Roles of the Audience: Aesthetic and Social Dimensions of the Performance Event ROBERT B. LOXLEY George Bernard Shaw once said that it is the listener who keeps the speaker speaking. Likewise, in interpretation it is the listener, or audi- ence member, who keeps the performer performing. Both parties need to be equally engaged with each other and with what is being said, if the literary experience is to achieve its ideal fullness in performance. The burden of bringing this ideal about is not the interpreter's alone but needs to be shared by the audience. In The Empty Space, Peter Brook states: ‘The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience. This is more than a truism: in the theatre the audience completes the steps of creation.’ Brook goes on to say that “today, the question of the audi- ence seems to be the most important and difficult one to face.”’? David Williams expresses a similar concern of oral interpreters when he writes that ‘we should attempt to illuminate, in any way possible, the real role of the audience in the act of interpretation.'’? The time may have arrived for oral interpreters to ask: What is the real role of the audience in interpretation? What functions does it serve? Is an audience necessary? And if it is, then how should it be regarded by the interpreter? Further, is the interpreter’s primary allegiance to the literature or to the audience? To both? Is a conflict inherent in these two allegiances? Interpretation theorists have always acknowledged the importance of the audience. Considered to be one of the three essentials of in- terpretation (along with the interpreter and the literature), it has re- ceived far less attention than the other two.’ In the first half of the twentieth century, interpretation saw a shift of emphasis from the in- terpreter to the literature, culminating in a view of interpretation as the oral study of literature.5 This view has occasionally denied the necessity of an audience at all.6 More recently an emphasis on the interpreter and audience together, or on the interpreter’s embodiment of the literary work has emerged.’ The audience, however, seems to remain a second- ary consideration of most interpreters. Williams, as well as Wallace Bacon, has expressed a fear that too much attention on the audience may distract the interpreter from the literary work and thereby dilute the literary experience, which is the interpreter's chief concern.® Williams raises the interesting supposition that if the interpreter adapts a perfor- mance to audience response, then something may have been lacking in 40Robert B. Loxley the analysis of the literature.? While interpreters seem to recognize, at least implicitly, that the audience is a part of the interpretation event, they often simply take it for granted. Let us consider that the function of the audience is to participate in the event by helping the interpreter shape the literature as it unfolds in performance. Its real role, then, is to become a part of the work of art. In the act of interpretation the literary text is transformed from the printed Page into a work of performance art. While having a form created by the author, the literature allows multiple possibilities for interpretation that may be realized in performance. Its form changes as a performance structure emerges from the interaction of interpreter and literature. The literature, however, as a work of performance art is not finished when the interpreter performs it: the audience also participates in the creative process of transforming the literary text in performance. The audience's reaction to, and action upon, the interpreter's performance is similar to the interpreter’s earlier interaction with the text, giving rise to still more possibilities of interpretation, structure, and meaning. Rather than di- luting the literary experience, audience participation and communica- tion with the performers are the means by which the literature is given its presence and structure in performance. Walter Kerr, the former drama critic for the New York Times, describes the process and effect of performer-audience interaction: [the performers] are in our presence, conscious of us, speaking to us, « working for and with us until a circuit that is not mechanical becomes established between us, a circuit that is fluid, unpredictable, ever- changing in its impulses, crackling, intimate. Our presence, the way we respond, flows back to the performer and alters what he does, to some degree and sometimes astonishingly so, every single night. We are contenders, making the play and the evening and the emotion together. We are playmates, building a structure." While performers draw the audience into the act, initially, by leading, guiding, and facilitating its involvement, they in turn can draw upon its participation to complete the work, to achieve a final form and structure for the literature in performance. Bacon's well known metaphor describes interpretation as a “matching process” in which two living forms—the interpreter and the Poem—achieve congruence, with each one “giving” a little in the pro- cess.'! We might also consider the audience a living form that enters into the matching process. One of the roles of the interpreter might be to facilitate that part of the matching process between literature and audience, with the ultimate goal of realizing a congruence among liter- ature, interpreter, and audience. Rather than ignoring audience re- sponse, the interpreter consciously encourages it, draws upon it and incorporates it into the performance; often the performance profits. Brook, and other theatre directors as well, frequently perceive their own work played before an audience as quite different from what it was in rehearsal.'? Richard Hornby similarly comments that an alert and re- sponsive audience can draw out elements of a play that the performers did not know were there. He mentions actors in a Production of Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour who, when viewed by an audience of a4LITERATURE IN PERFORMANCE Shakespearean scholars, gave a much stronger performance of the play than they had given previously. He concludes that it “had really become a different play, and a much better one."''3 A “contexts” or “contextual” view of interpretation offers one pos- sible theoretical framework for integrating the audience more com- pletely into the interpretation event. In ‘Speaking Literature,” Thomas Sloan outlines the basic thrust of such a theory. According to Sloan the interpreter is concerned not only with the text of a poem but also with the context in which the poem is perceived and experienced. The poem, he claims, “equals text plus context.'""* While Sloan is chiefly con- cerned with the rhetorical transactions occurring between a poem and its readers and between interpreters and their audiences, we can extend the idea of “‘context’’ to cover all aspects of the situation, including special considerations of audience, occasion, purpose, and environ- ment. The act of oral interpretation is embedded within this matrix, or context, and interacts with and ultimately becomes an integral part of it. Rather than focusing on the traditional three cen' interpretation, Or on anyone or two-of th proach focuses on the Bet ‘formance of literature within a sven context, contexts approach to interpretation is supported by philosopher Arnold Berleant's concept of the ‘‘aesthetic field,"’ in which the art ob- ject (including performances) is seen not as isolated or as existing within a vacuum but rather as “actively and creatively experienced” within a context, or field. The field consists of many forces that impinge upon one’s experience of art, ranging from available materials and technological resources to moral values and aesthetic theories.'> texts view of lnteopretation also allows us to view the entire pants with the literature, while ‘social experience arises from the in- teraction of the participants with each other. These two kinds of experi- ence are not mutually exclusive; they interact with and influence each other in a number of ways. First, aesthetic experience itself is social, particularly in the performing arts. Berleant refers to the performing arts collectively as ‘‘an activity which is social at heart," involving people in groups and occurring in the company of others.’© The social processes at work in the event make aesthetic experience possible and provide some of its chief values: the sharing of responses to the literary work, the mediation between private and social experience, and the exchange of energies among all of the participants, which gives presence to the literature in performance. Unlike the silent reading of a literary work, the performance of literature among a group of people affirms our relation- ship to others—not only through the experience of the literature itself, but through contact with others who are also responding to and ap- preciating it. Berleant summarizes: “The integrity of aesthetic experi- ence is, at its fullest and most complete, a social experience.'’” Elizabeth Burns refers to the social aspect of the event as the social occasion proper, or the “going to the theatre,” that provides the con- text, or envelope, for the performance.'® For her, the social includes essentially everything that takes place prior to and following the per- 42Robert B. Loxley formance, including arrivals and departures. In ven larger context, revi experiences in socie in condition the participants’ expec- js Vii experience during the event. XN, . irect audience participation in performance has been circumscribed to a small repertoire of overt behaviors, such as laughing or clapping. 4 he social aspects have tended to be devalued in modern times as’ 4 we focus increasingly on “pure” aesthetic experience. For exam tore, | di Further, audiences generally arrive just before the performance and. 4 leave immediately afterwards. Peter Brook comments on audience: %, Cc. leaving immediately after a performance and questions whether “beings, Sey shared experience.19 In The Theatrical Event, David Cole suggests that audience mem: bers will become more involved in a performance if they are able to Participate, to bring more of their “selves” into play.2° These vario roles, which can be played simultaneously, include perceiver, listener, appréciator, respondent, evaluator (or crit), and sue performer Roe listener. ience member can play the roles of the listener within athe audience also “performs” the liter- ature in_a sense by empathizing with the interpréter in_his/her roles a: pouator-characteror interpreter. Likewise, the interpreter, in a senSe, ecomes a member of his/her audience as s/he empathizes with its re- sponses to the work and allows the audience to help shape the directio: hustled from a theatre” is the most natural and healthy way to end 7 Y, of the performance." As a respondent the audience member's behavior 2K ranges from the covert to the obviously overt. Often little difference exists between these modes of responding; even intense concentration and silence are a strong form of response and can guide the interpreter, for example, in holding a pause for a greater or lesser amount of time. Finally, the audience role may be that of cocreator. As Brook suggests, the role of the audience is to assist the performer by becom- ing fully involved in the performance and by lending its presence to the performance situation.”? Thus, the real role of the audience is not one of a “consumer,” who passively “takes” from the performers but is one of “giving’’—of helping the interpreters to create the work of art in perfor- mance. In Frank O'Connor's view the audience is a vast sounding board for the performers, giving their full assent to what is taking place; they are the motor that drives the performance forward.23 NOTES, { Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Avon Books, 1968), p. 115. ? Brook, p. 119. * David Williams, “Audience Response and the Interpreter," in Studies in Interpreta- tion 1, ed. Esther M. Doyle and Virginia Hastings Floyd (Amsterdam: Rodopi, N.V., 1977), p. 202. * The lack of attention given to the audience by interpreters is illustrated by the simple fact that no interpretation texts—with the two exceptions of Grimes and Mattingly's In- terpretation: Writer, Reader, Audience and the third edition of Wallace Bacon's The Art of Interpretation—devote even a single chapter to the audience, even though it is considered to be one of the three major elements of interpretation. Among the few writers of texts who 43 Seg < ‘ UyLITERATURE IN PERFORMANCE give any emphasis at all to the audience are Keith Brooks, Eugene Bahn, and Lamont Okey in The Communicative Act of Oral Interpretation, in which the authors suggest that greater reader sensitivity to listener response might contribute to more effective performances. 5 See Martha Thompson Barclay, "Major American Emphases in Theories of Oral Interpretation from 1890 to 1950,” Diss. Univ. of Minnesota 1968, p. 298. ® For example, see Paul Campbell, The Speaking and the Speakers of Literature (Bel- mont, Calif.: Dickenson Publishing Co., 1967), in which he states: “It is the oralization of literature that is basic, not the performance before an audience” (p. 4). While performing for one's self is a legitimate and at times necessary activity, the interpreter might be said also to function as his own audience, as he in a sense becomes a part of his audience when other listeners are present. The interpreter always performs with a sense of audience—of the audience that might have been or will be—perhaps of an idealized audience. Performing for one’s self, however, is more of a private act and less of a social ‘or public one, and the influence of the audience is felt most keenly when an audience of ‘one or more others is present. 7 See Wallace Bacon, The Art of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), pp. 37-38. ® Williams, p. 199; Bacon, p. 36. Bacon has, perhaps, changed his view from the first edition of his text in 1966, which Williams quotes, to include a greater recognition of the audience in the interpretation process. In the third edition (1979), he writes that “some kinds of audience response lead the performer away from the text. . . other kinds intensify the sense of the poem's body, and this is likely to have positive effects" (p. 501), And in the first issue of Literature in Performance he writes that “... an audience, too, participates (ideally) in the incarnation and communion which occur in the interpretative event” (p. 6). ® Williams, p. 206. 10 Walter Kerr, “We Call It ‘Live’ Theater, But Is It?" The New York Times, 2 Jan. 1972, Sec. 2, p.1 11 Wallace Bacon, “The Dangerous Shores a Decade Late Interpretation, ed. Richard Haas and David A. Williams (Indianapolis p. 225. Also see Bacon, Art of Interpretation, pp. 37-40. #2 Brook, pp. 116-17. 12 Richard Hornby, Script Into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1977), p. 96. ‘4 Thomas O, Sloan, "Speaking Literature,” in Studies in Interpretation, ed. Esther M. Doyle and Virginia Hastings Floyd (Amsterdam: Rodopi N. V., 1972), p. 355. 18 Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Springfield, Il.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), pp. 46-90. 18 Berleant, pp. 65, 70, 86. 7 Berleant, p. 155. 18 Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 31. 18 Brook, p. 119. 20 David Cole, The Theatrical Event (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1975), p. 80. 2) Although the interpreter may be said to become a part of his own audience, there is also a certain sense in which the performer never becomes an audience member. The interpreter needs always to empathize with the speaker and not the listener so as not to break the sympathetic contract between poem and listener. The interpreter, for example, never wants to become so moved by his own performance that he is unable to perform from the point of view of the speaker of (or within) the poem. 22 Brook, p. 127 23 Frank O'Connor, The Art of the Theatre (Dublin, 1947; rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1974), pp. 10-11 in The Study of Oral Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), 44Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing