| Title | 3. Spectatorship Analysis |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Maaike Bleeker(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0469.03 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0469/chapters/10.11647/obp.0469.03 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Maaike Bleeker |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-10-24 |
| Long abstract | Analysing spectatorship involves examining how performances affect spectators and how they are invited to make sense of this address. How do shows direct attention, play into (and play with) expectations, desires, conventions, habits, and frames of reference? How do they engage spectators as bodies via various sensory dimensions? How do they trigger associations and invite interpretations? How do experience and meaning emerge from this address and the audience’s responses to it? This text looks at spectatorship in 03:08:38 States of Emergency (2019-2022) by Tore Vagn Lid and Transiteatret Bergen (Norway) to show how this performance engages the audience in a collective and embodied working through of a traumatic historical event, namely the blowing up of a Norwegian government building in Oslo and the massacre of sixty-nine young social democratic politicians at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in 2011. Spectatorship analysis can also be used to unpack real-life events. This will be demonstrated with an analysis of the arrival of the remains of the victims of the MH17 (the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down in 2014) at Eindhoven Airport and the procession through the Netherlands that followed. |
| Page range | pp. 67–84 |
| Print length | 18 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Maaike Bleeker is Professor of Performance, Science and Technology in the Department of Media and Culture at Utrecht University. She has many years of experience working as a dramaturg with theatre and dance makers. She is interested in how thinking and making, theory and practice, may mutually inform and inspire each other. In her writing, she combines approaches from the arts and performance with insights from philosophy, critical theory, and cognitive science to examine how people make sense of what they encounter in the theatre as well as in daily life and scientific practice. She is the author of Visuality in the Theatre (Palgrave, 2008) and Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking Through Practice (Palgrave 2023) and the (co) editor of (among others) Anatomy Live. Performance and the Operating Theatre (AUP 2008) Performance & Phenomenology. (Routledge 2015), Transmission in Motion. The Technologizing of Dance (Routledge, 2016), Thinking Through Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury 2019) and the Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology (forthcoming).