On the Border of Participation

A summary: Jordan, K. (2016). On the Border of Participation: Spectatorship and the ‘Interactive Rituals’ of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra. Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Dramma, 4(1). 104-118

Jordan Kelly has been present in La Pocha Nostra performaces as 1) performing-spectator, 2) watching-spactator and 3) performer. She discusses her experience and observations during and after the performances, in order to investigate spectators partitipation in contemporary theatre and performance after the turn of the millenium.

La Pocha Nostra spectator

Kelly Jordan detects three modes of beeig-a-spectator in La Pocha Nostra performaces:

• performing-spectators
• watching-directing-spectators
• spectators who stand back and observe

The Border Politics of Participation

The past 20 years there has bee a shift of contemeorary theatre and performance towards “more particiatory, interactive and emmercive forms of spectatorship” —> pro argument: democratisation of the arts

Jacques Rancière’s Emancipated Spectatror challenges this pro argument: Rancière recognises an established opposition between looking and knowing, appearance and reality activity and passivity. Contemporary theatre and performace aknowledges this opposition and challanges it by trying to move the spectator from passivity to activity —> emacipation = demand for equality between performer and spectator.

His position towards emancipation: “[A] non-performing-spectator may be actively participating in a performance precisely because of their distance. In this way, the border gives them the space to make connections between the staged reality and their own life. “

David Beech: the participant-spectator may be more under the artist’s control than from a distant position.

Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance: “[it] is essential to ask whether role reversal establishes a community of co-subjects or merely recreates the old relationship in a new guise” (40). The bodily co-presence of performers and spectators has the capacity to destabilise the dichotomous subject-object relationship and re-establish the bond between the aesthetic, social and political in performance (43–44).

Borders can be turned into thresholds as well as used to provide the necessary critical distance —> “possibility that borders are capable of cultivating more than one kind of emancipated spectator

Spectator Partitipation <—> One-night stand

Spectator-participation is its own form of practice that evolves rapidly: some love it some hate it.

Those who hesitate

Alexander García Düttman: the resistance to participation derives from the fact that it does not come naturally and requires making an effort, a situation that is exasperated by a further contradiction of wishing to participate at the same time as wanting to be left alone.

“The frame of performance had given me licence to behave in ways that were otherwise outside of my everyday identity, but once the performance was over, I was left to contemplate and take responsibility for the consequences of my actions.” —>

Analogy between a participatory performance encounter and a one-night stand social encounter:

• motivations of hedonism and narcissism, which are often fuelled by alcohol
• need for physical intimacy (dissatisfaction at the level of intimacy achieved)
• environment and events, that “create a heightened state that lifts the individual from their everyday reality and lessens their inhibitions” (lighting, sound, enhanced atmospere) —> liminal qualities, like their ability to produce spontaneous social interaction between strangers —> liminal moments are transitory and quickly dissolve when we resume our everyday life
• the morning after: euphoria, embarassment, regret

Those who are willing

Alston’s concept of ‘entrepreneurial participation’ —> ‘expert participant-spectators’

Individuals that run after participatory encounters “have developed the knowledge of participation and the requisite techniques to improvise and reciprocate at will.”

Participation can socially divide the audience into those who are “participation-rich” and those who are “participation-poor”. “[A]lthough spectator-participation may challenge the established hierarchy of artist over audience, a new social structure between spectators is created.”

This new stucture can cause several reactions to the watching-spectator that could complicate hums relation to the work: jealousy, relief, anxiety, excitement, empathy, inadequasy, admiration, regret, self-reproach, shock.

“Of course, the role of the watching directing-spectator in La Pocha Nostra’s performances gives onlookers a chance to regain some power back from the performing-spectators, without having to cross the border.”

The Paradox of Participation

A participant-spactator is placed in a paradox situation: hum occupies at the same time two positions which are mutually exclussive; hum is simultaniously on one side of the border as audience and on the other side as a performer not willing or not able to loose one identity in favor of the other. Hum unconsiously is self-aware of what hum is doing, hum is looking as an audience at what hum is doing as a perormer and this informs hums further doing as a performer.

Jordan Kelly concludes: “participation as exemplified in the work of La Pocha Nostra reorientates borders and unsettles the dichotomies on which narrow perceptions of performance are founded, most notably the subject-object relationship and the notion of looking and doing. However, the paradox of participation is that the border that separates the artist from the spectator can never be fully crossed because we are unable to completely abandon our role as the audience. It is also apparent that as some borders shift, others take their place, such as the personal boundaries set by participant-spectators, or the divisions between the modes of spectatorship. Nonetheless, I suggest that it is the opening up of the border between the spectator and the performer that gives participation its raison d’être. For it is in this liminal space that the transformative power of performance may
be revealed”.