I was invited by Neil Beddow at ACTA in Bristol to make a short contribution to a seminar on Ownership in/of Community Theatre.
After talking a bit about how Bubble go about creating a feedback loop between volunteer artists and specialist artists I tried to make a more oblique point - that you can't actually own theatre.
What I was trying to say was that Theatre in it's purest form, exists in the space between the actors and the audience - in the moment that the person watching responds to the performer, and the performer responds to the response. That moment is ephemeral, and it can't be owned.
We try to find ways to own theatre. Tickets, Scripts, DVD's, live cinema screenings. But are these not just reports of the sightings of theatre. If the actor cannot respond to the gasp or chuckle of the audience - if the audience are deprived of their rarely used, but highly feared, right to boo because they aren't there, then it's not actually theatre.
The response to my brilliant observation was polite silence and questions about other things I'd talked about. Maybe my point was blindingly obvious. Maybe it's just irrelevant. What I had suggested certainly wasn't a direct response to the question.
But in a way it was. One of the foundations stones of theatre (and certainly of community theatre), is sharing. The sharing of a word, action or story by a performer. The gift of listening and emotional engagement given by the audience. The dance between the two. And when it works well, the possibility that not only are the audience plugging in emotionally, they are also thinking ahead -deducing what might happen next. So rational brain and emotional brain are at work simultaneously, while outwardly we lean forward to signal our support for the actor to continue the journey.
It all requires sharing. And the moment cannot and should not be owned.
I think what Neil intended us to discuss was how some professional artists might disallow the voice of the participant artists and how some processes sometimes abuse the power relationship. But I believe that if we bear in mind that that theatre is created between us, then it's very existence is defined by, and dependent on, co-ownership.
