New Forms of Communities? The Constitution and Performance of Audiences in Digital Theater during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic plunged many theaters around the world into a temporary crisis and favored the rise of digital theater forms. This article investigates how the reception of theater changes in the digital space and, above all, how audiences as a social dimension of theatrical performances must first be constituted separately there. Based on performance analysis of the digital theater productions Homecoming and Sterben from Germany, the significance of the digital infrastructure for the assembly, performance, and action repertoires of these theater audiences is discussed. The author examines how audiences can be formed into different temporal communities in the digital space. These temporal communities are characterized by hybridity and have the potential to enable intense theatrical encounters across spatial boundaries.

Riotous Performances

Theater audiences have been expressing their opinions about what is happing on stage and in the world around them for centuries. In some instances, uproarious behavior bordering on — and including — full-fledged riots, have provided early indications of profound conflicts taking shape within society that eventually can gather to overturn the political and social order. As the cases discussed here — drawn from Naples, London, Brussels, New York, Dublin, Paris, Miami, and Kyiv — suggest, such disturbances can reflect economic discontent, the rise of nationalist identities, and the emergence of new artistic movements. A night at the theater, the concert hall, or the club is always about more than the background noise of our lives. What happens when performers meet their audiences signals how we see our futures; and ourselves; and how we like what we see, or not.

Concert Hall, Museum, Cinema, and Theater Attendance: What Difference Do Audience Motivations and Demographics Make?

Given the ubiquity of art in almost all human societies, why is it that participation in the arts is so diverse? To address this question, the present study examined demographic and motivational variables as predictors of arts attendance in a sample of 480 participants, and whether any significant differences appear among attendees at different venues. The ordinal logistic regression identified income, entertainment, and art interest as predictors of arts attendance, with income leading to greater attendance at several art forms. Subsequent analyses also unveiled significant differences in demographic and behavioral characteristics among concert hall attendees, museum visitors, cinema goers, and theater audiences. Taken together, these findings illustrate that audience behavior is selective and incited by conscious awareness of a person’s unique needs. From an applied perspective, adequate knowledge of human functioning will enable arts managers to attract new audiences, without neglecting their responsibility towards art, culture, and education.

Agonistic Audiences: Comic Play in the Early National Theater

This essay considers how rowdy theater audiences contributed to a broader cultural understanding of democratic politics in the early United States, showing how raucous and occasionally riotous theater patrons enacted a form of popular rule that was predicated on the paying audience’s sovereign right to pleasure. Agonistic audiences thrived on the conflictual dynamics of disorder and dissidence, but their unruly practices only rarely devolved into mob violence, precisely because theatergoers largely understood themselves to be at play. I examine various accounts of theatrical disturbance, including Washington Irving’s famous depiction of a disorderly audience, to demonstrate how patrons cultivated a comic mode of sociality, one that foregrounded and maintained the essential playfulness of social contest. Such comic play acknowledged a horizon of popular enjoyment that stood in excess of rational-critical public discourse. The comic mode has long been undertheorized in literary and cultural studies of the early United States, yet it holds key insight into the practices of both early national theater and early national politics. By way of example, I offer a comic reading of Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) that reveals the imprint of the agonistic audience on the repertoire of the period, shedding new light on nineteenth-century genealogies of performance.

Music Theater “Online”

The article discusses the features of online broadcasts of musical performances in a pandemic. The paper emphasizes the ambiguity of the attitude towards online broadcasts, examines the problems and experience gained in the process of organizing online shows of theater performances, notes the potential of online formats for the development of theater audiences. The author analyzes the summary billboard of online broadcasts in April­May 2020 and gives recommendations for the development of online formats for musical theater.

Alexander F. Veltman and his story “Raina, the Princess of Bulgaria”

The article talks about talented writer A.F. Veltman (1800–70) and his story “Raina, the Princess of Bulgaria”, which was translated into Bulgarian and had a significant influence on Bulgarian readers and theater audiences. The article explores the creative mind of the author and determines his attitude towards the Bulgarian people through the study of the realities of Russian society of the first half of the 19th century, when A.F. Veltman lived and worked. This means looking at society, the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29, the activities of the Society of History and Russian Antiquities, and the historiography of the time. It should be emphasized that the idea of the historical predestination of Russia in the liberation of Bulgaria, which was embraced by the Bulgarian society of the second half of the 19th century with great enthusiasm and hope, is the leitmotif of Veltman’s entire novel.

Then Face to Face: Timing Trust in Macbeth

How does the temporality of trust shift as one moves from face-to-face interactions to larger social, technical, natural, and supernatural environments? This essay juxtaposes the most visceral elements of trust with more abstract ones by attending to length of the time span across which trust is understood to operate. Jennifer Waldron shows how Shakespeare’s Macbeth juxtaposes the split-second timing of face-to-face trust in the present with an apocalyptic time frame that imaginatively extends over vast reaches of time and space. Waldron argues that Macbeth’s actions simultaneously rupture natural temporalities of trust and supernatural ones. During the course of the play, Macbeth desperately attempts to seal off time, to contain Banquo and Duncan in their graves, and to avoid countenancing his own act of murder. Yet in spectacles such as the appearance of Banquo’s ghost and the line of kings presented by the witches, theater audiences witness several different versions of an apocalyptic theater.

Georgi, Yvonne (1903–1975)

Yvonne Georgi was a major figure in the evolution of modern dance in Germany. She amplified the scale of modern dance performances by expanding the size of ensembles operating in a modernist idiom, enlarging the narrative structures that motivated dance performances, and by increasing the complexity of the movement vocabulary used in modern dance performances. In pursuing these ambitions, she strove to reconcile ballet techniques with modern dance theory, so that ballet would assume greater significance in the modernist project. Modern dance in turn would achieve greater impact institutionally when it incorporated the organizational and choreographic discipline of ballet to build large-scale works with large ensembles for theater audiences generally, not just dance audiences. Georgi was also important in deepening appreciation of German modern dance in the United States when she toured the country with Harald Kreutzberg in 1929–30 and in developing a distinctly modernist ballet in the Netherlands, where she worked during the 1930s and 1940s.