A Spectatorial Dramaturgy

What is it about?

This essay attempts to raise certain issues that may be considered an ‘ethos of spectatorship’ seeking to place the knowing experience of the spectator in relation to the stage. Six sections characterising an ethics of recognition, looking, materiality, complicity and empathy, participation and imagination, and attending show how these work together to give a spectatorial dramaturgy. It is argued that such a dramaturgy is empirical, is an ethical economy of regard rooted in the material and social body in mutual and reciprocal concert. That it rests on the complicit, knowing empathetic imagination located and manifested in the engaged but distanced spect-actor as agent who witnesses the work of the actor in the arena we call theatres. It is suggested that this relationship between a presented mise-en-scène and the always-present spectator makes the spectator always active in some way or other. An ethical spectatorial dramaturgy is the work of the spectators actions within the weave of the theatre event.

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Photo by Matthew Hicks on Unsplash

Photo by Matthew Hicks on Unsplash