Participation (art)

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The term participation [Participatio (Latin), from pars (part) and capere (seize, acquire, catch)] describes the participation, participation or co-creation of the recipient in an artistic work. The artistic work can be a work from the genres of the visual arts , the performing arts , music , literature or film . The term participation refers to participation from two different perspectives, from the point of view of the artists and from the point of view of the audience . Participation differs in different degrees, both among artists and among the audience. Because the audience is not to be understood as a homogeneous group either, but is divided into individual recipients whose perceptions differ and who thus participate in different ways.

The starting point of participatory practices can be the intention to establish contact, in the sense of sharing experiences, knowledge or sensual experience. Accordingly, participation is primarily a communicative act. It is also the prerequisite and, at the same time, an accompanying phenomenon for all artistic projects. Another intention can be the desire for participation and influence. Participatory practices are process-based, cannot always be clearly delimited in terms of time and are determined by explicitly formulated or silent agreements. These agreements are based on social, cultural and political norms, rules and values. They are shaped by conditions in institutions as well as by economic conditions and are at the same time reflected in them with regard to historical developments. The explicit agreements can, for example, be communicated to the audience at the beginning of a performance as a kind of rules of the game or possibilities of the process. Participatory practices in the arts can be observed in all cultures of the world - often even at the interface with political or social practices. In the following, with a few exceptions, reference is primarily made to the Central European and American regions.

Participation in performative arts

Forms of participation

Depending on the activity and scope for action, there is a gradual difference between active and passive participation. The mere presence in the auditorium of a classic theater house can already count as a form of participation. It cannot be ruled out that the audience may make statements that influence the actors on stage in their performance (e.g. by coughing, clearing throats, scratching their feet, heckling, leaving the hall prematurely, general restlessness, conversations among the spectators etc.). However, participation is often understood as the dedicated involvement of the audience. This gives them the opportunity to intervene in the overall artistic process in a performance or on a work of art within a generally predetermined framework.

With this painting, the painter Albert Guillaume shows very impressively how intense and different emotions can be in an audience. The reason here are theater-goers who are late moving into their seats. Original title: Les retardataires (The latecomers), oil on canvas, 1914

Active forms of participation usually assume the inclusion of an audience through calls for action. This can be done, for example, through a direct questioning of the audience, which is equipped with "yes" and "no" cards, or through other technical devices and thus made visible. The viewer can also be moved to participate by the actor, who no longer appears as such, but as a "real" person, in that he no longer has to behave towards the "real" person as a viewer. On the other hand, targeted provocation can prompt the audience to act if, for example, common norms of the theater situation are radically broken or the audience is addressed directly. Individuals as well as different groups can be addressed and in this way previous group formation and identification processes can be made visible. The question arises to what extent the audience needs to know about a performance situation. That means whether a theatrical situation is sought out of one's own decision, or whether such a situation can also be forced upon, for example when someone encounters a staged situation on the street.

Passive participation is, for example, the act of watching. In doing so, not only is perceived and recorded what has already been predefined by other parties (e.g. actors, performers, directors) as content to be broadcast, but perceptual content is interpreted and newly created. Performers can never overlook all possible interpretations, these are always pluralistic. In some cases, forms of participation are intended to act as a catalyst for making things visible, such as certain norms. They should be instructions for action in certain situations. They may be used to activate viewers for the purpose of mere actionism (in the sense of “more action against boredom”) or as a (political) instrument for practicing or legitimizing actions in the sense of a democratization of art.

Theoretical positions on the concept of participation

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno speaks of the difficulty of bringing about participation in art. In his opinion, art always takes place disconnected from “real” life. An art that tries to imitate life would come across as hypocritical and narrow-minded.

Claire Bishop

Claire Bishop relates the social turn in contemporary art, including the turn to social contexts in contemporary art , with the collapse of a collectivist social vision of the historical avant-garde in Europe in 1917. She sees the neo-avant-garde, the protest movements of the 1968s and the fall of communism in 1989 as central points for this transformation. According to Bishop, “a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning” is the driving force for participatory art. This can be achieved in two different ways: either through constructive gestures of social influence, which represent an alternative to the injustices of the world, or through a “nihilist redoubling of alienation”, a denial of the negation. The desire to challenge and revise the traditional relationship between art object, artist and audience is characteristic of contemporary art of the 1990s.

“… The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a 'viewer' or 'beholder', is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant. " - Claire Bishop: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

Bishop criticizes the application of ethical criteria at the expense of artistic values ​​when assessing participatory projects. The assumption that aesthetics is an independent realm of experience misses and in this way reduces the permitted realm of aesthetics. This practice leaves no room for paradox, perversity and negation within the aesthetic. Second, the participants underestimate the active / passive binary. Bishop's reading of Rancière shows that the binary of active / passive viewer behavior or good collective / bad singular authorship is not constructive. In this arrangement, the participants are assigned a “position of impotence”, which is reinforced by this perspective. Instead of focusing on demonstrable social influence when assessing participatory artistic work, Bishop insists on a diverse range of nuanced language to address the artistic status of these projects. At the same time, she emphasizes the autonomy of our experiences in relation to art: “... aesthetics in the sense of aiesthesis; an autonomous regime of experiences that cannot be reduced to logic, reason or morality. "

Claire Bishop cites the works of the Thai action or performance artist Rirkrit Tiravanija as an example in her discussion of the concept of relational aesthetics (relational art / relational aesthetics), which was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud, and the inclusion of the audience by critics and the artist himself as the main subject is attributed. Bishop sees in Tiravanija's work not only the need to undermine the distinction between institutional and social space, but also that between artist and audience. Tiravanija's work Untitled (Tomorrow Is Another Day) (1996, Kölnischer Kunstverein) describes it as follows:

"Here, Tiravanija built a wooden reconstruction of his New York apartment, which was made open to the public twenty-four hours a day. People could use the kitchen to make food, wash themselves in his bathroom, sleep in the bedroom, or hang out and chat in the living room. The catalog accompanying the Kunstverein project quotes a selection of newspaper articles and reviews, all of which reiterate the curator's assertion that 'this unique combination of art and life offered an impressive experience of togetherness to everybody'. “- Claire Bishop: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics

According to Bishop, Bourriaud sees the concept of relational aesthetics, with which the work of Tiravanija could be described, not only represents the theory of an interactive art, but also an instrument with which current practices in our culture can be identified. Relational art can also be seen as a direct response to the transition from an economy based on the exchange of goods to an economy based on services.

Allan Kaprow

The artist and art theorist Allan Kaprow tried in his happenings , e.g. B. to break through a seemingly passive spectator attitude, in which the guests fall into an attitude of mere spectating or, when asked for their opinion, always gave the same, predictable, stereotypical answers, but were themselves involved. In order to achieve this, he wanted to discuss the possible roles and action potentials with everyone present at a happening before the actual event and to include their opinions and actions. A time limit for a performance (e.g. a work) in the classical sense is broken here; the previous meeting with the audience could be described as a type of performance and precisely because of this, the entire time experienced would become a common happening. The artists involved in the production could also loosen their trained and sometimes stuck behaviors of their respective art in order to make them more lively.

“It follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely. All the elements - people, space, the particular materials and character of the environment, time - can be integrated in this way. And the last shred of theatrical convention disappears. For anyone once involved in the painter's problem of unifying a field of divergent phenomena, a group of inactive people in the space of a happening is just dead space. It is no different from a dead area of ​​red paint on a canvas. Movements call up movements in response, whether on a canvas or in a happening. A happening with only an empathic response on the part of a seated audience is not a happening but stage theater. " - Allan Kaprow: Notes on the Elimination of the Audience

Hans Thies-Lehmann

Hans-Thies Lehmann describes participation as a process that is based on the desire to have more co-determination and points to a weakness in democracy. This is also where the desire for participation in the theater lies, which “should be a place of manifestation, expression, and demand for groups that are often referred to as the 'voiceless'.” The aesthetic dimension of participation is reflected in the post-dramatic theater, whereby the reality produced by all participants (performer and audience) is continually brought into focus, which was previously the case with the aesthetic product of a staging. When participation takes place with everyone involved, the line between laypeople and professional performers also becomes smaller.

However, Hans-Thies Lehmann is also critical of participatory forms. In the case of participatory structures (in politics and theater), it becomes clear that participation is hardly real. Apparently democratic structures only work superficially. The artistic idea cannot be replaced by participation, so that art always remains exclusive to a certain extent and is influenced by different educational privileges and the consequences of objective factors in the living environment. Participation in the sense of participation in theater projects by so-called educationally disadvantaged groups is in principle a good thing, but should not be seen as a solution, since it only seems to be a reality for a few. The production structure in the theater as an institution is always up for debate when it comes to participation. As long as the existing structures, which can be traced back to an understanding of theater in the 19th century, are not dissolved, participation on an artistic level is only a facade.

Irit Rogoff

In order to differentiate more precisely between levels of mere participation and active participation, the art historian Irit Rogoff, who teaches in London, speaks of directed participation and non-directed participation (directed or undirected participation). In doing so, she develops a thought model that goes beyond a distinction between active and passive participation. With this attitude she contradicts the assumption that failure to act is not a conscious decision and therefore not an expression of participation. It describes the museum situation in which processes of institutionally directed attention take place. High culture therefore requires undivided attention (total attention) that should be directed in a certain direction. In the institutional framework of the museum, Rogoff establishes two models of belief (two sets of beliefs): on the one hand, the overriding belief in the singularity of the work of art; on the other hand, guaranteeing access to the work of art through undivided attention. She suggests untangling these two concepts of singularity and undivided attention in order to interpret the relationship between art and audience and their strategies of concentration.

At this point, Rogoff is looking for other ways of participating in culture (other modes of participation in culture) and suggests playing with our attention by e.g. B. look away. She says that culture (and by that the museum institution is meant) gives us the opportunity to look at something together. It is up to us where we direct our attention. It is not about controlled participation, but rather about setting a platform for non-controlled participation that makes participation of the audience possible in the first place. She turns away from the object / spectator dichotomy in order to instead allow space for the dynamic manifestation of a lived cultural moment. Rogoff assumes that art, in contrast to politics, offers possibilities for a multitude of identities. She criticizes the idea of ​​a stable identity by assuming a multitude of cultural and social identities that we use when entering a cultural institution such as a theater or a museum. She speaks of fragmented identities of a person that combine different aspects, such as the identity of origin, language, sexuality, class, etc. So she criticizes that in politics we are required to have a single stable identity so that we can then use it as this identity e.g. B. Vote to vote for a particular party. In art, on the other hand, it is possible to have multiple identities and to participate in different subjective positions. During such a visit, these identities are constantly changing and prompt the audience to engage in a sustained interplay between directed and undirected attention. She also refers to the traditionally one-dimensional role division of the audience into viewer, spectator, listener or the like. So when Rogoff speaks of directed participation, she means the approach designed by artists or institutions and the resulting approach to one or more artistic works . The term undirected participation, on the other hand, describes the non-directed participation of the audience, in which their attention is directed to unforeseen occurrences. The course of this attention and the events classified as remarkable are determined, according to Rogoff, by the numerous identities with which the audience enters the institutions.

Rogoff asks whether viewing an artistic work creates a kind of community between the viewers. She assumes that culture, in contrast to politics, offers the opportunity to shed light on a topic together without having to decide on a uniform approach to it. How each individual visitor deals with it, according to Rogoff, is up to him or her and is determined by the respective identities. The question about the community is finally answered in the affirmative when Rogoff sees this community as forming for a moment, which emerges from the communication of the concrete situation, location and physical presence.

Max Glauner

The Zurich cultural historian and journalist Max Glauner pointed out as editor in volume 240 of the magazine Kunstforum international , "Get involved! Participation as an artistic strategy", that a consistent theory of participation has not yet been presented. In addition to the ubiquity of the term, most authors forgot about history as a reason for this. For this reason, systematic-descriptive articles on contemporary art and theater by Christian Kupke , Raimar Stange , Mira Sack were juxtaposed with texts with a historical perspective by Christoph Asendorf , Inke Arns and Sabine Sanio .

Already in 2014, Max Glauner derived a tripartite way of the concept of participation in an essay on the media artist Georg Klein from the Aristotelian triad of art theory production - work - reception . Accordingly, participation or participation is not related to one of the three moments of classical art viewing, but is found in all three in the modes of participation, interaction , cooperation and collaboration . In contrast to spectacle and religion, which have a "be there-and-in-the middle!" call, a "in the middle and outside (-being)" is constitutive for artistic participation. According to Glauner, almost every reception is an interactive form of participation, a mode that the cultural industry can hardly do without. In contrast, cooperative and collaborative participation formats are a rarity. Both require highly complex production contexts, whereby the cooperation - often at the theater - still unites different actors under one artist personality and their signature, in collaborations rarely more than two actors act.

For Glauner, the contribution of the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel to the Icelandic pavilion The Mosque at the Venice Biennale 2015 is a paradigmatic example of a successful collaboration . While the artist cooperated with the biennale organizers, city administration and church in advance, the project could only be implemented in the Friction with the Islamic communities in Iceland and on-site collaboratively arise.

Participation and communities in theater and performance

Not only Irit Rogoff raises the question to what extent a community can be created in theater and performance . It can be assumed that theater and performance performances, due to their temporal and spatial limitations, can only create a community to a very limited extent. This would be characterized by a mostly ideological demarcation from other groups or communities, which would remain stable over a longer period of time. A community in connection with the theater or the performance is mostly limited to the time frame of the theater / performance events and then falls apart again. Participatory theater / participatory performance can therefore create a “ we-feeling ” and different group affiliations, e.g. B. through strong polemicism and / or the request to join a presented opinion visibly or at least to express oneself in some form. However, these are of a very limited duration and should not be viewed in the sense of an identifiable community, since theater and performance can only deal with a mostly small ideological area, the actors of which would not form a community outside of the performance / performance. Targeted rhythmization can also contribute to the fact that the actors of a performance “tune into” a common rhythm, so to speak, and thereby feel a strong sense of togetherness, which can overcome previously existing (social, cultural, ethnic, etc.) differences. But here too it seems difficult to speak of the creation of a community.

However, theater and performance are particularly suitable for letting various mechanisms emerge that can create a community and keep it more or less stable. These include a common ideological attitude, spatial proximity, the common experience of emotions, but especially the emergence of coercive communities due to existing, sometimes unquestioned power relationships and the resulting oppositions. In the entertainingness of such apparent communities in theater and performance, one can sense a lack of danger, which enables the actors to take a position relatively quickly without having to face the risk of experiencing a real disadvantage in retrospect - e.g. B. by permanent exclusion from a community or other sanctions that go beyond the performance. Such a danger can also be thematized and made tangible through theater or performance. This can be countered there in a playful way, the effective mechanisms such as fear, peer pressure, sympathy and the like. A. can be made conscious and tangible in a special way.

Historical overview

Based on today's perspectives on participatory practices, the following overview sheds light on some developments in forms of participation on the basis of selected examples from different centuries in Central Europe. Participatory developments and those that prevent the participatory character are highlighted.

Greek antiquity

Active forms of audience participation were found early on in the theatrical context. In ancient Greece, public participation was embedded in the context of Athens' democracy and its institutions. The theater in Athens was a social art form. Politically, it was an integral part of public life in the polis. The first evidence of dramatic art in ancient Athens can be traced back to 508 BC. To date. At this time, theater was performed as part of the Dionysian Festival, in which comedies and tragedies competed against each other. The influence, both of Athens' democratic ideals and the Dionysian nature of the competitions, resulted in exceptionally high levels of inclusion and participation (see Methexis).

The Greek theater choir of this time consisted mainly of male amateur actors under 30 years of age and achieved greater identification of the audience and the attention of the competition jury than professional actors. Public participation was also part of the competition result. Competition jurors were recruited from the public by lottery and these selected jurors were also required to include the opinion of the remaining large number of viewers. The audience had no qualms about knocking out a play that they disliked with loud whistles, shouts and trampling. Only from 420 BC In AD, public interest slowly shifted its focus from a choir of volunteer citizens to professional actors.

Roman theater

The theater in the Roman Empire experienced its heyday between the fourth century before and the sixth century after our era. It was influenced to a large extent by Greek theater, but varied greatly in occasion, content and forms of presentation. This section concentrates primarily on the types of theater in which audience participation was explicitly welcome. During the time of the Roman Republic (509 BC - 27 BC), public theater was mainly concentrated in religious festivals and the public plays ( ludi ) that accompanied them. Stage performances (Ludi scaenici) had been introduced since the middle of the 4th century BC. These games were open to everyone: citizens and slaves, men and women, and also foreigners. This diversity of the audience was reflected in the high variance of theatrical entertainment that was offered. The first written drama is ascribed to a former Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who performed his translation of a Greek play with the so-called Ludi Romani in 240 BC. He created Latin versions of Greek comedies and tragedies by adapting them for a relatively uneducated Roman audience.

The games were used by the authorities to maintain the morale of the civilian population during the Second Punic War . The content of the games was subject to strict censorship and control by the Roman aristocracy on the one hand, while on the other hand it was inspired by the taste of a largely uncultivated audience. This led to the exclusion of all political or social contexts with subversive potential and to the strong spread of slippery, sexualized jokes.

All theaters in the Roman Republic were temporarily built from elaborate, expensive wooden structures on certain occasions. The first construction of a permanent theater in the Roman Empire (44 BC - 476 AD) was made by the victorious General Pompey, the Great, in 55 BC. Above all, he created a place where he and later politicians and leaders could appear in front of a large crowd in order to present and consolidate their authority in front of the popular base. Pompey's theater, the prototype for many others throughout the empire, could hold up to 20,000 spectators and was probably the largest and also the most expensive theater in Rome. Theater presentations became a widespread political tool used by the emperors. Theatrical performances and games offered them the rare opportunity to be seen by their people and to communicate directly with them: by proclaiming the former, as well as applause and cheers, chanting expressions of disapproval or petitions from the latter. The interaction with the rulers and consequent participation not only in the theatrical performance, but also - at least hypothetically - in political life in the state became the focus of the event. The frequency and fame of the games grew to such an extent that the Roman emperor and the people spent up to a third of the year together in performances. Another theatrical manifestation, which also invited audience participation, was a new type of pantomime. It spread in the early period of the empire and attracted a large, enthusiastic peasant audience. The Roman actors themselves were officially considered dishonorable; they were subject to strict legal restrictions and their Roman citizenship was revoked, although some of them had attained the status of celebrities as we know it today. The last evidence of scenic entertainment culture in Rome was documented in 549 AD. The official theater disappeared within a few decades.

Medieval Europe

The early medieval public in Christian Europe can be described as an almost completely theater-free space, except for the antics, dance and acrobatics of traveling minstrels, which probably represent the only continuity of scenic entertainment from late antiquity to the Middle Ages.

It was not until the tenth century that the spiritual play of the high and late Middle Ages emerged as part of the Christian liturgies . They were scenic plays that essentially reproduced the biblical Easter, Passion and Christmas stories. Until the 13th century, the venue was limited to the church and the language of the performance was Latin. The games were not intended to be an illusion, but were a ritual that served the experience and constitution of all those present - actors and audience - as a religious community or community. "The viewer perceived the games like a living devotional image, like an exercise in piety."

From the 13th century onwards, social-realistic content occasionally found its way into the spiritual and, over the next centuries, more and more secular games. In addition, the performances found their way out of the church to the marketplaces or other public places, where they could take place on sometimes elaborately manufactured simultaneous stages and in non-Latin language. The reception of the audience, who was partially only reasonably aware of the separation of game and reality in the Middle Ages, was at times very emotional, so that, for example, in the 15th century the performances could be followed by religious mass hysteria or outbreaks of violence directed against Jews. At the same time, from the 12th century onwards, various games and customs emerged within the framework of the Carnival tradition, which took place every year in the six weeks before Lent. In this, the authoritarian order was suspended or not recognized by the actors for a certain time. Mocking songs, farces and satires were performed. Solemn processions allowed all parts of the population to participate.

Fixed theaters in the 16./17. century

Fixed theaters were never built at the same time. While the Elizabethan Theater was established relatively early on as a permanent theater with permanent troops, other European states developed in different ways.

The spatial and temporal fixation of a performance enabled a new relationship between artists and audience to develop. In a theater, in which the audience pays, has fixed seats and the stage space is a delimited space provided with props and backdrops, a consolidation of attention takes place that does not happen in a performance “in passing” in a public place. A performance becomes more of an event. However, the relationship between the work, the artists and the audience was quite different.

View of a theater scene in which the stage is clearly delimited. Interactions are always possible between the audience and the artist. Pietro Falca Longhi - Theater scene with Pulcinelle actor. circa 1780
England, Elizabethan Theater

Strictly speaking, the term Elizabethan theater refers to the work of theaters during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), although the term is also often used for the theater under her two successors ( James I and Charles I ). William Shakespeare and the Globe Theater , to which the following section refers, are considered to be special representatives of this era .

Around 1600, most London theaters held up to 3000 people in different seating classes, which offered a popular form of entertainment for all social classes at low prices. Between the various theaters and other forms of entertainment, such as bear baiting or cockfighting, there was lively competition for the audience, so the performances were mainly designed to please the audience. In this respect, the audience at the time participated implicitly in the content of the pieces - the theme, the design, the dialogues and the choice of costumes were adapted to the audience's preferences.

The audience of the lower classes (groundling, from the English ground floor visitors) stood in the inner courtyard directly in front of the stage and were therefore right at the action. Accordingly, he had the option of physically intervening in the performance. The leftovers of the food and drinks offered for sale were not infrequently thrown at the actors who displeased the audience. A disappointed audience in the inner courtyard could become aggressive and even physical; get entangled in scuffles that demolished the prop. In some performances, reference was even made to these disturbing excesses: in Hamlet's words, the groundlings are those “who mostly know nothing but confused, mute pantomimes and noise” [“are for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. ”] (Hamlet, 3rd act, 2nd scene). The seats in the stands surrounding the courtyard were more expensive, ranging from wooden benches to opulent lord's rooms for the nobility. For the upper classes, the theater was a place to see and be seen. However, this did not prevent the aristocratic audience from loudly announcing what they thought of the performance by cheering, boos and heckling. The Lord's Rooms were located on the balconies right next to the stage, so that their occupants could be seen almost as well by the rest of the audience as the actors on the stage.

Spain

In Baroque Spain of the 16th century, stages inspired by the Italian Commedia dell'Arte established themselves. However, shaped by Catholicism and the power of the Inquisition, the content of the pieces was very fixed. The audience was mainly served with comedies, which enjoyed great popularity, but which repeatedly manifested the earthly and heavenly order in a similar way. Artists played set characters that kept cropping up in similar ways while the audience was entertained in shallow and trivial ways, entirely in keeping with the nobility and the church.

France

The French stages represented the spirit of the time: especially under Louis XIV (1643–1715) the exuberant pomp found its way onto the stages of courtly theater. The moving backdrops and sophisticated stage machinery were sometimes so noisy that the music and language on the stage were drowned out in the noise. The staging of political power came to the fore, not least because, among other things, high nobility and the king himself tried to perform on stage as artists in order to present themselves effectively to the audience. And the courtly audience also got the chance to show themselves to the public in the theater. The distribution of seats in the stands was an expression of hierarchies and it was not uncommon for the artists to exert themselves on stage so that their costumes drowned out those of the audience in pomp and conspicuousness. Despite the separation of the stage and auditorium, there is a strong blurring of staging and reality.

Enlightenment in Germany

In the Age of Enlightenment , playwrights such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Friedrich Schiller , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Christoph Gottsched began to make decisive changes to the theater as a venue in Germany. This is also known as the beginning of bourgeois theater.

The audience, who until then had mainly been in a communicative exchange with each other in the auditorium, were now brought about by various means (separate seats, darkening of the hall, etc.) to get an undisturbed view of what was happening on the stage. While the auditorium should now have less influence on the events on the stage, the events on the stage were also far more independent of the audience. Unrest in the auditorium was stopped. This separation of auditorium and stage was also achieved by means of the so-called fourth wall , an invisible delimitation of the stage through which the audience could see what was happening on the stage, but the actors acted on it as an imaginary wall.

The aim of this new arrangement was to give the audience the opportunity to empathize with the action. Likewise, the dramatists, who at that time mostly staged their plays themselves, tried to show moralizing content on stage. Through empathy, the audience should be educated to be moral people. As a further consequence, the upbringing of the audience at that time constitutes the manners in the theater that are still common today.

New scope of the theater director in the 19th century

In the 19th century, the theater was shaped, among other things, by the concept of theater freedom , which describes the theater as often the only place for public gatherings. At that time the theater was in great demand, which brought new foundations and new buildings with it, e.g. B. the Deutsches Theater (1850), the Lessingtheater (1888) in Berlin and the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse (1869) in Paris.

At the beginning of the century, the task of the theater manager was still to bring the literary work to view and to guarantee that it was faithful to the work. Due to the danger of censorship imposed by the state, theater directors were mostly forced to control productions in order to avoid punishment. On the other hand, the opposite development emerged in the later course of the century. In many places there was now increasing talk of an arranger in the artistic sense, and bit by bit the professional profile of the director was emerging. Towards the end of the 19th century, the director was not only allowed to make decisions about the overall artistic conception of the work, but also to manage the rehearsals and the ensemble play. This shows an institutional hurdle which primarily made it difficult for other theater employees to participate in the creation of a performance.

Theater of the 1920s and 1930s

In the Weimar Republic, various avant-gardists refined their stage experiments. Erwin Piscator, for example, tried his hand at the idea of ​​a total theater. This was characterized by a high level of technical effort that put the audience in direct control of the action on the stage. With a similarly political orientation, the aspiring playwright Bertolt Brecht tried to establish his model of epic theater on the Berlin stages. In this model, Brecht moves away from the classic theater arrangement of stage and auditorium and orientates his theater towards a street scene. The communication between those involved, i.e. actors and audience, would have to grow to a new level. Brecht also oriented his theater towards sporting events in which the audience can participate in a far greater degree than in the theater that had prevailed until then. Just as Brecht wanted to force communication between actors and audience, this should also exist between those present in the audience - up to and including heated debates about the topics negotiated in the stage.

Overall, the 1920s were marked by a strong class struggle. Political currents from both communist and nationalist sides tried to win supporters for their goals. A large number of agitprop groups emerged as the offshoot of the so-called Volksbühne movement, whose aim was to make a contribution to the class struggle of the working class with their performances. For this purpose, the groups made use of different forms of performance. In addition to songs and small pieces, the choir singing together with the audience was an integral part of the performances.

The theater under the National Socialists was largely based on the achievements of the avant-garde. Furthermore, the Thingspiel movement , which is shaped by Nordic mythology, is noteworthy. Subordinate to the goal of the National Socialists - the creation of a homogeneous national body - venues were created with a capacity of up to 50,000 spectators. Regarding the form of the stage, they tried their hand at Max Reinhardt's arena stages and endeavored to achieve a direct proximity between actors and spectators. Choirs that were positioned in the ranks of the audience also assumed great importance. The Thingspiel movement lost its importance after 1936, after the National Socialist Revolution was considered to be over in its own ranks.

Participatory theater forms and currents

In a historical overview it is not always possible to clearly delimit developments, rather developments take place parallel to one another in different places, and mutual influences can only be traced to a limited extent. In the following, examples are taken up that appear relevant to the term participation from a European perspective with regard to various currents and forms.

Puppet theater

An example of participation that is already experienced in childhood is the puppet theater / Punch and Judy theater. The audience or the children play a role in the continuation of the plot. You will be included in the action; B. warn Punch and Judy about the villain. Her exclamations of warning are addressed directly to the puppet, so he can get to safety in good time. Without the participation of the children it would end badly for Kasperle - at least this logic of action is generated by asking the children questions like "Do you see the big bad wolf?" Without the children's information, Kasperle would not see the wolf and would be at his mercy. Jens Roselt also describes this fact as probably "for many people the first theater performance in their life in which they take part as a spectator". He bases this observation on the compulsory Punch and Judy question “Are you all there?”, Which prompts the child to answer and thus to act. The child is taken out of its passive spectator function.

Theater avant-garde

The theater directors of the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century resisted the peep-box stage and the separation of stage and auditorium that came with it. Directors such as Max Reinhardt, Wsewolod Meyerhold or Erwin Piscator experimented with stage forms that would open up new perspectives for the audience. A well-known example is the arena stage, which goes back to antiquity. Here the audience sits in a (not completely closed) circle around the stage. The actors become three-dimensional figures for the audience. This stage form also opened up new opportunities for the actors. The steps onto the stage took place, for example, in Reinhardt's King Oedipus - production by the ranks of the audience. The actors were thus within reach for the audience. In contrast to the theater of the 19th century, experiments like these represented revolutions in the theater and also formed the basis for theaters in which the audience is involved in the ongoing action

Theater of the Oppressed

Augusto Boal , born in Rio de Janeiro in 1931, developed the theater of the oppressed based on the "hidden theater" . The Invisible Theater , Forum Theater and Legislative Theater are methods or advanced models of the theater of the oppressed. Boal takes up this form again in the 1960s as a response to the military dictatorship in Brazil. The Invisible Theater works with interventions in public space that are played by actors without the bystanders being initiated into the fiction of the situation. In this way, the audience becomes actors at the same time and the actors in turn observe how the situation they initiate develops.

Performance and happening of the 1960s

The happenings of the 1960s are described in the section above on Allan Kaprow.

Participation in theater and performance today

Marina Abramovic during her performance "The Artist is present". The performance does not take place in a theater situation, but in the MoMa in New York. The audience has the opportunity to participate by intervening in the situation in some way

Immersive theater

The term immersive theater appears for the first time in the 21st century, originally comes from the English-speaking world and has not yet been used in German. It is a form of participatory theater in which the boundaries between the perception of those involved and the perception of their roles are shifted. Often public spaces or other non-theater spaces are used. Temporality in immersive theater can range from a few hours to several years.

The British theater company Punchdrunk is considered one of the pioneers of immersive theater. Examples from the German-speaking area are, for example, the Danish performance group SIGNA , the Austrian performance group Nesterval , and the German action artist Christoph Schlingensief .

Christoph Schlingensief, for example, emphasized at the laying of the foundation stone of the opera village in 2010: "The relationship between people should be the greatest work of art." Like the founding of the Chance 2000 party, the project is designed to be sustainable as an art platform and is being run by Aino Laberenz , widow of the deceased Schlingensiefs, continued. Art should grow out of life: visitors and residents of the village are audience and artist at the same time. The open-air stage is located in the middle of the village designed by the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré and is surrounded by a school, a recording studio, a hospital and other modules. They can be played on at any time or used as a podium.

The following three examples combine the direct involvement of the audience or participants in the events of the event. At the same time, these randomly selected examples also point out the differences in the way in which participation can be staged in a theatrical context.

SIGNA

The performance group SIGNA has been carrying out performances since 2001, which, precisely because of their participatory nature, have caused a stir with the public and the press. In SIGNA Performances, the fourth wall is completely broken open. The viewer is involved in the story of the performance and mostly moves freely through the rooms used by SIGNA, decides how much he is involved in the action, speaks and interacts with the performers. In this way the audience becomes part of the respective performance and an actor in it.

“Fourth wall? Nobody is tearing them down as consistently as Signa and her eponymous collective, nobody is making the audience so radically part of the spectacle. ”- Udo Badelt: Join-in theater. In the ninth circle of hell

In the 2013 Club Inferno production at Volksbühne Berlin, SIGNA played in an empty apartment in Berlin-Wedding. A club was created in which the public could enter as club visitors for several hours. To learn more about the history of the club and its residents, one had to get in direct contact with the performers, interview them, talk to them and follow their instructions. Individual viewers participated to such an extent that they undressed, performers kissed, dined together, washed each other and let themselves be whipped. In the subsequent performance Black Eyes, Maria from 2013 in the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, SIGNA invited the audience to visit the premises of a former school building, redesigned in the Klinik Haus Lebensbaum, as visitors to the “Open House”. You could get to know the families living there, represented by performers from SIGNA, talk to them, learn their story, play with them, eat, drink and at the end of the evening get together for a common celebration.

Gob Squad

The German-English theater collective Gob Squad , which has been dealing intensively with the topic of participation since 1994, repeatedly involves guests in their performances. In her work Saving the World from 2008, passers-by were addressed on the street and asked about their lives. B. who they are, what they work or what they like. The scenic survey is embedded in a futuristic or fairytale-like setting. The result is a mixture between documentation, staging and art project, which is mostly performed in front of an audience in theaters. In "Room Service - help me make it through the night", the paying “theater-goers” observe four performers from a lobby room in a hotel, who are each located in a room of the hotel and can each be seen and heard on a monitor are. Performers keep calling on a phone in the auditorium and trying to speak to someone in the audience. This creates a wide range of opportunities for everyone involved to interact with one another. Although the performers can orientate themselves thematically on different action episodes, the reactions of the audience are generally open and an independent form of the participatory performance, since parts of the audience repeatedly become the action-creating element of the performance.

CUE

With the CUE, the initiators have created a platform in Berlin that deliberately refrains from various definitions such as happenings, an interdisciplinary event, improvisation or jam, which evoke an understanding of an event that is too narrow for this format. Improvisation in an interdisciplinary context (music, sound, dance, performance, painting, video art and much more) was the starting point of the concept in 2007. Since then, CUE has been a regular (originally a monthly) meeting that takes place in a given room at a given time. Together with the participation of the participants, the general conditions of the event are named, since everything else should be generated in the course of the evening from the encounter with the unforeseeable (“a temporary encounter with the unforeseeable”). Since there is no director or director, the task of designing the evening is shared among all participants and their needs. The focus is on shaping the evening as a shared task and responsibility of the participants. In a narrower sense, “cue” is understood here as a communicative tool that is used in this process. The experiences from the practical encounters in various CUE events since 2007 are accompanied by a theoretical examination of the concept of the CUE. Questions like - What is an event? How can you create conditions that invite participants to participate even before the event has started? What kind of participation is expected in a CUE event? - asked and offered various possibilities to answer these questions.

Since 2008, the CUE project has taken place in Berlin, other European cities such as Madrid, Istanbul, Rotterdam, Palermo, Barcelona and Riga. In addition to the individual events in the above Cities, a common online platform was created, which enabled communication between the cities via live transmission. The CUE project has extensive online archives from which the documentation of the individual evenings as well as the theoretical continuation of the concept of the previous 7 years can be found.

literature

  • Theodor W. Adorno: Aesthetic Theory. Frankfurt am Main 1970.
  • Claire Bishop (Ed.): Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art . Whitechapel Gallery / The MIT Press 2006.
  • Manfred Brauneck : The world as a stage. History of European Theater. Second volume. Stuttgart / Weimar 1996.
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte: Aesthetics of the Performative. Frankfurt am Main 2004.
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte: History of Drama. Volume 1. From antiquity to German classic. Tübingen 1999.
  • Erika Fischer-Lichte / Doris Kolesch / Christel Weiler (eds.): Berlin theaters in the 20th century. Berlin 1998.
  • Michel Foucault: The order of things. Frankfurt aM 1974.
  • Martin Gessmann (Hrsg.): Philosophical dictionary. 23rd edition. Stuttgart 2009.
  • Allan Kaprow: Notes on the Elimination of the Audience. In: Claire Bishop (ed.): Participation. Whitechapel 2006. pp. 102-104.
  • Günther Heeg: The phantasm of the natural shape. Body, language and image in 18th century theater. Frankfurt / Basel 2000.
  • Susan Kattwinkel (Ed.): Audience Participation. Essays on Inclusion in Performance. Westport 2003.
  • Dennis Kennedy: The Oxford companion to theater and performance. Oxford 2010.
  • Heinz Kindermann: European theater history. 4th volume. From Enlightenment to Romanticism (Part 1). Salzburg 1961.
  • Hajo Kurzenberger: The collective process of the theater. Choir bodies - rehearsal groups - theatrical creativity. Bielefeld 2009.
  • Josef Oehrlein: The actor in the Spanish theater of the Siglo de Oro. Frankfurt a. M. 1986.
  • Jacques Rancière: The emancipated viewer. Edited by Peter Engelmann. Translated by Richard Steurer. Vienna 2010.
  • Irit Rogoff: Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture. In: Gavin Butt (Ed.): After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance. Oxford 2005. pp. 117-134.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Volume 1. London 2012. p. 3.
  2. ^ Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Volume 1. London 2012. p. 3.
  3. ^ Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Volume 1. London 2012. p. 275
  4. ^ Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Volume 1. London 2012. p. 2
  5. ↑ See among others: Rancière, Jacques: The emancipated viewer. Vienna 2010.
  6. ^ Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Volume 1. London 2012. p. 18.
  7. ^ Bishop, Claire: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. No. 110, October 2004. pp. 51-79.
  8. ↑ Kaprow, Allan: Notes on the Elimination of the Audience, 1966, in: Participation - Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Claire Bishop, Whitechapel, London 2016, p. 103.
  9. ^ Lehmann, Hans-Thies: Get down and party. Together: Participation in art since the nineties (I), in: Heimspiel 2011. Theater Workshops Symposium Festival, 2011, http://www.heimspiel2011.de/assets/media/dokumentation/pdf/HSP-Doku_D_Lehmann.pdf , booth : January 30, 2014.
  10. ^ Rogoff, Irit: Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture. In: Gavin Butt (Ed.): After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance. Oxford 2005, p. 127.
  11. ^ Rogoff, Irit: Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture. In: Gavin Butt (Ed.): After Criticism. New Responses to Art and Performance. Oxford 2005, p. 133.
  12. ^ Rogoff, Irit: What Does It Mean to Participate? In: Audio archive of the Blackmarket archive, audio recording on the topic: Lexicon of dance gestures and applied movements in humans, animals and matter; http://www.blackmarket-archive.com/#/31 .
  13. ^ Rogoff, Irit: What Does It Mean to Participate? In: Audio archive of the Blackmarket archive, audio recording on the topic: Lexicon of dance gestures and applied movements in humans, animals and matter; http://www.blackmarket-archive.com/#/31 .
  14. ↑ Kunstforum international Vol. 240, June-July 2016, pp. 28f
  15. ↑ Glauner, Max, “Talk to me!”. Modes of participation in Georg Klein , in: Sabine Sanio, (Ed.), Georg Klein. Borderlines , Heidelberg 2014, pp. 16–21.
  16. ↑ Glauner, Max, Get involved! Participation as an artistic strategy , in: Kunstforum international Vol. 240, June-July 2016, pp. 30–55
  17. ↑ Glauner, Max, Get involved! Participation as an artistic strategy , in: Kunstforum international vol. 40, June-July 2016, p. 52 ff.
  18. ^ Brauneck, Manfred: European theater: 2500 years of history. An introduction. Reinbek 2012, p. 123 f.
  19. ↑ Roselt, Jens: Phenomenology of the theater. Munich 2008, pp. 9-11.
  20. ^ A form of resistance of communist theater groups against fascism in the 1930s, which u. a. is also associated with Dario Fo.
  21. ↑ See: Boal Augusto: Theater of the Oppressed. Frankfurt am Main 1989.
  22. ^ Baselt, Udo: Mitmachtheater. In the ninth circle of hell. in: Der Tagesspiegel, online edition, March 11, 2013, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/mitmachtheater-im-neunten-kreis-der-hoelle/7911488.html , as of January 30, 2014.