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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
The Emancipated Spectator provides a useful framework in this subject, I will
start by presenting this, because then Bond’s work can be placed in relation to
Ranciére’s argument. Ranciére claims that there are two dominant concepts
of the role of audience in theatre today. And they are the
two paradigmatic attitudes epitomized by Brecht’s epic theater [sic] and Artaud’s
theater [sic] of cruelty. On the one hand the spectator must become more distant,
on the other he must lose any distance. On the one hand he must change the way he
looks for a better way of looking, on the other he must abandon the very position of
the viewer. The project of reforming the theater [sic] ceaselessly wavered between
these two poles of distant inquiry and vital embodiment.*”*
Ranciére argues that both of these attitudes build on the underlying
presumption that the position of the viewer is in some way inferior to that
of the performer and that they need to be moved out of it. Either through
‘opening their eyes’ to change the way they see or through ‘raising’ them
into the role of performers as well. Ranciére contends that both are based
on the understanding that looking is a bad thing for two reasons. Firstly,
because it is “deemed the opposite of knowing. It means standing before an
appearance without knowing the conditions which produced that appearance
or the reality that lies behind it”.*?? Secondly, because watching is seen as
the opposite of taking action. “He who looks at the spectacle remains
motionless in his seat, lacking any power of intervention. Being a spectator
means being passive”.%° Rancière disagrees with this position and maintains
that the spectator is active when he is just watching what is on the stage,
because “looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution,
and that ‘interpreting the world’ is already a means of transforming it, of
reconfiguring it. The spectator is active, just like the student or the scientist:
He observes, he selects, he compares, he interprets”.**! He contends that
rather than abolishing the difference between stage and auditorium, or
instructing the audience on social situations, the viewer needs to be able to
make his “poem with the poem that is performed in front of him”, because
“she participates in the performance if she is able to tell her own story about
the story that is in front of her”. Ranciére’s stance is that the principle of
equality can be realised in theatre if the artists understand this creative
process in the audience and respects it as equal to their creative processes.
328 Jacques Ranciére: The Emancipated Spectator, Artforum International, 45, 2007/7, 272.
3% Ibid.
330 Ibid.
#1 Ibid., 277.
372 Ibid.
+ S8 *