Whether is be the influence of the performer or the revolutionary action of the spectator authors expand on viewership as functioning under systems and relations of power
Artistic practices have the ability to bring to view unjust political ideologies. Through Taylor’s analysis of various performances we can see how performance functions as a call to attention for the spectator and the politics being critiqued.
Pleasure is the passport. Though many audiences see live performance as a form of entertainment, pleasure often acts as the entry point for critical discourse.
Performance is neither true or false, it is either effective or ineffective. Does the performance make you feel? Does it bring the spectator to act?
Art acts as a representation (i.e. the platonic model). There is the idea of the table; the material, the table itself; the interpretation/representation, the painting of the table.
Theatre does not want distance. It wants to create a actor-spectator relationship. Boal highlights the viewer is capable of responding and interrupting what is on stage. Though Brecht and Boal both agree that “western theatre” requires passivity from the audience.
The requirement of passivity spotlights how theatre can act as colonization.
The body is acts as a site of transfer for knowledge. It is a creative doing which illuminates that which was not seen before.
Boal highlights through his exercises that to control one’s body is to make is capable of being more expressive.
Political art is a confrontation to the hegemonic practices that rule societies.
Struggle often activates performance. Be it through the tension that exists between the proletariat and the bourgeois (or from the spectator and the actor) this struggle pushes individuals to react to what is happening
Art is dangerous. It’s emotional engagement with the spectator can be coercive insofar as it encourages the spectator to take revolutionary action.