Presence & Personalization in the Performing Arts

It wouldn’t be difficult to notice an obsession with “being present” within the social sphere of the performing arts. From the grandiose dress codes and performance venues to the buzz of interviews and Q&A’s, the list of efforts to make an audience “more present” at a performance is utterly massive. However, viewing the performing arts as a means of expression poses a challenge to this insistence on present-ness: a phenomenon I like to call “the personalization effect.” What the personalization effect stipulates is that there is a direct correlation between being “present” and synthesizing a meaningful, individualized experience out of a performance. Since being “present” at a performance inherently leads to a more personalized experience, it is therefore up to the performer to determine whether this personalization serves to amplify the intended effect of the performance or potentially distort it.

There is a deceptive simplicity to defining what it means to be “present” at a performance. The immediate associations with being present tend to relate to sensory presence: watching closely and listening attentively. However, sensory presence alone is not nearly adequate enough to describe the full extent of presence. Yes, to be present at a performance is to be aware and alert about what is physically happening on the stage, but it is also to think, ponder, predict, and analyze that physicality. Yet to allow for this sensation of active presence to occur, both the audience and the performer must play distinct roles. In this instance, “performer” is probably more of a loose term that encompasses the event organizers, staff, writers, and actual stage performers, as they all collectively share the role of facilitating the audience’s presence in the auditorium. While the organizers and staffers carry the logistical side of this role, the performer(s) and writer(s) carry a considerably more arduous task: giving the audience reason to care about being present in the first place. It doesn’t cut it to simply ask the magician’s “Are you watching closely?”, but rather to entice the audience emotionally or mentally. After the means of being present and the reason to be present are both handed to the audience on a silver platter, however, so too is the responsibility of engaging with the performer’s material. Audience members can choose to remain braindead in their seats, their eyes glued to phone screens and their brains fluttering away, or to actively engross themselves in presently decoding the performer’s message. If, and only if, the roles of both audience member and performer are met, can the goal of “presence” be achieved.

Interestingly enough though, it is when we are most present at the performance that we tend to “personalize” it. While sitting in a group of people and watching events unfold on a stage can definitely be considered a collective experience, the performing arts are inherently individualized in effect. It could be easier for the performer to view the audience as a monolith, but ignoring the varying ages, experiences, familiarity with the genre of performance, and potential cultural barriers would certainly impair the audience’s connection to the performance. With that being said, these differences among audience members are precisely the reason behind this personalization effect; varying audience demographics that are actively analyzing and interpreting a performance do so through varying individual lenses of biases and personal thoughts. For example, a man who has played the saxophone since he was a child would have a different connection to a live jazz performance than a wide-eyed, naive child attending his first live performance would. Conversing with other audience members post-performance only serves to further prove this point: to a present audience, there simply cannot be only one way of experiencing a performance.

The key to connecting the heterogeneous audience with the performer and his message comes in the form of mutual awareness. An ideal performer would be one that knows his or her demographic and can equitably pander to their individual biases, and an ideal audience member would be one that is aware of his or her biases as as well as the performer’s intent beforehand. 

In this ideal performance, the performer expresses a message in terms of his or her performance, and the audience member easily receives that message and perhaps even develops a deeply personal experience from it. However, this auditorium utopia hardly ever exists, and as a result, the personalization effect could yield both positive and negative effects. On one hand, who is to say that it is an awful thing for an audience member to appreciate a performance for a reason that the performer didn’t necessarily intend for? One could argue that the performer’s intention doesn’t necessarily mean the “right” way of enjoying a performance, and that this “right” way simply doesn’t exist. On the other hand though, if the performer’s message is integral to the performance, the personalization effect could serve to distort the message or mangle the merit behind the performance. There are countless examples of performances misunderstood by audiences: The Velvet Underground, one of the most retrospectively influential rock bands of the 70s, wasn’t even given radio play or advertisements (Harvard), and films considered to be cult classics today such as Fight Club and The Big Lebowski were all initially received poorly by audiences that failed connect to the filmmakers’ brilliant social critiques. Since personalization can serve to either enhance the performing arts experience or cloud its value, performers should at least strive to be attentive of their audience’s varying reactions to what they see. Strangely enough though, even this attempt at omniscience can be hit or miss: it either backfires dramatically in the form of “dumbing things down,” or it connects to the audience and maximizes the meaningfulness and enjoyability of the performance.

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht is a brilliant example of a performance that has mastered the art of understanding its audience and reacting appropriately to its personalization. Brecht’s approach to his sociopolitical commentary serves to blockade the personalization effect as much as possible through Arturo Ui’s nature as “epic theater” rather than “dramatic theater”. He doesn’t seek to gain the emotional presence of his audience. Instead, he would much rather have their intellectual presence in what he refers to as the “classical, cold, highly intellectual style of performance” (Brecht). After all, how else can he showcase the process by which demagogues and dictators are created? None of the characters in Arturo Ui are even written to be remotely relatable anywho: not the Chicago criminals, not the hypocritical Dogsborough, not the scheming cauliflower trust, and most certainly not Adolf Hitler’s parallel. There is hardly any drama, hardly any reason to care when a character dies, and absolutely no reason whatsoever to be overjoyed. Since the plot and characters are written out to bar any emotional attachment from the audience, the personalization effect is almost entirely eliminated from the performance in spite of the audience’s intent presence.

The staging of Arturo Ui at the Rackham Theater in Ann Arbor somehow found even more methods of alienating its audience to the point of complete emotional detachment. The characters were all draped in blinding clown makeup, eliminating whatever humanity might have been present in their faces as they commit the most inhumane actions. Furthermore, the transitions between scenes all contained incredibly disorienting sound bites of Donald Trump speeches, leaving the audience even more polarized. The performance stirred me to my core and made me unbelievably uncomfortable, leaving me with a sour taste in my mouth yet brewing a newfound respect for the craft going into its creation. However, most importantly, it achieved Brecht’s ambitious goals: it made me and the other audience members approach what we were watching with a critical, thinking eye. We were present, yet Brecht, the director, and the performers all managed to be almost entirely omniscient of how their audience would react to the point where they were able to plan the performance accordingly. At the end of the day, every single person in the auditorium had seen the same scarring events and had heard Brecht’s message loud and clear because he refused to allow each of them to have individual takeaways and personalized experiences.

The real question lies in whether or not this approach worked, though. Would Brecht’s message had been just as potent if it were emotionally engaging, providing the audience with a cause or a character or an idea to root for? Or is the alienating combination of eerie metatheatricality and disturbing imagery the optimal way of hitting Brecht’s ever-so-relevant message home? Well, one could argue that creating a beacon of light in the darkness of Brecht’s script would’ve given the audience a reference point to distinguish Ui’s cruelty from, essentially making the performance more accessible. However, I vehemently believe that it dumbs Brecht’s message down to an audience that simply needs to be able to be critical. If Brecht truly wants his message to be a pragmatic form of activism rather than a lazy social commentary, eliminating all forms of personalization brushes away anything that could possibly cloud the details that Brecht wants his audience to pay attention to. Let’s picture for a moment that Brecht wrote a protagonist in his script: a dashing, charming young man with a yearning for justice and the guts to run against Ui in his political campaign. This scenario would shift the focus away from the psychological and social realities that lead to the rise of authoritarian rulers in favor of focusing instead on our lovable new protagonist. Instead of being critical of how criminals are formed, the lens by which we view the performance becomes the stereotypical “good vs. evil” black and white portrait of justice that not only insults its audience’s intelligence, but also provides nothing in the way of practical activism. Worse still, it gives the audience a character to empathize with and view as an extension of themselves, and forces them to actively pose the question of, “If I were in his situation, would I do the same?” Because every audience member would answer the aforementioned question differently, a newfound layer of subjectivity is added to a performance that simply demands to be objective. Therefore, in this particular scenario, blocking away the personalization effect serves to amplify the message of the performance while rendering it effectively haunting to every single member of the audience.

There are instances where allowing the personalization effect to freely flutter across the auditorium serves to heighten a performance’s greatness, however. Pictures at an Exhibition by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky is an example of an emotionally stirring and imaginative piece of music that provides deeply individualized and personal imagery with each of its movements. The idea of musical movements that each centralize around an imagined picture being viewed at a hypothetical exhibition is one where the sheer opportunities of individual experiences are absolutely baffling. Each person might formulate an entirely different story for each image, leading to a collage of images, stories, sounds, and colors that harmoniously coexist. To my disappointment however, as the composition was brought to life by the Ann Arbor Symphony, so were all the diverging stories and images destroyed. The performers took the artistic liberty of providing a storyline to every musical piece and its corresponding image through a screen projection, a choice that was horribly inconsistent to my enjoyment of the performance. On one hand, the whimsical gnome story provided me with a new angle of appreciation for the piece entitled “The Gnome”, but “The Ballad of the Unhatched Chicks” had all of its momentum and joy killed by a mind-numbingly poor animated depiction of actual dancing chicks in actual eggs. This is an example of streamlining a performance to its detriment; the music itself was still played incredibly well and retained the vigor of its original Mussorgsky writing, but the animations killed any sense of discovery and imagination that could’ve been there. In fact, throughout the entire performance, I found myself gravitating the most towards the non-Mussorgsky operatic segments that were in Italian, because my senses allowed me to levitate to my own fantastical realm of interpreting these beautiful voices that sang of matters I could not comprehend. Case in point: just as the personalization effect can cause a dip in the quality of the performance, it can also augment it and revitalize it to heights of enjoyment and memorability. 

Ultimately, predicting your audience’s reaction is no easy feat, nor is it necessarily a rewarding one. As the performer and audience both play a role in being present and managing the levels of personalization within any given performance, they also carry the responsibility of evaluating their choices to best suit the performance’s effectiveness. Audience members must be aware of their inherent personal biases while being present, and performers must be mindful of their audience’s individualized experiences in determining how viable their artistic choices may be. While this utopia may be rare if not altogether impossible, when both performer and audience member collectively come closest to its realization, the experience truly becomes otherworldly. 

Works Cited

Harvard, Joe. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Brecht, Bertolt, and John Willett. Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic. Bloomsbury, 2015.