‘Shaped like a question mark’: found poetry from Herbert Blau'sThe Audience

Abstract

Performance theorist Herbert Blau's The Audience (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) is an important yet neglected theoretical text on theatre audience. Deconstructive, dense and allusive in nature, Blau's text creates a real challenge for his reader. This paper presents a study of The Audience employing what I am calling literature-voiced research poetry. This consists of found poems created from certain kinds of theoretical texts, particularly those that are, like Blau's, rich, thick and metaphorical in nature. In creating these found poems, I am moving into using an arts-based research methodology as a way of knowing within an inquiry process, as well as a way of analysing and representing data (Oberg, A., Arts-based educational research, Notes from presentation at Association for Graduate Education Students (AGES) meeting, University of Victoria, 18 March 2003). My dissertation, Marked by performance: a curriculum theory and poetics for audience in the performing arts (in progress), will include literature-voiced research poems as part of my literature review and will move into researcher-voiced and participant-voiced poems that attempt to capture the residue of performance, and how the experience of performance (specifically theatre performance) has the potential to mark us, to shake us to our core, as Aristotle, Artaud, Barker, Brecht, Grotowski, Nietzsche, and other theatre theorists have long-hypothesized. The completed study will present poetic co-created representations of how performing artists, critics and other highly-experienced audiences, as well as students of audience education (secondary and post-secondary), experience the residue of performances throughout their lives as significant cognitive, affective, social and even potentially profound spiritual events. It goes on to pose the question: what are the implications of these poetic understandings of audience-in-performance (AIP) for emerging curricula of audience and performance studies in education? Thus, the study is an attempt to express these almost inexpressible experiences through poetry for the curricular purpose that, within our increasingly dramatized and performative culture, audience-in-performance education is an important yet neglected aspect of art education and education in general.

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