Spectatorship, participation and the position of the critic/ Diana Damian
Commissioned by SPACE: Writers on the Move
Published in Portrait of a European Critic, October 2011
Contemporary notions of distance are versatile, atomic, narrative and interchangeable. Increasingly, we are testament to shifting cultural topographies in which the local and the global, the personal and the public, the social and the political interact. Postmodernism has dislocated the relationship between how culture is produced and how it is received. Its legacy has left contemporary performance and inherently, its discourse, with an interest in fluidity, relationality and thus the displacement of authority.
There has been a shift in the hierarchy of cultural voices. Theatre practitioners are interested in providing audiences with narrative and formal agency, crafting temporary communities and carving utopic encounters. This is a landscape with an increasingly hybridized aesthetic, topical concerns and language that has arguably been responding to the changing nervous system of a global society. This concern with the direct encounter is a manifestation of the relationship between artistic practice and flows of meaning- the form of communication becomes a medium, not an objective, thus creating a circuit of shifting criticality.
This affects contemporary politics of distance within the performance ecology; audiences are invited to shift and adapt narratives, engage in formal play and inherently, in a critical position towards the work. Yet as Hal Foster underlines Roland Barthes’ “death of the author does not necessarily mean birth of the reader”[i]. These circumstances are only simulations of micro-communities with isolated rituals and models of social and intellectual engagement that are not synonymous with wider societal practices.
The practice of the critic, responsive to the wider ecology and concerned with the production of knowledge and meaning, has been widely affected by this shift. Reliant, at least historically, on a critical distance between both cultural receptors and producers, it has become vulnerable in light of the developing politics of spectatorship. The task that traditionally belonged to the critic- that of enquiry and articulation of meaning, has been shifted by the development of the embodied critic- the limited agency with which audiences operate in participatory theatre. This direct encounter has positioned the critic within, not outside the creative act, thus shifting the formation of meaning and diluting critical distance.
The contemporary critic is, to borrow Augusto Boal’s terminology, a spect-actor, embodied in the performance act, observer and active participant with the limited ability to influence the narrative or formal development of a performance. Arguably, there has always been a flow of meaning between spectator and performance. Yet the shift emerges with the externalization of this subjectivity and its reorientation back into the performance. If traditionally the audience member took a critical position to no direct effect in the performance, participatory theatre relies precisely on this position to affect the perception and sometimes form of the live experience. The critic can no longer be an incognito audience member, and is therefore forced into a different formal dynamic.
Critical discourse has been institutionalized by the performance industry in an ecology of micro-democracies where cultural transactions are enabled without the necessity for mediation which criticism provided. There is a fundamental issue here; if these micro-democracies operate in isolation, the same applies for the critical discourses. Therefore the practice of criticism has a new set of challenges: negotiating the direct experience of an event with a clear critical position, participating without the direct interference of critical expertise in the performance act, and crafting a new language to adequately critique hybrid forms. Add to that the growing pressures of a problematic publishing industry and the availability of cultural voices propagated by artists, producers, institutions and marketing departments.
The performance ecology needs a potent discourse to remove institutionalized modes of thought; in a theatrical vocabulary of hybrids and micro-communities, the critic is the cultural operator who can articulate the noise and formlessness, elucidating the almost apolitical relationship to social politics that performance has appropriated. There is a need to reposition criticality and expertise within this growing ecology.
The practice of criticism is an inherently reactionary one. If performance appropriates dynamic notions of distance, then criticism needs to also examine the cultural transactions it is part of, its form and dramaturgy, in order to reposition the practice at the heart of cultural discourse and make sense of the contemporary performance ecology. Critical examination needn’t require a radical shift, but a clear negotiation of its variables in light of this dependency. Distance and objectivity can no longer be the remit of the critic, yet expertise and a wider view of contemporary symptoms can.
The incessant formal experimentation of participatory theatre has led to its consecration, but it underlines the need for a critical response that both acknowledges the direct encounter and underlines its problematics. There is a distinction that needs to be made between performance and its discourse in order to avoid standardization.
Despite the fluid distance that performance has appropriated, the critic’s position requires independence, and this needs to be negotiated in light of the contemporary performance practice. This is a unique moment for the practice of criticism to deconstruct its mode of cultural reception and articulate the discursive requirements of contemporary performance. This involves carving new space for a developed and more diverse form of critical practice: the critic as an active, independent curator of public discourse.
[i] Hal, Foster, ‘Arty Party: Chat Rooms’, London Review of Books (London, 4 December 2024)
Tagged: SPACE, Writers on the Move