Download As you it. A personal take on spectatorship. IRL. VIRTUAL. And the

As you
it.
A personal take on spectatorship. IRL. VIRTUAL. And the space in between.
By: Babiche Ronday
Scenography master, Think. First year.
December 2014
In the early days men created animations by creating fire and watching cavedrawings come to live.
Today we are surrounded by virtual fire. A staggering estimate of 9 million people in Holland are on
facebook visiting their facebookprofiles about 20 to 24 times a week. For the first time ever more
people own a smartphone than a PC in Holland (Source: Volkskrant, 13-12-2013). Surrounded by
screens in the western world we walk with our feet in the real world (IRL) and with our heads in the
virtual world of virtual clouds. And often get lost in the space in between both worlds. What are the
implications on this development on spectatorship? Even more, In thet heatre and art that confuses
the genres?
The monologue Shakespeare once wrote in his ‘As you like it’describes the world as a stage and men
as merely players. What would Shakespeare have written now, considering the (st)age we live in?
The world we live in? All the social, cultural, historical en technological changes that have been made
since aside… what ‘age’ would Shakespeare assign to the facebook user? What would Oscar Wilde
make of the facebookpicture of Dorian Gray?
There is a trend in the theatre where live video footage is often used in performance. Allowing the
actors to be present ontstage as well as on a videoprojection. The audience then sees the actor in
real life from head to foot. And for example his face in close up, a distorted image of the face. The
audience also often is shown how the video is created. The actors move away from the camera,
move towards it. This form of theatre combined with this form of use of technology draws the
attention of the observer to the way the observation takes place. The effect of these combined
images make the viewer become aware of the difference between watching a theatre performance
and watching video images. Between reality and fiction, distance and nearness, in the flesh and
digital (Liesbeth Groot Nibbeling, p.1.). But can the spectator become even more involved?
There are many calls for the emancipation of the spectator. In the age of endless exchange between
roles and identities, between reality and virtuality, between life and mechanical prostheses etc.
Ranciere proposes the spectator to be emancipated to be active as interpreters who try to invent
their own translation in order to appropriate a story for themselves and make their own story out of
the art presented (Ranciere, p. 10).
But can the spectator become even more involved by being witness to the exposing of the theatrical
workings of the virtual and the real?
For me as a puppeteer I am truly touched when the workings of the theatrical instrument are laid
open and bare. I am very fond of the art form of puppeteering in the open form of manipulation in
which the puppeteer visually manipulates a dead object to life. Never hiding his own illusion. It is
fifth wall theatre, all out there, in the open. And the spectator is very, very much needed in order for
the puppet to come to live.
Is this open form of manipulation also possible in the combination of the real and the virtual world?
Is there a form possible where the audience simultaneously codes and decodes what is seen of the
real space and the virtual space? Can the virtual world, as the puppet in puppeteering, become more
than real in the exposing of the deadness of it and in the invitation to the spectator to ‘believe’?
Where is the fifth wall in the world in between the virtual and the real world? We should find that
wall and go to that place, but how?
Maaike Bleeker states that seeing is much more then meets the eye. It is an embodied experience,
involving so much more then just the optical senses. The theatre can be a vision machine, staging
ways of looking. Theatre presents a staging that is also constitutive of the real. But: Can the spectator
be the machinist of the theatrical apparatus or the vision machine as Bleeker refers to (Bleeker,
2008. p.9)
I propose that the spectator should be given theatrical tools and applications to place themselves in
the world in between the virtual and the real. That the artist (in this case being me) will create tools,
structures and stories where the spectator can try and invent their own translation but at the same
time SEE THEMSELVES living in the world in between.
The spectator needs to be made aware that he or she is part of the theatre performance of the in
between. That he or she is part of the (video)images he or she watches, between the distance and
nearness, reality and fiction, between in the flesh and the digital.
Theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is NOT a bad thing. We need a new theatre, a
theatre outside the theatre and into the smartphone and the real world, FUNDED on and founded in
spectatorship where the spectator isn’t spectator anymore but the giver of life. Believing and
disbelieving what is shown. Feeling and not feeling the story being presented.
Theatre has to be brought back to it’s true essence where the theatre is a theatre without
spectators. A theatre where spectators will learn things and will be captured by images and become
active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers.
Spectatorship is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link
what the see with what they have been seen and told, done and dreamt. There is no priveleged
medium as there is no priveleged starting point. There are everywhere starting points and knot
points from which we learn. We have to turn spectators into actors. We have to acknowledge that
any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor is also the spectator of the same
kind of story. We have to turn the ignorant into learned persons, or, acording to a mere scheme of
overturn,make the student or the ignorant the master of his masters(Ranciere, 2007, p. 1-10).
All the world is a stage. All the men are merely players. And actors. And spectators. As you like it
1.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator. In : ArtForum (2007).
see also: http://members.efn.org/~heroux/The-Emancipated-Spectator-.pdf
Maaike Bleeker, Visuality in the Theatre. The Locus of Looking. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.
Cecile Brommer and Sonja van der Valk (eds.) Domein voor Kunskritiek, 2008. Jan Wolkers,
or the woolly blanket. An introduction in which the author places de role of the theatre
audience in a historical perspective and makes a plea for a ‘Wolkerian gaze’, Liesbeth Groot
Nibbelink, translated by Wendy Lubberding