The Audience: Its Role

and Imagination 1

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Performer and Audience

• In a world of technological innovations,
how has theatre survived?
• The relationship between performer and
audience:
– The special nature of that relationship
– The chemistry of that contact
• We are not just in the presence of the
performers—they are also in our
presence.

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Performer and Audience

• The essence of literature and the visual
arts is to catch something at a moment in
time and freeze it.
• With the performing arts that is impossible,
because the performing arts are not
objects but events.
• Theatre focuses on one thing and one
thing only—human beings.

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Theatre as a Group Experience

• Unlike other art forms, theatre provides a
communal experience.
• A theatre audience does not contemplate
theatre individually, but rather as
individuals within a
larger group.
• Without an audience,
can there be a
theatrical event?

© T. Charles Erickson
© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Audience Makeup and the

Theatre Experience
• It is not just important to have an audience, but
also to know who the audience is.
• Are the audience members homogeneous or
from a variety of backgrounds?
• Some factors that contribute to the audience’s
makeup:
– Gender
– Race
– Socioeconomic background
– Geography
– Age

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Separate Roles of Performers

and Spectators
• Audience involvement
• Aesthetic distance
• Observed theatre
– Audience participates
vicariously and
empathically
• Participatory theatre
– Involves participation through
direct action © Steve Liss/Time Life/Getty
– Creative dramatics,
sociodrama,
Participatory theatre is a means
psychodrama, and
drama therapy to another end—its aim is not
public performance.
© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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The Imagination of the Audience

• The audience’s role in the
creation of illusion:
– Willing suspension of disbelief
• Believing in fantasy
• Accepting drastic shifts in time
and space
• Rapid movements back and
forth in time
• Anachronism
• In theatre, the audience
must be as willing to use its
imagination as are the
performers.
© T Charles Erickson
© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
 1-8

Tools of the Imagination

• Symbol
– A sign, token, or emblem
that signifies something
else
• Metaphor
– Stating that one thing
is another in order to
describe its meaning
more clearly

© R. Morely/PhotoLink/Getty Images
© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Imaginary Worlds of Theatre

• Realism
– Brought to you by
Ibsen, Strindberg,
and Chekhov
• Realistic elements of
theatre:
– Resembles observable
reality
– Characters rooted in recognizable human truth © T Charles Erickson
– Characters with life histories, motives, and anxieties
– Setting and costumes that reflect where “real”
people would live and what they would wear

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Imaginary Worlds of Theatre

• Nonrealism
– Nonrealistic elements of theatre:
• Everything that does not conform to our observations of surface
reality
• Poetry not prose
• Ghosts, soliloquy, and
fantasy
• Abstract design
elements
• Dreams and symbols
– The surface of life can
never convey the whole
truth.
© Craig Schwartz/Center Theatre Group, Ahmanson Theatre

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Stage Reality vs. Fact

• Whether theatre is
realistic, nonrealistic,
or a combination of
both, it is not the
same as the physical
reality of everyday life.
• No matter how
involved we become © Richard Termine

in a theatrical event, it is important that we

are always aware on some level that we
are in a theatre.

© 2015 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.