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Audiences have a role

Published Monday 26 October 2009 at 11:00 by David Micklem and David Jubb

In response to Roger Foss’ argument against interactive theatre, artistic directors David Micklem and David Jubb explain why they are acknowledging and celebrating audiences’ creativity in a season at Battersea Arts Centre

In October, we’re looking forward to a season of theatre that celebrates the creativity of its audience. Battersea’s 150-year-old motto is its title and inspiration - Not For Me, Not For You, But For Us.

Audiences will design and create their own community in Home Sweet Home, develop their own stories and characters in A Small Town Anywhere and dance the night away in Handbag.

In last week’s Stage, Roger Foss had a bit of a pop at this emerging interactive theatre form. So we’re exercising our right of reply and, in the spirit of our season, we’ve invited some of the audience from scratch performances of A Small Town Anywhere to contribute.

We’ve enjoyed plenty of cracking nights out watching more traditional forms of theatre. When it’s good, we get a buzz from the chemistry that writer, director and performer can create. But we’ve often found ourselves disconnected from the storytelling going on ‘over there’. We think great theatre is enriched by recognition of the presence of audience members in the same room. Too often we have sat in auditoria where it feels like the story played out in front of us would continue whether we were present or not - theatre’s version of the old riddle about the tree falling in an empty forest.

Theatre is a broad church and we think experiment is at the heart of its future. Indeed, traditional approaches to theatre-making wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for artists exploring new language, content and form. Great writers are usually serial experimentalists - constantly trying new things out, finding out new ways of telling stories. If theatre is to continue to evolve, it shouldn’t just be left to writers to experiment. We think that artists from all kinds of different backgrounds and disciplines should be enabled to create theatre. That’s not the same as threatening the existence of writers. It’s about recognising that the possibilities of live performance are diverse and that by celebrating hybridity - rather than fearing it - we create more possibilities for theatre’s future.

The work we develop and present at BAC is informed by both the presence of our audience and by the building in which it is presented. After a decade of scratch - a process now adopted and adapted as far afield as Sydney Opera House, involving artists creating work in dialogue with audiences - we know that audiences can contribute significantly to great new ideas for theatre. From Jerry Springer - the Opera, to The Masque of the Red Death, to our forthcoming 1984 with Blind Summit, audiences can help tease out the brilliant potential of new theatre shows.

Because Not For Me, Not For You, But For Us is all about this interaction, we thought we’d ask audiences who have seen A Small Town Anywhere in scratch performances at BAC to respond to Roger’s thoughts. Here’s a sample of their replies.

• Paul Bennun: “Please tell Philip Glass, John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Arnold Schoenberg and Benjamin Britten that procedurally generated works of art are less valid artistic statements or in some way trivial propositions for audiences as related to works devised using older, equally valid, methods of creation.

• Anna Wexler: “If the aim of theatre is to educate, then it is well established that the best teaching involves participants in the process, guiding them towards discovering the ‘right’ answer for themselves rather than merely telling them it. Small Town, along with most other emergent theatre, clearly has an aim and a message, but the audience are guided towards realising this message for themselves. And through participation in this process, they learn a lot more than they would have done by merely watching the action unfolding in front of them in a passive way.”

• Fergus Dick: “People who want to sit and be entertained whilst not being part of the experience are misplaced in the theatre. They may cower in the darkness behind proscenium arches, but they would be better off watching TV.”

We agree. We think audiences are excited and hungry for this kind of work, and our role is to support the artists who are interested in making it. Roger states that “it’s a profound mistake to assume that the traditional story-actor-spectator relationship has to be a deadening social control device, or that hip-and-happening audience interactivity is in the vanguard of liberation”.

There’s a desire to create a polarity here that we think does a disservice to the value of diversity in theatre. Of course theatre needs well-made plays written by ace writers, served brilliantly by directors and performed by highly skilled actors.

But we also can’t afford to let theatre ossify around one narrow, old-fashioned definition of ‘good theatre’. Theatre is enriched by a diversity that seeks the most appropriate new forms and acknowledges the creativity of its audience, and this is exactly what Not For Me, Not For You, But For Us celebrates.

• David Micklem and David Jubb are joint artistic directors of BAC

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