Crossing Places and Affective Moments: Disclosing the Possibilities of Being There

This paper will use a phenomenological lens to explore audience experience in contemporary performance through an examination of two recent (and very different) productions – Romantika Theatre’s The Crossing Place (2017) and Ridiculusmus’ Beautiful People (2022). I will use these two productions as case-studies to explore the phenomenological experience of being there.

Building on extant Performance Studies scholarship that has worked over the past decades to situate spectators as co-creators of meaning, I will explore how audiences within these productions find themselves emerging out of the cracks and disorientations of theatrical spaces. This follows Hans-Thies Lehmann’s ground-breaking concept of postdramatic theatre as a form of performance which moves beyond the conceit of mimetic representation, organised by coherence, to a space where ‘spectators encounter the theatre as just that – theatre’ (Boyle et al. 2019: 2).

In this presentation I will explore the imbrication of the spectator relationship in terms of the openness of these two performance encounters. This will enable me to develop an understanding of contemporary theatre practice as a specific form of mediation in its dual sense: as both a procedure of affective operations and a process of continual re-creation.