• Home
  • About
    • About this Blog
    • About Andrew Taylor
    • Contact
  • Subscribe
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Getting in our own way

February 12, 2008 by Andrew Taylor

Charles Isherwood in the New York Times has mixed feelings about emerging theater works with an emphasis on active audiences, where the viewer plays a significant role in the way the event unfolds. It may be event-worthy and alluring to new audiences, he thinks, but it lacks many of the essential qualities of complex narrative and ”serious theater.”

Part of the problem with such interaction, he suggests, is that while we’re wandering through the interactive setting, we are too aware of ourselves to get lost in the experience:


If we are too conscious of our own presence in the presence of art, it can be a distraction to engagement. Think of how hard it is to connect with a beloved painting if you come upon it after too many hours in the museum, your feet sore and sticking to the floor. The mind is most receptive when our sense of ourselves as physical entities impinging on the world can be forgotten, and we are free to open up to a new experience.

It’s a subtlety worth exploring, as all roads in the lively arts seem to be moving toward more visibly active audiences, less traditional audience chambers, and less sitting quiet in the dark. Isherwood even wonders if our common definition of ”active” is starting to skew toward visible and physical action rather than more invisible, internal forms.


…it is worth reiterating that to be an active participant in a theatrical experience, you don’t have to put on a mask or have your feet fondled; you just have to be spiritually present.

Filed Under: main

Comments

  1. Scott Walters says

    February 12, 2008 at 11:06 am

    Isherwood isn’t examining his own preconceptions. Why is “getting lost in the experience” more complex than actively participating? Historically, such passivity is a recent development: Goethe is the one who shushed his audience and lectured them on how an audience should behave — quiet like mice. But when theatre was healthier, active audiences were expected.

  2. Sean says

    February 13, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    As a working storyteller, the concepts of “me” vs. “them” instead of just “us” are pretty odd to me. I struggle with static art. Is this “be quiet now” just more of an extension of the inability of the audience to find relevance in “legitimate” theater? Why the silence in a museum- isn’t silence another form of contribution or is it just passivity?
    Excellent post.

  3. Heather Clark says

    February 15, 2008 at 12:26 pm

    Thank you for including Isherwood’s article this week. My company actually included it in an e-blast that we sent out yesterday, as we currently have a promenade performance up in Chicago. This performance style is one that we have experimented with multiple times and each time we receive wildly different reviews from critics and audience members. Consistently though, avid arts participants find this a new, exciting way to experience live performance in a shared environment. Perhaps it is a passing fad and will be replaced in the next few years, but promenade performances quick upward trend in popularity speaks to the need for theater to step out of the Naturalism/American Realism box and respond to our modern culture.

  4. Chris Casquilho says

    February 15, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    I used to work in a vaudeville theatre. We liked boos, hisses, and huzzahs. That’s an active, engaged audience.
    Isherwood seems to be getting at the idea of context. There’s a great article about audience and context by Gene Weingarten published in April 2007 in the Washington Post – “Pearls before breakfast.”
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
    “In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” writes Weingarten, “Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.
    ‘Optimal,’ Guyer said, ‘doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.'”
    In Isherwood’s case, he’s talking about internal and external states as they relate to the ostensible degradation of optimal context by audience participation. Participation as an end in itself is a distraction; participation to aggrandize the ego is destructive; what manner of participation lends itself to the optimal context, and what is the intended outcome?

About Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

ArtsManaged Field Notes

#ArtsManaged logoAndrew Taylor also publishes a weekly email newsletter, ArtsManaged Field Notes, on Arts Management practice. The most recent notes are listed below.

RSS ArtsManaged Field Notes

  • The bother of bylaws July 8, 2025
    Does your arts nonprofit's map for action match the terrain?
  • Minimum viable everything July 1, 2025
    Getting better as an arts organization doesn't always (or even often) mean getting bigger.
  • The rise and stall of the nonprofit arts June 24, 2025
    The modern arts nonprofit evolved in an ecology of growth. It's time to evolve again.
  • Connection, concern, and capacity June 17, 2025
    The three-legged stool of fundraising strategy.
  • Is your workplace a pyramid or a wheel? June 10, 2025
    Johan Galtung defined two structures for collective action: thin-and-big (the pyramid) or thick-and-small (the wheel). Which describes your workplace?

Artful Manager: The Book!

The Artful Manager BookFifty provocations, inquiries, and insights on the business of arts and culture, available in
paperback, Kindle, or Apple Books formats.

Recent Comments

  • Barry Hessenius on Business in service of beauty: “An enormous loss. Diane changed the discourse on culture – its aspirations, its modus operandi, its assumptions. A brilliant thought…” Jan 19, 18:58
  • Sunil Iyengar on Business in service of beauty: “Thank you, Andrew. The loss is immense. Back when Diane was teaching a course called “Approaching Beauty,” to business majors…” Jan 16, 18:36
  • Michael J Rushton on Business in service of beauty: “A wonderful person and a creative thinker, this is a terrible loss. – thank you for posting this.” Jan 16, 13:18
  • Andrew Taylor on Two goals to rule them all: “Absolutely, borrow and build to your heart’s content! The idea that cultural practice BOTH reduces and samples surprise is really…” Jun 2, 18:01
  • Heather Good on Two goals to rule them all: “To “actively sample novel experiences (in safe ways) to build more resilient perception and prediction” is about as useful a…” Jun 2, 15:05

Archives

Creative Commons License
The written content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images are not covered under this license, but are linked (whenever possible) to their original author.

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in