Layne Manzier, center, in TUTA Theatre’s The Jewels, adapted and directed by Kirk Anderson, movement directed by Aileen Wen McGroddy. Photo: Anthony La Penna
I’m sure I’m asking the same questions as anyone who has a Facebook account and a live performance practice: will we survive this? I can’t say that we will or we won’t, but I have to say this: we must.
Those of us addicted to the social pheromone produced by strangers gathering in the same room to play pretend have been deflated by fear, loss, and loneliness in the past two weeks or so, and for good reason: physical togetherness has been deemed too high a risk. We can no longer trust the bodies of strangers. Perhaps, in this time of anti-capitalist quietude, we will learn to (or be forced to) trust the goodwill of strangers, but their bodies? A government mandated restraining order. We collectively turn our gaze to our multimillion-dollar performance palaces, hundreds (or thousands) of seats, neatly wedged in together, well within the danger zone of six feet. This audience architecture suddenly becomes a dangerous health risk: how can we force our precious, precious subscribers, single ticket buyers, and their patient dates to encounter their own mortality when all they want is a good night out?
My two cents: maybe we don’t. Force them, that is.
Audience architecture has changed before, and it can change again. Did you know that our predominant multi-level proscenium audience setup is a relic of a revolutionary change in Parisian opera at the turn of the 19th century? (I didn’t, until this semester.) I am not arguing that we return to curtained-off compartments for nobles, seating boxes on the stage, or full food and beverage service during the show—ok maybe that last one—BUT I am arguing that the social experience of live performance has evolved along with architecture, and both of those things have the capacity to change.
Stage directors know that it is “easier” to stage proscenium. Essentially, there is one point of view and one viewpoint to care take—a single window into the world, which changes before our very eyes. This is the architecture of film, of vaudeville, of Western Christianity: for many of us, this is our heritage. As we experiment with audience architectures and invite people into the thrust, the alley, the round, there is often a sense of scarcity: “In this composition these three seats get only butts, but I’ll change it up in the next beat to give them some of that sweet, sweet actor crotch—I mean, face—I mean crotch.” There is a paternalism to this mode of problem solving: the assumption that audience is unable to help themselves. The way that we set up most performance spaces, this is absolutely true. We train audiences to shut their bodies off, to entrust control of their senses to us. I would guess that most (certainly not all) audience members would say that the benefit has been, by and large, worth the risk incurred by entrusting their physical safety to those of us who invite them into our houses.
Enter COVID-19. The Plague.
The systems that we have in place to ensure the bodily well-being of our audience are suddenly inadequate. A causal match of armrest-jockeying becomes a life-or-death duel, a doorknob becomes a grenade, a public bathroom, a nuclear war zone. The terms of engagement have changed, and we don’t have the buildings, staff, or supplies to change with it. Thus, the audience contract itself must change, and with it, the flow of trust. We must entrust the audience to manage their own bodies, and then they’ll tell us how to build the performance venues of the future.
Like everything in theatre, this is, of course, not a new idea. Imagine a busker who has defined their performance space on the street with a few props and a rope. Think of the oh-so-trendy world of immersive theatre, where the audience may be masked and set loose in a fictional world. There’s the outdoor concert, families picnicking hundreds of feet away from the performers, pleased to talk amongst themselves as they listen to the music. Bleacher seating at the minor league game. People laying out their yoga mats in the studio. College students choosing their seats around a seminar table. Attendees at a shadow puppet show in Bali, welcome to come and go, get a snack, have a conversation, and watch from either side of the screen. People know how to arrange themselves, given the opportunity to figure it out. Unfortunately, most theatres don’t have the tools to allow them to do so, or the space has been tread over time into deep, rutted paths that make it impossible to climb out of the ditch. Our European-legacy, proscenium, seats-packed-side-by-side-in-rows-in-the-dark-theatre is a theatre where the audience has placed their trust in us to arrange the world in front of them to see from the best (or the least bad) angle. It’s a world where actors’ bodies, psychologies, and one wall of living rooms are opened up to an anonymous mass of witnesses whose bodies are erased by the discipline and punishments of silence, stillness, and darkness. This model breaks down in a world where people must take greater care for themselves. They may no longer trust us, the theater makers, so me must learn to trust them.
What if we handed people a chair and let them move it wherever they liked, whenever they liked? What if it was a big room, and people could choose to sit or stand? What if there was just a big ol’ bench? Yes, people will move during the pivotal scene. People might start talking to each other during the show. These are all bylaws in the audience contract that are, at most, 200 years old. That is a drop in the bucket for an art form that is thousands of years old. We can take it. I don’t know what brilliant solutions the collective imagination will come up with, but this is your friendly reminder that social distancing is really physical distancing, and we have all been negotiating that since a single-celled organism scooched away from the primordial ooze.
