Part 2. Spectacle and Emancipation.

Spectacle.
- What is a spectacle?
- Is there a way for the subject/performance to not be spectacle?
- There is this concern:

“If I’m not part of the subject, maybe it is a spectacle”

- If this is true, is it a bad thing?

How do you choose artistic content?

- Is content just a meeting place for an exchange, or does the content matter in and of itself?

- How much can you engage with 3rd item (subject) … as opposed to just engaging with each other as performer/audience?

Where is meaning?

- If everyone in the room (artists and audience) is engaging with a work and trying to understand what it is?

- Someone suggested that perhaps performers contribute their particular competencies and a desire to investigate what subject means with a new audience, audience contributes their intelligence and desire to investigate new subject?

"Just because you get everyone to walk around the space, doesn’t mean you’re part of it"

- Spectacle of advertising and mass media as being in opposition to individual experience, wants to impose experience in order to persuade you of something
- Hickey seems to be trying to emancipate the word “spectacle” as well – he challenges our understanding/definition of it as negative, suggests that looking and acting have never been separate – we just think about them that way.


Emancipation.
- Who is the more “emancipated spectator”? The dancer who goes in to watch contemporary dance with an understanding of what the art/culture is or the person who goes in with no familiarity with the art/culture?
- What expectations does an audience come in with?
- One person argued you just engage and unconsciously analyze (in other words, maybe there is no way to detect emancipation, we are just articulating something that already happens)

“maybe the emancipation doesn’t have to be self-conscious”

- Do audiences resist being emancipated? Maybe there is fear in the freedom to enter a performance as an emancipated spectator

(“there is comfort in knowing what the rules are, and knowing what my role is as an audience member is - if you change that rule and give me authority, I don’t know what to do anymore and feel uncomfortable”)

- What is the community construct around staying in your seat? Why don’t we leave? Respect for performers? Is it reputation? Pressure?

- If you don’t know you’re emancipated, are you? If I don’t know I’m free to leave at any time, am I emancipated?

- Is the safety of rules for the purpose of commodification?

- We’ve been discussing the “we as performers are imparting our expertise to you lesser audience people” inequality but there is also the reverse inequality we need to consider: “emancipated” audiences who have power to value or devalue artistic product (kick over set, throw tomatoes, etc) – if we give audience power, they use it to purchase art of their choosing.

Is this also a problem?

- Discussion of Jacob Wren show at Harbourfront

(demanded emancipated audience – i.e. demanded participation from very beginning and had loose boundaries ... but one audience member became very destructive)

- Potential of the internet to emancipate spectators?

(story of child looking for mouse attached to the television as indicator of people’s basic assumption these days that they can participate in entertainment)