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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