop-up company that makes use of unused commercial and or industrial sites to produce Souks—markets in other words—in which young or new or under-resourced artists are given a chance to show their work. While he is very clear that capitalist relations underpin the economics of using these spaces (for example, the companies give Theatre Delicatessen free access and thereby gain a tax advantage), Alston argues that within that

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compromise, Theatre Deli is able to promote a number of those who were not part of the count (as Rancière might observe)11 by giving them opportunities to be seen. The identification of these events as souks, however, raises another interesting but troubling aspect: there is a transaction that takes place when the spectators and representatives of the performers bargain in a transaction that establishes in fact how much money they will pay to see the performance. Spectators are encouraged to bargain and negotiate. This sounds uncannily similar to the Green Book form of value attribution— how much would you pay for this performance? However for Alston, what makes transactions interesting […] in the Souks is that audiences are encouraged to rethink an economy not just as an abstract entity that demands deficit reduction and austerity, for instance, but as an economy of subjects who act. Moreover, audiences are encouraged to reflect on the endorsement, legitimation and valuing of particular kinds of action within an economy of productivity and service by considering how their own participation in transaction affects others via a process of being affected. (Alston 2016, p. 205) Now if that in fact is what happens, it is a good argument for his conclusion which is that [a]udiences are asked to financially value the labour of those who produce work to present, and which may also involve audiences as participants, calling into question the value of a particular kind of value. But audiences must also navigate the immaterial production of affect when faced with an appeal to remunerate a performer, whose efforts are geared toward the satisfaction of an audience’s desire to experience the fruits of their labour. (Ibid.) The main problem I have with this suggestion is that it is speculative—we cannot know whether or not audiences feel the discomfort of the transaction, identify it with a neoliberal paradigm, or have some other affective feelings which might even cement an instrumental and economic basis for their valuing of the performance. I think we have to ask a number of spectators what they are in fact perceiving and feeling.

Towards a spectatorial research agenda There are various kinds of spectatorial research. The most prevalent kind is the informed commentary of scholars and critics who write about their experiences. This is valuable and often inspiring; we might consider it

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‘testimony’. Second, many scholars extrapolate from the production what sort of spectators it requires or constructs or otherwise produces. This is, I would argue, slightly less satisfying because it always leaves the question of whether or not spectators responded as the analysis claims they did, and it also usually overgeneralises those responses. (This is basically my challenge to Adam Alston.) It would be stronger and better to combine some diverse methods. In the special issue of Theatre Journal on Spectatorship (2014), an essay by Keren Zaiontz illustrates a combination approach I find successful. She writes about immersive performances, and in fact begins with one by Ontroerend Goed, to construct a theory of narcissistic spectatorship as symptomatic of the neoliberal context in which we exist now. ‘A narcissistic spectatorship encourages the viewer to fully engross herself in the artistic production in a way that highlights her own singular relationship to the piece,’ writes Zaiontz (2014, p. 407). She argues that this atomised experience is typical of neo-liberalism’s prosumerism, citing Harvey, and that it encourages spectators to become self-absorbed in their own unique experiences, sometimes competitively with others, highlighting Punchdrunk’s deliberate provocation of this style of spectating. In addition to theory and reasoning, Zaiontz turns to real evidence in the social media and blogs recorded by spectators at Sleep No More and The Drowned Man. She points out that the Sleep No More wiki gives spectators tips to help ‘individual spectators who want to secure particular interactions or visit specific rooms’ (Zaiontz 2014, p. 417). The third form of evidence in the article is Zaiontz’s own experiences in attending not just Punchdrunk but also the one-on-one performance she writes about, I Will Tell You Exactly What I Think of You by Zeezy Powers (Toronto). Here, she offers her own testimony, but it is different from other spectators because she is informed—she is after all a theatre scholar, and so should have an edge of authority in her claims. (And I think she does.) Still, I would argue her analysis of Powers’ effects and affects would be stronger if she also had some quantitative data about others who participated in these performances and what they said after the fact about the experience. Adam Alston, too, is such an expert witness: he theorises beautifully about immersive performances and their political potential and is a good critic of neoliberal aspects ‘productive participation’ (Alston 2016, pp. 5–11). But his only evidence for audience experience throughout the book is his own informed participation. He defends this strategy explicitly in contrast to calls for quantitative evidence (mine among others). Alston writes: While these [quantitative] research methods have much to offer to our understanding of audience engagement in a range of settings, the position of an audience member who approaches immersive theatre ‘from the inside’ as an opinionated theorist can still be – and perhaps ought to be – harnessed as a critical position, even if it is not an objective position

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(which would seem a difficult ambition to achieve). With this in mind, the ‘I’ of the researcher need not be the scapegoat of empirical research methods, valuing objectivity over and above alternative values. (Alston 2016, p. 26) All right, I say. Fair enough, or maybe from my perspective fair—but not enough: that is, I am arguing for the combination of types of research and a multiplicity of evidence as the strongest way to achieve knowledge about spectatorship. I know this is difficult—having been involved in the one spectatorship project, it was exceedingly complex, we were under-­resourced in every way, and I would not do it again in the same way. Still and notwithstanding, my conviction is that collaboration is the way forward. We learned that theatres were interested in our findings and wanted to move beyond their marketing research on their audiences into some of the relational possibilities indicated by people who enjoyed continuing to think and speak about their experiences. Institutional homes such as the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität ­Berlin or the recently formed Center for Audience and Spectator Research at the University of Toronto can reach out to large theatre communities in global cities with rich theatre cultures in search of interested partners. Capable social science scholars can also assist in designing good instruments for use in gathering substantial bodies of data. I am hoping for expansive research that links theoretical insights with expert opinion and testimony— and also numerical assessment of actual ordinary spectators and what they experience. In conclusion, I set before you two exemplary directions for research, both of which I credit and think are important to future research on spectatorship and audiences. The first is Joshua Edelman’s study, also funded under the AHRC Cultural Value Project. It draws the advantage of more robust data from being linked to a larger project on European cities, the ‘Project on European Theatre Systems’ or STEP. Edelman’s project surveyed over 1,800 spectators for theatre and dance in Tyneside in northeastern England, as well as conducting a parallel set of focus groups. They were investigating what value these performances held for audience members, but also whether these values differed between subsidised, amateur, and commercial performances. Edelman and Šorli write that they were not interested in the quality of the performances per se. What they were interested in was making sense of the social place that theatre as a field holds within contemporary European society. Thus, we were not interested in the extraordinary pieces of work that generally attract the attention of theatre scholars, but the more ordinary examples that make up the bulk of theatrical life. We are also less interested in differentiating between higher and lower quality audience experiences […] than we are in seeing

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the differences in experience related to organisational and structural differences in the theatre field. (Edelman & Šorli 2015) The thing that makes this study important, I think, is that the research group, over a number of years, has developed a survey instrument that is being used comparatively across six European cities. That begins to approximate the ‘big data’ ambition I mentioned above. And although his study does not ask the kind of questions a Centre for the Study of Immersive Theatre might want to ask, it indicates how a significant body of data can be compiled and analysed by collaborative partnerships. Finally, lest there be any doubt about the primacy of individual phenomenological experiences in my recommendations, I turn to an article by one of the two leaders of the Cultural Value Project, Patryzca Kaszynska. In ‘Capturing the Vanishing Point: Subjective Experiences and Cultural Value’, she identifies what she thinks of as a social science culture of rejection of first order, that is first-person, evidence and urges scholars to embrace elements of empirical, phenomenological sociology as part of their methodological framework: Experience provides such a platform for encounter provided one acknowledges the socially mediated nature of experiences without however eliminating the subjective element of the first-hand perspective. […] All phenomenological approaches share some fundamental features. Crucially, they approach experiences from the subjective or first-person point of view of the subjects undergoing these experiences, and in order to safeguard this subjective perspective, they capture this content descriptively in the first instance, before attempting any further analysis. (Kaszynska 2015, p. 259) This is what we attempted within our ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’ project, and it is what I think needs to be done across our spectator and audience reception research. It involves us in work in the trenches to secure the needed evidence, but then also our interpretive, discipline-­ specific expertise to highlight the outcomes and to design the investigations that will yield answers to important questions. The research only matters if the stakes are genuinely important, and what I would characterise as fundamentally political. Informed expert testimony and the collected evidence of spectators’ experiences would begin to make knowledge about immersive theatre much more concrete and reliable. Its main cache has been to provide intimate, individualised, intense experiences. What experiences are these really? How do they differ among spectators? And most importantly, the ‘so what?’ question: what is the net effect of immersive experiences—do they turn us inwards to narcissism and escapism? Or do they engage spectators

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in affective ways that can and sometimes do promote social engagement and critique? We need the evidence to answer these and many other questions.

Notes 1 All three of these scholars have developed a critique of the way actual workers are impacted by their representations in artworks or through involving spectators or volunteers who do for free what they would be paid for doing. See Jackson (2011), Bishop (2012), and Ridout (2013). 2 Adrian Howells was a highly esteemed UK performance artist who engaged one-on-one involvement in intimate encounters. 3 The Green Book was revised in 2011 to provide language that made explicit this premise about determining value by ‘willingness to pay’. See the revised pages, 57–58 (H.M. Treasury 2011). 4 For a history of the relevant policy documents behind these views, see Reinelt (2014). 5 While the CfP is no longer available, the quotation also appears in the final report of the project (Crossick & Kaszynska 2016). 6 Prior research projects of the BTC include a survey of new writing for Arts Council England (2009), published as ‘Writ Large: New Writing on the British Stage, 2003–2009’. In 2012, we jointly sponsored a round table with the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), ‘From Spectatorship to Engagement’, which brought together 25 invited artists, scholars, and public figures to discuss different models of capturing public value. That same year, we partnered with Manchester Metropolitan University and the Library Theatre in Manchester in a study titled ‘The Spirit of Theatre’, based on surveys, interviews, and creative workshops, investigating the role of memory in the relationship of patrons to the Library Theatre. This became a kind of pilot project for our AHRC study. The BTC operated as a cooperative; six members collaborated on ‘Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’: David Edgar, Julie Wilkinson, Dan Rebellato, Chris Megson, Jane Woddis, and I constituted the team, with additional support from Chris Bridgman and postgraduate researchers Lisa Skwirblies and Wendy Haines. 7 For a more complete account of the research project and its results, see Reinelt et al (2012). All quoted materials and specific findings come from this report. 8 The amateur choirs that are drawn from the locations where The Events is produced create an immersive experience for their members as literally part of the production, and seem also to stimulate spectators to identify more deeply with the community at the play. For a discussion of The Events in the context of our research study, see Megson and Reinelt (2016). 9 He indicated in his first survey that he was between 16 and 25. He was one of four spectators interviewed for Fight Night. Comprehensive accounts of the interviews, their methodology and process are included in the project final report. Note that we quote verbatim the words of our subjects (Reinelt et al. 2012). 10 The transcripts of the project interviews along with the surveys are protected under data protection protocols of the University of Warwick. We have endeavoured to protect the privacy of our subjects here and elsewhere by anonymous attribution. 11 Rancière is an important theorist for Alston, who discusses him in detail in his chapter on Theatre Delicatessen. The idea of championing those who have no part, or who escape the count (the authoritative count of the police (state)) is a key idea of Rancière’s political philosophy. See Rancière (2010, p. 33).

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References Alston, A 2016, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Par­ ticipation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Aston, E & Harris G 2012, A Good Night Out for the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Bishop, C 2012, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Verso, London. Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P 2016, ‘Understanding the Value of Arts and Culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project’. Available from: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/docu ments/publications/cultural-value-project- final-report/ [2 May 2017]. Edelman, J & Šorli, M 2015, ‘Measuring the Value of Theatre for Tyneside Audiences’, in Cultural Trends vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 232–244. Available from: doi: 10.1080/09548963.2015.1066074 [2 May 2017]. Harvie, J 2013, Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Treasury, H.M. 2011, The Green Book: Appraisal and Evaluation in Central Govern­ ment. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/ attachment_data/file/220541/green_book_co mplete.pdf. [1 May 2017]. Jackson, S 2011, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, Routledge, New York. Kaszynska, P 2015, ‘Capturing the Vanishing Point: Subjective Experiences and Cultural Value’, in Cultural Trends vol. 24, no. 3, pp. 256–266. Available from: doi: 10.1080/09548963.2015.1066077 [2 May 2017]. Lavender, A 2016, Performance in the Twenty-First Century: Theatres of Engage­ ment, Routledge, London and New York. Machon, J 2013, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Per­ formance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Rancière, J 2010, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, S. Corcoran, (ed & trans), Continuum, London. Reinelt, J 2014, ‘What UK Spectators Know: Understanding How We Come to Value Theatre’, in Theatre Journal vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 337–361. Reinelt, J, Edgar, D, Megson, C, Rebellato, D, Wilkinson, J & Woddis, J 2012, ‘Critical Mass: Theatre Spectatorship and Value Attribution’. Available from: http:// britishtheatreconference.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Critical-­M ass10.7.pdf. [2 May 2017]. Reinelt, J & Megson, C 2016 ‘Performance, Experience, Transformation: What Do Spectators Value in Theatre?’, in Journal of Contemporary Drama in Eng­ lish vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 227–242. Available from: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ jcde.2016.4.issue-1/issue-files/jcde.2016.4.issue-1.xml. [2 May 2017]. Ridout, N 2013, Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. Zaiontz, K 2014, ‘Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance’, in Theatre Journal vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 405–425.

Chapter 11

The case for empirical audience research Antje Kahl

As a sociologist, I initially found it somewhat surprising that empirical audience research in theatre studies was rather uncommon. This may have to do with a different perspective on the subject of theatre: whereas theatre arts specialists generally consider performances to be the central research interest of their discipline, my own interest as a sociologist is not so much in the work of art or the aesthetic dimension of theatre as it is in theatre as a social situation. In addition to issues revolving around theatre as an institution and the relationship between theatre and society, it is precisely the audience’s behaviour, or the interplay between audience and actors in a performance situation, that is of sociological interest. These are the issues that make the three preceding texts from this section much more accessible to me. They all deal with these aspects while using widely varying methodological practices. At the beginning of her paper, Stefanie Husel observes that changed theatrical forms demand new research methods: if we accept the assumption that immersive theatrical forms enable particularly intense individual experiences, then we cannot continue our analysis with the notion ‘of an ideal or distanced spectator’. Rather, we would require – in Husel’s words – ­immersive research to be ‘a kind of research that is prepared to commit itself, to be part of the panorama, to really play the game, and thus to become able to report a very individual and intense experience’. At the same time, such research would have to be capable of distancing itself from its own commitment in order to gain perspective on it. Husel describes this interplay of immersed and distanced research in her examination of Bloody Mess by Forced Entertainment. Here, she takes an autoethnographic approach as an immersed audience member while also maintaining a distanced perspective on audience practices, using her analysis of audio recordings of the spectators’ laughter during the performance as her basis. Although, in my view, the oscillation between immersion and distancing need not be tied to the use of different methodological practices but can also be applied within a single methodological approach, Husel’s analysis demonstrates two things particularly well. On the one hand, it demonstrates that laughter is not an exclusively individual response on the part of separate audience members but a social-relational

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affective occurrence that, as an audience activity, is at once communicative and self-coordinating. On the other hand, it also becomes clear that audience participation has virtually always been an essential element of performances, even in more conventional settings with a clearly identifiable, fixed stage before which the audience sits through the entire performance. To Husel’s observations we may add that at a time when theatrical forms are changing and therefore bringing the audience into focus as co-creators of the performance, there’s another reason to demand new methodologies. The more visible audience participation becomes, the more apparent it becomes that audiences can participate in completely different ways. ‘The audience’ as such does not exist at all; rather, there are different ways of shaping the relationship between spectator and performer as well as different ways of assimilating and referencing a performance. Accessing these different configurations and their accompanying experiences requires empirical research capable of focusing on a variety of potential modes of reception as co-­creative activity. This potential variety of perspectives with regard to the performance event also enables us to question our own position. For it is only against the backdrop of a variety of perspectives that the researcher’s own position becomes apparent as one perspective among others and thus open to critical reflection. Such a relativisation of our own perspectivity is important in avoiding a potential short circuit in our research claims: that is, the conflation of own perspective with that of ‘the audience’. In contrast, we may consider the possibility that the performance can affect spectators in very different ways. Such an empirical view expands not only our theatrical knowledge of the relationship between audience and performance but also our broader understanding of what people do with and in the theatre and what theatre does and means to people. Matthew Reason likewise comes to this conclusion when, at the end of his paper, he writes: ‘[a] consideration of participatory audiencing requires us to shift from thinking about what performances do with (or do to?) audiences, but instead what do audiences do with and do to performances’. Reason understands ‘participatory audiencing’ to mean the process by which spectators generate empirical knowledge from their experience through actively grappling with the work of art. Reason in turn sees this process of generating empirical knowledge as a ‘committed return’, as both an affective and reflective exchange between one’s own experience, one’s own empirical knowledge and the work of art. His research examples are themselves almost artistic in the nature of their intervention: Reason asks his discussion partners to grapple with the performances they experience by using artistic means such as drawings, collages, memory maps or poems. This is followed by a group discussion about these performative acts. The core idea behind this approach is that it is in this grappling that meaning emerges and, in this way, transforms experience into empirical knowledge. A central theoretical point in this is the temporal extension inherent in audiencing or spectating. Audiencing is commonly linked to the time and place of the performance.

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In Reason’s view, however, it is precisely the delay between the actual performance and the spectators’ active engagement with the work of art that is essential to participatory audiencing. An occasional objection to such approaches points out that memory-­ based methods do not enable us to make statements about the experience of the moment, but ‘only’ about our retrospective view of the experience. Although this is a relevant distinction, we might consider whether the concept of the experience of a performance should be confined to the time of the performance. For is it not rather our very engagement with the ­theatrical experience, some of which occurs after the momentary experience of performance, that gives theatre its social effectiveness? Should it not then be the aim of empirical audience research to attempt to focus on this ‘afterwards’ in which, for instance, we might exchange views on what we experienced and, through that exchange, create meaning? Is it not true that the spectators’ retrospective understanding of the performance situation is important to theatre’s socio- political potential? And would it not also then be true that it is not so much the participants’ purely situational impressions that possess transformative potential but rather the way in which, at a later time, each individual creates meaning from their own experience of being affected? And that this happens precisely through engagement with other participants? Such socio-political aspects also form a central element in Janelle Reinelt’s paper. Although methodologically quite different from Reason’s approach, Reinelt’s work clearly shows what can be gained through the practice of empirical audience research. She argues that an expansion of the ­methodological spectrum in theatre studies would lead to more concrete, reliable and durable results. Furthermore, it is only on this basis that we can sufficiently support certain theoretical assumptions, such as those concerning the political aspects of immersive theatre – or we may simply have to reject them. Although one must agree with this in principle, the sympathetic implication that quantitative procedures in particular produce ‘real evidence’ appears somewhat problematic. After all, methodological procedures, including quantitative ones, do not in and of themselves produce evidence. A method’s appropriateness depends largely on the research question, and even a mixing of methods is not ‘stronger and better’ per se. The extent to which certain methods can be meaningfully combined within a specific research context (‘meaningfully’ in the sense that the combination produces the most effective answer to the research question) depends likewise on the research question, and not everything combines well with everything else at all times. In this respect, we must first determine which new, relevant research questions are even possible, given our presently changing theatrical forms; and as a second step, we need to consider which methodological means can be used to proceed towards answering this question. All in all, however, a widening of the applicable methodological spectrum enables us to answer a greater variety of questions. Only in this way will we be able to examine one method from the perspective of another in

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terms of its advantages and disadvantages, its possibilities and limitations, or to consider traditionally employed methods in a new light. In conclusion, I would like to briefly address the question of what social sciences can learn from the collection of contributions in this section. As a sociologist interested in methodologies, theatre studies research on the relationship between performance and audience is extremely inspiring, especially with regard to the further development of what are known as performative social science methods. By this, I mean methods that demonstrate a closeness to performative artistic acts and that are used to communicate qualitative social science research results, some examples being ethnodrama and ethnotheatre (cf. Saldana 2005, 2011). Here, research data and results are transformed into script form and then staged, the purpose being to convince the observer not only through argument, or discursive knowledge, but to draw them in emotionally, to move them. Similar to autoethnographic approaches, the presentation and communication of research methods and results are themselves considered a part of the research. Thus, the audience’s reactions or discussions following such performances can themselves be turned into additional data for the research process. Just as the texts collected here do not represent the performance event as unidirectional and occurring exclusively on stage but rather as a process of exchange between performer and spectator, one can view scientific methods of exchange in a similar way. Scientific events could then be described as an arrangement involving the interplay between the production, performance and reception of scientific knowledge. A central element is the generation and mobilisation of agreement, rejection, criticism and c­ ontradiction – that is to say, of various forms that demonstrate or display knowledge, interest (or lack thereof), argument and appropriation. All this takes place in a variety of physical forms: in discussions, above all (e.g. at conferences, meetings and workshops) but also, of course, through text production, i.e. through correlative texts. In the context of this sort of perspective on the scientific production of knowledge, we could also enquire as to what extent affective events occur in (intermediate) scientific methods for the presentation of results and their reception; whether and to what extent this plays a role in the creation of plausibility and evidence; and the extent to which affect is involved in the scientific production of knowledge. Accordingly, to regard scientific processes of communication and reception as a part of research may prove to be an important point, one that we could adopt in our scientific self-reflection in order to take a closer look at scientific knowledge production processes and, as scientists, to contend with these processes that we use in our daily work.

References Saldana, J (ed) 2005, Ethnodrama. An Anthology of Reality Theatre, Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA. Saldana, J 2011, Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage, Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, CA.

Part III

Questions of power – politics of affect in immersive performances

Chapter 12

Feminism, audience interaction, and performer authority1 Jen Harvie

Across my research, I am concerned with democracy and inequality, and how theatre and performance can both extend democracy and challenge conditions which limit equality, especially for groups disadvantaged by, for example, age, class, race, and gender. I often want to imagine that the most politically progressive performance is that which is apparently most ­democratic, appearing to offer the greatest extension of agency or power to its audiences. However, the correlation between audience participation and the extension of democracy is neither direct nor given, as is clear from many examples of performance discussed elsewhere in this volume and beyond,2 and as I explore throughout my 2013 monograph Fair Play – Art, Perfor­ mance and Neoliberalism.3 Given that I elsewhere criticise much immersive theatre for limiting ­democratic engagement, in this chapter I explore how that kind of limitation could potentially function beneficially socially. I focus on performance which offers audiences some agency, but importantly also deliberately and explicitly withholds it, in order to preserve authority for the performers in ways that do not so much extend democratic engagement as enhance critique of the conditions that reproduce inequality. I am interested here in performances that, first, show that democracy remains, for many, a fantasy; second, direct audiences to consider how – to make a more equitable world – we have to recognise and revise the attitudes and behaviours that produce and sustain inequality; and third, explore the value in making performance that actively limits democratic engagement by being at least somewhat autocratic, in order to achieve my first two points. I explore two recent feminist performances. The first is American performance maker Adrienne Truscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else, first produced in 2013. The second is English performance maker Lucy McCormick’s Triple Threat, first produced in 2016. Both shows interrogate naturalised gender dynamics that not only disadvantage women, but are often violent to women. These shows are not what would usually be understood as immersive. That said, they do deploy many techniques of active audience engagement and interaction,

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and in some important ways they immerse audiences. I focus on these shows partly because of their participatory features, but not because these features seem to offer democratic hope; rather, because, in performance, these and other related features made me worried for the shows’ makers; the potential for audience participation seemed to risk misogynist violence. The power dynamics of performance and spectatorship have long raised particular problems for feminism. As film scholar Laura Mulvey influentially put it in her 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, hegemonic regimes of representation tend to pose women as ‘to-be-lookedat-ness’, objects of the voyeuristic and scopophilic gaze, objectified, exploited, and inappropriately sexualised (Mulvey 1975). But if conventional, fourth-wall-observing theatre may often pose the kinds of risks Mulvey identifies, participatory and immersive theatre forms potentially pose even greater problems, given their intrinsic opportunities for proximity, pursuit, and touch. I was concerned about Truscott and McCormick because both shows exposed their bodies within narratives suggesting sexual exposure, both deliberately courted audiences who might be enticed by a woman’s apparent sexual exposure, and both invited interaction in small performance spaces that made some touch inevitable and groping quite possible. Furthermore, both performers present as personae who appear, in different ways, naïve or vulnerable: Truscott’s persona is a beginner comedian who professes to not really know what she is doing; McCormick’s persona is arrogant but appears devoid of self-awareness. Was there a risk, I worried, that Truscott and McCormick might somehow be mistreated in performance? What would that do to them? Would it undermine these performance makers and their feminist critiques of sexism? Would it exacerbate women’s inequality rather than diminish or at least critique it? For reasons this chapter goes on to explore, I did not need to worry; both women are decisively in charge of their performances and the power dynamics of controlling them; their personae may appear naïve, but Truscott and McCormick are not. They performatively articulate the kinds of ripostes that have long been provoked by Mulvey’s article. These ­r ipostes – including by Mulvey herself – variously argue that women must be able to self-represent; to choose to appear as sexy if they want to for any audiences, male, female, or other; to choose to appear naïve if they want to; and to revel in the power of such self-articulations (see, for example, Mulvey 1989). Truscott and McCormick overcome gender-biased representational regimes partly by overturning them, self-representing as having authority over their own self-representation. Truscott’s Asking for It interrogates the apparent cultural legitimation of rape jokes and the broader spectrum of patriarchal culture of which those jokes are the tip of the iceberg. McCormick’s Triple Threat interrogates the master narrative of the story of Jesus. Both performers interrogate female nudity as inherently sexualised-for-others.

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But both shows do more than self-represent. For me, Truscott and McCormick in these shows achieve their most powerful feminist effects largely through careful management of relationships with their audiences. First, the two performers secure audiences’ complicity with their interrogations of gender inequality as well as with themselves as powerful, engaging performers. They take their audiences with them in their gender critiques by cultivating audiences’ on-side camaraderie. Their apparent naivety prevents them from seeming exclusive and high status. They are neither preachy nor pious. They are funny, fun, and cheekily, sometimes lewdly, comradely. This is the comparatively easy part: most audiences could agree that misogyny is bad and can find something likeable in Truscott and McCormick. Second, however, these artists manage a more difficult task: they compel audiences to recognise their complicity in reproducing gender inequality in everyday ways. By inviting participation while presenting as naïve, these artists leave space open for audiences to imagine exploiting them, or to ­recognise how others might exploit them. However, these artists do not hand over to audiences the kind of authority apparently granted in much immersive theatre. Rather, despite their apparent naivety, they mostly retain that privilege for themselves, directing audiences to face up to the punishing effects of sexist attitudes as well as audiences’ own complicity in maintaining those standards – for example, by ‘recognising’ Truscott’s and ­McCormick’s personae as apparently vulnerable in the first place. One of the most important ways these shows may ultimately be immersive is by showing how the very cultures they and their audiences are immersed in perpetuate gender inequalities and misogyny, both wittingly and unwittingly. These are the core claims I want to make about these performance practices in this collection’s focus on audience participation and in my current pursuit of effective feminist performance practices. In the face of powerful, profoundly naturalised, and tenaciously persistent gender inequality, these feminist performers do not cultivate the kind of idealised democratic engagement their scenarios show to be fantasy; rather, they cultivate and exploit their own authority to reveal audiences’ cultural complicity in a broad spectrum of gender inequality. Why do we need such performance strategies for feminism now? Perhaps a better question is, how can we not need them? In Germany, 2016 opened with mass sexual assaults on women at New Year’s Eve celebrations in Cologne, Hamburg, and other cities (Noack 2016). The USA has an infamously misogynist President, Donald J. Trump, who called his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton a ‘nasty woman’ (see, e.g., Woolf 2016), and was recorded in 2005 boasting that he kisses and gropes women without consent, explaining, ‘When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything’ (quoted in Puglise 2016). Autumn 2017 has been marked by a cascade of revelations and claims about

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sexually abusive behaviour by powerful men in anglophone film and theatre industries, including American producer Harvey Weinstein, American ­actor-director Kevin Spacey, English director Max Stafford-Clark, and Irish director Michael Colgan (see Harvie 2019). Gender inequality and violence against women continue, pervasively, to be not only culturally tolerated but condoned and legitimated. Performance has to respond.

Adrienne Truscott: Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else Adrienne Truscott is an American performer with a long record of feminist burlesque performance as one half of performing duo the Wau Wau Sisters (Wau Wau Sisters n.d.). In 2013, in the wake of a number of high-profile male comedians joking about rape, she started touring her solo comedy show Asking for It, subtitled, A One-Lady Rape about Comedy Starring Her Pussy and Little Else.4 The show has two putative focuses: comedy and rape. Truscott plays a persona who speaks with a southern drawl and always has an alcoholic drink in hand. She wears an enormous blonde wig, massive high heels, a tight jean jacket, and, as the title has it, ‘little else’; she spends about the first third of the hour-long show naked from the tops of her shoes to the waist of her jean jacket. In other words, she presents as an exaggerated stereotype of a profoundly naïve ‘dumb blonde’, rendered vulnerable by alcohol and hyperbolically ‘asking for it’ by apparently offering not even the obstruction of underpants. The first time I saw this show, I did not worry about Truscott; it was October 2013, the venue was Camden People’s Theatre in north London, and I felt I was amongst feminist comrades. The second time I saw Asking for It, I did worry. It was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2014, near midnight, in a small single room that was, by day, Bob’s Bookshop. The performance space was tiny and practically on top of the audience seating. ­Because of the show’s title, its categorisation at the Fringe as comedy, and the late-night performance slot, I worried the place would be packed with leery, drunk men eager to see this notorious pussy-exposing show, also possibly eager to touch Truscott, and not very interested in her exploration and condemnation of rape culture. What would Truscott do? Was she really asking for it? What she ostensibly asks for is advice on being a comedian; she introduces herself as a beginner comedian trying to learn the ‘rules’ of comedy. She observes the prevalence of rape jokes in contemporary stand-up, and her stage is populated with photographic portraits of male comedians who perform such jokes. She explores rape whistles, pop lyrics that boast about rape, and popular cultural attitudes about rape, women, and what it is ‘safe’ for women to dress and behave like. Though Truscott ‘tells’ rape jokes, the overarching story of the show is that rape really is not funny, and that freedom of speech arguments put forward to defend rape jokes do not take account of social double standards;

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namely, that it is predominantly women who are raped and predominantly male comedians who want to protect their right to free speech. By near-opening with the questions, ‘So, anyone here been raped? Anyone here raped anyone?’ (Truscott 2015), Truscott also emphasises that it is not just being raped that is depressingly culturally prevalent, but therefore necessarily also doing raping. Getting her audience onside to condemn rape is easy; what she effects much more subtly is bringing audiences on her side to see how they are all inside, immersed in, and to varying degrees complicit in pervasive cultural attitudes and behaviours that condone a wide spectrum of gendered inequalities and violence, sometimes including rape. The charming persona Truscott gets audiences onside partly through her charming and apparently slightly vulnerable persona. She is welcoming and solicitous of her audience, repeatedly asking how we are doing (Truscott 2015). She is especially attentive to audiences near the front of the space in the little venue, attentive to their proximity to her pussy. To one man in the front row, she comments, ‘Your face looks like horror and money well spent’ (Truscott). She is also likeable because she is funny, physically and verbally. Physically, she performs striptease, only to reveal three layers of jean jackets, three layers of wigs, and about nine layers of bras (she never reveals her breasts). Several times in the show, there is a blackout and the video of a face of a man singing is projected onto Truscott’s bare torso, her pubic hair providing a goatee, simultaneously enhancing the male singer’s masculinity and comically undermining it. For example, at one point a video of Andrew Stockdale from the Australian hard rock band Wolfmother singing ‘Woman’ (2005) is projected onto her belly. The song is ostensibly an anthem to a powerful woman (‘She’s a woman, you know what I mean; you better listen, listen to me; she’s gonna set you free oh oh yeah’). However, its use as a soundtrack for numerous sports-themed computer games and for male buddy films such as The Hangover Part II (2011) indicates how its hard rock sound enables its comfortable assimilation by macho cultures. Truscott’s reappropriation and literal re-positioning of the song radically destabilises the default authority of that macho culture. Verbally, Truscott offers a lot of gags, many of which are puns. But when the audience groans at these, she quips that though they will accept rape jokes, when she does just one single pun, ‘you guys are like, “Fuck off, we’re more sophisticated than that”’ (Truscott 2015: emphasis original). She does make jokes about rape. She opens, ‘Thanks for coming. Bet y’all didn’t expect to hear that at the rape show’ (Truscott: emphasis original). She comments that ‘the research was a bitch’, but immediately continues, ‘as a woman, I also really struggled with what shoes to wear to get taken seriously. But I can see from the back that I fucking nailed it. Look at that’ (Truscott). She high-kicks to show her shoe to the back and, in so doing, of course, she

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separates her legs. As well as being funny, the show implies that Truscott is vulnerable, that she does not fully realise what audiences are ­salaciously enjoying, and that, given how she is ‘asking for it’, the show might actually end with her rape, an ending she foreshadows a number of times. Feminist perspective This combination of hostess-like friendliness, genuine funniness, and potential vulnerability works to get Truscott’s audience on her side and into her perspective. In the striptease sequences, she gets the audience raucously cheering, but she never delivers the payoff, drawing attention to and frustrating some audiences’ potential desire to see her fully naked, to consume her as a visual object. By flagging the cultural desire for women’s sexual exposure, she draws attention to the ethics of that desire. Repeatedly, she claims she is very comfortable, noting, ‘I feel real, real comfortable… even if none of you guys do’ (Truscott 2015). She controls and leads the dynamics of display and consumption, turning her active gaze on the audience to recalibrate hegemonic gender dynamics that would have her as passive spectacle and onlookers as active but invisible voyeurs, and thereby beyond reproach. Part way through the performance, she asks, ‘What’s funny? What’s a joke? What’s comedy? What’s a rape? It’s really hard for some [people…]. What if we could all agree… at the very least, rape is rude?’ (Truscott 2015: emphasis original). She then asks some audience members to role-play. Given the topic of rape and the blurriness of her boundaries, the men she asks to participate are reluctant, but they are somehow compelled, perhaps by her cheery assertiveness and/or their sense of pride. She asks them to repeat the word ‘no’ to her questions. She then asks them repeatedly whether they would like milk in their coffee or cereal; they answer no; and she mimes pouring it anyway, repeatedly. Her male roleplaying partners are symbolically violated by her mimed pouring and she compels them explicitly to articulate the words about sexual consent usually voiced by women: ‘no means no’. The bathetic effects of undesired milk standing in for non-consensual sex, and of rudeness standing in for rape, work powerfully to show that the clearly accurate equation ‘no means no’ can only be interpreted subjectively in contexts where radically unequal gendered double standards are applied. Truscott then tests more such double standards. She discusses American male comedian Jim Jefferies and jokes at length that she would not have sex with him. She then teases the audience that they are disappointed in her and ventriloquises their reprimand that she, ‘got all shallow and judged a guy because of how he looks […]. Leave the straight white guy alone’ (Truscott 2015). She recounts how the song ‘U.O.E.N.O’ recorded by Rick Ross in 2013 boasted that he drugged a woman, then raped her: ‘Put Molly [MDMA/ ecstasy] all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it; I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it’. In the interests of research, Truscott

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says, she decided to give a man a date rape drug. The audience murmurs disapproval and she replies, ‘Oh come on, equal rights!’ (Truscott 2015); simultaneously, it is clear from the ridiculousness of the ensuing story of her attempt to date-rape a man that she never made any such attempt. She acknowledges that she is ‘asking for it’, that she invites sexual violence. After all, she walks home after dark (‘Cuz I’m over seven’, she observes); and she talks to strangers (‘I call it meeting new people’, she notes) (Truscott 2015). Again, she uses bathos to highlight the perversity of suggesting women are ‘asking for it’ when they behave as adults. But she also shows that these kinds of perverse and patronising attitudes towards women are familiar because deeply culturally entrenched. She does not say, you recognise this because you believe it; but audiences would not recognise it unless they did, somehow, ‘know’ it. Through humour, bathos, inversion, and irony, she powerfully commands audiences’ perspectives to confront sexism. Managed par ticipation As well as managing audiences’ perspectives, Truscott manages audiences’ participation. She deliberately seeks audiences who are looking for ‘pussy’ by performing on the male-dominated comedy circuit, often late at night, and offering ‘a lady’, ‘her pussy and little else’. She then appears to fulfil what the ticket offers: she is semi-naked, she seems naïve, she strips. But though she ostensibly gives what is advertised, she also challenges expectations, assumptions, and presumptions. Her nakedness is not to-be-lookedat-ness; it is assertive and in her control; she looks back, and she controls the exposure of her body, never, for example, exposing her breasts. She is apparently naïve, but naivety is a deliberate and quite sophisticated ploy through which she cultivates audiences’ engagement and their effective entrapment in double standards. She importantly invokes the possibility of audience agency by inviting participation; but rather than simply handing over control, she repeatedly challenges how audiences enact their authority by implicitly undermining the ways they use it, for example, to objectify her body. After her bra striptease and much audience whooping, she comments, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed that, y’all. I may be pushing forty but I have the tits of a twelve-year-old,’ simultaneously seeming to collude with the audience in her own sexual objectification while implying the proximity of their response to the abuses of pedophilia. Ultimately, if she immerses her audiences in anything, it is the pervasiveness of gendered inequalities of everyday life. And it is through her careful control of audience engagement that she confronts audiences with their own immersion in, participation in, and complicity with such misogynies. In this performance, it is not so much that the audience is passive; Truscott seems to provoke catcalls, and she actively solicits the audience to participate by exploiting many features of stand-up comedy, including interaction with audiences, direct address, human-scale representation, and

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performer-audience proximity. But more important is the performer’s activity and agency; she actively leads her audience to confront uncomfortable truths and to acknowledge their own immersion and engagement in a spectrum of behaviours and attitudes that oppress women. Audiences are both outside the performance, looking in; and audiences are in it, implicated. She is representing the problems, and her audiences’ engagements with her really are the problems; audiences do not have the comfort of distance to excuse themselves from complicity. Truscott exploits the doubleness of theatricality: the performance at once represents social relations and shapes the real sociality of the occasion (Svendsen 2016). Truscott does not let us forget that we are not just in represented social relations but also in real ones, with real political, social, and personal stakes.

Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat Lucy McCormick is a queer femme English performance maker and co-founder of the feminist company GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN (GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN n.d.). Her hour-long version of Triple Threat was directed by long-established queer British performer Ursula Martinez and performed, where I first saw it, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in an Underbelly venue in August 2016, co-produced by London’s Soho Theatre.5 It has since toured and appeared twice at London’s Soho, where I saw it again in April 2017. Triple Threat re-enacts the New Testament, recounting the epic story of Jesus as told by the small singing and dancing troupe of Lucy and two supporting very buff, femme-presenting, gender-queer dancer-performers whom she calls her Girl Squad, Ted Rogers and Sam Kennedy (see Figure 12.1). The trio tell the story in an hour, in a black box stage space of approximately 12 square meters, using such economies of scale as – for the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh – Gold Blend instant coffee, frankenfurters, and meringues (all of which get thrown around the performers, stage, and auditorium). Triple Threat recounts this important part of the story of the holy trinity in a kind of cabaret, incorporating necessarily truncated narrative but also bodily enactment, pop songs, lip-synching, and street dancing, fulfilling in more ways than one the title’s colloquial ‘triple threat’ of singing, dancing, and acting. The trio of performers mostly wear underwear, but these are neither the loincloths of standard biblical iconography, nor the kind of elegant undergarments preferred by much contemporary dance; McCormick usually wears baggy and time-worn y-fronts; Rogers and Kennedy wear showily branded y-fronts. Triple Threat assertively incorporates the performance of sexual acts. It opens to reveal McCormick singing with heartfelt emotion but inaudibly, because she is singing not into a microphone but a dildo (see Figure 12.2). Eventually Kennedy gets her to notice what is wrong. Securing a mic, she redeploys the dildo by apparently inserting it into her vagina

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Figure 12.1  S am Kennedy, Lucy McCormick and Ted Rogers in Triple Threat. Source: © The Other Richard

Figure 12.2  L ucy McCormick in Triple Threat. Source: © The Other Richard

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inside her y-fronts, enlisting Kennedy to hold up her leg and the dildo and proceeding to enact, you see, Mary’s immaculate conception while she continues to sing. Later, Judas’s betraying kiss is a scene of deep tongue kissing and heavy petting between McCormick and Rogers. And Kennedy as Doubting Thomas is only persuaded of the ‘wounds’ of Jesus/McCormick when she has thrust Kennedy’s fingers into every orifice in her body, starting with her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears and moving to her belly button, vagina, and anus – whereupon Thomas/Kennedy finally believes. By McCormick’s own account (Harvie 2017), Triple Threat revels in its own preposterousness, by telling one of the most epic and influential stories of all time, and doing so within the profound constraints of the fringe circuit, in a single hour, in a small venue, and with typical – but, here, a­ bsurd – economies. The aesthetic is cheap and cheerful, camp, and proudly, joyously queer. It is not immersive theatre, but as a form of live art cabaret, it is actively participatory, semi-immersive performance: the performers directly address the audience; in a break between scenes, McCormick asks audience members about themselves, a task which routinely ‘doesn’t go that well’ (McCormick 2016a); telling the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, she invites her audience to fill in the blanks by miming things, such as how he wears a crown of [thorns] and has to carry his own cross up a [hill]; she enlists the audience to take up singing Bryan Adams’ 1991 pop hit ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ after Jesus’s death; and she performs the ascension by body-surfing along the upraised hands of the audience, from right upstage to the very back of the auditorium. ­ ynamics – Triple Threat queers conventional binary and binary-enforcing d of gender, sexuality, theatre’s separation of performers and audiences, and much feminism. It does this by presenting a playful openness, modelling a practice for itself and its audiences that merges fun and political commitment, and establishing a relationship to its audience that is friendly but also in charge, setting the terms as open while also directed by queer feminist leader Lucy McCormick. Playful openness Triple Threat models a playful openness that challenges not only religious and sexual proprieties and master narratives, but also stereotyping and binary-­enforcing understandings of genders, sexualities, performers versus audiences, comedy versus pornography, and even queerness, with ­McCormick herself presenting as a ‘passing’, femme – potentially ­heterosexual – woman who reveals herself and/or her performance to be thoroughly queer. Gender play is fluid: McCormick is the Virgin Mary, ­Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Jesus, Mother Mary, Jesus, and finally a bearded God, as well as always and/or partly herself; Kennedy and Rogers likewise take up roles both ­conventionally male and female, including worshipping kings

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and mourning women. Narrative is playfully irreverent: McCormick depicts King Herod’s ­massacre of the innocents by devouring a carton of Innocent brand smoothie; Jesus’s temptation in the desert is performed by lip-­synching the 1997 debut single of Destiny’s Child, ‘No No No Pt 1’, while Rogers tempts McCormick with cigarettes, lager, and Nutella. Genre is dynamic. In conversation with me, McCormick commented that she sees the show variously as comedy-­as-pornography and/or pornography-as-comedy (McCormick 2016b). She and the other performers execute what might be seen as pornographic acts such as using the dildo, snogging, heavy petting, and vaginal and anal fingering, but also make them ridiculous or comical. The show’s engagement with gender, sexuality, and pornography is not pious or judgmental but rather open, exploratory, and fun. Fun and politics Triple Threat models a practice that merges fun and political commitment, insisting on the value and potential inseparability of both while also, importantly, enlisting audiences in this practice. In an interview in November 2016 with me, McCormick talked about being led in making this show by her desire to do what she wants to do, namely, sing and dance to pop songs. But she also talked about that fun as producing a kind of ‘carbon footprint’ of indulgence that she feels she needs to pay back through politically committed work (McCormick 2016b). Her story of Jesus is peppered with fun, funny, and anachronistic dance sequences that draw energetically, expertly, and hilariously on stock pop video moves and sequences; her soundtrack juxtaposes the story of Jesus with an array of familiar, singa-long-able, heart-string-pulling pop tunes by the likes of Destiny’s Child, Bryan Adams, Snow Patrol, and Justin Bieber; and her costuming incorporates the faux-heroism of a handmade Adidas cape (see Figure 12.2), the bathos and irreverence of a mourning veil formed out of an Adidas jacket (see ­Figure 12.1), and numerous putative wardrobe malfunctions that leave her apparently unknowingly bare-bottomed and/or breast-exposed, like Janet Jackson in the infamous ‘Nipplegate’ of the 2004 Superbowl halftime show. Hilariously preposterous the show may be, but it is also emphatically political. McCormick’s apparently naïve combination of Bible and pop asks what the important myths and mythic forms of our times are – the ones that most move audiences and that people can and want to sing and dance to – and whose stories they are, men’s and/or women’s. Her faux-heroic costumes ask questions about putative gender and class appropriateness, and her malfunctioning wardrobe challenges the pieties and gendered oppressions of cultural shaming. Crucially, her fun naivety also gets audiences onside, so that when she shifts register, she takes audiences with her to focus on uncomfortable things. After Jesus’s death, McCormick performs as Mother

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Mary and sings Snow Patrol’s somber 2004 single ‘Run (I’ll sing one last time for you)’. She moves into the audience, emoting, and gradually gets very distraught, until she ends up back on stage, prostrate in apparent grief, screaming, and with her bare bottom exposed, having popped the fasteners on the crotch of her body suit. She compels audiences to look at and face what they might not like to see – a woman screaming, with grief. This is Jesus’s story but from Mary’s perspective. Fun but firm leadership As that example indicates, McCormick establishes a relationship with the audience that is friendly and fun but also in charge, not only refusing the oppressions of Laura Mulvey’s voyeuristic to-be-looked-at-ness, but joyfully embracing a semi-naïve but effective leadership. McCormick leads audiences through the show. She organises the dildo for the scene of immaculate conception, instructing her assistant on what to do. When she is snogging Judas, she directs Kennedy as the arresting officer with a hand gesture on the point at which to come and arrest her; Kennedy does not initiate this; she commands it. She controls where Doubting Thomas (played by Kennedy) puts his fingers and how he moves them. And she orchestrates the audience’s participation. Before the ascension scene, she announces it is ‘Time to wrap up the play and think about what it means’, stating ‘It’s about democracy’ (McCormick 2016a). She invites everyone in the audience who wants to participate to form a corridor of upraised hands on which she can body-surf semi-naked to her ascension. Throughout her ascension, she repeatedly checks, ‘Everyone ok?’, and reminds audiences to ‘fill in the gaps’ and that ‘no one is above anyone else’ (McCormick 2016a). These phrases pay satirical lip service to the physical risk of the scene, engage the audience in that risk as much as McCormick, and propose a kind of democratic engagement that is, however, led by her – our very fallible, messy, female, martyr-hero. She engages and celebrates democracy but also mocks its altruism. In terms of the power dynamics between audience and performer, she shares the power, definitely on her terms, but her terms are quite open. In my experience of the ascension scene, the audience was very careful of her body, taking care to keep it aloft and also not to touch her ‘inappropriately’. In interview she told me, however, that in the terms established by the performance, the boundary on what is inappropriate is quite open (McCormick 2016b). McCormick’s persona in Triple Threat, like Truscott’s in Asking for It, is ostensibly naïve; caught up in her own self-importance, she apparently does not see her own absurdity and vulnerability to sexist voyeurism. But like Truscott’s naivety, McCormick’s too is a ploy. Like Truscott, she uses it to seduce audiences into adopting perspectives which might perceive her in patronising or sexist ways, but her ultimate control of her persona,

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and therefore her control of her audiences, gives her the upper hand in the balance of dramaturgical power at work in the performance. Like Truscott’s, McCormick’s performance reveals audiences’ embeddedness – or ­i mmersion – in sexist cultures, and audiences’ complicity in those cultures. At the same time, her joyous engagement with her audience, like Truscott’s, invites them to join her also on the side of critique of that sexism.

The importance of feminist authority Both of these shows offer empowering feminist self-representation and critique. They bring their audiences onside through charm, attractiveness, funniness, wit, as well as faux-naivety. They manage audiences’ perspectives and they manage audience participation, making audiences confront their embeddedness in sexist cultures. These performances enable some interaction and participation, largely to establish camaraderie between performer and audience. However, they also withhold audience agency in order to preserve agency for the performers, drawing attention to the conventional gender dynamics that might suggest these women should give up authority, preserving that authority for these women to command their critique, and allowing them to lead audiences not only to see sexism but to see their own structural participation in it. And these feminist performers are not alone in such work. Others working at the generic boundaries of live art, stand-up comedy, and cabaret and using some similar feminist strategies include Split Britches, Lauren Barri Holstein, and Hot Brown Honey. In seeking the most politically progressive theatre, we might seek performance which seems to do the good and important work of extending democracy, but we must also pay attention to performance which effectively denies audience agency in order to withhold authority from audiences so that it can confront them with unpalatable truths, such as the persistence of misogyny. We must pay attention to performance which reserves agency for performers who compel us to look at the limits of our democracies and the conditions which produce those limits and their inequalities. This is not the widely dispersed agency of a fantasy of democracy, but nor is it fascism; it is effective leadership and persuasion that are making audiences face what needs facing.

Notes 1 My thanks to Doris Kolesch, Theresa Schütz, Sophie Nikoleit, Thore Walch, and everyone who helped to organise and contribute to the event Commit Yourself! Strategies of Staging Spectators in Immersive Theater in Berlin in November 2016. Sincere thanks also to the artists Adrienne Truscott and Lucy McCormick who generously shared their work with me, including performance videos.

156  Jen Harvie 2 Adam Alston notes that immersive theatre, in particular, requires ‘productive participation’ from audiences, but also risks being ‘escapist’ for them, or encouraging their ‘explorative pursuit of personal pleasure’ (Alston 2016, pp. 2–3; italics added). These modes of what Keren Zaiontz calls ‘narcissistic spectatorship’ (Zaiontz 2014, p. 407) foreground the priority – possibly empowerment – of the individual audience member, but not in ways that contribute to democracy as the collective action of a group of people. 3 In Fair Play, I explore how immersive theatre risks offering the kind of spectacle that evacuates social interaction (Harvie 2013, pp. 183–184), and how, broadly, [t]he social engagement [that] delegated performance [including immersive performance] offers can […] be seen as at best limited, possibly compromising and even malign. The agency and egalitarianism it proffers can be modest, superficially placating or problematically and spectacularly distracting, diverting attention from, for example, the simultaneous material disempowerment of millions of people by increasingly insecure global labour markets […]. It can conscript audiences’ participation in acts, situations and dynamics they might not otherwise support. (Harvie 2013, p. 41, italics original) That said, I do respect the democratic politics of immersive theatre work by the likes of, for example, Metis Arts, including their 3rd Ring Out (2008–2012) and World Factory (2015) (Metis Arts 2013). 4 For research purposes, Truscott kindly shared with me a video recording of the show made at The Creek and Cave in Queens, New York, in September 2015. 5 Triple Threat began life as a series of short performances in queer clubs and other venues. For research purposes, McCormick kindly shared with me a video recording of the show made at the Underbelly, Edinburgh, in August 2016.

References Alston, A 2016, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Par­ ticipation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN n.d., GETINTHEBACKOFTHEVAN, website. Available from: http://www.getinthebackofthevan.com/ [9 November 2017]. Harvie, J 2013, Fair Play – Art, Performance and Neoliberalism, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Harvie, J 2017, ‘Episode 2: Lucy McCormick: Triple Threat’, in Stage Left with Jen Harvie, podcast, 17 March. Available from: https://soundcloud.com/stage_left/ episode-2-lucy-mccormick-triple-threat [8 April 2019]. Harvie, J 2019, ‘The Abuse of Power’, in P Eckersall & H Grehan (eds), The Rout­ ledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, Routledge, Oxon (forthcoming). McCormick, L 2016a, Triple Threat, Unpublished Video Recording Made at Underbelly, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, August 2016. McCormick, L 2016b, Discussion with Jen Harvie, London, 4 November. Metis Arts 2013, Metis Arts, website. Available from: http://metisarts.co.uk/ [4 December 2017]. Mulvey, L 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Screen vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 6–18. Mulvey, L 1989, ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)’, in Visual and Other Pleasures: Language, Discourse, Society, pp. 31–40. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Feminism, interaction, performer authority  157 Noack, R 2016, ‘2,000 men “sexually assaulted 1,200 women” at Cologne New Year’s Eve Party’, in Independent, 11 July. Available from: http://www.independ ent.co.uk/news/world/europe/cologne-new-years-eve-mass-sex-attacks-leakeddocument-a7130476.html [11 November 2016]. Puglise, N 2016, ‘“Pussy grabs back” Becomes Rallying Cry for Female Rage Against Trump’, in Guardian, 10 October. Available from: https://www.the guardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/10/donald-trump-pussy-grabs-back-meme-womentwitter [11 November 2016]. Svendsen, Z 2016, ‘The Dramaturgy of Spontaneity: Improvising the Social in Theatre’, in G Born, E Lewis & W Straw (eds), Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, pp. 288–308. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Truscott, A 2015, Asking for It: A One Lady Rape about Comedy, Unpublished Video Recording Made at The Creek and Cave, Queens, New York, September 2015. Wau Wau Sisters, the, n.d., The Wau Wau Sisters, website. Available from: https:// wauwausisters.com/ [9 November 2017]. Wolfmother 2005, ‘Woman’, Wolfmother, Modular Recordings. Woolf, N 2016, ‘“Nasty woman”: Trump Attacks Clinton During Final Debate’, in The Guardian, 20 October. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/ us-news/2016/oct/20/nasty-woman-donald-trump-hillary-clinton [11 November 2016]. Zaiontz, K 2014, ‘Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance’, in Theatre Journal vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 405–25.

Chapter 13

The promise of participation revisited Affective strategies of participation Gareth White In The Accidental Collective’s Here’s Hoping,1 we in the audience are asked several times to stand and to identify ourselves, to declare that a certain song or a certain moment has given us hope. We are asked to offer images that come to mind with the word ‘hope’, and when we do, seeds are scattered across the stage. Small gestures like this intersperse the two performers’ own personal meditations on the meaning of hope today. They feel small, of course, but not quite futile. My own reluctant offerings are drawn into the rhythm and mesh of a performance-as-assembly, a being together with others whose hopes may not be identical, but who can be persuaded to yearn together. Daisy and Pedro, the performers, are self-conscious about avoiding a manipulative swell of collective purpose, so leave us thoughtful rather than galvanised. But the reward of coming together in search of hope is almost unbearably meagre; it’s a charming, occasionally beautiful performance, which gently suggests that others share my worries as well as my hopes, and uses brief moments of audience action to suggest this sharing. It makes me think about how performance is directed to the future, how it hopes for change, and how being together as a group, and doing things together, is shaped by performance makers towards this hope and this change. In Rimini Protokoll’s Remote London,2 the audience come together in a different way. We walk together as a ‘horde’, explicitly framed as a shared identity. We are described as if we move as an organism, and this sense of collectivity is reconfigured in different ways several times: we observe others in the city, we pretend to be a crowd at a demonstration, we dance, we are split up into teams, we race each other. We become flaneurs, apart from and among the city’s living inhabitants, who are made to perform for us, for example at King’s Cross, where the architecture of the station entrance is appropriated as a proscenium arch, as are the dead, in the graveyard where we begin our walk. As in Here’s Hoping, there is an explicit coming together as a group, but with an implicit interest in what it means to live together, and how to respond to the challenges of urban life. Neither of these pieces seeks to incite change with this being together; each is content with a provocation to thought, rather than a call to arms or a challenge. They begin to pose the problem of living together, in a culture with intractable and hopeless-feeling challenges, and in a city that moves together organically without substantial

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interconnection. They are interesting pieces in their own right, but I use them to introduce my argument as a contrast to another pair of participatory performances which more demonstrably stage being together as a problem, by creating situations of conflict into which to cast the audience participant.

Nightwatchers The first of these is Nightwatchers at the Tower of London3, like Remote, a work in which the audience wear headphones. My friend and I have a rendezvous at Tower Hill. We have been told to meet a woman wearing a red scarf, and to make ourselves known to her by asking a question that includes the word ‘midnight’. Directed to another agent, we are given our equipment: an obsolete-looking mobile phone, headphones, and a bag to carry it in. Having put on the headphones, I am instructed: Watch the men and women around you. Move slowly towards someone without them noticing. Are they alone or in a group? See the action of their hip joints, their feet on the pavement. Do they give away their thoughts in the clench of their jaw? This is a dance, this movement of people around you. There are patterns to find, habits that people adopt. It is your job to see those patterns, the swirl and movement of bodies around this place. It is your job to use your gut and the hairs on the back of your neck, to see without being told. (Anagram 2016, p. 3) It’s a cold, wintery evening and there are few people around, but still, I catch some people passing, wrapped in their scarves, and think of their indifference to these strange goings on. I am addressed through the headphones by Laura, who refers to me throughout as ‘operative 341’. She is testing me, to see if I have what it takes to be an ‘agent’. Throughout this piece of hybrid museum-immersive-historical-­headphonewalkabout performance the participant spectator is invited, explicitly or implicitly (more often implicitly), to imagine the mental states of other ­p eople. Some of these people are fictional, some are not, and at some points the overlap of fictional and real people creates the tensions that are my point of interest in this performance. Telling me of the history of the Tower, Laura asks me to walk to the river, to a spot where the river connects to Traitor’s Gate. While I am there, she puts me to the test. She asks me to find a small envelope in the bag I have been given: can I see a person walking near me who looks suspicious? Can I put the envelope in their bag without them noticing? The envelope contains incriminating evidence, she says, that will get this person into trouble with

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the police – can I prove myself by achieving this task? At this point I am implicitly led to imagine a set of different minds and mental states: first, there are fictional characters, including Laura, speaking to me and the fictional agent that I am expected to incriminate; and second the ‘real’ people – the theatre makers who have devised this strategy, the actor speaking Laura’s lines, and most troublingly, the person that I have spotted that I think I am supposed to plant an envelope on. This is troubling because I’m in a public place, and I’m not certain whether I’ve been asked to plant an envelope on an actor or an ‘innocent’ passer-by. I’m not sure if I’m going to fulfil the task. I become anxious, and I’m saved by the voice of Laura, who stops me and tells me the test is complete – I don’t need to follow through and actually plant the envelope. At this point I wonder about the intentions of the theatre makers. The invitation to act, and the abrupt cancellation of that invitation, has evoked such a strong reaction in me that I give them credit for intending it that way. My heart rate is raised, certainly; this is evidently an affective strategy. But also, at this moment in the piece, my curiosity is matched with concern: is it going to continue in this vein? How am I to play this game? Am I being played with? The feeling of the performance makers as present with me, not just in the words that ‘Laura’ speaks, is powerful. What’s in their minds, as they lead me through these things? What do they intend for me?

Theory of mind There are two kinds of ‘theory of mind’ in this chapter; the first is a specific proposition about how human thought is premised on a world inhabited by other minds, which Lisa Zunshine asserts are so important that they ‘make human culture possible’ (Zunshine 2012, p. 13). Zunshine, in Getting Inside Your Head, says that we are ‘greedy mind readers’, instinctively disposed to imagine mental states in other people. We value particularly highly the moments of ‘transparency’, when we feel that we have insight into other minds, and storytelling – in literature, film and theatre, and other forms of representational art – exploits moments of ‘embodied transparency’ in clever ways. Bodies, from time to time, give away what is usually hidden, the mind, and art holds our attention in part because we can’t help but be interested when this happens. She says for example that there are ‘three “rules” for constructing moments of embodied transparency in prose fiction’ (p. 30): contrast – making transparency stand out in a context of opacity; ­transience  – allowing transparency only brief appearances, building tension; and restraint – in characters that generally try to hide their feelings. Zunshine tells us how Jane Austen juxtaposes telling the reader about the mental state of a character, and narrating a moment of embodied ­transparency in which a character’s state is apparently revealed to another. This is Elizabeth Bennet, observing: …Mr Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment

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than surprise. His complexion became pale with anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature. He was struggling for the appearance of composure, and would not open his lips, till he believed himself to have attained it. (Austen, in Zunshine 2012, p. 34) Contrast – he’s not like this in the rest of the scene; transience – it passes quickly; restraint – he struggles. What’s persuasive is not that Zunshine has noticed that literary characters are interested in each other’s minds and try to conceal them from others, or that readers might enjoy these moments, but the range of narrative or representational techniques she observes which exploit our interest in how people’s minds become transparent, either to us or to other characters. When reading, viewing, or spectating, of course we imagine the interiority of the people represented; but we are also engaged by sophisticated strategies that engineer the transient moment of transparency, when characters force each other into moments of self-realisation, or burst into song or soliloquy, or simply appear in full face to the spectator in a picture that has others turned away or in darkness. These strategies differ according to genre and context, but what Zunshine observes is sufficiently complex that I believe her when she says that they can only be explained in these terms. I’m not convinced that this explanation needs recourse to cognitive neuroscience or evolutionary psychology to be persuasive: it is commonplace, but not trivial, to reflect that I am interested in what others think and feel, and am sometimes engaged in a kind of mind reading without expending conscious effort on it. Look in my direction and I’ll imagine a reason why. Blush and I’ll feel your embarrassment. And if you whisper in my ear I’ll wonder about your motives.

Inside the participant’s head In Nightwatchers, we are asked explicitly to imagine what is on other people’s minds, for example: when we are told to plant a note on a stranger, later when we are told to give a card to someone whom we trust or don’t trust, when we accept gifts from others, when we listen to the voices of two characters and follow their instructions, or when we imagine historical figures. In each of these exchanges, we imagine another mind, but that tells us very little. The interest comes with the complexities of experience that can emerge from this ‘mind reading’. In another interesting moment from the evening, as I enter the Tower, I begin to be concerned about whether the jingoistic, paranoiac tone of Laura’s exposition will continue. My reflexive political critique begins as she tells me about Thomas Phelippes and the origins of counter-espionage in England, and indicates that my ostensible purpose as ‘Operative 341’ is to prove myself capable of joining her organisation dedicated to protecting the country from nefarious other powers. As I’m rehearsing my objections – that Elizabeth’s reign was notoriously vicious,

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autocratic, and the beginning of the modern surveillance state, that this is a reactionary, conservative model of a monolithic history – and as I’m even considering how I’m going to put all this to the friend who has invited me to this preview performance, Laura’s transmission is interrupted, with the appropriate hiss and crackle on the soundtrack, by another voice, claiming to be a rebellious ex-member of her organisation. His name is Greene, and he begins to describe the organisation and the tower itself in very different terms. Another model of history is offered: of a palimpsest building that shows itself in the walls, and of a past that becomes real according to the questions you ask of the traces it has left. As Greene says: ‘Everything here is papered over by something else. They haven’t bothered to hide it because most people don’t even look’ (Anagram 2016, p. 8). It is this voice that leads me deeper into the tower, and which seems now to represent the mind of the performance makers. However, this isn’t embodied transparency as Zunshine describes. It is the same ‘theory of mind’ but in the positing of an intelligence and an intention behind action and words, rather than within a human body. It is still, in her words, about ‘getting inside your head’. It doesn’t present or describe bodies betraying the minds that they contain. But it plays games with conflicting impressions of minds at work. It works on ‘hungry mind reading’: as I participate, I don’t only imagine the mind of a character, but also the intelligence behind that character. The bluff of indicating one intention, then introducing another more interesting one, amuses me, but it also affects me. Irritation turns to delight, and my disposition towards the performance changes. The performance asks me to get inside the heads of other people, and it gets inside my head too. What I feel is stimulated by my unconscious projection of what the other participants feel, and it provokes my own affective states. I go through a series of relationships to how I ­i magine their thinking, ultimately coming into a complex orientation towards what I think is intended for me and other participants by the performance makers. Our orientation to the work leads to how we participate in it: how we turn to face it is part of and initiates the repertoire of action we have when invited to participate. And our orientation is dictated by how we imagine the other minds present to us. How we are disposed to adapt to/respond to/ imagine other minds is personal, and the person is shaped by circumstance. The procedure leads to interactions that address, or appeal to, subjectivity as it emerges from learnt response, personal history, contextual cues and triggers, habit and tactics. I am disposed to respond, to take up a relation in certain ways. In part I am consciously orienting myself towards an evolving set of ‘other minds’ as I perceive them in this network of activity. And in part I orient myself unconsciously: my dispositions don’t manifest in my own mind as conscious thoughts. To put this strongly, they are pre-­subjective or intersubjective. Is there a pre-individual affective grounding of conscious action? Or, even, does my body act without my conscious volition? This is a matter of controversy, a theory of bodies that relate directly to each other,

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mind that emerges in and because of the interrelation of bodies, action that leads to subjective volition rather than vice versa, as Brian Massumi puts it: Before the subject, there’s an in-mixing, a field of budding relation too crowded and heterogeneous to call intersubjective. It’s not at a level where things have settled into subject and object […] When I say it all comes back to the body, I don’t mean the body as a thing apart from the self or subject. I mean the body is that region of in-mixing from which subjectivity emerges. (Massumi 2015, p. 52) This is a more radical way of thinking about being together. Instead of minds perceiving other minds, we pay attention to how bodies experience other bodies. It helps us to explore how complex affective processes arise out of relatively simple participatory strategies that depend on and exploit our embodied minds and potentially pre-individual agencies: bodies that encounter other bodies, rather than minds aware of other minds.

The Privileged For further exemplification, we can turn to a participatory performance with a clever procedure for implicating its audience in a problematic community. Jamal Harewood’s The Privileged was staged at Camden People’s Theatre in London in April 2016. It is an apparently simple piece, in which Harewood performs as an institutionalised polar bear called Cuddles, in the care of the audience who are put in role as zookeepers. But Harewood’s invitation leads to something much bleaker and more problematic. The audience gather in a circle of chairs, in the middle of which is curled Harewood, in his polar bear suit. There are pieces of cooked chicken strewn around the floor, and a series of numbered envelopes on some of the chairs. We sit under working lights. There is no other set or set dressing, and no action or instruction until someone thinks to open the envelope with a ‘1’ on it, and reads from a sheet, introducing us to Cuddles and to our responsibility for caring for him. Following a series of instructions, we are asked to wake Cuddles up, to play with him, to discipline him, and eventually to feed him. His food is a large bucket of fried chicken, which one participant is dispatched to fetch, and we read that he will consume all of it if we do not stop him – his natural survival instincts not having adapted to the plentiful supply of food in his captive situation. The catch, however, is that the instructions in envelopes 6 and 7 require us to remove Harewood’s bear suit piece by piece, and now he stands among us naked. He remains bear-like, doesn’t speak, and is fiercely protective of his food. The spectacle that is the climax of the performance is of a group of (mostly) white people fighting with a naked black man for a bucket of fried chicken. Fried chicken is referred to in the instructions as ‘his species’ favourite food. This food’s ‘cultural baggage’ is greater in the United States than the United Kingdom. For example, Claire Schmidt notes its appearance as a motif of race

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in films from Birth of a Nation (1915), to Bob Roberts (1992) to Precious (2009) (Schmidt 2012). But any resident or visitor to London will see that the chicken shop has successfully hopped the Atlantic, and it seems that the stereotype may have too, given Harewood’s appropriation of it here. There may be distinct currents that bring variants from West Africa and the Caribbean with London’s different diasporic communities, but the bucket that Cuddles is fed is KFC, not jerk or suya. Harewood has manipulated and reanimated racist tropes and ­images – of dependency, irresponsibility, greed and fried chicken – and has also manipulated us as audience participants to both help him stage these images, and to become physically and emotionally involved in them. To use some of my own terms for his invitation: his procedural authorship has created a horizon of participation that is restrictive (White 2013). The performance progresses according to written instructions, and while the group of participants negotiate how to respond to them, together and individually, the instructions are explicit: ‘Stand up tall, make eye contact, point towards the snack and say “eat”. Repeat the command until it does as you say’, reads the sheet inside one of the envelopes. People try to find ways of continuing with the performance that are gentler, more ethical: they reason with Cuddles/Harewood, they tempt him/it, they apply firm child-management techniques. But eventually, faced with his determination to continue eating to the point of sickness – the certain, human sickness that will follow for Harewood, not for Cuddles, if he’s allowed to eat the whole bucket – the interventions become physical, and in response to his violent resistance, violent. I become aware, again, of a set of minds at work in the performance: a fictional animal that remains present even when the costume is removed; Harewood himself, crafty, bold, wilful, self-destructive; and the other participants who read and interpret, and play and puzzle, and ultimately fight with the in-role artist. For me there was some quite conscious consideration of what the performance procedure was provoking as it was under way, a dawning awareness and admiration for how the piece was playing me. And I was aware of other people’s emotions: I could perceive amusement, worry, puzzlement among the participants, and to some extent feel what Harewood was going through, intermixed with his performance of a threatened and aggressive animal. This is worth thinking about with the stronger sense of the affective that Brian Massumi proposes, that which comes before emotion, which has not yet been recognised and pinned down as an emotion, that which moves the body, and bodies together, before it comes to mind: affect as the gravitational field we move in. My friend Tom, for example, was one of those wrestling for chicken at the climax of the performance, and spoke of feeling the violence of the moment moving him to resolve the situation: not of anger or concern, but of a force acting on his body, a need to act. Harewood has not only staged the images that we make as a group, but staged the affects that charge and energise them. His game, his set of performative invitations, has made us act and feel together. Not to feel and act as one, but as expressions of the same field of affect: differently charged and differently energising. This is a performance procedure that reproduces and re-enacts racism, an image of people acting together that reconstitutes a black body as overcome

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by appetite and in need of discipline. Does it follow that the affects that drive it are explicitly racist affects? I suspect not, though it is possible that such things lurk. In my own memory of the piece, the charge of the moment, the urge to do and not do remains and inflects my sense of complicity. For me, this memory of an affective charge doesn’t coalesce entirely into remembered emotions. I recall some disgust (but also a desire to take some chicken for myself, early on), some fear for people’s bodies and property, some amusement. But the dominant memory of the climactic moments of the piece is of a generalised tension, a sense of my own presence in an emerging event, simultaneously aware of it having been deliberately and manipulatively constructed around me and that I was still of it and it was of me. It’s sticky, like the chicken grease that was on the floor of the studio when we arrived, and on the hands of some participants when we left. Harewood puts us in role; he uses a variation of what we might recognise as a ‘mantle of the expert’, as in Dorothy Heathcote’s drama in education (Heathcote 1995). Heathcote’s technique is to ‘endow’ children with a role that gives them a position of authority in an improvised drama, encouraging them to engage imaginatively, take the lead, and make strong choices. But this is a problematic role: we have been cast as ‘the privileged’, and we have also been cast, perhaps, as racists. Our expertise is superficially as animal keepers, but this mutates into expertise in pacifying and dominating unruly black bodies. This is ‘antagonistic’ participatory art, in Claire Bishop’s terms (Bishop 2004). It exposes flaws in social relations rather than seeking to heal them. When Harewood says that he seeks to create ‘temporary communities through participatory events’ (Harewood, n.d.), it doesn’t seem that he’s looking for happy, wholesome communities. By casting me as a racist, is Harewood calling me a racist? I choose not to think so. I choose to enjoy being part of his game and part of his antagonistic community. I choose to be reminded that white privilege is a presence in my life, and its affects might express themselves through my body, in my community, or in communities that I am transiently part of. For Massumi, affect is ‘an event, or a dimension of every event’ (Massumi 2015, p. 47) and there is political potential in ‘tweaking the interference and resonating patterns’ (p. 18) that make up affective life. These performances, including Harewood’s, can hardly be said to do more than ‘tweak’: they twist perception, tug at a thread of understanding, jerk and unsettle. This is a productive coming together because of this tweaking: it asks questions about the micropolitical, that which passes between us each time we move together and around each other. For Massumi, micropolitics is ‘what makes the unimaginable practicable’ (p. 82), but I would say that the imagined-­unimaginable in this case is racism happening through me, through my body. Of course, this is not unimaginable, but only generally unimagined: I mostly forget that I have this capacity, and this complicity. My proposition, then, is that the initiation of a problematic affective community is a characteristic of ambitious participatory practice. This piece promises nothing in itself; it hasn’t been an exercise in participatory democracy. The shared experience is not a wholesome

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one. Its promise lies only in its potency as a way of posing a problem: it can stage antagonistic affective politics. Nightwatchers, too, asks subtle, gentle questions about living together in a contemporary city, but by staging these questions through the bodies of the participants it, too, addresses them somewhere other than the rational. It works in a different register.

Shaping being-together and being-apart If Zunshine’s work is part of a ‘cognitive turn’ in humanities thinking, Massumi straddles this and an ‘affective turn’. I can find three objections to the cognitive turn: that its insights are trivial and can be divined by other means, that it puts humanities research in a subordinate position to the scientific, and that the mobilisation of science and ‘falsifiability’ does unwelcome ideological work. Ruth Leys’ objection to Massumi’s turn to affect echoes the latter, in that it leads to a position of ‘minimal rationality’ making ‘disagreement about meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis’ (Leys 2011, p. 472). This is particularly relevant to participatory performance because of the question of agency. Participation offers choices – welcome or otherwise – and seems, on common-sense consideration, to ask us to decide rationally whether and how to participate. Even if we allow for the engagement or interference of emotion and affect in these decisions, knowing that we sometimes don’t think our way into our choices, they are still our choices. They belong to the subject self, grounded as it is in a body that feels, and sometimes acts, before it rationally thinks. However, the position of some cognitive science and philosophy on this is stronger than the phrase ‘minimal rationality’ suggests. For Thomas Metzinger, the sensation of a subject self emerges as an ‘ego tunnel’ whose substance – its walls, floor, ceiling – consists of unconscious processes; the conscious decision-making mind is a fiction, a dressing up of empty space between the real machinery, an emperor who is not only naked, but barely there at all (Metzinger 2010). I (in these terms both the experienced I-ness that happens in my mind and the wiser and quicker mind beneath it) – ‘I’ am not competent to take a position on this fundamentally hot topic, not now and perhaps ‘I’ never will be. Will cognitive science solve the problem, empirically? Probably not any time soon, and perhaps also never. But neither do we have a satisfactory answer to the social constructivist determinisms offered by social theory and philosophy that are more familiar to performance studies – step forward Judith Butler, Althusser, Bourdieu, and others. Writers like Massumi engage with what the body does and is with a political agenda. Bodies, for him, aren’t apolitical iterations of a human archetype or genotype, but instantiations of the fields of energy (literal energy, with its specific history) that produce them, affective instantiations of human subjectivity. Massumi’s thinking consciously and precociously appropriates cognitive science, and his ‘minimal rationality’ is inspired as much by Deleuze and Guattari as by cognitivists like Metzinger.

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In this case, the suggestion of how the human mind deals with being apart, with other people being present to us but never fully knowable, leads to some insight into the dynamics at play in the experience of participation. And the idea that being together is always a being together as bodies, before minds, introduces another set of dynamics. I have, elsewhere, characterised the work of the practitioner of participation as ‘shaping’ these aspects of experience, as if they are artistic material in the hands of a sculptor manipulating the conscious perception of mind, moulding the unconscious affects of bodies (White 2015, p. 46). Other versions of this metaphor, the theatre maker as composer or conductor of experience for example, might offer more purchase on the dynamic aspects of participation as an event, on the rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint of the affective and the cognitive. If performance stages spectators, it doesn’t merely exhibit them as representations of themselves and others like them. By staging spectators, people, and bodies, it stages and restages an affective politics, where bodies are channels for political energies rather than instantiations of identities.

Notes 1 At London’s Oval House on 27 October 2016. Accidental Collective are Daisy Orton and Pablo Pakula. See: http://www.accidentalcollective.co.uk/about-us/. 2 Iterations of the piece have been staged as Remote Berlin, Remote Santiago, and Remote Milton Keynes, in cities around the world. See http://www.rimini-pro tokoll.de/website/en/project/remote-x. 3 Nightwatchers was produced by Historic Royal Palaces, and written and directed by Anagram. See http://weareanagram.co.uk/project/nightwatchers/.

References Anagram, (unpublished, 2016), Nightwatchers. Bishop, C 2004, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, in October no. 110, pp. 51–79. Harewood, J n.d., Jamal Harewood. Available from: https://harewooo.com. [2 May 2017]. Heathcote, D 1995, Drama for Learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of the Expert Approach to Education, Heinemann, London. Leys, R 2011, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, in Critical Inquiry vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 434–472. Massumi, B 2015, Politics of Affect, Polity, Cambridge. Metzinger, T 2010, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Basic Books, Philadelphia, PA. Schmidt, C 2012, ‘She Said She’d Never Even Had Fried Chicken! Fried Chicken, Humor and Race in Bob Roberts’, in Digest, a Journal of Foodways and Culture. Available from: http://digest.champlain.edu/vol1/article1_4.html. [27 April 2017]. White, G 2013, Audience Participation in Theatre: Aesthetics of the Invitation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. White, G 2015, Applied Theatre: Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Methuen, London. Zunshine, L 2012, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Chapter 14

Capturing complexity while being pressed for time A conversation between scenographer Mona el Gammal and Theresa Schütz

Theresa Schütz:  

From what I know of your work, the two narrative spaces that have so far been opened to spectators (House Number Zero and Rhizomat) could be described as the tip of the iceberg – because they really offer only a small and fleeting look into your work, which is in fact a huge and lengthy research project using artistic means. Could you please give a short introduction into the main topics of your r­ esearch-based trilogy? Mona el Gammal:   Since 2007/2008, we’ve been building these narrative spaces. I’m not quite sure yet if it will be a trilogy in the end, or if there will be a fourth part. Haus Nummer Null/House Number Zero, the first part, was pretty much about where we’re headed if we don’t change something in our society. There’s this private company, IFM (Institut für Methode/Institute for Policy), that’s replacing the state. It’s a system of surveillance with no personal privacy in a future world of global ­destruction – a massively polluted world with no animals, where humans are completely controlled through systems that measure bodily functions. As a spectator, you enter the house of the main character, Miss N, who is opposed to this system. She is a very intelligent, well-­ educated and enthusiastic woman who helped establishing the IFM in the beginning because she trusted its promises of equality for everybody. Having realised that the system is becoming more and more dictatorial, she decides to get involved with the resistance movement Rhizomat. But the IFM arrests and imprisons her in this house. People visiting House Number Zero experience how this dystopian system functions, and they get a glimpse of her secret activities and research for Rhizomat. For the first part, I worked together with the author Juri Padel, and for the second part, Rhizomat, I worked with Evol M. Puts. Between these parts, there was again a large period of research on the question of how this world could look – this alternative system really based on equality without exploitation of humans, animals or nature. The rooms developed from our main research areas of water, plants, agriculture,

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sustainable energy, production and transport systems in this alternative social and economic system. In a way, it’s an anarchistic system because there is no state and no borders. But it’s not anarchistic in a chaotic sense; it’s just a system that really allows rules to be developed together instead of having someone completely disconnected setting the rules for everybody else. Second, we focused on the question of forms of ­resistance today, for example the power of hacking, of destroying infrastructures, which becomes relevant for Rhizomat’s strategies and techniques of resistance. What is the starting point of resistance? Our point isn’t that this is the one and only solution; it’s actually about expressing how urgent it is that solutions be developed in order to initiate discussions about alternatives. Because we want to use fiction as a means to fight the principle of TINA (There Is No Alternative), which is one of the reasons for current disastrous global developments. The narrative space as an artistic form is a kind of container, or shell, for a content that has to precede it. The shell itself is not interesting. TS:   And do you think that immersive theatre and/or narrative spaces are the most suitable shells for dystopias and utopias today? MeG:   I find it interesting that I had to learn during the process that, in comparison to utopias, dystopias are so easy to build! In a way, it really annoys me that there are so many dystopias in art at the moment. I find it a bit smug to stay there representing bad worlds, because it helps to affirm the status quo when audiences enter into these shitty worlds and realise that they are just as shitty as the world outside. It lets you rest on

Figure 14.1  R hizomat by Mona el Gammal, Waiting Room. Source: © Torben Otten

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your laurels, which is dangerous. The more important part is to think about what would be better. For me, art in a broad sense means creating something in order to change reality, to change society in a good way. I like Beuys and his concept of social sculpture and the whole philosophy behind it. That’s why the third part, if it’s ever realised, will be something different, like a real shared space. It’s not about forming a commune to live an alternative lifestyle. We want to apply our research. It should be something like a laboratory of the future, open to everyone and dedicated to finding out how we want to live. It should be a human right to learn that there are always alternatives and to learn how to communicate them and how to realise them. TS:   Let’s dwell for a moment on the question of Rhizomat’s aesthetics, of narrative space as the shell you chose for your research on resistance and real utopia. First, I’m interested in the indexicality of the laboratory in Rhizomat, which was located in the building’s basement, a former telecommunications office in Berlin-Friedrichshain, due to time constraints and material. As I entered the space, it was more like entering a past than a future to come. There were these old used instruments, antiquated machines, and outdated CRT monitors, which produced an odd retro atmosphere, perhaps even a melancholic one. Is the idea behind this choice of materials and tools a bit like ‘we need to go backward before we can move forward’? Second, I’m wondering about the timing and dramaturgy of the spectator’s visit in Rhizomat, because I myself felt really manipulated by the guiding lights and noises. If, for instance, the lamp in the next room started to flicker, I felt this urgency to move on, although I hadn’t finished my (re)search for clues or traces in the variety of papers, plants and plans. It was really a pity to not have enough time to immerse myself into your complex world of materials and ideas. The commitment was there, but the time to dive into it wasn’t. Is this potential frustration, arising from a lack of time to experience everything, a trade-off for keeping the audience’s attention and interest in this real utopia you’re building? MeG:   I’ll start with the retro futurism. There are two or three different aspects. First of all, I am really not the kind of person to say that the old days were better, because a lot was worse. We as women, for example, would not be sitting here like this if we were still living in the old days. But I do think we’ve lost something too. And I think it’s our connectedness. And so, yes, in the narrative space there’s this connotation of another time. It looks like the past, but it doesn’t have to be the past. I mean, we chose this mixture: we had a 3D printer inside (that itself even looks retro) as well as all these analogue systems and machines. And of course, we only had a small budget (half of what we would have needed). But you have to work with what you can get. We’ve been lucky to get a lot of the things as gifts. A lot also comes from the trash.

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And I do in fact like the aesthetic of old things (the colour patterns and materials), which came through in all these objects that weren’t in use anymore. The second thing is that Rhizomat is the most personal project I’ve ever made. That’s why it was really hard to open it up to an audience. Because it was like they’d walk inside of me. These laboratory rooms that are so crammed and this atmosphere between chaos and ­complexity – that’s how I very often feel. We also wanted to share this experience of an intense urge to find a solution, but at the same time, the feeling of being stuck in an incomprehensible complexity. You really need to take time to enter into this. It is true, you could spend a week inside, maybe even longer. All those papers don’t just look nice – they are full of information. Now, people were alone inside for 50–60 minutes. And during that time, there were three people sitting behind the set to make it possible. The amount of effort is already absurd. Still, I always fight for it. We’ve also tried to have two or more people entering at the same time, but it’s actually really strange how people’s behaviour changes when they come in pairs. They become much more occupied with each other. And sometimes they even get foolish, putting things in their pockets and so on. But I wanted to get them to enter this inner world with concentration and focus. It’s a metaphor of sorts: I’m also alone in this inner world. TS:   What do you know about the reactions of spectators who visited Rhizomat? MeG:   Afterwards, a lot of visitors described their main fear of someone jumping out. Apparently, Rhizomat was a bit too scary. It was interesting to hear because it was absolutely not intended. Obviously, that was one quality of being immersed that I really did not intend or expect. On the other hand, the discomfort of being in this basement fits quite well because thinking about alternatives is not comfortable – although it is worth it. You could interpret it as leaving your comfort zone in order to be able to see further. And the situation of being part of a resistance (like the members of the Rhizomat) is also not comfortable at all. It’s much more comfortable to be part of the IFM world. In this context, it’s remarkable how many audience members described how they’d felt better in the IFM world. And I wanted them to reflect on that. Because what’s going on in the basement is much more human. TS:   I think that became clear through the set design. I felt that, in contrast to the world upstairs, the basement was really inhabited by humans. There were a lot of traces to find, like half-empty cups of coffee, a nibbled apple, the clothes, the handwritten notes. Besides these traces, the lower space of Rhizomat was also very loaded with allusions to the cultural imaginary of science fiction films, novels and literature. I found a lot of references among the papers, like quotations from Pynchon,

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Artaud, and Handke. That significantly enhanced the complexity of the narrative space we’ve already addressed. But again, the question lingering for me is whether the experience of being overwhelmed through this ballast of things, materials and references, which is also clearly framed (both institutionally and aesthetically) as art, could really trigger the desire to change something. What if the feeling of being overwhelmed remains unproductive, trapped in affirming this sense that ‘it’s useless anyways, I’d better stay in my comfort zone, which I can easily ignore’? So you were probably asking for a commitment that goes beyond the spectator’s commitment to the performance itself. And this was obviously hard to generate in a majority. MeG:   At this point, we have to speak about the forum. At the end of the visit, we handed out a code to every audience member. In case the experience was too much for them, we offered an online forum with about 50 pages of information as an opportunity to keep working through the content and to join in on developing it even further. It was created as a forum that should grow in a parallel and independent way. The code was the entry key to the homepage. But for several reasons this didn’t work. Only a few people participated in this online part of Rhizomat. One reason was probably the aesthetic structure of the website. At first glance, the design was perhaps too chaotic and therefore daunting. Second, the texts were potentially too intellectual for immediate and intuitive reactions. Third, and presumably the most important factor, was again the need for time. You have to take time to think the ideas and concepts through.

Figure 14.2  R hizomat by Mona el Gammal, Laboratory. Source: © Torben Otten

Capturing complexity  175 TS:  

Personally, I can’t stand reading white text on a black background for more than five minutes. Everything becomes blurred. And so for me, the medium’s materiality was the problem. I would really like to have a book instead. Like in Christophe Meierhans’ lecture performance Some use for your broken clay pots, in which he presented a new constitution for a different democratic state, in collaboration with specialists from Belgian universities. And it was circulated as a printed document after the show. MeG:   That’s quite interesting since we thought that clicking through the website would be a smaller barrier than reading a book. But because the incredibly limited participation deeply frustrated me, we’re currently also working on a book. It’s still a pity that the forum format didn’t work out, because we had also planned to meet the participants afterwards and to form small working groups or whatever would be the outcome of this. And due to organisational issues, we didn’t have an opportunity for an audience talkback afterwards. TS:   I’d like to come back for a moment to this position of observing you’ve mentioned already. In one way, I found it calming to know that someone had to observe me via monitor during my visit in order to give the right cues. On the other hand, I felt myself acting as if under supervision, in the sense of surveillance. What observations did you make about the audience’s behaviour? MeG:   I only took part during the first and last blocks of performances. And I was happy to observe my favourite visitor: it was a teenager, perhaps 18 years old. And I had the impression that he really got it. I had the desire to come down and give him a hug or something. It was amazing. The way he entered the rooms and focused his attention towards the material (which I know quite well) – the sequence he chose told me that he understood it. For instance, he read a paper in laboratory 2 and went back into laboratory 1 afterwards in order to check another note that was connected with what he read in laboratory 2. And then I thought everything was worth it. TS:   You also produced a short VR version of Rhizomat for Berliner Festspiele’s programme Immersion. For me, this shift of media came along with a shift in meaning in terms of spectatorship. That spectators are alone is the most important quality of audience involvement in this work. Being alone in the narrative space is, in a way, necessary in order to become a member of Rhizomat, whereas being alone in the VR version belongs, on the level of narration, to the sphere of the IFM. Isn’t that a contradiction? MeG:   When I was asked to do a VR film, I was not sure if we should do it. But a few different reasons changed my mind. First is that we wanted to give more people access to the content. The film also gives you access to the forum if you’re interested. Second, I wanted to introduce

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some content into a medium that I dislike in order to criticise it from the inside. Usually in VR the recipients forget that they are wearing the glasses. I wanted the very reverse: the recipient should become conscious of wearing the glasses. That’s why, within the fiction, you’re told that these glasses have been implanted by the IFM. Rhizomat’s goal is to get the glasses off. At the end, members of Rhizomat address you in order to motivate you to see with your own eyes and get rid of this reproduction. The glasses themselves become the protagonists in a way. There is a permanent data display that moves with the recipient’s view. This gives the user the sense that this system had really been fixed to their head. I have to admit that I hate the term virtual reality. Why don’t we call it virtuality? I didn’t want to pretend that reality was produced, because, thankfully, it wasn’t. That’s also why the two members of Rhizomat only appear as holograms in the film. In comparison to the narrative space, VR transmits a kind of ‘dead aesthetic’. That’s also why we connected it to the dystopian world of the IFM. TS:   Currently, there are a lot of art projects dealing with the topic of alternative futures but using different forms and aesthetic means, like Blast Theory’s 2097: We made ourselves over, The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma’s Germany Year 2071 or Jonas Staal’s project New Unions. Do you think that immersive forms like narrative spaces or performance installations like SIGNA’s are perhaps particularly suited as ‘shells’ – to use your word again – for contents like alternative realities or futures? MeG:   I can’t answer this question. I have to admit that I’m not very involved in the art or theatre world, so I don’t know most of these works. I’m mainly occupied with reality and theory. I read a lot of sociological books and we have been researching this for more than ten years, it really takes time. The last two years we’ve been starting to build more alternatives in a positive, utopian way. Because building dystopian worlds bored me, it’s too easy. But I think there is a changing consciousness in society today, coming with movements like Occupy, that we really have to do something. And there were other smaller political movements that disappeared quickly but left structures that others adapt for their claims. The most important thing is to find others who also want to change something and to unite with them. It won’t work alone, anyway. If you find those others in the art or theatre world, so much the better. This conversation took place on 3 July 2017 in Berlin.

Chapter 15

Immersive guilt factories Theresa Schütz

Re-enacting guilt My starting point for the following is the tendency observable in many contemporary (western) theatre and performance installations to take up the issue of (mostly postcolonial) guilt through relational aesthetics and specific performer-spectator constellations. Works like Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A/B (2011/12), Lagos Business Angels (2012) by Rimini Protokoll, Microcosm (2016) by Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks, or Interrobang’s Process 2.0. A labyrinth of guilt (2017) all share a significant commonality: they do not only represent stories of guiltiness on the grounds of postcolonial or neo-liberal realities, but they also develop scenographic and interactive arrangements that foster specific situational means of affecting the audience. Various strategies for involving the audience within the unfolding performance often lead to a situational (re)production of emotions like shame, guilt, or a sense of responsibility. Theatre scholar Adam Alston recently voiced suspicion towards the current trend of immersive theatre by suggesting that such shows (like those of Punchdrunk) might function like ‘experience machines’ (Alston 2016, p. 2), dependent on the commitment of a primarily western, primarily young, adaptable, and well-educated audience. Alston argues that the supposedly ‘unique’ experiences promised by immersive theatre formats are produced just as neoliberal subjectivities are. By focussing on the quality of participation, he demonstrates that participation in immersive theatre is often more a biopolitical practice of usable skills for flexible, narcissist, and entrepreneurial selves than a strengthening of someone’s agency (Alston 2013, p. 137). Participants rehearse skills like risk-taking, in the sense of embracing unfamiliar and potentially uncomfortable situations, and self-interest, in the sense of fighting to secure the best individual experience possible (for instance, by catching a one-on-one) – crucial skills in the neoliberal narrative of personal success. Following Alston, I would like to offer an aesthetic analysis of effect (Wirkungsästhetik) in two poignant case studies by focusing on the relational and inter-affective involvements they produce, and by considering these involvements within the social context of neoliberalism.

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This approach necessitates a distinction between immersive theatre on the one hand, and immersion as a broader cultural practice on the other. For me, immersive theatre is a genre-like umbrella term for all contemporary performance installations (like Punchdrunk, SIGNA, and Les Enfants Terribles) that (1) create fictional worlds actualised in large-scale site-­sympathetic environments, that (2) involve activated ‘spect-­actors’ in a certain role or function, and that (3) transgress the traditional ­boundaries of illusionistic performance through ‘real’ interactions and intimate encounters.1 In contrast to immersive theatre, I consider immersion as a broad contemporary phenomenon and cultural power technique. In this second sense, immersion refers to a dynamics of affect that fully absorbs and amalgamates different individuals among each other in a group and into an environment. This dynamics appears in a range of contexts and forms, from modes of reception in virtual reality technologies to the governance of subjectivities in Human Resource Management (see Mühlhoff & Schütz 2017). While a comprehensive theory of form has yet to be developed in the research on immersive theatre, there is a marked tendency towards conceptualisations of ‘immersive experience’ in participatory performance formats (see Machon 2013; Biggin 2017). In contrast to these approaches, I’m suggesting here a third way: by analysing the relationality and affective dynamics of these formats, I am less concerned with defining a genre or identifying a particular quality of spectator experience as ‘immersive’; rather, my aim is to open up a perspective on the experience of immersion as a powerful cultural force made palpable within the space of aesthetic performance. Taking Dries Verhoeven’s Guilty Landscapes, episode II and Julian Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory as examples, I will analyse the two installations as affective experiments. Although they are not exemplary productions of contemporary immersive theatre, they do open up performance spaces that centre on an encounter between audience members and performers: an encounter that fosters though does not determine specific social emotions like guilt, shame, bad conscience, or a sense of responsibility. These emotions unfold in such a way that one is invited to experience bodily in situ the degree to which emotions are culturally and historically constructed, socially ‘fabricated’, and the ways in which we are immersed in specific emotional regimes or feeling rules (see SFB working paper 1/16, p. 10) that shape our behaviour, re-actions, and moral values. The German term ‘Schuld’, which can be translated as both guilt and debt, implies four different meanings: economical, juridical, theological, and moral. Everyday linguistic usage often mixes up all four dimensions. Someone is guilty if they consciously transgress against a norm and if they damage another person through this offence. Therefore, guilt signals a disturbance in the relation to others and urges one towards atonement and compensation. As a moral feeling, guilt (like shame) is deeply rooted in our

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culturally constructed relation to historically contingent norms (Demmerling & Landweer 2007, p. 237). It’s important to differentiate between guilt as a relatively abstract moral term and the feeling of guilt as a social emotion. Following Sara Ahmed, I do not use the term ‘emotion’ to refer to the distinct, inner feelings of a subject, but rather to social, relational, and embodied practices. Emotions shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies, and they are produced as effects of circulation (Ahmed 2004, pp. 8–9). Therefore, guilt can be understood as one specific cultural effect of the circulation of affects, signs, and meanings between bodies. The primary questions for the analysis of Verhoeven’s and Hetzel’s works are therefore: (1) What aesthetic strategies are used to produce feelings of guilt? (2) What kinds of guilty feeling are ‘fabricated’? (3) What do the constellations of felt guilt tell us about the relationship between subject and society?

Guilty landscapes The second episode of Dries Verhoeven’s2 video installation series Guilty Land­ scapes was presented in Berlin during the final season of the Foreign Affairs festival (Haus der Berliner Festspiele 2016). It took place within the framework of the new format Nachtausstellung/Exhibition by Night, entitled Uncertain Places. Instead of an entrance fee, a personal registration at 9:30 pm was required. The list offered time slots for only 18 audience members per night. At 11:30 pm, an employee of the front house picks me up in the foyer and guides me to a stairway usually not accessible for the audience. Having reached the third floor, he asks me to take a seat in front of a closed door. I find myself waiting in the glaring, bleak staircase for about five minutes, becoming more and more tense. Another employee then opens the door to a vestibule where I am asked to leave my coat and personal belongings. Before he opens the door to the installation, he instructs me that I should independently leave the performance space after a period of ten minutes. I enter a room of approximately 60 square metres, one side of which is completely filled with a screen 2.5 metres tall. Projected on the screen is the image of a sparse landscape. Three barracks of wood and canvas built in an obviously provisional manner fill the right centre of the image. A puddle takes up the foreground. Pieces of plastic waste and other debris are littered about the area. The sun manages to break out of the small piece of sky visible. The represented space gives an apocalyptic impression. Do the hills at the horizon consist of waste? What has happened here? War or a natural disaster? These are my thoughts while a rough gust of wind plays out of the loudspeakers. I notice an illuminated display on my left side – the kind typical of exhibitions – with the title ‘Port-au-Prince’ and a list of materials used in the installation.

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Only now do I become aware of the man who is also a part of the projected landscape. In the composition of the whole image, he did not attract my attention at first. Apparently, he stood up while I was examining the display. He’s wearing dark blue trousers and a reversed cap. With his legs in the puddle, he stands there, focusing on me. How can it be possible that he seems to look directly into my eyes? He starts to approach me. I feel myself watched by him. He stands in the same posture that I do. I change it and he does the same. Is he mimicking me? I’m surprised and confused (Figure 15.1). Feeling that I’ve now ‘arrived’ in the installation, I sit down on the grey box positioned across from the screen. Again, he mirrors my movements and sits down on a slab swimming on the surface of the puddle. Can we talk to each other? For a brief moment, I consider saying something, but remain silent. At many points, I find myself avoiding direct eye contact. He then stands up and invites me to do the same. We’re now standing upright in front of each other. He bends down and switches an audio player on. Instead of the wind, the room is now filled with loud drumming and chants that sound African to me. Slowly, he starts to move; he raises his arms with both fists in front of his chest, synchronising the contractions of his arms with the swinging movement of his turning hips. Although I’m alone, I act coyly. And although I’m not really in the mood for dancing, I start to move my hips too. But why are we dancing anyway? In contrast to the landscape, of which he is a part, it feels absurd. He is there, I am here. I’m in my safe place of the exhibition space, he’s in the representation of a poor and destroyed landscape. I sense the

Figure 15.1  G uilty Landscapes, episode II by Dries Verhoeven. Source: © Christopher Hewitt

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impossibility of a real encounter. I interrupt the dancing and sit down again. He keeps on moving for a while. Then he stops too, coming closer to me. With a smile on his enlarged face on the screen, he suddenly leaves the projection to my right side. I linger in the space with a diffuse feeling of trepidation. The experience of this strange encounter leaves me with a sense of powerlessness. The format opens up a space for experiencing and reflecting on inequality, impotence, and constellations of guilt and responsibility.

Staging separation and uncertainty The performance, which basically consists of an encounter between me as a beholder and the young man in the represented Guilty Landscape mediated by a video projection, lends itself to analysis in the framework of Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics. As a curator and art critic, Bourriaud developed a theory of contemporary art forms that focus on human interactions, ‘where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which [take] being-together as a central theme, the “encounter” between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning’ (Bourriaud 2002, p. 15). Against the background of a social ontology and philosophical materialism, intersubjectivity forms the foundation for both production and reception, in the sense that ‘the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth’ (Bourriaud 2002, p. 22). Relationality – as an analytical tool – therefore focuses on specific affective dynamics and social bonds3 that are produced, reproduced, and codetermined by the artwork. The arrangement of Verhoeven’s Guilty Landscapes, episode II produces at least two significant qualities of audience involvement: separation and un­ certainty towards my own position as a spectator due to several inequalities within the form of the encounter. An organisational inequality starts with the registration process. The fact that only a small number of spectators are invited to participate not only demands a certain engagement on the part of the audience (the first-come, first-served principle), but also separates a small circle of ‘chosen ones’ from the outset. Verhoeven’s work is presented in the framework of an exhibition, and this frame is also reiterated twice in the set design of the space: the lighted display stand provides contextual information about the video installation, and the grey box in the centre of the room suggests the ideal perspective towards the screen. Conventions of reception could lead the visitor to start by contemplating the projection in the tradition of landscape painting or landscape photography – a tradition that already implies considerations of the relation between human and nature. At the same time, the isolation in the exhibition space directs attention towards the spectator’s own perception and emotional re-actions. The kind of disturbing clue in the four-part series Guilty Landscapes (episode I: Hangzhou, episode II: Port-au-Prince, episode

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III: Homs, and episode IV: Pattaya) is that each of the four individuals in each of the four video projections starts, at some point, to distinguish themselves from the landscape of which they are (initially) a part. They do so with their eyes fixed towards the imaginary eye of the camera they are approaching, which also means that they become larger in the projected video image. The visual mimicry of the landscape (which at first leads to their invisibility) is then transformed into a visible game of imitating the spectator’s posture and gestures. This could be considered an invitation for a re- or interaction because, through the movements, I as a spectator realise that the exhibition space has suddenly become a shared space in which there’s not only me see­ ing the person on the screen, but also the person seeing me. Both of us enter into a relational sphere of reciprocal exhibition. With regard to conventions of reception, the emerging potentiality of seeing and being seen creates – at least for me – a feeling of uncertainty: now the safe place of the exhibition is transformed into an uncertain place (as the title of the night exhibition series has already suggested) where anything could happen. There are now even two uncertain places in two different layers: the represented uncertain place Port-au-Prince, which in the case of episode II seems to be the place of the young black man, and the uncertain place of the relational situation of encountering. A performance space for a one-on-one, mediatised via screen, emerges for both of us. The third ‘actor’ besides us is the screen. The closer the man comes at the end of the performance, the bigger his face on the screen and the more noticeable the medium itself becomes. The fuzziness of the projected image (due to resolution) disturbs the ambivalent intimacy of the encounter. At the same time, it opens up associations with instant messaging services like Skype, which precisely allow us to bridge geographic distances and facilitate being-together through screen/ed relations. Aside from the fact that such Internet-based means of communication themselves address an important aspect of contemporary feelings of isolation, this installation’s reference to forms of everyday digital communication triggers the idea that Guilty Landscape, episode II could also be a live broadcast from Portau-Prince. Another inequality becomes palpable as a result: we’re able to share a restricted moment of con-temporality, but the localisation of our bodies remains distinct. Uncertainty and/of separation: are we together or are we apart? With regard to the man’s first actions of mirroring my posture, the installation establishes a principle of interaction fundamentally based upon mutual dependency, since the playful process of synchronising body movements needs the ‘other’ as a necessary counterpart. If one of us changes position, it automatically creates for the other a kind of pressure to act. For instance, his request for me to dance transforms into a demand issued by his body, which I follow more or less involuntarily – not because I’m in the mood for dancing, but because I don’t want to be impolite or appear shy or aloof.

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The evolving dance scene remains deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, the situation becomes more intimate through the prolonged eye contact, his shirtless body, the rhythm of the drums, and the dancing; it’s even possible that a small flirtation unfolds. On the other hand, the ‘foreignness’ becomes conspicuous. The song that he switches on is called ‘Bode Bode Alou Mandiaz’, an example of Haitian voodoo music.4 The cult of voodoo is deeply rooted in the cultural identity of Haitian society as part of the African diaspora, but my only references at the time stemmed from popular culture portrayals of a transgressive African ritual practice. In this shared act, there is an encounter of two separate bodies with separate cultural and corporeal knowledge and memories. The way he appears to be affected by the music differs from the way it affects me.

Framing guilt Considering the aesthetics of effect from a reception theoretical perspective, the staged encounter in Guilty Landscapes entangles the visitor in a complex relational and affective experiment with framing strategies and their effects. While for Erving Goffman, frames are an important tool for individuals to identify and make sense of specific social situations or interactions (­Goffman 1977, p. 18), Judith Butler’s concept of frames goes beyond this individualistic and subject-oriented perspective. She fundamentally criticises the normative idea of personhood as individualism and its role in delimiting (or framing) the scope and meaning of recognisability, and thus of human life itself (Butler 2009, pp. 5–6). For Butler, frames are an operation of power through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) […]. They do not unilaterally decide the conditions of appearance but their aim is nevertheless to delimit the sphere of appearance itself. (Butler 2009, p. 1) The social ontological premise is that ‘[t]he “being” of the body […] is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximise precariousness for some and minimise precariousness for others’ (ibid.). Therefore, epistemological framing (in Butler’s sense) also functions as a cultural mode of regulating affective and ethical dispositions. She also reminds us of a poignant link between framing and guilt: As we know, ‘to be framed’ is a complex phrase in English: a picture is framed, but so too is a criminal (by the police), or an innocent person (by someone nefarious, often the police), so that to be framed is to be set up, or to have evidence planted against one that ultimately ‘proves’

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one’s guilt. When a picture is framed, any number of ways of commenting on or extending the picture may be at stake. But the frame tends to function, even in a minimalist form, as an editorial embellishment of the image, if not a self-commentary on the history of the frame itself. This sense that the frame implicitly guides the interpretation has some resonance with the idea of the frame as a false accusation. If one is ‘ framed’, then a ‘ frame’ is constructed around one’s deed such that one’s guilty status becomes the viewer’s inevitable conclusion. (Butler 2009, p. 8, my emphasis) Following Butler, I argue that the form of the mediatised encounter in Guilty Landscapes as a reciprocal bodily exhibition fosters specific framing processes. Depending on my own affective disposition, and due to the modalities of separation and uncertainty produced through feelings of inequality, responsibility, and the re-enactment of guilty feelings, I position myself and my counterpart within culturally and epistemologically ­hegemonic frameworks. Bearing this in mind, I’d like to ask: how does Guilty Landscapes frame (in)dividual5 feelings of guilt? As I’ve described earlier, Verhoeven’s installation establishes two different uncertain places. Knowing the title of the episode, the projected images could be ‘read’ as an inaccessible area of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, which had been damaged by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016. Hundreds of people died and more than 10,000 houses were destroyed, which has resulted in a massive ongoing and urgent humanitarian crisis. The contextualising reference to Port-au-Prince provided by the exhibition’s frame (re-)evokes pictures from the broader cultural imaginary that has been shaped, at least in part, by the imagery selected and circulated by news media in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. Within this coverage, climate change, processes of global warming, and questions of responsibility become thematic. Is he really living in Port-au-Prince? With my presumptions as to the hardships faced by this man – that is, presumptions based on the material squalor of the destroyed place that he inhabits ‘in’ the picture – our relation is transformed into an exemplary constellation in which I represent the ‘global north’ while he becomes the representative of the ‘global south’. This establishes a dimension of relationality that goes far beyond the situational encounter between him and me in the framed here and now of the performance installation. We are both framed culturally as well: he as a ‘victim’, and I as a ‘perpetrator’. The young man is victimised, positioned within a scene of a natural disaster’s aftermath, standing in this ruined landscape caused by a hurricane, which could be understood as a direct consequence of global warming patterns for which our western industrialised countries are primarily responsible. I, as the counterpart of this encounter, develop feelings of shame and guilt because of my personal failure to render assistance, while at the same time I blame

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(and frame) myself for living my western life of wealth, which rests upon the exploitation of the global south. The relation becomes even more emotionally charged and loaded with historical impact if considered through the lens of postcolonialism. Although a comprehensive sketch of the long and rich history of Haiti exceeds the bounds of this chapter, I would like to draw attention to a particular historical moment and its consequences, which carry significance for the topic of Schuld as both guilt and debt. Aside from the association with natural catastrophes, Haiti is also known for the 1791 Haitian Revolution, in which slaves revolted against their French colonisers, leading to their formal independence in 1804. Since 1825, Haiti has had to pay millions of French francs as reparations to France due to their loss of plantations and slaves.6 Throughout the centuries, this has made economic stability practically impossible. Today, Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western ­hemisphere, burdened with new debts (Schulden) coming from US-­ American and European developmental aid. The encounter thus raises – besides the moral postcolonial guilt of the ‘first-world’ witness – the neo-colonial fabrication of financial guilt/debt for Haitians as a practice of dominating countries. These references I have to our shared reality intensify the inequality I feel, which is further heightened through the installation’s dramaturgy of affect – through spatial separation that leaves me feeling isolated, an unexpected interruption in the circulation of gazes (given his ‘looking back’ at me), uncertainty regarding how to communicate, and the timidity and shame that result from that uncertainty. All this shapes an encounter that, structurally and thematically, cannot take place eye to eye. His appearance is framed and mediated by the camera lens and projection, which determine what I’m allowed to see or, more specifically, what I should see. And the display with the title standing in the exhibition space operates as a caption; it frames my perception and my interpretation. In addition to the reference to instant messaging services, the live stream video is reminiscent of global news coverage with its penchant for circulating spectacular images of natural catastrophes and war for the consumption of viewers a world away. In her essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag discusses the relation between (war) photography and compassion, as well as the question of how pictures can mobilise their ‘spectators’ to do something, to transform a moment of being affected into action. Sontag maintains that photographs need contextualisation like a title or a comment in order to render the captured scene interpretable. Butler, however, counters […] that, in framing reality, the photograph has already determined what will count within the frame – and this act of delimitation is surely interpretive, as are, potentially, the various effects of angle, focus, light,

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etc. In my view, interpretation is not to be conceived restrictively in terms of a subjective act. Rather, interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of genre and form on the communicability of affect […]. (Butler 2009, p. 67) In Guilty Landscape, episode II, I find myself being set into a relationship with an unfamiliar counterpart. Although in his performance there are no indications of pain or suffering, I frame t(his) situation as an experience of poverty and existential precariousness, and I do so on the basis of a broader cultural imaginary concerning Haiti. Since new technologies allow us to regard the pain of others all over the world at any time, normative moral obligations to feel compassion and empathy (for the lives of those who are framed as ‘grievable’ in Butler’s sense) too often come to naught for viewers inured to the visual onslaught. During the performance, I did not feel compassion or empathy, but rather guilt. Moments of a consciously shared con-temporality and the experience of an interdependent bodily encounter led me to become aware of a fundamental ‘being-with’ in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense. The inequality staged by the performance and felt by me fostered normative moral feelings of guilt. I felt ashamed because of my failure to render assistance (for instance, with a donation) to those who suffer from war or natural disasters – a feeling I re-enacted phenomenologically in the act of lowering my gaze and avoiding his glance. I adopted the culturally constructed guilty conscience. By re-enacting guilt, I felt in and through my own body how interpretative frameworks are structured and how they shape my affective and ethical attitudes, values, and norms. Guilt factory I enter a pop-up store named ‘SELF’ on Volksgartenstraße in the Austrian city of Graz. Two young shop assistants are standing behind a black counter with a white sink, smiling at me. The interior is mostly sober with a minimalistic black-and-white design. Soap boxes, empty and numbered, are arranged at the back right side of the shop. Two large staged photographs hang on the wall, each with a black man lathered in white soap suds on a grey-blue ground (Figure 15.2). The two women are dressed in black and white too. One of them offers to clean and massage my hands. I agree to this and promptly find myself in a sales conversation. ‘This soap is a really special product. It’s a human soap – a soap made from humans for humans’ (‘von Menschen, für Menschen’). From humans? ‘You mean it is made of human fat?’ ‘Yes! If you’d like to hear more about it, you’re cordially invited to visit our soap factory in the back of the shop’. Said and done. I’m fascinated and find myself waiting for access, feeling convinced that I’m about to visit a fake institution.

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Figure 15.2  S chuldfabrik/Guilt Factory by Julian Hetzel, pop-up store. Source: © Ben and Martin Photography

With a group of five other audience members, I first enter a lavatory with six toilet cabins on the right side and a smiling young lady, busy with needlework, who’s obviously playing the lavatory assistant. After a short but kind Austrian greeting ‘Grüßgott’, she directly addresses me with the question ‘Do you like to spend your holidays in low-wage countries?’ My resolute denial is answered with the space allocation ‘cabin number six, please!’ From inside, the toilet is similar to a confessional box. It is completely dark and it smells like incense. A male voice, accompanied by an ambient soundscape that reminds me of a spa, talks to us via loudspeaker: It’s arranged. We would like to offer you the opportunity to recognise your own package of guilt and to make it useful as a resource. Discover your unused raw materials and make their hidden potential accessible! Be proud of being guilty! Change your guilt into capital. And please render the dirt on your hands to us! (…) Cabin six: [that’s me] Have you ever called someone out in public and felt good while doing it? I think about it. Memories flash through my mind. And, indeed, to my own dismay, I remember an exemplary episode from my childhood. I’m asking myself whether I would be ready to divulge the anecdote or not, but I don’t get the chance to find out. At that moment, we’re called to enter Dr Larsen’s office. She introduces herself as a plastic surgeon from The Hague. A dummy with a large belly (an ersatz patient) lies on a stretcher (Figure 15.3). The

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doctor confesses, ‘I am an art lover!’ and tells us about how Julian Hetzel, the director of the performance installation, first approached her with his idea in order to win her over to the project. ‘We’re both interested in beauty, which is today an important value in society!’ She explains further that liposuctioned fat is usually sent to a corporation that burns the fat in a cost-intensive way. After extensive negotiations with medical practitioners and lawyers, however, Hetzel was able to make arrangements for two men from South Holland to legally donate their fat to the project in order to upcycle it as an ingredient for soap. Dr Larsen simulates performing liposuction on the dummy’s body, asking us rhetorically and with a large smile: ‘Isn’t that great?’ I find myself deeply irritated that the fictional dimension has collapsed with the acknowledgement of the art project’s concept. The next room is the place of production and thus the heart of the factory. Dr Larsen leaves us alone for some minutes. We’re invited to watch everything carefully, but not to touch anything. The framed contracts with the two donors are also presented on the wall. The room is filled with the smell of soap. I start a small conversation with the other audience members on the validity of this project. We’re uncertain and dubious.

Figure 15.3  S chuldfabrik/Guilt Factory by Julian Hetzel, Dr Hennie Spronk. Source: © Wolf Silveri

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A young man wearing a tracksuit comes to bring us into the next room. He and his colleague – both remain silent throughout the scene – produce the electric current for the factory with two stationary rowing devices. As soon as one rowing machine is moved, a signal light flashes up and another machine starts to stamp white paper bags with the inscription ‘SELF’. In the next to last room, we’re invited to have a seat in a set similar to a professional photo studio with spotlights and a small stage. Here we witness a performance of moving soap suds accompanied by a soundtrack of Gregorian chants. Is it a lesson on how to produce profitable art out of a by-product? Or a comment on masking deceptive business practices through art? In the final room, we’re welcomed by a marketing assistant behind a window in a separate room. He’s wearing a white shirt and a suit; he seems to sweat. The arrangement of Macbook, iPhone, and a cup of coffee to go on the otherwise empty glass desk strengthens the cliché of an ambitious ‘entrepreneurial self’ in contemporary neoliberal and post-industrial start-up culture. His calendar is already flipped to 2017 (although we’re in September 2016). He starts to explain Hetzel’s concept again: ‘SELF is an idea. The idea of transformation’. The project upcycles the fat of our affluent society in order to produce a soap, the revenue of which will be utilised for water well construction in the African republic of Malawi. Above all, with each soap sold, an additional soap will be donated to the people of Malawi. SELF thus claims to produce cultural, economic, and social value. Fat is energy is guilt. On the basis of this equation, we can make our western guilt useful as a resource. Applying the metaphor to the reception of this performance, it means that we, as an affluent western public, are invited to do something good by attending an art event that is at the same time a developmental aid project. Guilt Factory therefore opens up the opportunity to wash ourselves clean of global guilt, both metaphorically and literally. Do I find this cynical? Back in the store, I buy a piece of soap. A special discount – it ‘only’ costs 15 euros. But why am I actually doing this? Perhaps because the performance suggested that I’m part of the system, that I’m complicit in this global cycle of guilt/debt production, and would therefore amass even more guilt if I were to resist buying it.

Fabricating indebted subjectivities Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory begins with audience members entering what seems to be a pop-up store, which suggests that the installation belongs to the genre of fake institutions. Again, by referencing a familiar genre, the installation raises certain expectations in the visitor/spectator in terms of reception conventions that here operate primarily through an asymmetry of knowledge concerning the differentiation between art and non-art. The salesroom establishes a black-and-white design motif, which is consistently expanded to the first performers the spectator encounters, a white woman and a black woman, as well as to the photographs of men washing

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their black skin with white foam (see Figure 15.2).7 The stage design flirts with exaggeration, but at the same time appears absolutely plausible within contemporary neoliberal pop-up culture. This mode of uncertainty towards what’s real and what’s staged continues with the invitation to a hand washing, which already evokes the metaphorical dimension of ‘washing someone’s hands clean (of guilt)’, but which is, at the same time, also a common sales practice for wellness products. SELF is presented (in black-and-white boxes) as a special soap in a limited edition and promoted with the German slogan ‘von Menschen für Menschen’ (by/from humans, for humans). This opens up a complex set of references to a specifically German collective guilt arising from the history of the Second World War and the Nazi regime: in the course of the Nuremberg Trials, it became public that the concentration camp Stutthof had produced soap from the human fat of dead bodies. Entering the rooms of the factory, the focus shifts from collective to individual guilt. Visitors are invited to unburden themselves of their personal sins. Guilt is actually fabricated in this situation through the recasting of toilet cabins as confessional boxes. Sitting in the dark box with a voice prompting recollections of guilty deeds and offering a path to absolution conjures up catholic practices like confession and the purchase of indulgences. The atmosphere fosters a moment of soul searching and calls for the acknowledgement of personal culpability. The spectators find themselves in the role of the accused. Dr Larsen and her simulation of a liposuction again shift the focus from an alleged individual back to a collective dimension of guilt. Now I as a visitor/spectator identify myself as a member of the affluent society of self-optimisation she’s talking about: a society that attaches high value to a historically contingent and unsteady concept of beauty, which currently prizes a slenderness achievable through procedures like liposuction, not only for reasons of health but also for self-optimisation. Beauty is no longer the purpose of art, but a matter of surgery and body modification technologies. Just as with Guilty Landscapes, Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory implicitly tackles the relation between nature and technology. Dr Larsen herself opens up a postcolonial global perspective by broaching the issue of Hetzel’s concept for the project. The immaterial guilt of rich industrial nations in the global north (a result of the exploitation of subaltern populations conspicuously absent in this installation) is transformed here into a concrete product, which in turn becomes new capital. Again, the visiting subject is framed – in the double sense of being blamed for a wrongdoing and being epistemologically identified as privileged white ­European – as complicit in the vicious economic circle of global Schuld (guilt/debt). The pop-up venture SELF becomes representative for western corporations and their marketing strategies, such as greenwashing in order to suggest sustainability and fair trade. This could be considered a contemporary secular transformation of the religious practice of indulgence barter: buying yourSELF

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a good feeling by supporting the ‘good’ corporations. It serves as a moral motivation for the purchase of SELF. If I decide to buy a piece of SELF for 15 euros at the end, I’ll automatically be supporting the construction of a water well in Malawi. Consumption takes the place of concrete action against these processes, merging with the neoliberal project of ‘self-improvement’. Besides the fabrication of the concrete product, Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory opens up an obstacle course through several practices and feelings of guilt, all of which are deeply rooted in Christian culture and which, at the same time, build the foundation of contemporary western ­neoliberalism. These constellations make the structural dimension of emotional regimes palpable while simultaneously fortifying the sense of being (in)dividually immersed into this complex social system. In her book Dividuations: The­ ories of Participation, Michaela Ott argues that the concept of the ‘individual’ – notionally deriving from the Latin word individuus (not divisible) – is anachronistic and obsolete for describing the sub-ject(um) in contemporary western societies of control (Ott 2018, p. 62). Taking up Gilles Deleuze’s usage of the term ‘the dividual’ in his essays on film theory as well as in his Postscript on the Societies of Control, Ott provides a historical review of how, since Demokrit, the individual has been defined ontologically through different processes of participation (Teilhabe). Ott belongs to the strand of affect theory that takes its starting point from Spinoza’s (via Deleuze’s) understanding of affect not as referring to an inner state of an individual but as a relation of affecting and being affected among humans as well as among human and non-human entities. The individual is ontologically immersed into several different processes of participation. Hence, dividuation is not a new concept that goes hand in hand with processes of digitalisation and quantified selves (although its relevance increases in such a context), but rather arises from the constitutive partaking of humans in cultural techniques, symbolic practices, and processes of sociality (Ott 2018, p. 321). Against this background, the experience of immersion that I have identified in Guilty Landscapes and Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory does not address the individual quality of reception or participation (as it does in most film or media studies approaches), where the subject is supposed to become immersed within a (usually) fictional world distinct from day-to-day reality. Rather, immersion here appears as an oscillation between re-enacting a culturally constructed and embodied emotion within a situation prompted by the artwork and reflecting upon one’s own dividual embedment in emotional and socio-economic power regimes that precede and exceed the constructed performance scenario.

Art as capital? Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory clicks along like clockwork: every eight minutes a group of six audience members, maximum, is invited to enter the factory. Each sequence is therefore strictly limited to a fixed time span. This controlled quality of participation severely limits the possibility to

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pose a question about the content while inside. The factory is a machine that does not require involved participants. Hetzel’s clockwork, with all the actors performing themselves in a loop, still continues if no group of guests is present. Whereas the makers of immersive theatre productions market their performances by emphasising the uniqueness and singularity of the experiences they offer, Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory team – although it is to some degree comparable to immersive forms of theatre – works on an assembly line in order to fabricate two products: the soap as a material gift8 and the performance as an immaterial gift. The English word ‘gift’ in German means poison. And the exchange of gifts is again connected to the economic sphere and the creditor-debtor relationship, in the sense that gift-giving might involve an expectation of reciprocity. This opens up the implied metalevel of thinking about the function of (funded) art: what’s the nature of artworks as ‘gifts’ to/of a society? After visiting the room in which human manpower is transformed into energy (a scene which could also be interpreted as a critical comment on ‘upcycling’ leisure activities like sports, not only within production processes but also in the production of self-optimised subjectivities under ­neoliberal governance), we find ourselves in the position of contemplative art consumers, watching the dance of moving soap suds.9 Dramaturgically, this fifth room, which involves no speaking actors, is created as a space for listening to sacred music while contemplating a(nother) work of art. The soap suds form evanescent figures in the air before dissolving into small puddles on the ground. In the logic of the factory, this artwork is itself a product of upcycling in the sense that it’s built out of the (art)factory’s by-product. Therefore, it seems to be emblematic for the ongoing process of material transformation (and its capitalisation), as well as for ephemerality on the metalevel of contemporary (and also capitalisable) art production. What lasting, socially relevant impact could be made through art? Instead of regarding the beauty of forms, celebrating l’art pour l’art, Hetzel’s ­Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory as a whole is exactly the opposite. The fact that he really found two body fat donors in South Holland, that he concluded legal agreements, and that he really produced this soap in the Netherlands transforms his performance installation into a social intervention. In the tradition of Joseph Beuys’ concept of art as a social sculpture, Hetzel takes Beuys’ famous equation art = capital literally. On the one hand, Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory is socially engaged art, which creates, in addition to the ephemeral performance event, a real product, the revenue of which will be utilised for water well construction in Malawi. As in his former project The Benefactor (2011),10 he transforms art funding into developmental aid. Hence, even more significant than the performance event are the artistic ideas and concepts that shape and transform society in a concrete (and perhaps sustainable) manner. On the other hand, Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory remains conceptual installation art with a strong emphasis on (only) increasing the level of SELF-reflexivity. By reflecting on

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his own position as a privileged white man raised in a catholic bourgeois family in southern Germany, now working as a well-educated artist for the European festival market, in a way Hetzel performs his own private indulgence trade by developing an artistically framed structure through which he’s able to ‘give something back’ in the sense of substitutional compensation. Concluding the installation with a devil’s bargain, audience members remain framed: not buying the soap means refusing to support the water well project, but buying the soap means acknowledging guilt. Both decisions centre my own position as consumer and producer, creditor and debtor in the Schuld-machine. The struggle with my blameworthy SELF concerning the politically and morally correct way to re-act is precisely the crux of this performance. In this sense, Schuldfabrik/Guilt Factory also criticises a mode of art reception which, in the end, only remains entrenched in a self-­ satisfying, affirmative gesture of giving myself a pat on the back instead of really changing something. In his essay The Making of the Indebted Man (Die Fabrik des verschulde­ ten Menschen), Maurizio Lazzarato examines to what extent ‘Schuld’ (debt/ guilt) should be regarded as neoliberalism’s main social foundation. Everyday consumption is transforming us into an integral part of the economy of debt (‘Schuldenökonomie’), while the power relation between creditor and debtor creates the strategic centre of neoliberal politics (Lazzarato 2012, p. 39). This is because financial debts, as well as moral guilt, always imply a specific form of subjectivity: one is responsible towards someone else. This vectorial force of social submission builds a dispositif that fabricates individual and collective subjectivities (Lazzarato 2012, p. 122). In neoliberal societies, the ‘homo debitus’ is supplementarily linked with the ethical and biopolitical responsibility of continuous self-improvement. In both installations, a situational experience of my genuine entanglement as ‘homo debitus’ in this global Schuld-economy proceeds through my affective and cognitive re-acting and direct acting out of emotional meanings. Due to the form’s relationality, my specific emotional re-enactment itself gains the character of performance and thus urges self-reflection. This oscillating emotional and rational moment of setting oneself in relation, as a ‘subject that is immersed in a cultural framework, in a complex set of social rules, values, rituals, languages etc.’ (Leitner 2011, p. 98) as well as in emotional regimes, is what I am identifying as the experience of immersion, triggered through contemporary relational art practice.

Notes 1 In this sense, I’m positioning myself in contrast to the current Anglo-­American research on immersive theatre that mostly assembles very different theatre and performance formats under the umbrella term immersive theatre (like

Immersive guilt factories  195 Punchdrunk, but also Lundahl & Seitl, You me bum bum train, and Coney) using tautological definitions while neglecting the option to qualify the works as a genre: I am now certain that “immersive theatre” is impossible to define as a genre, with fixed and determinate codes and conventions, because it is not one. However, immersivity in performance does expose qualities, features and forms that enable us to know what “it” is when we are experiencing it. I know when I have experienced a wholly immersive event I am totally submerged in it for the length of time that the work lasts, aware of nothing other than the event itself and only actions, feelings (both emotion and sensation) and thoughts related to that event are the consequence in that time. (Machon 2013, pp. xvi–xvii) 2 I’m focusing on Verhoeven’s Guilty Landscape, episode II because it is the only part of the currently four-part series that I could attend live. Short video clips of all parts are available from http://driesverhoeven.com/project/guilty-­land scapes/ [9 March 2018]. 3 I’m playing with the fruitful polysemy of the English term ‘bond’ which means ‘financial obligation’ as well as ‘relation’. For a broader discussion in cultural studies concerning the interwoven layers of religious, economic, and moral social bonds (as well as in the sense of guilt), see Macho (2014). 4 Musique du monde: Haiti. Les 101 nations du Vaudou. 2005 Buda, Track 2. 5 The notation ‘(in)dividual’ with brackets around ‘in’ refers to Michaela Ott’s concept of dividuation, which will be discussed in detail later in the chapter. See Ott (2018). 6 For a short survey of the historical implications of debt between France and Haiti, see Macdonald (2010). 7 These staged photographs refer to highly racist advertisements from the nineteenth century. With its properties to cleanse, the soap in the world of imperial colonialism gains the status of a fetish object. In the context of the aesthetics of the shop, the staged photographs of the black bodies within the white foam most viciously continue the tradition of racial differentiation. See ‘Das Spektakel der “Anderen”’, in: Hall (2004), especially p. 126. I thank Friederike Oberkrome for this hint. 8 Due to guidelines that do not permit money to be earned by the installation, the festival Steirischer Herbst restricted Hetzel to selling his soap as ‘art’. A plaque on sales counter informs the audiences: ‘Caution. Package content is not for consumption or external use. SELF is not a sanitary, nor a cosmetic product. It is an artwork’. Through this gesture, involuntarily, the product becomes upcycled again. Not only the performance itself, but also the materialisation of the conceptual idea is framed as art. 9 The clouds of soap suds reminded me of Mette Ingvartsen’s The Artificial Na­ ture Project, a post-human theatre of things, atmospheres, and energies which opens up a space of reflection towards ethical questions concerning the impact of the Anthropocene on nature and environment – a thematic context that integrates another dimension of (human) guilt towards nature (and therefore other humans), which is addressed implicitly in both installations. 10 In The Benefactor, Hetzel donated 1 euro of his project money per day to a girl living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, http://julian-hetzel.com/projects/ the-benefactor/ [6 March 2018]. See also the talk with Julian Hetzel in this volume.

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References Ahmed, S 2004, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Alston, A 2013, ‘Audience Participation and Neoliberal Value: Risk, Agency and Responsibility in Immersive Theatre’, in Performance Research vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 128–138. Alston, A 2016, Beyond Immersive Theatre: Aesthetics, Politics and Productive Par­ ticipation, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Biggin, R 2017, Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience. Space, Game and Story in the Work of Punchdrunk, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Bourriaud, N 2002, Relational Aesthetics, translated by S Pleasance & F Woods, Les Presses du Réel, Paris. Butler, J 2009, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, London and New York. Demmerling, C & Landweer, H 2007, Philosophie der Gefühle. Von Achtung bis Zorn, Springer-Verlag, Hamburg. Goffman, E 1977, Rahmen-Analyse: Ein Versuch über die Organisation von Alltagser­ fahrungen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M. Hall, S 2004, ‘Das Spektakel des “Anderen”’, in J Koivisto & A Merkens (eds), Ide­ ologie, Identität, Repräsentation. Ausgewählte Schriften 4, pp. 108–166. Argument Verlag, Hamburg. Lazzarato, M 2012, Die Fabrik des verschuldeten Menschen: Essay über das ­neoliberale Leben, b_books, Berlin. Leitner, F 2011, ‘The Fear of Immersion… and the Thought of the Big Other’, in SK Menrath & A Schwinghammer (eds), What Does a Chameleon Look Like? ­Topographies of Immersion, pp. 94–111. Halem-Verlag, Cologne. Macho, T 2014, Bonds. Schuld, Schulden und andere Verbindlichkeiten, Wilhelm Fink, München. Machon, J 2013, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Per­ formance, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. Macdonald, I 2010, ‘France’s debt of dishonour to Haiti’, in The Guardian. 16 August 2010, available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cif america/2010/aug/16/haiti-france [9 March 2018]. Mühlhoff, R & Schütz, T 2017, Verunsichern, Vereinnahmen, Verschmelzen: Eine affekttheoretische Perspektive auf Immersion. Working Paper SFB Affective Societies 5/17, available from: http://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/publikationen/ workingpaperseries/index.html [9 March 2018]. Ott, M 2018, Dividuations: Theories of Participation, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. SFB Affective Societies 2016, Affective Societies – A Glossary. Register of Central Working Concepts. Working Paper SFB 1171 Affective Societies 1/16, p. 10, available from: http://www.sfb-affective-societies.de/en/publikationen/workingpaper series/wps_1/index.html [9 March 2018].

Chapter 16

Dark immersion Some thoughts on SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs Rainer Mühlhoff

Let me start this comment by saying that I have been working on the topic of immersion from a perspective not directly related to theatre but to philosophy. I have been doing critical theory of what I call ‘immersive power’, a form of power that is dominant in post-industrialist corporate environments, for instance, where immersion is used as a strategy to govern employees. One of my case studies was the work culture of IT start-ups. These companies frequently present themselves as playful work environments where you will find all sorts of lifestyle elements integrated into the workplaces (such as toys, kicker tables, sports facilities, outdoor sites, and free food). The rationale of these arrangements is to blend work seamlessly with leisure, to ‘stimulate potentials’ so they can ‘unfold freely’ to foster innovation. I have been arguing that the design of these work environments is implemented as a specific technique of governance and subjectivation. While the Fordist paradigm of workplace organisation follows a logic of enclosure, the post-Fordist era builds on ‘intensity spaces’ where you are not enclosed, but rather immersed in inherent (and often amplifying) dynamics based on your psychological and emotional dispositions instead of external constraints such as fixed work hours and the notorious ‘cubicle’ around your desk.1 Now you might wonder what this has to do with immersive theatre. I will suggest in the following pages that there is a connection which arises when we take into account that these techniques of workplace governance were intellectually preceded by the fields of group dynamics research and group psychology that emerged in the 1940s following, among others, the work by Kurt Lewin at MIT. This work found its way into Human Resource Management in the 1980s, when the ‘teamwork’ paradigm was widely adopted around the world. Teamwork is a management technique that sources its energy by harnessing employees’ inherent motivational and social forces. In teamwork you are meant to engage with your colleagues as a full person with affects and emotions. Teamwork promises to make everyone relate on eye level, as putative friends or at least as people with needs and feelings – which makes you committed to one another. Affect scholar Melissa Gregg (2011)

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points out that people working in teams are often heavily immersed on the basis of feelings like guilt, shared responsibility for the whole project and a general exploitation of social skills. Training measures such as team building and corporate retreats indicate that there is an apparatus of stimulating and producing suitable psychological dispositions for teamwork in employees. Finally, in those constellations, power structures and hierarchies are in fact not undone but often only masked behind group dynamics and mechanisms of group pressure (cf. Terranova 2010). In light of this background of mine I would like to share my observations on the SIGNA performance in Vienna called Wir Hunde/Us Dogs. I saw the closing night of this production (18 June 2016) and I will just recount my personal experience here (it was my first SIGNA performance, I should add).2 Upon entering the setting, I was addressed from the outset in this commanding tone, with this authoritarian attitude by one of the performers who asked me for my name. He introduced himself as Iwan; I guessed that Iwan might not be his real name but the name of his character in the fiction. I was asked to give my real name, which appeared to me as asymmetric and as a strategy of discomforting personal engagement, and which I intuitively refused because he was addressing me in this authoritarian tone. So I gave a fake name. And already in these first 45 seconds I made a decision: my plan for the night was to refuse to be addressed in this voice. I did not want the performers to address me in this barking, authoritarian, harsh voice anymore. This implied a second decision that crucially framed my experience of the show. I tried to intervene in scenes of violence, for instance when people were slapped or beaten, when these doggies (‘Hundsche’), or the performers playing them, were physically abused in diverse ways. Such measures were integrated into the fiction in an immensely sophisticated way, and, what’s more, the audience was also implicated in those scenes and measures – mostly as passively enabling agents. For instance in the ‘kennel’, scenes of flogging doggies that were ‘new’ to the community were staged as a kind of spectacle for the audience, surrounded by a narrative that one has to be extremely careful in this special area of the asylum, as some of these not yet domesticated doggies are ‘uncontrollably violent’. Another and even more intricate type of violent scene was the typical family living room setting (e.g. in Wieland Kalthoff’s and Iwan Hinghaus’s rooms), where ‘masters’ who seemed eager to perform well as hosts on this open house day would thrash (or threaten to thrash) their doggies as scapegoats for wrongs they did not actually commit and as an obvious relief to their own tensions in the rare situation of having public visitors. Often this was accompanied, all within the fiction, by an apologetic discourse on why this violence is justified for the doggies’ own sake, implying everyone’s understanding. In this way, the two figures Wieland and Iwan performed what one could call the lower-­ middle-class family tyrant: intimidating, friendly on the surface, but deeply

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insecure  and brutal behind the facade, controlling the whole scene affectively and discursively to the extent that no one would dare to contradict or even question their behaviour, audience members (as guests) included. When on those occasions a doggy was about to be thrashed, I tried to intervene, and this created literally explosive scenes. The performers were excellently trained, or maybe ‘trained’ is not the right word; the performers were excellently performing an explosion towards me. For instance, when I threw a soft ball at Wieland’s back as he was just about to beat one of his doggies under the eyes of about ten visitors sitting on his sofa, he went into a full-blown tantrum. Though he was not attempting to beat me, he was performing the same aggression on the verbal level and finally he threw me out of the building (and that also meant out of the show). I refused to go, and this created a very delicate situation because it meant that the whole scene kept being interrupted for the other spectators in the same room, who, as it seemed to me in my agitated state, just wanted to witness a ‘nice’ immersive theatre scene that happened to be a scene of domestic violence. Upon my intervention, Wieland’s reaction remained completely within the fiction, yet it made me feel guilty towards the others, since it seemed that to them I was disturbing the performance. These two layers, fiction versus performance, were always intricately entangled with each other. Now, what did I take away from this evening? When it comes to the concept of immersion as a certain mode of being affectively involved, absorbed and modulated in an intensive relational dynamic (Mühlhoff & Schütz 2019), in this situation it meant to me a modulating engagement on three different dimensions. One was that I had to act as a private person; for instance when I was facing an authoritarian tone which I didn’t want to face, or when other performers (the doggies) were seeking intimate physical/body contact with me (such as rubbing their genitals on my leg) – they were kind of checking what the limits are – what are my limits of intimate contact? In this way I was forced to (re-)act ‘personally’ more than I would have in a normal theatre show, where I would just sit in an armchair – I would call this ‘immersive’ on a very basic level. This first dimension concerns the relation to myself and my feelings within the performance. The second dimension of immersion was that I had to act as a guest, as a guest (of an open house day in an asylum) within the fiction, but also as a guest of a performance show. The tricky thing is that this was not seamless; there were discrepancies or tensions between these two guest roles; for instance, should I intervene or not, should I disturb the fiction or are they even counting on audience members to interfere? Within the fiction, an intervention might disturb the fiction, for of course I would not be a nice guest of an open house if I were to intervene; but on the level of the performance, I knew that this was an immersive performance in which I could probably do anything without them dropping character, and it might even create more interesting situations for everyone if something unexpected were to happen.

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So, there was a constant negotiating between what seemed like two contradictory but concurrent forms of immersion as a guest. Hence, this second dimension concerns a twofold relation of me as spectator to the whole setting. A third dimension that characterised immersion in this show to me was that I felt triggered to act as a political subject. There were a lot of references and meanings in this well-crafted fiction connected to the political world outside. There were the topics of ‘refugee crisis’, the FPÖ in Austria, institutional racism, paternalism in psychiatry and the authoritarian psychology in education which reminded me of the Nazi era. Moreover (and more immanently), I gradually discovered during the five hours that there were a lot of smaller ‘hints’ around the scenes that this whole asylum might be a systematic apparatus of sexual abuse and domestic violence. For instance, there were suspicious web cameras on tripods next to beds that looked like those from pornographic sites; there were a lot of verbalised references by the doggies to sexual relationships with their ‘masters’; there was a submissive sexualised behaviour performed by some doggies towards me and other audience members that was embedded in narratives like ‘this is what my master does with me at night’. As a guess, I would say that this performance was using a fictional setting that turns out to be a well concealed structural apparatus of abuse and violence, masochism and sadism, if one looks at it carefully, if one reads the codes. So, the pressing question for me became: how do I behave towards this politically? This meant taking what I saw not (only) as individual scenes of violence or abuse, but as evidence of a structural configuration that must be questioned and politicised on a general level. I was a ‘spect-actor’ after all, not just an invisible, passively observing ghost floating through the inner space of this asylum. This question of politicisation was the third and strongest dimension of my way of being immersed in this performance. Interestingly, however, this dimension was pretty much a relationship not between me and the performance, but between me and the rest of the audience in light of larger and more general political issues. This is a point I would like to stress. It was because so many other people in the audience did not do anything and did not seem to notice the structural level of violence that was staged here in the fiction that I felt like: ‘What!? I should just watch this passively with all the others just watching it passively? No, this is not an entertainment show!’ And that framed me into the role of the ‘recalcitrant’ guy (as Iwan called me), intervening because the others did not. So, the political dimension of my engagement actually concerns a relationship between me and the other members of the audience within the immersive framework of that performance. It seemed to me in my rather agitated state that the majority of the audience did not see that this was a structural apparatus of violence that they were passively enabling by behaving like ‘polite’ guests; and if they saw it, I was sure that either they didn’t care or didn’t

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want to see it.3 This is what framed me affectively into a recalcitrant role, understood as a form of protest within the performance. The consequence of this experience to me is that immersion cannot be understood as only a relation between me as a single individual and a fictional setting. The dimension of audience-audience relationship was absolutely critical for my own experience of, and my behaviour in, this show. Yet, what was I protesting against? The fiction or the performance? I think it is precisely characteristic of this as an immersive show that this border is blurred. It was the structural configuration of authoritarian pleasures and violence I was protesting against – and this was more than merely fictional. This brings me to my last concern. This show made me think not only of the audience-performance and audience-audience relationships, but also of the relation between the performers. It seemed obvious to me that an immersive production like this must be first of all immersive for the cast. They were performing this consecutively for one month, almost every night, five hours long, with amateur actors constituting 50% of the cast.4 After the shows most performers went to sleep all together in one large dorm (so it was rumoured). I was already wondering in the performance whether, on the level of group dynamics, the power relationships of the fiction might extend to power relationships outside performance hours – whether the affectivities and psychologies that are performed might extend to ‘real’ affective and psychological dispositions of the actors. This suspicion made me suddenly furious, as it potentially turns the production itself into an apparatus of structural violence. In a setting in which violence and physical abuse, tantrums and authoritarian commands, sexualised power relationships, inferiority complexes, shyness, borderline behaviour and anxieties (on the part of the doggies) are performed to such a degree of realness, intensity and temporal duration, will some of this not be built on ‘real’ pleasures and ‘real’ psychological structures on the part of the performers? To what extent must we concede that such a production might be an apparatus of producing, stabilising or amplifying psychological dispositions through which the fiction gradually, over the course of time, becomes real? I raised this question in the audience Q&A on 19 June 2016, and I got very interesting answers. One performer of a doggy came to me afterwards saying that my suspicion – that power structures of the fiction extend to the relations within the cast – is justified, but that it couldn’t be said officially. The performer of Wieland Kalthoff explained to me in a long conversation that Wieland would not have been able to perform the tantrum upon my throwing a soft ball at his back if this intervention had happened in one of the first and not one of the last nights. By the end of the period, his affective embodiment of the figure was so advanced that he could perform this furious explosion ‘completely automatically and without deliberate thinking’. Such an intervention does not happen in the performance every day; his

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reaction is therefore not a scripted piece of acting that works better with each show. Rather, within the figure/fiction/role, this was a reaction towards something unexpected; hence, one could say that there is something like an emerging affective autonomy of the character Wieland beyond the scripted repertoire of the role. Such an autonomy of an affective character emerges in a certain relational affective arrangement, in which this very affective disposition gets produced and stabilised over time in an affective niche into which Wieland is growing (here it is the niche of the choleric family tyrant within the fiction).5 The carrier of the character is thus not the single performer, and the affective brilliance of his/her performance is not primarily the result of a good knowledge of his/her individual psychology plus acting skills. Rather, it is a relational and situated phenomenon. Hence saying that certain (authoritarian, submissive, sadist, masochist, etc.) psychological dispositions of the individual actors can freely unfold in this performative setting might be true, but is generally a too simple version of the critique I am raising. The affects we see in the play are not merely produced by a mobilisation of individual psychological memories of real affective and emotional constellations (this is what sociologist of emotion Arlie Hochschild calls ‘deep acting’). Rather, we seem to have a converse phenomenon of ‘deep realisation’ in the case of immersive theatre: a certain relational arrangement (which is, at first, fictional) creates affectivities and psychologies of real persons that transgress the realm of fictionality towards psychologically real pleasures, real sadistic and masochistic relations. Although the setting was created as fictional, the affects might become real; they gain reality, as dispositions of real persons, over time. This is how my visit left me with political scepticism. The show reminded me of the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, where alarming observations were made of similar processes of the situated emergence of psycho­ iscussed – and logical traits in the context of perceived power. It should be d not kept as corporate secrets of the performance company – in what way such productions are immersive for the cast, blurring the boundaries between individual psychological engagement and engagement on the fictional level. Frankly, this performance looked like a sado-masochistic machine to me, with audience members as passive enablers, so long as this is not verbalised. As much as one should therefore intervene in the play, why should one not intervene on the level of theatre curating, production and scholarly reflection of this phenomenon?

Acknowledgements I thank Anja Breljak and Theresa Schütz for their comments on an earlier version of this text and for our many discussions on Wir Hunde/Us Dogs.

204  Rainer Mühlhoff

Notes 1 See on this: Deleuze (1992), Boltanski and Chiapello (2006), Terranova (2010), Mühlhoff (2018), and Mühlhoff and Slaby (2018). 2 See Benjamin Wihstutz in this volume for more details on the fictional setting of SIGNA’s Wir Hunde/Us Dogs. See also Schütz (2016). 3 The idea that others didn’t intervene because it was a performance occurred to me, but it made me even more upset as I considered this argument to be void, see below. 4 In other SIGNA productions, such as the recent Das halbe Leid/Half the Suffer­ ing (Hamburg 2017), which was running daily from 7 pm to 7 am, this is even more extreme. 5 For the concept of an ‘affective arrangement’, see Slaby et al. (2019); for the approach of a relational genesis of affective and psychological dispositions, see Mühlhoff (2018, 2019).

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