Audience
by Jonathan Burrows
Jonathan Burrows is a British choreographer who has published various collections of various words of great wisdom. In this ‘fragment of writing’, Burrows really gets me thinking about the performer-audience relationship…
Audience
I’m not sure I want to be a spectator anymore,
I’d rather be in the audience.
A spectator is somehow implicated in what’s happening,
but then I can’t seem to find what I need.
Finding what I need requires hanging back
and watching in a more wasteful way.
It’s only at that distance
I have those brilliant shifts
that stick in my head.
I want to watch things in a place that leaves me alone,
and lets me keep my distance
from you and the rest.
It’s not that I won’t join in,
it’s just there’s something I’m looking for
which I find best when I’m in a group
alone.
Sometimes I’m looking a bit natural,
which I work hard at
when I want to disappear.
I’m representing myself watching you
and you’re busy representing whatever you’re
representing.
It’s all quite self-conscious.
But my brain gets into gear then
and starts thinking of lots of things,
which is why I like performances.
I don’t get that when I watch sport.
Being a member of the audience means watching out of the
the corner of your eye,
alert to the things that might happen while you’re
thinking about something else.
That’s why standing ovations are such a killer,
the way the vulnerability and doubt get stopped
and you lose a bit of the afterlife of the performance,
that would have lingered at the edge of your mind
for a few days.
I have no problem with the old rules
or the new rules,
or the no rules,
I just want to hang around and somehow disappear,
which is when things get interesting.
I need that and it comes in different shapes
and some of them involve seating and some of them don’t.
I’m not bothered as long as I have some space and time,
and nobody tries to teach me how or what,
and in the end I’m always joined in and I’m always not.1
From Carte Blanche magazine, 2016. With thanks to Hooman Sharifi for inviting this piece of writing and to Gillie Kleiman for help and advice.
As I prepare a new show, I find Burrows’s thoughts both comforting and challenging. I’m absolutely with him that ‘standing ovations are such a killer’ and I, too, much prefer it when ‘nobody tries to teach me how or what’ — so much art has become so didactic. Yuk! But as a performer I find ‘the audience’ a quite unknowable thing. They’re not all Jonathan Burrows, they’re not all me… How to invite them all to join in whilst also leaving them alone?
‘Audience’ in Jonathan Burrows Writing Dance (Varamo Press, 2022), 65-7.