Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

incidental people
Games were also a structuring principle for The Blackie’s theatrical
experiments in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Unlike the work of Augusto
Boal (whom Bill Harpe met twice), participatory performances at The
Blackie tended less towards ‘a rehearsal for revolution’ than towards a
melancholic exposé of how society really operated. 84 These extended social
games, often based on government statistics, included The To- Hell- With-
Human- Rights Show (December 1968) and Educational Darts (March 1971).
In Sanctuary (November 1969), performed at Quarry Bank High School,
the participating audience were assigned different types of housing on the
basis of fi lling in a form, which included questions about their income and
number of dependents. The housing ranged from ‘Breck Moor’ (a large
detached house) to ‘Box Street’ (slum dwellings), each of which was
provided with appropriate entertainment: at the former, sherry and chess;
at the latter, brown ale (but no bottle opener). The action unfolded from
this point, with four improvised performances emerging simultaneously
from these scenarios. Some participants would obey the law (which moved
very slowly and bureaucratically, in order to mirror real life), while others
broke it and were arrested, imprisoned, and so on. 85 Half structured, half
improvised, such productions positioned themselves against the education
programmes of theatre companies (in that they allowed the audience to
produce the work themselves, rather than learning about somebody else’s
performance) but they also worked against theatrical productions in which
the audience members all experience the same thing simultaneously; in
Sanctuary there were at least four possible types of audience experience.
Berman, by contrast, found it more diffi cult to introduce participatory
theatre to Inter- Action’s repertoire, since there were so few good playwrights
interested in exploring this genre. He ended up producing his own
plays, based on a formula defi ning the amount of changes that an audience
could make in the work, from pantomime (where only one answer is possible
within the script) to theatrical situations where the outcome is entirely
unplanned. His play The Nudist Campers Grow and Grow (1968) began with
actors playing Adam and Eve, dressed in synthetic fi g leaves, entering the
theatre from Hyde Park, and performing from behind two bushes. Their
dialogue concerned a debate about whether or not they could be seen nude,
eventually inviting the audience to take off their clothes and join them
behind the bushes onstage – which people did. The more usual format for
Inter- Action projects, however, was one- act theatre (as compiled in
Berman’s Ten of The Best, 1979) or the popular interactive entertainment of
the Fun Art Bus.
The pre- eminence of performance as the community arts medium par
excellence was facilitated by two events: the Theatre Act of 1968 (in which
the Lord Chamberlain ceased to be the censor of what theatre could be
shown in public) and the launch of Time Out magazine in 1969 (which
listed all cultural productions in London indiscriminately of status or
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