Rupert Christiansen’s latest on the increasingly tepid applause at UK performing arts events makes an interesting guess at the cause:
“We are repeatedly exposed to the sounds and images of extreme drama, both actual and fictional. This may mean that the excitement that live music stimulates is less intense and surprising – we hear it, after all, every day, reproduced with a fidelity that wasn’t possible in the pre-FM, pre-digital era. The passivity of television and a certain fed-on-a-plate laziness about our consumption of art also contribute to the fall in the clapometer.”
Bundled in there somewhere are two common thoughts about the live arts: that they are a ‘consumption’ activity (where the artists ‘produce’ and audiences ‘consume’), and that ‘hearing’ a performance is comparable to ‘being there’. Both of these assumptions are worth challenging, because they always seem to lead us to the same frustrating conclusions: audiences are boors, desensitized by media, and they don’t appreciate what we produce.
If we want to stick to production metaphors (as business people often do), what if we considered the live arts as a co-creation, where both artist and audience construct the final result? In that world, participants on both sides of the proscenium are integral to the production process, and only the group of us in space and time can consume what we’ve created together.
