This week’s readings coincide in how Classical approaches to theater have established predetermined passive roles for spectators. Boal starts his Teatro do oprimido with a succinct, pragmatic background and summary of the system of Greek tragedies codified in Aristotle’s Poetics. The breakdown of the connections between politics and art reveals the coercion of a ruling aristocracy who, in Classical times, utilized public theater as a way of purging social vices through a complex of empathic identification between the spectators and the actors, achieving a climactic catharsis to modify the public’s conduct. Therefore, a spectator is a passive entity who receives an education through gut-wrenching osmosis. Boal’s revolutionary theatrical practices are aimed towards making the spectator an active participant, a spec-ator, in the play, bringing to the fore their own experiences as a way of negotiating the meaning of the play itself and their own social practices.
Through his own theatrical processes, Brecht proposes the idea that this mimetic algorithm that Boal deftly demolishes only produces passive sleepers, spectators overwhelmed to the point of numbness in the theater. While maintaining the perspective that theater’s main end is entertainment and pleasure, his theatrical practice of alienation (or estrangement) is geared towards a more critical spectatorship in which the public is pushed to react critically to the characters portrayed onstage by a process of breaking theatrical illusions of empathy and highlighting the strangeness of everyday actions, permitting spectators to engage critically with the world depicted in art with the world they navigate for themselves.
Likewise, in Performance, Taylor also postulates that, while spectators do function within a system of power relationships inside and outside of the theater, contemporary performances as embodied practices displace the role and placement of the spectator in front of otherwise dramatic acts like live performances. Seeing is a way of knowing, of reaching and even contesting power, and through the viewing of a performance, of a specific context moved by bodily actions, spectators can now be called to action in ways unanticipated by ancient Greek aristocrats, allowing for the creation of spect-actors like Boal and Brecht would have wanted.