The School of Arts would like to invite you to a
Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance Research Seminar
Turning to the Audience
With
Stephen Purcell, University of Warwick
Penelope Woods, Queen Mary, University of London
Join us for an audience with two of the keenest observers of current performance for presentations and conversation on the what, when, how and why of contemporary theatregoing. Once the barely acknowledged silent witness of the performance event, the audience is increasingly recognised as its active participant, collaborator and arbiter; nowhere more so, perhaps, than at the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe, a venue which has turned received understandings of spectator engagement and popular participation on their heads. Our speakers aim to shed new light on one of the most challenging periods in this theatre’s history, with an ear cocked to the larger questions about seeing, hearing and feeling performance that it provokes. Who watches, and how? Who listens, and why? You decide.
Penelope Woods
Audience: Shared Light / Shared Shakespeares
The project to reconstruct The Globe Theatre on Bankside in London in 1997 has produced an exceptional kind of audience. The visibility of the audience in the particular open-air conditions of this reconstruction served to foreground (make newly visible) the fact and complexity of audience to performance scholars from its inception. Twenty years on, I consider the practices of community, fantasies of history and reconstruction, and operative power dynamics- through the lenses of hospitality and identity- at work in this performance venue. Here I examine the recent claims about the significance of ‘shared light’ to the Globe project, and unpick the ways that both this material condition of audience experience and encounter, and the institutional investment in it, are productive of specific tensions in institutional and public relationships to ‘Shakespeare’.
Steve Purcell
Audiences and Shared Light at the Globe
The recent announcement that Emma Rice would be stepping down as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe indicated that disagreements with the Board over the importance of ‘shared light’ productions were behind her departure. This paper, drawing on material from my forthcoming monograph Shakespeare in the Theatre: Mark Rylance at the Globe, examines the ways in which shared light performance during the reconstructed Globe’s first decade produced a highly participatory mode of audience response. The paper will explore some of the ways in which productions during Mark Rylance’s artistic directorship made use of the theatre’s visible audiences, speaking directly to and with them. Globe actors and directors adapted the principles of Stanislavskian naturalism to this distinctly non-naturalistic space, finding new ways to think about character objectives and the ‘fourth wall’ that accounted for the presence of the audience. Performers were divided over the extent to which they should attempt to control or regulate the ways in which audiences participated at the theatre. Direct address and audience participation affected the ways in which meaning was produced in the space, displacing the authority of the director and rendering performance radically contingent.
followed by drinks
Wednesday 7 December
5pm – 7pm
Jarman Studio 2
University of Kent
All welcome.