Page 45 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

36 Graham White

elements but moving beyond these into questioning the social environment and
context of the performance. The questionnaire itemises elements of the
‗onstage‘ proceedings, such as costume, stage properties and scenography, for
discussion and analysis to consider how ―the event‘s components separately‖
generate ―part of the overall meaning‖. However, it also asks the observer of
the performance to consider elements not part of the aesthetic object of the
stage, such as the ―relationship between acting and audience space‖. Asking
―where does [the] performance take place‖ and ―how did [the] audience react‖
, the questionnaire suggests that both the audience and the observer of the
audience may be active elements in the creation of the performance‘s meaning.
A production of Macbeth performed in the darkened proscenium arch setting
of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon is thus seen to have
a very different context and significance to the same play performed in a
promenade production in a disused school, as in the case of the influential
PunchDrunk company‘s performance, Sleep No More, in Kennington, South
London in 2003, in which audience members witnessed different elements of
the production in different spaces and in an order decided by audience choice
within the constraints of the production‘s overall shape.
When theatrical practices move further, to break down the separation
between the aesthetic object of performance and its social surroundings, the
role of the audience can become the core of the event‘s significance. The
participatory performances engaged in in the late Brazilian director Augusto
Boal‘s models of Forum or Invisible theatre (in the former the audience is
actively requested to intervene and debate and decide how the drama should
unfold, in the latter the audience is at first unaware that they are participating
in a performance) raise questions concerning the possible, appropriate or
relevant reading of any ‗staged‘ component to the events. The implication of
Boal‘s practice is that the audience is a potentially destabilising element in the
theatre‘s transmission of meaning, even when the context of the performance
is apparently highly managed and controlled – as might be seen to be the case
in the social performance of the courtroom [Boal 1979, 1995]. The
significance of social performance and its representation in the case of the
Diana Inquest may be to depict the audience to the Inquest and the social
performances which its members engaged in as part of a contestation of
authority over the dominant meanings of the events being examined.
Notwithstanding David Miller and Greg Philo‘s warning that the reading of
the subversive potential of audience ‗resistance‘ to the authoritarian role of the
media is increasingly fetishised, as ―the activities which are said to be resistant
are often trivial‖ [Philo & Miller, p. 56], the social performance of the