Contemporary theatre is often incorporating elements of participatory art, where spectators are usually participants or even co-creators of the performance. The theatremakers are freeing the spectator from his passive position and are delegating part of the responsibility for the pieces’ final form to him. It could look like the third theatre reform is coming: after the director and the space, the spectator is freed, activated, and made authentic. However, Claire Bishop states in Artificial Hells that the willingness to participate is just another level of passivity because it requires submitting to the artist’s concept. Contemporary society desires authenticity and uses participation as a false substitute. The spectacularity has replaced performativity: people are revealing their lives on social networks but are afraid to talk to strangers on the street.
A researcher is a very special kind of spectator – but he is still a spectator. The experience of the spectator drastically changes from seeing a theatre piece where performers and audience are strictly divided and one where the line between the two is blurred. In a similar way, a researcher’s view changes between a situation when he is “only” a spectator of the piece and a situation where he has participated in it as an artist. The quality that is changing is the authenticity of perception. How authentic should a spectator – or a researcher – be?
When researching contemporary theatre pieces, the lecturer was confronted with his own authenticity. Is artistic research authentic, when the researcher is writing a text on his own theatre piece, which he knows inside out, and thus can manipulate the impression of the reader? What changes, if the researcher has not participated in the piece and is doing his research from the position of a spectator? Can the research also be done by not seeing the performance at all – and could it even be beneficial?
Otto Kauppinen is a doctoral student at Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, Czech Republic, where he also did his Master’s degree in Theatre Dramaturgy. He is in long term interested in socially engaged art, especially theatre. During 2015-2016 he worked as a dramaturge of a political theatre group Divadlo Feste based in Brno. He also participates in international theatre projects like Promised Lands: Metropolis organised by Paolo Grassi Academy in Milano, Italy in 2017. During 2017-2018 he worked with Divadlo Continuo physical theatre company based in Malovice, Czech Republic. He is half–Czech, half–Finnish and he is bilingual. He has been translating Finnish contemporary drama into Czech since 2012. He has been awarded for his translations with the first place in the Evald Schorm Prize for young talented playwrights and translators for the year 2014. He is also writing theatre plays. His last piece was a libretto for a contemporary opera based on Finnish mythology for the Brno-based festival Janáček 2020.
In his doctoral research, he analyzes contemporary theatre performances which caused unusual physical reactions from the audience, disrupting the performance. He argues that presenting political topics in theatre performances in a way that does respect the spectator as a relevant subject encourages him to engage in discussion with subjects of a different opinion. The basic principle of the thesis is applying Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics, confronted with Jacques Rancière’s concept of the emancipated spectator, in contemporary theatre, shifting the focus from showing an opinion on the stage to showing a relation.
The Landing of the Agronaut. Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-Mx1z5yETc.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du réel – Criticism, theory & documents, 2002. ISBN 978-2-84066-060-6.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Exform. London: Verso, 2016. ISBN 978-1-78478-380-8.
Jobertová, Daniela – Koubová, Alice (ed.). Artistic Research: Is There Some Method? Praha: NAMU, 2017. ISBN 978-80-73314-72-9.
Rancière, Jacques. Emancipovaný divák. Bratislava: Divadelný ústav, 2015. Svetové divadlo. ISBN 978-80-89369-89-8.