1565, Italy.
As spectacles are flourishing and intermedi, those extravagant street events, are at their peak, Francisco de Medici decides to celebrate his recent marriage in a unique event combining music, stage design, dance, and other special effects. Painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, known for his decorative skills, was put in charge of building the venue. Vasari takes over a space in the Palazzo Vecchio, turning it into the first permanent theatre in Renaissance Italy. He creates an elongated space with a stage at the front, areas for the audience at the sides, and at the centre, on a square platform, the sitting place of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and his wife, Joanna.
The structure of western theatre was subject to many changes and transformations in the following centuries, yet its driving principles remained the same. From Andrea Palladio's Teatro Olimpico to the Shakespearean Glove, theatrical spaces were arranged according to the sitting place of the exclusive viewer – the ruler, the king, the mayor, the philanthropist, the duke – seated in the centre of the tenth row. The speech, the movement, the vanishing point are all directed at them.
The framed stage of the proscenium and the fourth wall have both become established in the standard theatre layout; a convention dividing the venue into a geographical map of points of view, tracing a socio-economical distribution of ticket purchasers. Today, the computer program of the Israeli Opera marks chairs in different colours, according to their price: a red chair is 350 NIS, and a green chair is 145. It seems stage art is the only art in which the audience, the common people, settles for a partial experience, whereas the king and duke are entitled to an uninterrupted view. Anyone who has found herself sitting behind a pole or stretching his neck in the fifth balcony knows exactly what I mean. I do not know any cinema goer who will agree to miss parts of the screen, or a museum visitor compromising for the upper part of Michaelangelo's Pietà. Some will surely claim that as the gaze is necessarily decentralized and unfocused in live shows, each viewing angle provides a complete personal experience. Yet the key question is not what the audience sees or misses, but towards whom the stage is directed, on which perspective axis it operates.
The seating place of the king is not a purely architectural question. A complex relationship of love, hate, courtship, and treason takes place between the stage and the spectator's seat. This visual perspective calls for a certain kind of works, actors, and seats.
The frontality of that transparent fourth wall in the naturalistic play is only an alleged solution to the question of seating places and the location of the king. We are asked to believe it is a live, autonomic world, unaware of being watched, and as a consequence, free of responsibility for providing a "democratic" point of view. This world is asking us to believe in its neutrality. But how can we explain that to theatre subscribers, whose gaze meets the performers' forehead from the second balcony?
In the early 20th century, theatre figures such as Gordon Craig, Oskar Schlemmer and later Robert Wilson and his colleagues brought this frontal, focused relationship to extreme. They understood the proscenium was a continuation of a visual art convention, a frame of a living image oriented towards the centre of the venue. The dramatic tension in formal and plastic works such as Wilson's Einstein on the Beach or Heiner Goebbels's Hashirigaki revolves not only around the actor's body, but between the four sides of the square stage as well. Plays of colour, shape, light, shade, and scale take place on stage, creating a dynamic visual language based on absolute frontality – like the visual language of the cinema screen, a sort of stepbrother to the proscenium. Watch a Robert Wilson work from the first row or from a side seat, and you will miss most of it. In another step towards the complete framing of the gaze, British director Pete Brooks creates a black fourth wall at the front of the stage, with a gap resembling a cinema widescreen. The complete flattening of whatever happens on stage, the change of scale and the transformation of theatrical seats into cinema chairs cancel the hierarchy of viewing at once. Just like in cinema – the camera defines the perspective and the point of view.
As opposed to these hyper-frontal theatre makers, experimental groups such as The Wooster Group and Richard Foreman, and later on, choreographers like Pina Bausch, Alain Platel and Sasha Waltz have broken scenery perspectives, thus also breaking the entire dramatic and narrative process. The show remained frontal, yet the theatrical event was shattered. These shows revolve around multiple axes at the same time. The centre of the stage is abandoned in favour of an eclectic, chaotic event, which cannot be encompassed with a single gaze. Each seat presents a different encounter with the work, an intimate introduction to a certain moment. The location of our seat draws our attention to a particular performer, an individual plot line, a specific event. We learn to let go of the whole picture.
We have sat on many different seats. Seats made of stone, concrete, wood, or plastic, padded seats and worn-out seats. Eventually one's bottom gets tired and one needs to stretch one's feet. The break from the Western theatrical tradition and the influence of modern art led to the creation of the Happening and performance art. In other words – we must get up. No more reserved seats. We roam about, free to come closer or remain distant, to participate and take part. We can have a drink, arrive late, and leave whenever we please. The open event asks not only for our gaze, but for our presence. The viewers' involvement in the work frequently makes them into its active subject, and the artist into a catalysator. In Marina Abramović's Imponderabilia, the subject of the work is the contact between gallery visitors and the naked body upon entering the exhibition, and in Yoko Ono's Cut Piece, the audience is allowed to cut the artist's clothes, as she sits on stage, completely passive. As in classic theatre, it is human behaviour that is being examined, but here it is the audience's behaviour that is at focus: the real drama is their reactions, their decisions and choices.
Whether we decide to participate in the event or stay sitting in our chairs as onlookers, our presence is part of the dialectic of the event. The audience's embarrassment is often the key driving force. Whether emotional or intellectual, it emanates from the inability to distinguish ordinary action from artistic action, to decipher the artistic structure, to identify the difference between performer and spectator. The works of Spanish Fura de Baus or English Punch Drunk are characterized by a club-like experience, marked by hysteria and ecstasy. The seemingly spontaneous event is created by carefully organized processes, inserted with staged moments. These undermine the spectator's trust in the genuineness of the experience, intensifying the sense of danger: the young man that was brutally stripped and taken to the hanging pole, is he an actor or a performer? Will the young woman who locked the spectators in the room come back to set them free?
Let us return to the Renaissance spectacles and to the city's open areas. The city is once again the central stage, and also a dramatic world that is being researched. The actions and images are created out of the specific site. It is an experience of roaming and searching, it is a show that is a visit and re-discovery of familiar places.
At times, it addresses a specific audience interested in participating in a guided tour. In Night in the City by Forced Entertainment, the audience explores the city of Sheffield in a tour bus, as they listen to explanations from the guides. Actors playing local residents blend into the city. During this part-documentary part-fictional guided tour, an urban mythology is being written. Like in cinema, the city becomes an object of desire, a collection of narratives through which the spectator-tourist travels.
Austrian group Theatercombint intervenes in the architecture itself. In Bambiland, performers march on the bank of the Danube wearing huge loudspeakers on their heads. They recite Alfrieda Jelinek's highly charged text as if they were political announcers. The city absorbs their voices and messages, which blend into the clamour of trains, buses, and cars. The spectator is the random resident, who came upon the show on their way from the train to the supermarket. The show becomes an inseparable part of the urban landscape.
In addition to the active spectator and the random audience, there is the typical postmodern spectator – the spectator who sits in his desk chair in front of the computer screen. In the virtual space – absolutely personal, yet social and global – every spectator is king for a day. The desk chair is the ultimate combination of all previous seats.
The person who occupies it is the peeping spectator, the participant, operator, tour participant and wanderer. In Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now, the virtual and theatrical experience merge into an audience-operated urban game. Sitting in front of a computer screen, the spectators use it to control and direct the movement of runners across the city. With an exceptional syntax, the show combines the physicality of running, the drama and effort of the actual event, and the absolute detachment of the operator sitting comfortably in front of the screen.
From seat to armchair, from participation to staring.
Power is back with the people. We sat in the king's chair.
We are the sole rulers of a world in which we no longer participate.
Translated by Michal Shalev