The Piece Comes to Life through a Dialogue with the Spectators, not with the Performers: An interview on participation with Dries Verhoeven

Abstract

This interview focuses on social and carnal dimensions of participation in theatrical performances developed by the Amsterdam-based director and stage-designer Dries Verhoeven. His pieces – audio-walks, gaze-dialogues, chat-conversations, live-cinema-events – take place in the public space and motivate the audience-members to make their own decisions and to interact with performers or other participants in one-on-one constellations. Verhoeven tries to maximize the presence of the audience. He reflects the specific quality of communication in performances and demonstrates, how it differ from the conventionalized nature of spectatorship in theatre: Initiating encounters and an intersubjective mode of participation, he tempts to make the participants aware that the piece is happening right here and right now with the people who are really there. As his performances function as proposals, which only offer an aesthetic frame for the spectators, Verhoeven regards every kind of behaviour as legitimate in order to share thoughts, moments, feelings with other people. Analyzing the social marks and cultural boundaries in the urban public, on the one hand he talks about the power of the spectator's conventional expectations and consolidated social acts. On the other hand he exemplifies dramaturgical and aesthetic strategies, which avoid a politics of distance and stimulate contingent actions and interventions.

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