4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

Integral-Aesthetic Accidental-aesthetic
Invited audiences
Opening nights
Commercial productions publicly
advertised
Audience of those “in the know” Audience of those who are
interested
Integral-Ritual Accidental-Ritual
Audiences at weddings, funerals, Tourists watching a ceremony
etc.
Inaugurations, signing of treaties,
state matters
Figure 6.3
selective inattention 221
Imported rituals performed in
theaters
where they are exhibited in public theaters (see chapter 4). Select
mailing lists and word-of-mouth performances are popular in New
York now: a kind of not-so-secret society of those in the know. An
attempt is being made for theater to fill a niche abandoned by religion:
solidarity, mutual supportive belief, gathering in the catacombs, etc.
Even within the same performance an audience can change from accidental
to integral. At the end of Over Here!, a light Broadway musical of
the mid-1970s, the two Andrews Sisters came onto the stage and gave
an encore of some favorite oldies. The audience immediately picked up
on the apparent “special performance” and the theater was aglow.
(Even I was taken in. I later inquired whether the Sisters did this every
night, or only the night I was there. Every night.)
Interestingly, the behavior of people as spectators differs greatly
depending on whether these individuals comprise an integral or accidental
audience – and this difference is not what one would expect. By
and large, the accidental audience pays closer attention than does an integral audience.
This is for four reasons: 1) the accidental audience chooses to attend,
has often paid to attend; 2) its members attend as individuals or in
small clusters so that large crowd action is unlikely – each spectator or
small group is a stranger among strangers. 3) An integral audience
often knows what’s going on – and not paying attention to it all is a
way of showing off that knowledge. Sometimes, as during the reading
of the Torah prior to the bar mitzvah boy’s performance, the featured