Building an audience, I wonder, is it like building a set? It must be. You go out and grab the bits and pieces, the raw materials and resources you need, putting them together in such a way that the parts are transcended by the all…
Found myself accidentally in a footrace yesterday here in Baltimore. Thousands of people dressed in green, running 5K for what? I guess the beginning of spring. The turning of the planet. St. Patrick’s day, ostensibly. There was a definite ritual to it. Pumping ZZ Top out of loudspeakers in the staging area. A police vanguard blasting down the thoroughfare – the wrong way down on Charles St – to clear the path energetically. Unseen passengers in an SUV. The sound of hundreds of people running, footfalls hitting the pavement.
I walked along the edges of the human river, floating by, watching the people exerting themselves. Looking for something in the faces of passersby. People to hand a flyer to for our show tomorrow night. How to build a new audience. Going out and selecting the raw materials from the lumber yard.
The question becomes: who do I want to invite to my house? There’s a reason the auditorium of a theatre is called that: a house. Front of house, back of house. You hear some of these same terms in the restaurant business. It’s because theatre is a hospitality-based enterprise. You welcome people to come in from the cold and share the same space with you for a while. You offer them entertainment, drinks, pleasant conversation…
What I realized, walking along this vast mass of people, is that I don’t want to invite everyone in the city indiscriminately into my house. It’s not that they don’t deserve it, but that maybe they wouldn’t appreciate it. Maybe they wouldn’t care; the opportunity would be wasted on them.
I gave a few flyers out to young couples in love, to hippy girls with dreadlocks who looked like they just walked here from Northern California who thanked me profusely for it, to people standing off to the side of the action, just watching. Stragglers. Theatre, even popular theatre, at least today is still somewhat a refuge for those on the fringes. A place to exist from the edge looking inward.
I did not find the answer in that footrace, nor in the parade which followed it. Though I had a good time walking alongside the “thronging masses of humanity”, people dressed in their finery, men and women marching (in the month of March), drummers drumming, dancers dancing. Many people involved in a ritual the significance of which may be opaque or completely transparent. Can’t quite tell anymore.
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ASSOCIATED CONTENT BY TIM BOUCHER (Auto-Generated)
- Audience Reaction As Aesthetic Measurement in Performance
- Techno Media Surveillance Utopia
- The Audience Is Not Invisible
- Carpentry and building
- Stage Left and Stage Right
2 Comments
You built an audience for the previous incarnation of your blog. You just didn’t seem to do it intentionally and didn’t seem to realize that they would go away when you stopped doing what brought them there.
Funny, I’m not even talking about this blog, but I never realized I had that experience here in this domain. Never considered it like that before. What did I do to bring people here? What was I doing?
Something different now, or maybe not. Maybe that same questioning lingers. For me though, the terms may not be the same. The axe head.