“Open space”: The spectator's place in contemporary theatre communications

Abstract

Contemporary theatre theories (E. Fischer-Lichte, H. T. Lehmann) put forward a new, “anthropological” understanding of a staging. The theorists suggest giving up the idea of a staging as a production which is enclosed into a frame and in this way resembles a work of literature or a painting, and put forward the thesis of a theatre performance as a meeting of actors and spectators — an event with no preliminary set limits, but only those that are created in the process. Such an optics presupposes that special attention is paid to the fgure of the spectator and to his creative role. If the spectator is viewed as a partner, a new category of analysis needs to be introduced. This article proposes to introduce the notion of “spectator's comfort”. It must be distinguished from spectator's comfort in traditional theatre communication: that one is based on care about the comprehensibility of the director's message and is, basically, a sort of patronage over the spectator. Spectator's comfort in contemporary performances originates in the idea of the spectator's freedom, of an open space, preserved for him in the performance, and of renunciation of forceful measures to infuence the audience. As an example of an experimental performance, comfortable for the spectator, we analyze Heiner Goebbels' “Max Black, or 62 Ways of Supporting the Head with a Hand”. The strategies utilized by Goebbels (an invitation to a “scientifc” experiment and intensive observation and self-observation; turning to the diary form, where the fgure of the other and interaction with it are abated; specifc work with corporality, and so on), fully belong to the author and combined in unique way. However, despite their singularity, they serve as a brilliant and spectacular example of how the category of spectator's comfort is being developed in contemporary theatre communications.