Getting Together and Falling Apart: Applauding audiences

Abstract

Looking at recent and historic audiences, this article investigates the possibilities of participation in theatres which are provided by the synchronizing potential of applause.

Applause is a negotiation of acknowledging and estimating a performance (in the sense of its success), and it is being produced by and authenticated through gestures. It is aimed at an object, an accomplishment, a performance, and at the same time at all the others who constitute an audience in that very moment of acclamation or disapproval.

The article asks about the individual and/or collective quality of this action, being an expression of enthusiasm and a way of collective recognition with a collectivizing effect, especially effective in an organized form of clapping in 19th century Paris: the claque. Doing so, it becomes clear in how far the work spectators and listeners do is being subjected to a similar process of differentiation and refinement as the one the performers go through.

Proposing to investigate a historically established, rather non emphatic concept of participation allows to put under scrutiny the ways in which participation is informed by synchronization and rhythmic differentiation. The idea of action (within the audience) at the intersection of moving and being moved is of central interest for this article's argument. Taking a closer look at the dynamics of (historical) audiences reveals the manifold options beyond passivity or activity which turns this odd singular into some sort of plurality, a collective divided many times in itself, constituting engagement with a performance between affirmation and difference, pleasure and critique. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide whether ‘progressive’, participatory performances are in fact enabling, while ‘conventional’ performances have the effect of something like a sedative.

Notes

¹ Premiere Leuven, Belgium/Playground Festival, STUK, October 31, 2008. Concept, choreography and direction: Ivana Müller; Performers: Katja Dreyer, Karen Røise Kielland, Bojana Mladenovic, Pedro Inês, Daniel Almgren-Recén, Rodrigo Sobarzo; Text: Ivana Müller, Bill Aitchison and the performers; Lighting design and technique: Martin Kaffarnik; Sound design: Viljam Nybacka; Artistic advise: Bill Aitchison. A video trailer of the performance can be accessed at http://www.ivanamuller.com/videos/. All quotes from the performance according to my notes during the performance from October 23, 2009.

² This resonates the way in which processes between stage and auditorium are being addressed through the model of a ‘feedback loop’ by Erika Fischer-Lichte. According to Fischer-Lichte, the ‘opposition between acting and observing collapses’ (Fischer-Lichte, 2008: 59). As ‘perceiving subjects’, spectators act by doing certains things and by what is happening to them. (This latter aspect – central to me – is not explicit in the English translation of this passage (cf. Fischer-Lichte, 2004: 100).)

³ I would like to thank Kai van Eikels for pointing me to that.

⁴ This is not a closed chapter of theatre history. Besides from evidence that theatrical claques still existed way into the twentieth century (or still operate today, see the documentary on today's Italian opera houses Opernfieber; written and directed by Katharina Rupp, D/CH 2004), the claque has a still vital afterlife most notably in the pre-recorded applause of the television laugh track. There are more recent phenomena though like the professionally organized trading of ‘likes’ on Facebook.

⁵ Until now, there has not been written any substantial study of the claque, only shorter essays and passages in histories of theatre, opera or music. Nineteenth century literary texts e.g. by Berlioz, Balzac, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam as well as treatises or autobiographies by former claqueurs serve as source material.

⁶ Quote from Ivana Müller's Playing Ensemble Again and Again.

⁷ This information was accessible at http://www.ctopera.org. After the closing down of the company, the website was shut down.

⁸ See Rogoff, 2005. Irit Rogoff's account of participation as ‘looking away’ makes an interesting claim for distraction and distorted or defocused attention as an important mode of engagement with art.

⁹ Weingartner, Felix, Erinnerungen an die, Parsifal‘-Aufführungen 1882’, in Weingartner, Felix (1923) Lebenserinnerungen, Wien/Leipzig, (quoted in Csampai, 1984: 131).