Audience Participation as Consumption and Citizenship in Contemporary Storytelling Performances of The Iliad
David Bisaha
Abstract
As American military actions in the Middle East continue, the Trojan War has become a useful text for exploring the emotional landscape of war. In this article I contrast audience engagement strategies in two storytelling performances of The Iliad, 2012’s An Iliad and 2013’s Measure Back. Both productions use the Homeric epic to link ancient and modern war, yet their methods for framing audience agency differ sharply. An Iliad attempts to create shared responses of ritualized mourning through realistic, individualizing techniques, while Measure Back cultivates independent spectator-citizens by provoking immediate, emotionally uncomfortable reactions and encouraging judgment of fellow audience members. By applying Gareth White’s concept of “horizons of participation,” developed in his study of immersive and participatory performance, I argue that the style of audience engagement offers an opportunity to reflect on the agency of the individual citizen. Interactive audience strategies highlight the performativity of citizenship—you are shaped by what you do—whereas a realism-based mode tends to reduce citizenship to consumption: the spectator as consumer of the actor’s emotional labor rather than co-participant in historical meaning-making. While neither production fully develops viable political interventions outside the theater, the participatory techniques of Measure Back constitute a strategy for developing individual agency through dissensus, and uncover implicit assumptions of passivity and affective consumption on which An Iliad is based.
As American military actions in the Middle East continue, the Trojan War has become a useful text for exploring the emotional landscape of war. In this article I contrast audience engagement strategies in two storytelling performances of The Iliad, 2012’s An Iliad and 2013’s Measure Back. Both productions use the Homeric epic to link ancient and modern war, yet their methods for framing audience agency differ sharply. An Iliad attempts to create shared responses of ritualized mourning through realistic, individualizing techniques, while Measure Back cultivates independent spectator-citizens by provoking immediate, emotionally uncomfortable reactions and encouraging judgment of fellow audience members. By applying Gareth White’s concept of “horizons of participation,” developed in his study of immersive and participatory performance, I argue that the style of audience engagement offers an opportunity to reflect on the agency of the individual citizen. Interactive audience strategies highlight the performativity of citizenship—you are shaped by what you do—whereas a realism-based mode tends to reduce citizenship to consumption: the spectator as consumer of the actor’s emotional labor rather than co-participant in historical meaning-making. While neither production fully develops viable political interventions outside the theater, the participatory techniques of Measure Back constitute a strategy for developing individual agency through dissensus, and uncover implicit assumptions of passivity and affective consumption on which An Iliad is based.
| etudesfeb2015bisaha.pdf |
