1 Can There Be Artistic Performance Without an Audience?

Without an Audience?

When we last encountered Berthold and Magda, they were sitting in a

provincial theater regretting their choice of evening entertainment. We also

left hanging unresolved in that theater, however, a question about what had

in fact taken place. Much of what happened on stage did so without being

attended to by an audience. For, we will recall, the audience consisted solely

of Berthold and Magda, who found other things to engage their attention as

the actors toiled. But Paul Woodruff assigns an attentive audience a constitu-

tive role in a theatrical performance. As we have seen, he defines theater as

“the art by which human beings make or find human action worth watching,

in a measured time and place,” and maintains that we have a theatrical event

only when both performer(s) and audience are exercising this art (2008,

18). If so then, while Berthold and Magda may have attended a performance

by actors in a theater, they didn’t attend a performance of theater.

Of course, there is nothing to prevent Woodruff from stipulating that he

will use the term “theatrical event” in the foregoing sense. And it is tempt-

ing to read him in this way, given his concession that what transpires in the

absence of a suitably attentive audience may be a performance even though it

is not theater: “Take away the audience and the watching ends. If no one is

watching, it’s not theater, though it may truly be a performance” (Woodruff

2008, 42). But Paul Thom adopts what seems to be an even stricter line, hold-

ing that in the absence of an audience one doesn’t even have a performance.

9

Elements of Performance

II: Audience

and Embodiment

Philosophy of the Performing Arts , First Edition. David Davies.
© 2011 David Davies. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.