Why Theatre?

 

Traditionally, performance happens in an Auditorium, which as the auditory root of the word suggests, originates from Greek for ‘a place for listening’, for paying attention. Thus the auditorium gives context to the spectacle; it is through the framework of its seating arrangement, comfort, programme note, the cultural background and composition of its audience, that the spectacle obtains context and is given meaning. In a mobile theatrical experience, considering that the spectacle is all around us, changing with our movement through it, the Auditorium is self-constructed within each listener, a psychic space that, prompted by sound, provides context for the experience.

 

A theatre auditorium is a segregated enclosure into which one enters wilfully with the intention to focus one’s attention on the activity presented in it, yet without losing the knowledge that this space exists among other spaces within the city and throughout a temporal continuum.

 

In a mobile theatre experience, the focus is an active listening process that is intended to isolate sounds, actively segregating the `heard’ and the `listened to’. This process can be prompted by verbal communication, for example by way of introduction: “Close your eyes now and listen to the sounds around you”; or by way of occupation of the listener's headspace.

 

In such interventions, the public space is the ‘objective’ reality that is being augmented by the listeners imagination, shifting attention and reconextualisation to create an experiential space.

 

This experiential space is site-specific and person-specific, a personified Auditorium. I describe the word Auditorium here as a psychic space drawn and constructed from a Gestalt of perception, an affect of the environmental on the personal; a spatial, cultural and experiential framework that contextualises the meaning of a state of being at that moment.

 

Within this personified Auditorium, all affects of the environment can be considered theatrical. Especially pedestrian activity, which when stylised and incorporated into the script through the use of covert performers, enhances the theatrical experience.