On Spectatorship

Introduction

Anxo Abuín González and Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla¹

This volume should be understood in the context of the “postdramatic” (Hans-Thies Lehmann) and “postspectacular” (André Eiermann) paradigms that have put into question traditional concepts regarding representation and role of the spectator in the creation of meaning, and which have also placed the spotlight on the importance of performativity as a strategy to create new scenic perspectives. It deals, therefore, with a new “expansive” textuality that relates to what Claire Bishop (2006 and 2012) has termed the “social turn” in theatrical and artistic practices, embodied in the diffusion of interventionist, collaborative, dialogical or participative forms, forms that are always dissonant and anti-hegemonic, as demonstrated in the civic commitment that has been characteristic of the Spanish stage in recent years.

This is not just an appeal to collective identity, but an attempt to create a public space, an agora, in which spectators can participate in solidarity, sharing ideas and debating freely about the future of the community to which they belong. The aim is to create a strong public, capable of accepting the new performative structures and in this way constituting themselves as counter-publics, ready to resist dominant discourses and create a more democratic and egalitarian reality. Using the terminology of Reinaldo Laddaga (2006), according to which there was once a predominant “aesthetic regimen of the arts”, in which the author wrote isolated from his political context, and the recipient remained a passive spectator of a work presented as fixed and closed, in the new artistic “regimen of practice”, the author involves him or herself in collaborative projects, and the recipient becomes a participative agent in works whose borders are unstable and unfixed, invested in plural networks and collective projects. This is a theatre that can be understood as an “expanded field”, which we should value as an opportunity for greater creative liberty and, perhaps, an intensification of the potential of the “hyperconnected multitude”, allowing for the emergence of new ways of experiencing and experimenting with the intersections of the virtual and the real. The contemporary artist has no other option but to confront the world within which they exist with the instruments at their disposal in a given moment, instruments that are described in a new vocabulary: hybridization, process, hypertextual navigation, cooperation, flexibility, interaction… The “new spectator”, if in reality such a thing exists, has also moved away from their traditional position and has accepted the challenge of not just being a “hunter of signs” or a “textual pirate”, to use the image dear to one of the apostles of the so-called “culture of participation”, Henry Jenkins (1992), who himself was writing in the wake of Michel de Certeau (1984), but a creator and co-author of unique signs that move in unpredictable and rhizomatic ways.

The new artistic practices can be understood as “ways of doing” that require complex procedural mechanisms and strategies: the theatrical experience challenges us to invent those “ways of doing” that re-establish an authentic public sphere in the context of today’s social networks. It has to do with approaching the status of the “new spectator” in contemporary theatre, understanding it as a locus in which social, political, and gender identities are negotiated…, and we attempt to do so from the perspective of the new formulations that have arisen to designate the new figures of the spectator emerging in contemporary theatre: ideal (Balme, 2008), emancipated (Rancière, 2009). Immersive (Alston, 2016; Biggin, 2017; Frieze, 2016; Machon, 2013…), participative (Bishop, 2006, 2012; White, 2013), relational (Bourriaud, 2002), committed (Lavender and Walmsley, 206), intermedial (Helbo, in this volume), or expanded (Sánchez, 2011). With these approaches, we hope to provide tools for the analysis of contemporary theatre, looking at the work of contemporary authors on both dramaturgical and spectacular levels, and relating these to a “politics of vision” (Olivier Neveux, 2013).

We have tried to distance ourselves from a monolithic focus on spectators and audience in regard to their corporeal, sensorial, and affective capacities (Matthew Reason’s “corporal turn”, 2011), taking into account questions of attention, memory, and semiosis (the process of attributing meanings) and community (the social dimension). Contemporary theatre has addressed these issues in many diverse ways, which are reflected in the ever-increasing theoretical terminology of theatrical studies, as is evidenced in the recent Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts (2022), coordinated by Matthew Reason (et al): “audience-participants”, “playing-audience”, “guest performers” (Machon, 2016, 38), “narrator-visitors”, “extended audiences” (Couldry, 2005), “visitors”, “co-players”, “participants”, “mobilised spectator” or ”spec-tactors” (Boal, 2009). As Herbert Blau (1990: 42) and, in an especially interesting contribution, Ben Walmsley (2019) argue, if the theatre of the 19th and 20th centuries deprived the spectator of their critical judgement (distained and domesticated, in the words of Antonin Artaud), today questioning the role of the audience has become fundamental: “Questions of audience engagement naturally beg the fundamental question of what an audience actually is and does. To what extent do audiences constitute a congregation, a collective, a community, or even a public? How do people transform into an audience and how might they best prepare for this transformation?” (Walmsley, 2019, 3). Of course, these are but some of the possible questions that can frame the audience as a “constructed conscience” of thought and desire, as, again, to use Blau’s words (1990: 25), an increasingly “empowered” and complex entity.

In these pages can be found some of the most important figures of recent Spanish theatre, writers and companies whose work has contributed decisively to the configuration of new figures of the spectator. A non-exhaustive list would include Los Torreznos, Angélica Liddell, Roger Bernat, La Ribot, Antonio Fernández Lera, Rodrigo García, El Canto de la Cabra, Laila Ripoll, Mariano Llorente, Andrés Lima, Pablo Remón, Álex Rigola, La Fura dels Baus, or A Panadaría. We have grouped the contributions in two complementary sections. The first, titled “Towards a Theory of the Spectator”, includes chapters with a theoretical bent, although they all offer interpretive commentaries on specific texts and spectacles. The second, titled “Case Studies”, while not abandoning theoretical insights, centres its analysis on specific pieces, authors, or companies. We hope that the final result offers a theatrical panorama that is as rich as it is full of subtle detail and that represents a theatre presupposing an ever-changing spectator.

1 This work is part of the research project “PERFORMA2-PERFORMADOS. Metamorfosis del espectador en el teatro español actual” (PID2019-104402RB-I00) (2020–2023) [“PERFORMA2-PERFORMADOS. Metamorphosis of the Spectator in Contemporary Spanish Theatre” (PID2019-104402RB-I00) (2020–2023)], funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, within the State Plan for Scientific and Technical Research on Innovation (2017–2020).

Catharsis, Neo-Catharsis, Post-Catharsis: Tragic Consciousness and Ethical Ambiguities in Contemporary Theatre

Anxo Abuín González¹

On January 15, 2019, a review of the performance of Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus at Teatros del Canal (Madrid) by Raquel Vidales was published in the Spanish newspaper El País. The journalist chose the title La catarsis era esto [So this is what catharsis feels like], assuming that the average reader would certainly be familiar with the term “catharsis”. Just in case, she emphasizes that: “The audience, fully involved in the show since the very first second, experiences the first adrenaline rush of the night. Dionysus, the god of wine, the instigator of orgies, shows up: ‘Every man needs a bit of madness’ –a motto that he will repeat as a mantra until the end of the show. […] The people in the audience are mesmerized. They gobble up a scene and drool as they dream of the wonders of the next”. The audience are carried away in enthusiasm, apparently reaching a delirious state that urges them to dance using “relentless twerking moves”, and many (among which Pedro Almodóvar) are quick to take out their smartphones to capture the moment for posterity. The show concluded with the tragedy chorus admonishing the spectator with the severity of a coach: “Re-empower yourself. Enjoy your own tragedy. Breathe, just breathe. And imagine something new.”