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Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts
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Worst Participatory Experience
Version of record first published: 15 Sep 2011.
To cite this article: (2011): Worst Participatory Experience, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 16:3, 108-112
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Worst Participatory Experience
While the word ‘participation’ has come to have
an almost entirely positive meaning in art, politics,
sociology, etc., many of us may remember moments
when we were made to participate in something and
the experience was just terrible, and we couldn’t find
any good point in the whole thing even in retrospect.
As we did not want to brush that aside in our issue,
we made an open call and also asked people we knew
for personal accounts that portray the dark side of
participation in the performing arts. The following is
what we received in return. The authors could choose
whether they wanted their full name to appear with
the text, their initials only, or remain anonymous.
kai van eikels
This is about a theatre performance that happened
at an alternative place. The time when the curtain
was expected to rise had already passed, and I
rushed to the venue with a map that indicated
the way to a temple. At the temple they had a
funeral decoration, and there was a ticket counter
as reception for a ceremony. It seemed that many
actors, costumed as staff and attendants, had
already started to perform. I told the ‘receptionists’
about who’d invited me to the show, and they led
me to the second floor, where I thought would be
tonight’s theatre. Upstairs then, a coffin was there.
Suddenly I realized that this was not a performance
– it was somebody’s funeral service. I went pale,
and hurried off the hall with downcast eyes. And
found out that the performance happened at a
temple next door. It goes without saying that I
hardly remember how the performance was.
at / j a p a n
As a part of a performance by a director, whose
works I otherwise highly admire, I once visited an
apartment house in Tokyo. I knew neither that it
was a living community nor what to expect there.
After finishing dinner alone, I went to the given
address on a cold, rainy November evening, but some
other participants and I had to wait for latecomers
outside the building. What made me feel even more
uncomfortable was that we were told to wash our
hands for disinfection and pay a fee in advance. By
the time we were allowed to enter, it had already
become so icy that the enthusiastic reactions of
the staff and the latecomers to a guided tour by an
inhabitant appeared to me only strange. I found the
women’s blatant pride about their household rather
annoying. And I finally gave up participation and fled
when we were informed that the inhabitants and
visitors would share dinner – and the fee was for that.
h i t o s h i ta n a k a
I remember attending a performance of The
Show Must Go On, by Jerome Bel, and two times a
spectator went onstage when the actors performed
‘I Am Watching You’. These spectators might have
thought, ‘I can do that’ – or, ‘I also want to be there
and watch from there’ – or they just went because
the dancing looked so easy to do. The outcome in
both cases was quite violent, as the other spectators
revealed by the way they were watching that
actually there is a whole ‘technique’ or ‘technology’
that had been developed by the actors and the
director to perform ‘Watching You’. So somehow
it showed how performing is not participating,
or something in that direction. Another memory,
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Worst Part i c i p a t o r y E x p e r i e n c e s
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which goes in the opposite direction: During a
performance based on improvisation by Régine
Chopinot at the Théâtre de la Ville called W.H.A.,
a spectator went onstage and danced with the three
dancers during the fifteen last minutes of the show.
That was quite incredible, as he was not invited to
do so, and as he was himself not a dancer (that you
could see). But his way of moving was applying the
rules he had understood from the forty-five minutes
of the performance he had watched. The dancers
were surprised, and first they seemed to reject him
a bit, but he insisted and was then integrated. Thus
the trio became a quartet, and the spectator said
after that experience, ‘I was sitting on my seat, and
I felt that I wanted to take part from the other side,
I wanted to be there, I wanted to try and feel what it
does.’ So he participated in something that looked
very complex and succeeded in transforming the
conventions for himself and for the other spectators
who suddenly did participate in another way: ‘If
he does it, we can do it too’ – or, ‘He is crazy, I
could never do such a thing’ – or, ‘He does it and
he is an extension of me sitting here, he makes
me participate’ .… He showed how participating is
performing.
xavier le roy
I have always had an aversion to joining standing
ovations against my will. Standing ovations
have become quite common at performances of
classical music and opera – too common. I want
to believe that standing ovations are reserved for
exceptional moments and outstanding performance
achievements. Even admitting that people have
very different criteria for what is “exceptional” or
“outstanding,” it is clear that standing ovations
are about something other than the quality of the
performance alone. They are regulated by a certain
notion of public ethics and social propriety. They can
be awkward and embarrassing if you don’t want to
stand. They raise uncomfortable questions: If I don’t
stand, am I insulting the performer? If I don’t stand,
am I insulting the people who are standing? If I don’t
stand, will the performer think I really hated it? Or
might he actually have a better conscience knowing
that some people can distinguish a good from a
109
mediocre performance? These questions would
logically apply to clapping as well, yet I have never
been bothered by the pressure to clap along; it feels
less committal. The act of standing up evokes other
performances of obedience from my childhood:
saying the pledge of allegiance, answering questions
in the classroom, responding to the priest’s “all rise”
(which is interesting asymmetrical with his command
“you may be seated”). I don’t want my participation in
the arts to be tainted with such ritualized gestures.
The standing ovation is supposed to be earned, not
foreordained. And yet sometimes, even when I don’t
feel it has been earned, I resist, protesting silently
the pressure, and then … stand with the rest. This
replaces one form of bad conscience with another.
There has to be a better way to participate!
dana gooley
My worst experience was with the James Joyce
Liquid Memorial Theater when I was a teenager.
I don’t remember the name of the piece I saw,
just that it was performed at LACMA (the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art). The audience
was blindfolded and led through a so-called
‘sensorium’-cum-experimental-play that basically
and, really, only seemed to be a flimsy excuse for
the performers to grope and caress and torture
the audience members relentlessly with hippie
platitudes involving the words freedom and love
in the name of liberating them from the fascism
of their sexual and emotional reserve, or some
such crap. The only thing it did for me was give
sensuality a permanent bad name.
dennis cooper
Participation is not engaging me in a staring contest
in the name of pure, unmediated co-presence.
t i m o t h y m u r r ay
Don’t forget to sign the Visitors’ Book
At the end of many extraordinary, boring or
forgettable events, I suffer a feeling of dread, a
condition of sheer blankness in relation to the
experience I have just encountered. The sensation
is compounded with thoughts of guilt and pressure.
My unease arises from the prospect of a foreboding
g e o r g i n a g u y reference:
Agamben, Giorgio (2009) The Signature of All Things :
On Method, New York: Zone.
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Boston area, circa 1980–1. Lesbian-produced musical
– musical – about health hazards in the workplace.
Excruciating from the beginning, since performers
could not act, sing or dance. Friend involved; couldn’t
leave. Then, during the intermission, audience
members were asked to fill out a questionnaire
about health hazards that we faced on our own jobs.
The second act began with performers dramatically
intoning audience responses. Seemingly forever.
Various
invitation, the opportunity to sign the ubiquitous
Visitors’ Book and transcribe my immediate reply.
Syntactically this is a volume owned by visitors,
a chance to put a signature to my own experience.
In these terms, I’m not sure what I fear exactly:
that my comment won’t be up to the mark, neither
fundamental nor perceptive enough. Deeper than
this runs a concern as to what this apprehension
says about me as researcher and participant.
Agamben writes of the status of the scholar as
precisely dependent on ‘the ability to read these
ephemeral signatures’ and in extension to write
them (2009: 73). Surely I ought to want to write in
the book, to document my own presence on this
occasion. Worse still, surely I ought to know what
I want to write, have some innate response that is
eloquent, imaginative and astute to contribute.
My partner, in contrast, feels no such necessity or
culpability. He is happy to leave his participation
undocumented, not, as far as others are concerned,
to have been there or responded. This complicates
my reaction further. Conversely, why I am not happy
for my encounter to remain private? Why do I have
an impulse, no matter how perturbed, to proclaim
my attendance? After all, my signature adds ‘no
real properties’; if I do not leave a signature the
performance or exhibition remains qualitatively
unchanged (Agamben 2009: 40). My anxiety is
about active reaction and leaves me synchronous
neither with those, like my partner, who can accept
participation as concurrence, nor with those who
easily represent and document this synchronicity.
To sign is to authenticate; it is a communicative
gesture, positive or negative, a means of
distinguishing and directing attention. A sign is
a trace, a vestige or perhaps indicates an event to
come. The reading of Visitors’ Books is certainly an
officious pleasure and it may be this enjoyment in
the annotations of others that develops my unease.
Each decision as to whether to leave an entry in the
Visitors’ Book is situational. Each time, however,
this entry blights my leaving.
erica rand
The worst thing I saw along these lines was what
would be called today a ‘performance installation
piece’ about forty or so years ago in New York. It
was called Live with a Family, and it consisted of a
group of actors pretending to be a family living on
a stage set in an off-Broadway theatre. You paid a
fee and could come and go as you like. One of the
performers was O-lan Jones, aka O-lan JohnsonShepard. She was Sam Shepard’s first wife. Many
years before he wrote a play for her called Firensic
and the Navigators, which was quite entertaining.
She sang ‘A-Hab, the A-rab’ at one point. Anyhoo,
he eventually left her for Jessica Lange. It was quite
a messy divorce climaxed by O-lan serving him the
papers herself on the set of the film Country, which
he and Lange were shooting. He made a play out
of that, Fool For Love – turned into a film by Robert
Altman. O-lan’s film appearances include Edward
Scissorhands and Natural Born Killers. Anyhoo, Live
with a Family was boring as hell, so in an attempt to
liven things up I tried to start a conversation with
O-lan. This violation of the fourth wall completely
threw her, and she began to berate me. This was
fun for a while, then she stopped – seemingly
exhausted. She didn’t just stop talking to me, she
stopped talking with anyone else. The whole thing
ground to a halt. So I left. The next day I learned
the show had closed.
david ehrenstein
No such things as ‘worsts’, but variable discomforts:
In the mid 1980s I was witness to an
uncomfortable hybrid of ‘mediaeval feast’ and
‘new writing’ that climaxed (and collapsed) when
a ‘guest’ who had accepted the offer to engage in
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Worst Part i c i p a t o r y E x p e r i e n c e s
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banter with the actors was spat upon by an overexcited ‘jester’; director and managers leaping in
to restrain and placate, the ‘performance’ segueing
into compensation negotiations.
A mistake for which I must take responsibility
– in a TNT production ‘Gorbi and the Dragon’,
the initial action was interrupted by a (fictional)
strike by the performers, and the audience were
urged to seize the stage and perform the play for
themselves. Following a review in the Socialist
Worker newspaper, a number of Socialist Workers
Party members turned up and did just that – they
were then at a loss as to what or how to perform,
and the actors, uncomfortably, and in mutual
embarrassment, ushered the revolutionaries from
the stage.
When I was 10 years old (forty-four years ago)
our school was visited by the then groundbreaking Theatre In Education company from the
Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, UK, for a participatory
performance-workshop based on the Siege of
Kenilworth Castle (1266 CE) – four members of
my class (including myself) were chosen to lead
groups of children representing different military
forces. Unfortunately (not listening) I missed the
instruction to attend a briefing at breaktime, and
when the workshop recommenced I led my force
into a heroic (but histriographically unhelpful) rewriting of events.
Perhaps the most conventional form of
participation is the applause of an audience. In
the late 1970s I was present when an audience
at the Winter Gardens, Weston-super-Mare, UK,
intervened through applause to stop a performance
of a short Edward Albee play that they considered
unsuitable for its ‘family’ audience. At the end of a
scene the audience clapped and clapped, and when
the actors attempted to begin the next scene they
clapped again, this went on until the actors gave up
and abandoned the performance.
phil smith,
december
2010
Back in college my friend Miriam Hartman, currently
the principal violist of the Israel Philharmonic
Orchestra, asked me to play the continuo part in
a performance that she and her friend Monica
111
Gerard, currently on the faculty of the Hudson River
School of Music, would be doing – with orchestra
– of Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto. I agreed
readily, assuming I’d be playing the part on piano
– my own instrument. At dress rehearsal, however,
I realized that I’d be playing this on harpsichord –
an instrument I’d never even touched before. The
orchestra was horrified, it seemed, to see – and hear
– me fumbling around. (They must have expected
– from hearing Miriam describe me – someone like
Wanda Landowska or Rosalyn Tureck. Instead, they
got a Rosalyn Dreck.) The audience, eventually – or
at least ones there in the know – were horrified as
well. I, too, was horrified – until, that is, I finally let
myself listen to a tape recording of the performance.
Not bad, I thought. Then again, I could barely hear
myself on it.
kevin kopelson
Berlin, June 1996: I was told not to miss Christoph
Schlingensief’s Rocky Dutschke ‘68. Upon our
arrival, actors dressed as police were calling out
orders into the crowd and busily checking out the
area when Schlingensief turned up to present two
of the evening’s main protagonists in a kind of
twin pack: Rudi Dutschke, spokesman of the West
German student movement, and himself, master of
ceremonies and spokesman of the performance, in
an ill-fitting wig and with a beaten-up megaphone
in his hand. Half an hour later we were asked to
enter the theatre. The stage designer had removed
all the seating, replacing it with a stand in the
middle of the stalls upon which stood a tent and a
banner explaining that this ramshackle installation
represented the small town in East Germany where
the real Dutschke had grown up during the 1950s.
The theatre-goers could find themselves a place
somewhere in between on the wide steps of the
floor, which had been affixed with tape bearing the
phrase ‘More emotion!’ When the first gentleman
was required to drop his trousers in order to
bathe his bottom in milk in the style of an African
ritual (and actually did so), it became clear that
things could become uncomfortable. Following
this scene, two of my friends went to sit at the
edge of the auditorium. They were well advised.
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Astrid Meyerfeldt came running up. She yelled at
my boyfriend, ‘Why are you putting up with this?
Why aren’t you defending yourself?’ And while she
got involved in a scuffle with Schütz to prevent him
from dragging my boyfriend away, she shouted at
the audience, ‘And you lot? You’d rather gawk than
intervene?’
Various
Only ten minutes later the actor Bernhard Schütz
stormed up to my boyfriend, of all people. Before
he knew what was happening, Schütz had taped
his ankles and was dragging him by the arms to
the stage. ‘You’re coming with me!’ he screamed.
Neither my boyfriend nor I knew how to respond.
We weren’t used to being bulldozed in such a way
in the theatre. But here one couldn’t tell how far
things would go. What should we do? We didn’t
want to make a bad situation worse. As I was trying
to undo the tape as quickly as possible, the actress
s a n d r a u m at h u m
[Editor’s note: After this truly terrible experience, Sandra
decided that she had to work with the man who was
responsible for it and became his assistant from 1998 to 2002.]
***
Statler: That was wonderful!
Waldorf: Bravo!
Statler: I loved it!
Waldorf: Ah, it was great!
Statler: Well, it was pretty good.
Waldorf: Well, it wasn’t bad …
Statler:Uh, there were parts of it that
weren’t very good though.
Waldorf: It could have been a lot better.
Statler: I didn’t really like it.
Waldorf: It was pretty terrible.
Statler: It was bad.
Waldorf: It was awful!
Statler: It was terrible!
Waldorf: Take ‘em away!
Statler: Bah, boo!
Waldorf: Boo!
***
112