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Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air

Why conversations?Why electric air?What is an audience member?Writings about actors and audiences The interviews The performances Book structure Notes I Electric air The electric air of theatre Descriptors of the electric air Atmosphere Liveness Electricity Undercurrents of the electric air Theatrical undercurrents Suspension of disbelief The encounter Ephemerality Narrative Psychological undercurrents Transference Projection Identification Empathy Sociological undercurrents Presence Celebrity magnetism Community Notes The view from the stage Who is the actor?Backstage Onstage Presence Double consciousness Stage fright Whom do they see?Encounter Audience presence Conversations No electric air The curtain call Notes The view from the audience Who is the audience member?In the house Proximity Electricity and atmosphere Whom do they see?The encounter Double consciousness Presence Charisma Drawing power Space-filling ekstases “Being”: authenticity and comfort The curtain call Notes II Conversations Heisenberg’s psychological conversations The production and the project Psychological undercurrents Transference Identification Projection Empathy The suspension of disbelief Consent Shutting out the world Filling in the gaps Double consciousness Heisenberg workshops: extending the conversation Notes Encounters with The Encounter The production and the project Double consciousness Narrative Encounter Intimate distance Community Presence Questions raised Extending the conversation: theatre of the mind Notes Hunger. Peer Gynt: a thirst for conversations The production and the project Stimmung Tuning to the space Tuning to the artwork Tuning to each other Tuning to the actors Tuning to the audience The walk-out Audience and the walk-out Actors and the walk-out Atonality and tuned space Extending the conversation: reaching out from the border Notes The electric air The conversations Relationship Relational audience research Notes Appendix: Actor biographies

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Why electric air?
During audience interviews for my last monograph, Audience as Performer, I was intrigued by how many of the 106 audience members interviewed relished the opportunity of discussing the live atmosphere of a theatrical event.Their demeanour would actually change as they commented, “Ah the energy,...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
Writings about actors and audiences
The relationship between the artwork or performance work and the audience has been discussed since Aristotle’s Poetics. This aesthetic relationship has been explored most prolifically and contains the central precept of most contemporary audience research: the audience’s meaning-making. The...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
Electric air
The electric air of theatre As an audience member, I have often sat in the theatre auditorium enthralled by the charge of electricity in the air that seems so combustible that a spark could ignite it. As an actor, I have often stood on the stage intoxicated by the heady atmosphere that rolls across...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
The electric air of theatre
As an audience member, I have often sat in the theatre auditorium enthralled by the charge of electricity in the air that seems so combustible that a spark could ignite it. As an actor, I have often stood on the stage intoxicated by the heady atmosphere that rolls across the footlights and sharpens my...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
Descriptors of the electric air
...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
Undercurrents of the electric air
The electric air has undercurrents. Eleven undercurrents of the electric air provide the basis for the discussions in the rest of the book: suspension of disbelief, the encounter, ephemerality, narrative, transference, projection, identification, empathy, presence, celebrity magnetism and community....
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
No electric air
Conversations across the footlights, be they hostile, affable or otherwise, help create the electric air. It is when there is no conversation at all that the production can wilt. As Hibbert described it, “there are some houses that are not having it.You just sit there and you go,‘what’s it all...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
The electric air
This book set out to describe the importance of theatre’s electric air. It is a nascent step in describing a poorly understood phenomenon experienced by actors and audience members. The book did not set out to prove a scientific theory of the electric air. How do you capture the wind? As actor Marcel...
(Actors and Audiences: Conversations in the Electric Air)
Text Formation Through Expansions and Conversions
For the analysis of narratives, Riffaterre (1979:405) proposes a model based on a minimal sentence or a matrix that undergoes transformations, complicating as it progresses, until it attains the maximal level, which is the narrative itself. The transformations are mainly of two kinds: expansions and...
(African Perspectives on Literary Translation)
Actors and processes
Media systems research draws heavily on political science and the study of governing institutions, political actors, and parties. This is indispensable for analysis of states’ activities, from engineering and directing to combatting misinformation. The mapping of COVID responses, discussed earlier,...
(The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism)