Many years ago in a small theatre, a brief conversation with the person next to me. I was on the edge of surprised when she, in her mid-thirties, made clear that she had nothing to with performing arts. Perhaps slightly prejudiced, but in particular as she wasn’t in company with a friend. She expressed that she didn’t come to the theatre – in this one the program was largely dance – to be entertained. As an audience member I have a responsibility to what I attend. It’s not like going to work or anything like that, she said, but an active practice and this activity, she continued, is like a contribution to the performance or at least the situation.
As the light in the saloon started to dim, she whispered, “I’m here to do something, not just receive, you know, something already chewed and ready to consume. That I can do in front of my screen, and if the people on stage think I’m here to have a nice time,” before the darkness settled, she tapped her temple with her index finger a few times.
It was quite uplifting to be let into my neighbour’s spectator’s philosophy, and however kind of tacky, I remember a close friend, for decades insisting that theatre, or art in general, never is a matter of pleasing. Interestingly my compadre Jan never continued his argument, he never told me or the world what performing arts were supposed to be, just not pleasing. Not challenging, asking questions, change or make the world a better place, not to be revolutionary, destructive, fashionable, trash, empowering, cynical, it was simply not there to please. Hope was definitely not an option. As an old school Marxist, Jan would never fall for the temptation of hope.
It didn’t matter or perhaps it was essential that art didn’t know what other than pleasing it was. But pleasing, no matter what, meant rocking the audience members into the slumber of consumption, of passively receiving already agreed upon opinions, conventions, norms, morals, ethics and politics.
The opposite of pleasing however is not theatre, dance and art that engages with urgent topics. Evidently urgency is already pleasing and something that it feels great to engage with.
Together we, me and Jan, categorically refused to talk about the audience, always only audience members, which we understood as single entities that must not be grouped together under any circumstances. The idea of the audience as a collective, that could be addressed as one, a group or community, was something we had exorcised after being acquainted with the Italian thinker Paulo Virno, who made a strong distinction between a multiplicity and a multitude, where a multiplicity is a number of individuals or entities that can be grouped, whereas a multitude consists of entities that cannot, that can only be addressed as singular individuals. A multiplicity is made up of entities that are different in degree, such as humans, mammals, pianos. There are differences but they are not different in kind, which is the case of a multitude.
In regard to a multiplicity, the price to pay for belonging to a group, however, is the absence of a personal or individual voice. As Virno proposes, what arises from the multitude is not voices but an undefinable complaintive murmur. Indeed, when a head of state addresses the people, what is overlooked is the individual. The people are one and the single person’s requirements is not, cannot and must not be taken into account. When performing arts play for the audience, it no longer consists of singular existences, with their specific needs and demands, but only of a grey mass of anonymous nobodies. It goes without saying that every multiplicity is hierarchical and power oriented. It cares for everybody but can’t see you, at least as long as you don’t break the law.
The multitude is not cheap either but the price to pay is reversed. Here the individual possesses a singular voice but has no social network, no community to hide within and people or community to belong to. The multitude is a lonely place, and mind you, if you break the law or somebody breaks you nobody will take notice. The law is on vacation.
Multi this or that is not more or less favourable but the difference is crucial and what they do in the world is fundamentally otherwise. Concerning the realm of governance, it is clear that multiplicity operates in the domain of politics, whereas revolution is the travel companion of the multitude, which, exactly because it’s incompatible to group, is incompatible with politics, in the sense that Jacques Rancière proposes, politics being the maintenance of the polis, the city state.
There’s evidently a practical complication connected to any form of multitude, as long as it’s understood through Virno’s rather radical perspective. A multitude cannot have extension in time or in space, considering that any extension implies the establishment of relations which catapults multitude into, spot on, multiplicity.
In the arts, perhaps in particular performing arts, the conditions are overlapping although not identical to the realm of politics, after all we are in the protected space of the theatre. In there the conventional understanding is that we, the audience members enjoy, possibly because the defined timeliness, the safe and confirming support given by a multiplicity, the audience. Many, perhaps even most, visit the theatre not for what goes on on stage but primarily to be part of and perform being the audience. Theatre as social ritual, and even though what happens on stage is challenging or provocative it’s still pleasing, because after all the multiplicity confirms the identity of the individual, who as we know have no voice, which also means that one need have no opinion about no nothing at all. Comfy!
Now, to circumvent pleasing what’s needed is not noise, conflict, violence, spit, blood, high tech, provocation, activism, crude politics, nudity or authenticity, but the construction of a situation that lures that individual spectator out of the multiplicity, that generates momentum or activity in the individual audience member to emancipate themselves from, so to say, the crowd, and thus generate a moment’s multitude.
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Generally speaking, there are two models discussed in regard to emancipation. The violent version represented by the situationists and Guy Debord. In short: If you don’t emancipate yourself, we will make it for you. Brute force, and some 30-40 years later through Jacques Rancière, who understood that for a moment to qualify as properly emancipatory it cannot be designed, strategic or directional. If it is, emancipation is nothing more than general independence, and the connection to multitude flips over to multiplicity.
It’s important to underline that emancipation for Rancière isn’t anything like moving out of your parent’s house, being ghosted by an affair, deleting an addictive app or even terminating your artistic career. In fact, it’s much worse and in ways exponentially more violent. Emancipation implies the emergence of a voice, a voice that cannot be contained by the multiplicity, the context within which it emerges. An altogether new voice which means that it’s also foreign to the individual in the process or moment of emancipation. This is why emancipation is worse and potentially violent, it’s a moment in which the individual’s self, his, her or their personhood is under active and possibly devastating pressure. Emancipation is incompatible with safe space, it’s even a moment to which we have no defences, no boundaries or modes of protection, indeed because it’s a new voice. Mind you, a new voice is not an improved, improvised, alternative, artificial or strange voice. Those are still identifiable. The voice emerging out of moment’s emancipation is new, it exists but has no identity.
Emancipation happens to an individual and according to for example, the French philosopher Alain Badiou, collective emancipation is very rare and coincides with the revolutionary moment, so to say the moment when revolution kicks in, that millisecond of critical mass. It’s however a misconception that emancipation is personal. It happens to your person but isn’t personal. It’s individual but with a twist. Because it cannot be repeated it’s individual and singular, but simultaneously, as it gives way for the emergence of a new voice this voice can potentially, from that moment on be “used” by everybody in the entire universe. Emancipation is singular and individual at the same time as its universal and access for all, one could say it’s public, properly public. We should just remember that the multitude is categorical, there’s no grey scale or gradient, it’s singular and universal but nothing in between.
Contrary to what might be an initial interpretation, emancipation has nothing to do with individualism nor with development, instead it implies a moment of suspense or withdrawal of identity. Emancipation happens to your person but at that moment that person is not you but just a person.
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Theatre, perhaps art in general, has conventionally been closely associated with interpretation. The recipient is supposed to engaged with interpretation, which, somewhat categorically, implies to locate, secure and situate what is happening, is in front of you or meeting your ears. Observations and identified signs are then compared and related to already acquired information and knowledge. In short, interpretation, again somewhat categorially, consolidates identity, knowledge, relations, ethics and politics as we know it. Interpretation, obviously, isn’t dirty or bad behaviour, it rather feels fairly nice, it’s even pleasing, because you figured it out. Afterwards in the foyer you can deliver your unexpected yet brilliant interpretation to the awe of your fellow audience members or you can feel stupid because you sense that you didn’t get the code, couldn’t decipher intricate connections or didn’t have the references, as one says.
Interpretation rides in company with multiplicity and the dark side of interpretation is that however original your perspective might be, it’s still just a perspective. However smart your mise-en-scène of Hamlet is it’s still just good old Hamlet, no emancipation, no way.
To Jacques Rancière theatre or art must disassociate with interpretation, cannot be about leaning back and contemplating plausible, possible or probable scenarios, references, citations, what have you. To the French philosopher any such theatre is stultifying the audience, underestimating them as if they need guidance, support not to get lost and are unable to make their own minds up. Theatre or performing arts, to him, isn’t in the first place at all cerebral, but a matter of production. Not in the sense of a theatre production, but the starting point for the possibility of emancipation is that interpretation is discarded in favour of the production of meaning located in the individual audience member, thus a production that’s singular to each person. No, the audience isn’t supposed to get up on stage, they’ll be fine sitting down, what Rancière refers to is the production of meaning, or sense, and it’s this process that at times can give way to moments of emancipation, but only as long as there’s a form of gap, shortcoming or maybe leakage between the sense giving presentation and the audience members’ modes of sense-making. Emancipation, can be said, to be the production of new forms of sense, making it possible to bridge the sense-giving presentation and sense in regard to meaning.
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Over the last few years accessibility has showed up as an urgent matter. Accessibility in respect of giving different groups and individuals in our societies opportunities to spend time with art is obviously not something that can be bargained with. In a democratic society all citizens should have an equal right to participate in art and related events, but here access is not concerned with the art but primarily buildings, transportation, support in the form of audio description, sign language and related forms of guidance. It’s another form of accessibility that concerns me, where everything has to be explained and where anything that cannot be immediately grasped, consumed and understood must be re-worked, re-imaged or even erased, and not only in regard to content but also in respect of timing, or simply dramaturgy. Nothing can be too long or too short, stretched or fragmented, there must be one story not three or none at all, parts are obliged to be connected so that they make sense, put together in a pleasing and followable order, nothing can be superimposed without being anchored to the foundation, everything must be arranged so that there can be no ambiguity in regard to meaning, significance or attention.
But how come no one has started screaming, objected loudly or just put on a strike, because accessibility is indeed the demise of any possibility of emancipation, of any dissensus, to use Rancière’s wording, between sense and sense (sense-giving presentation and sense in regard to meaning). Accessibility is even the end of interpretation because without any leakage or opacity between parts and a whole, beginning and end etc. only one perspective is authorised. But most of all accessibility implies an utter lack of trust in our audiences, as individual audience members and as a group, in regard to their ability to make their own minds up, finding their own ways through or even to consider the possibility that they are happy as ever to get lost and remain lost.
Moreover, consider the moment when somebody argues that a certain art work isn’t accessible because it doesn’t align with an agreed upon political opinion. Does that not mean that art runs the risk of having to submit to the general liberal populist modus operandi that more or less rules at least the entire Western world.
I’m of course not arguing for difficult for difficult’s sake, elitism or some snobbism, but if we want to protect art from society’s destructive attitude to art, we, and we’re in a rush, need to have a serious conversation around accessibility, because when accessibility rules we can just as well stay home and look at our screens consuming even more numbing images designed to keep us away from each other, from intimacy, wonder and magic, from forming communities, from being passionate, from being politically active, from caring about the small and the big, people and the planet, art and emancipation. Because contrary to accessibility art and emancipation are not forms of escape, of making anything easier, they are the beginning of intense forms of engagement, of change, and the making of worlds.