PETER CRAWLEY on becoming a theatre performer
'You there! Yes, you! The person sitting a safe distance from the stage, avoiding our gaze and trying to retract your head into your chest like a frightened tortoise. Fancy a little audience participation? I'll take that vigorous head shaking as a yes. Come on down. That applause is for you!"
In a broad sense, all theatre is an act of audience participation - it couldn't happen without you. But in another sense, many people would rather be left alone. After all, you've paid to see professionals at work and you're hardly likely
to earn a cut of the door. A dentist hardly ever pops his head into the waiting room to say, "I'm about to perform a complicated root canal procedure inside. Does anyone want a go of the drill?"
Yet audience participation is all the rage in theatre. In the past few weeks there have been some truly dreadful examples, with one Absolut Fringe show justifiably drawing fire when it stripped an unwilling and protesting male spectator to his waist. Would they have been quite so crass if the participant had been a woman?
Still, as the phenomenon continues between festivals, audience participation has taken a surprising turn: in the right hands it doesn't have to be like pulling teeth.
Melanie Wilson's Irish Brunetteat the Absolut Fringe was one marvellous example. Delicately illuminating her small audience in non-confrontational dapples of light and addressing us as characters - a sea-captain, a cartographer - Wilson seemed as attractive and unthreatening as a wood pixie, speaking to audience members like intimates without seeking an actual response. It was head-spinning when she finally did, and, in a column-convenient coincidence, that audience member happened to be me.
Asked to recall private moments for the benefit of paying punters and to make a series of choices that guided her narrative in unexpected ways, I was struck by how comfortable the situation felt. I hadn't volunteered. I had been hypnotically enlisted.
It was the opposite with Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen, a show of choreographed chaos in the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival. I began the show aghast to see one of 13 Belgian adolescents smearing lipstick on someone in the front row. I ended it, one exhilarating hour later, feeling jealous not to have a similar memento.
Perhaps so much theatre has gravitated towards direct audience involvement because it has had to reconsider its role in culture. In the information age, every other experience has become weirdly exhibitionist,
but also weirdly isolated. You watch must-see TV alone, share in viral video clips with unknowable millions, have hundreds of friends online but no one at your birthday party.
Audience interaction breaks open our iCocoons, shrinks the space between us, and makes us realise that theatre is one of the few genuinely shared experiences still available. And people seem
to like it. So the next time the actors ask for someone to enter the splash zone, don't be surprised to see a forest of raised hands.
