Audience=Dumb? A Thought Experiment

Here is a description of a performance event, O.A.P. by performance artist Ursula Martinez, from the introduction to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre:

“O.A.P.… investigated her [Ursula’s] own fear of growing old while also exploring gender as performance… In a memorable scene, ‘old Ursula’ donned high heels and make-up and turned to the audience asking whether anybody would like to kiss her. During the embarrassed silence that followed, we were left to decide whether it was just the distance to the performer on stage or the image of old people as non-sexual beings that prevented us from volunteering to kiss her.”

The translator of Lehman’s book, Karen Jürs-Munby, uses this moment as an example of how performance can “destabilize the spectator’s construction of identity and the ‘other.’” The example, however, depends on a certain idea of spectatorship as a willful surrender of agency, that being in the audience means being unwilling to invade the world of the performer, and therefore to act in a meaningful way. Now, for sure, there is an awful long history of this theory of spectatorship proving itself in practice—the exceptions are so rare they are history making (the riot it provoked in the theater is one of the reasons A Doll’s House is so famous today). And many dramatists have used this theory to exploit the spectator as a metaphor for the kind of obsequious, politically dormant populace most susceptible to totalitarian dominance (Information for Foreigners one of the more obvious examples, Cabaret one of the more commercial).

BUT, I can’t help but think, when reading about this moment in O.A.P., what would happen if an audience member (say, me) were to have stepped up to the actress and kissed her. One can imagine such a spectator (say again, me) having read up on performance theory and understanding what Ursula was up to, and so deciding to subject the play itself to an experiment. Would Ursula have awkwardly smiled and continued the show as though the kiss hadn’t happened? Would she have walked offstage and ended the performance? One thing is certain, the basic theory of spectatorship on which her entire performance rests would have vaporized. And wouldn’t her anger and frustration have opened up new room for inquiry—for example, into the role of the performer in creating and manipulating the spectator, on the dependence of the performer on the spectator for his or her very existence.

One might argue that it is Ursula’s very intention to subvert and therefore destroy the passive spectator, and that in doing so her play is brutally anti-theatrical, aiming to undermine the very conditions of the theatrical event itself. If this argument were true, however, Ursula would celebrate a kiss from a rebel spectator like myself. My suspicion that she wouldn’t, however, speaks to my suspicion of the anti-theatrical, or at least the anti-spectatorial, impulse itself. I wonder what Lehmann will have to say on this issue as I venture into his book…