towards an ethics of intimate audience

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PEET 3 (1) pp. 41–57 Intellect Limited 2012

Performing Ethos Volume 3 Number 1

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/peet.3.1.41_1

Keywords

audience participation theatre ethics intimate theatre one-to-one theatre Adrian HowellsNel Noddings

HeLeN IBALLUniversity of Leeds

Towards an ethics of Intimate

Audience

ABsTrACT

As so-called ‘intimate theatre’ (Gardner 2009) becomes a feature of UK festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe and the focus of the BAC (Battersea Arts Centre, London) One-on-One Festival (2010 and 2011), so relations between audience and performer alter. This shift has raised concerns about the ethics of theatre audience participation. Taking Adrian Howells’s one-to-one performance Footwashing for the Sole (premiered Glasgow 2009, international touring since 2009) as its case study, the article undertakes an ethical review that identifies key benefits and risks of the activity for Howells and his participants. The evidence is drawn from a three-day interdisciplinary research workshop conducted with Howells and student thea-tre-makers, witnessed by psychologists and applied ethicists (Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds 2010). Using video clips of the two workshop performances of Footwashing for the Sole, which are available to readers via an online archive, the article proposes an ethics of intimate audience that draws upon a key concept from Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) read through Nel Noddings’s care theory (1984). It concludes that, in a dynamic heightened by the ‘particular intimacy’ (Sedgwick 2003) between physical touch and emotion, Howells and his audience-participant bring their ‘ethical selves’ (Noddings 1984 and 2007) to this ‘accelerated friendship/relationship between two initial strangers’ (Howells 2009).

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1. INTrodUCTIoN

This article is an outcome of Theatre Personal: Audiences with Intimacy, an ongoing project that was launched in 2009 to research contemporary audi-ence participation in the United Kingdom. The project explores convergences of lively and current fields in theatre and performance studies, applying recent debates in theatre and ethics (Grehan 2009; Ridout 2009; Meyer-Dinkgräfe and Watt 2010; Matthews and Torevell 2011) to new perspectives on audi-ence and spectatorship (Freshwater 2009; McConachie 2008; Ranciere 2009). Theatre Personal’s aim is to position its research methods in direct contact with its subjects, creating opportunities for dialogue and, indeed, for the practical implementation of some of its findings. What differentiates the project from studies of audience ethics such as Helena Grehan’s (2009) is its determina-tion to work with – rather than solely writing about – key practitioners, and to employ case studies of audience-participant experiences, rather than just rely-ing on the scholar’s own experiences or those of arts journalists. By ‘gathering and assessing evidence’ from the responses of individual participants, rather than joining a majority of theatre scholars who are ‘more comfortable making strong assertions about theatre’s unique influence and impact’ in generalized terms (Freshwater 2009: 3–4), Theatre Personal is an active contribution to the small revolution in theatre studies that is called for by Helen Freshwater’s Theatre & Audience (2009). Furthermore, Theatre Personal proposes research methods designed to facilitate and investigate reflective practices concordant with Freshwater’s subsequent review:

Despite my scepticism about some of the claims made about the liber-ating effects of participatory performance, I also think that there are hopeful signs that contemporary theatre is now providing opportunities for more meaningful forms of audience participation. For me, this hope resides in companies and performers who have learned to trust audiences, offering them real choices and accepting that genuine partic-ipation has risks as well as potentials: that it involves vulnerability on the part of performers and participants, as both parties open them-selves to unexpected circumstances and outcomes [… from the recog-nition that] not all experiences of participation are positive, requiring them to confront the limitations, disappointments and frustrations that are surely integral to any genuine participatory experience.

(Freshwater 2011: 409)

This article is motivated by the recognition that participatory experience, dependent upon interpersonal engagement, is inevitably a complex territory with potential risks along with possible benefits. If, as Freshwater claims, ‘hope resides in companies and performers who have learned to trust audi-ences’ (2011: 409), there is surely reciprocation to be made by supporting audience-participants who are learning to trust practitioners. In working towards an ethics of intimate audience, Adrian Howells’s Footwashing for the Sole (premièred at The Arches, Glasgow 2009, international touring since 2009) provides a paradigm example. There are two main justifications for this claim. Firstly, positioning Footwashing for the Sole (henceforth referred to as Footwashing) as a primary case study invites critical engagement with journalistic perceptions of a burgeoning trend for audience participa-tion in twenty-first-century UK theatre practice. This participatory form is


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differentiated from the broader spectrum of diverse strategies by theatre-makers such as Brecht, Boal, Grotowski and the Living Theatre by its direct engagement with specific audience members; a one-to-one relationship that Rachel Zerihan (2009) suggests has its genesis in Chris Burden’s Five Day Locker Piece (1971). With particular reference to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Guardian theatre critic Lyn Gardner has been voluble in identify-ing this audience-participatory practice in terms of its newly ‘widespread’ availability and by ascribing the label ‘intimate theatre’ (Gardner 2009 – also see Cavendish 2009; Gardner 2010; Lamont 2011). Whilst perceptions of a recent gamut of interactive and seemingly personalized theatre might be cause to celebrate the rejuvenation of ‘audience participation’ from its traditional associations with embarrassment and entertainment at a fellow spectator’s expense, it is also an apposite moment to consider the ethical implications, recognizing that this trend is associated with reported compli-cations, some of which I discuss later.

Having initiated the investigation with a project of applied research, this article follows through on Gardner’s recognition that so-called ‘intimate thea-tre’ places ‘audiences in situations they would never encounter in a traditional theatre’ which raises ‘ethical issues – both for those making and watching the work’ (Gardner 2009). It is in this context that the second reason for propos-ing Footwashing as a paradigm arises from particular circumstances surround-ing the piece’s inception. Footwashing was produced during Howells’s AHRC Creative Fellowship at the University of Glasgow (September 2007–June 2009) and thus his work was subject to scrutiny using established processes of ethical review. Under such circumstances, assumptions that ticket purchase implies consent – ‘after a week at the Edinburgh Festival, I should have known that the purchase of a ticket here on the Fringe can contractually bind you to almost any sort of audience participation’ (Lamont 2011: 26) – are destabi-lized, and theatre-making gets reframed as an experiment involving human participants.

Using Footwashing as a case study, I want to propose ethical review as fundamental to creative processes in work whose project is intimacy with its audience, whilst also evidencing that the process cannot contain every eventuality – indeed, acknowledging that some obvious risks are also some of the most challenging to overcome – and recognizing that there may be a risk of succumbing to a false sense of security because ethical review has taken place (see Howells 2010). Stimulated by initial findings from the research, I want to suggest Nel Noddings’s care theory as a mode of discourse with the capacity to illuminate the nuances of engagement with Footwashing. It was in the context of the meaningful and moving contact achieved by Howells – evidenced later with reference to the project’s online video archive – that ethicists present at the research workshop identified a reference point in the field of virtue ethics. It was in exploring this field that I discovered the related area of care theory, which has in turn provided a discursive framework for investigating the complicated nature of practitioner–participant interaction. In Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), Noddings proposes that caring, ‘rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness’, is a preferable approach to ethics than ‘justice-based approaches’ (1984: 2). As I will go on to investigate, by means of Noddings’s model, to work towards an ethics of intimate audience is to consider reciprocity, receptivity, reversibility and benevolence as much as it is to assess beneficence through established procedures of ethical review.


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2. MeTHod

The three-day interdisciplinary research workshop (Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds, 14–16 May 2010) informing this arti-cle provided an opportunity for a practical evaluation of recommendations from the initial ethical review that Footwashing received at the University of Glasgow. The research workshop was the first time that the performance involved a second layer of ‘audience’ beyond Howells and his solo audience-participant; usually the intimacy is private, a one-to-one encounter. Indeed, it is unsettling to look at the video footage and see witnesses observing the performance with notebooks and pens in hand, and to acknowledge the presence of a camera. However, that I find it strange is telling in itself because the ethical review of creative processes is at present a relatively unfamiliar practice in UK higher education (except in ‘applied’ fields), as was evident from the workshops, and it can feel quite harsh, personal and, indeed, over-cautious.

During the research workshops, I invited Howells to perform Footwashing twice consecutively, each time with a different audience-participant and in front of a small group of ‘expert witnesses’ and postgraduate student theatre-makers. The group was composed of five postgraduate and postdoctoral student-participants and four witnesses, bringing expertise from applied ethics and psychology, with myself as the fifth witness, from theatre studies. The witnesses from ethics and psychology were invited because one-to-one thea-tre involves interpersonal relations that, in analogous professional situations, have a code of ethics and specific requirements regarding training and supervi-sion, including procedures for dealing with potential harm. This becomes even more evident where there is a blurring of habitual distinctions between social and aesthetic practices, such as in cases, including Howells’s, where there are similarities between intimate audience and confessional, spiritual and/or counselling experiences (also see Iball 2012). One of the two psychologists had significant research experience in the professional ethics of counselling and psychotherapy.

As a practitioner, Howells works with integrity, insight and sensitivity. There were many instances during the workshop weekend, and subsequently, of awareness that my understanding and insights into practice were playing catch-up with Howells’s own. Nevertheless, there is not equivalency in terms of support for Howells as there is for professionals in one-to-one occupa-tions such as therapy and counselling, particularly in terms of strategies of closure, self-support, professionally accredited supervision and support mech-anisms that could be called upon if needed. Such dynamics are relatively new territory for venues, and lack of experience is heightened by the pressured economics of programming for limited audience numbers. This is a field for further investigation later in the project. The additional layer of spectatorship in the Footwashing performances during the workshop introduced a level of inauthenticity to the research method in the sense of disturbing the intended dynamic although, as will be discussed later, this disturbance produced some illuminating responses from all parties. Throughout this article, unless otherwise stated, all quotations are transcribed from workshop discussions. Subsequently, and as is evident from an example discussed later in this article, the opportunity to evaluate findings and recommendations from the work-shops in the light of audience-participant experience arose from the first BAC One-on-One Festival (6–18 July 2010).



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3. THe reseArCH PerForMANCes

The intrusiveness that had been anticipated as a consequence of opening a one-to-one performance to witnesses dispersed as Footwashing got underway. This was facilitated to a significant extent by the techniques that Howells had in place to prepare himself and his audience-participant. You can observe these techniques in the archive of video clips online (Iball 2011a): they include a meditative sequence of seven breaths along with the verbal information and instructions that Howells gives at the beginning of the piece; these strategies recognize informed consent as a key component in facilitating ethical partici-pation. Indeed, one of the psychologists at the research workshop observed that ‘the same performance piece could have very different ethical qualities depending on the extent to which the performer has prepared themselves and the audience’. Howells responded to questions on this topic during the work-shop by describing how the advance publicity for Footwashing lists each stage of the performance for prospective audience-participants:

An audience member is given this experience as part of a festival. They will normally have read about it on the Internet or in a brochure and it clearly says exactly what I will do … I will wash your feet, I will anoint your feet … it even says, which I am not happy about, that I will ask your permission to kiss your feet. Now, I’ve left that in because the ethics committee at Glasgow University insisted that I did. I wouldn’t normally do this in the professional theatre world, but I’ve left that in for them because that is what the ethics committee insisted that I made transparent when I did this as part of my research.

The Glasgow committee’s insistence upon informed consent was reiterated by ethicists and psychologists in the workshop and, at points, the student theatre-makers, practitioner and I struggled with this recommendation. Our struggle was most evident in relation to the ‘liquorice’ performance, which you will find video-archived online (Iball 2011b). There is evidence of Howells’s struggle in the indented quotation given above. In the arts, advance infor-mation about what happens is often accompanied by a ‘spoiler alert’. With the ‘liquorice’ performance there was a big difference between the theatre-maker’s intention and a psychologist’s concerns about how the piece might be experienced by the participant, with the recommendation that an expla-nation of the piece be presented at the outset, rather than at the end of the performance as the theatre-maker had planned. On reflection, it seems that intimate experiences of audience have the potential to take the participant on a journey of a different order, because the quality of ‘surprise’ is relocated to the unpredictability inherent in a one-off interface between practitioner/artwork and the participant’s individual experience. Indeed, and as discussed elsewhere (see Iball 2012), assumptions, misunderstandings and anxieties on the part of the participant are as potentially detrimental – though this may be itself interesting and amusing – to the piece as are ‘spoilers’. Thus, informed consent may well support and facilitate a fuller reception of the work.

As is evident from the series of video clips (Iball 2011a), Howells’s actions in Footwashing are also explained carefully at each stage during the perform-ance. This helps to address the inequality that Howells recognizes as occurring in the relational dynamic because ‘the practitioner has the map’. Noddings names the two parties in the caring relationship: the ‘first member is the


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“one-caring” and the second is the “cared-for”’ (1984: 4) and it is the inequal-ity in this dynamic that some commentators have found problematic. Sarah Lucia Hoagland (1990) critiques the ethics of Noddings’s model, concerned by the reliance on ‘giver’ and ‘taker’ roles (parent and child, teacher and student), which invoke dependency and dominance. This dynamic is, in fact, not so clear cut in Noddings’s model – and neither is it clear cut in Footwashing, as I will go on to explore.

Please go online now (Iball 2011a) and watch the extracts from the first audience-participant’s experience of Footwashing (see Extract 2). Clearly, this is one example and other participants may be reluctant, concerned, uncertain or resistant; I address specific instances later, as well as exploring the internal processing of this experience by the participant and by Howells. The careful-ness and ritual of the process is emphasized by Howells getting into a comfort-able, cross-legged position. He holds the meditative pose for a few moments, seemingly to make sure he is ready. This recalls the breathing of the seven breaths preparing both Howells and his participant for the experience at the outset (see Extract 1); the meditative pose probably also signals this reminder to the audience-participant. In Extract 2, the uncertainty whether to put both feet in the bowl is acknowledged in the sharing of a small glance and laugh by Howells and the audience-participant. On watching the video back, I notice that eye contact seems to function in this sequence both as reassurance and as the prompt for expressed reactions by the participant. So, for example, once Howells has lathered the liquid soap in his hands he looks up at his partici-pant and in response she half-giggles and covers her face with her hands. For a while, both gazes are concentrated on the foot that is being soaped. Then Howells looks up – a ‘checking’ with his participant – and her response to their eye contact is a louder giggle, or laugh, than before. As Howells gently dries her foot, an experience both felt and observed by the participant, she begins to cry and covers her face with her hands.

Watching this section, you will notice Howells looking at his partici-pant several times (00:02:29–42), gauging her process, before beginning to wash her second foot. This sequence may be recognized as exemplifying the fundamental components of caring as proposed by Noddings: engrossment, motivational displacement and recognition. She identifies engrossment as a requirement for caring, describing it as ‘receptivity’ to the needs of the other (1984: 30). Noddings goes on to say that engrossment must be paired with motivational displacement: where the one-caring’s behaviour is determined largely by the needs of the cared-for. Howells ‘checks’ again as he prepares the soap, looking once and then looking again (00:02:54–03:00) at which point eye contact is established and the participant smiles and exhales audibly. Noddings states that caring requires recognition of the caring by the cared-for. When this happens, where the cared-for responds to the caring, Noddings describes it as ‘completed in the other’ (1984: 4).

The video then cuts to a conversation instigated by two questions from Howells: firstly, whether the participant has had her feet washed by anyone before and, secondly, whether she has ever washed anyone else’s feet (00:03:00–00:04:03). A little later, when Howells asks, ‘How is it for you to have me doing this for you?’, the participant’s tears return. She says that it is ‘quite humbling’. Her hands again go to her face, cover her eyes and wipe tears. ‘I suppose it makes me … it makes me wish that the world was better. So it is kind of good but at the same time a little bit sad’ (00:04:05–43). The participant then asks, ‘Can I ask you something? How is it for you washing



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my feet?’ to which Howells replies that it ‘absolutely feels like a privilege. And I am not bullshitting you, as I’ve washed over six hundred pairs of feet and it feels every time like something important, something special.’ In response to Howells’s question whether she could do the same for other people, the participant says that ‘it feels like it is connected to goodness, so would push through the reservations [she would feel] to give someone the experience’. Noddings suggests that people build an ‘ethical ideal, an image of the kind of person that they want to be’ and it is in this context that she distinguishes between natural caring, which arises as a response based in ‘love or natu-ral inclination’ (1984: 5) and ethical caring: that is, the difference between wanting to care and feeling that one must. She goes on to claim that ethical caring is based on, and depends upon, natural caring because the ‘foundation of ethical response’ is in ‘the memory of caring and being cared for’ (1984: 1). By applying these concepts, Footwashing’s ‘particular intimacy’ (Sedgwick 2003: 17) may usefully be charted. The next section explores the ‘particular intimacy’ of practitioner and audience-participant, with reference to some of the constraints and conventions of performance.

4. ACCeLerATIoN, rePeTITIoN ANd CAre

One of the witnesses from applied ethics described his response to observ-ing Footwashing at the research workshop in terms of being ‘moved’ by ‘how getting right into the middle of someone’s life’ had ‘happened so quickly’. This is concordant with Howells’s description of his practice as inducing ‘an accel-erated friendship/relationship between two initial strangers’ (Howells 2009). During Footwashing the intimate experience of sensual and careful treatment; of being anointed, soothed and cleansed; is employed by Howells as a means of initiating closeness and openness – intimacy – in a concentrated time period. The ticketed slots are sometimes 20 and sometimes 40 minutes long, depending on the venue’s programming requirements. Howells’s performance evidences Alphonso Lingis’s assertion that ‘the sensorial is a medium in which any point turns into a pivot, any edge into a level, any surface into a plane, any space between things into a path’ (1998: 30). The possibility of intimate engagement occurs in the connection between Howells’s questions about his participant’s relationship with their feet and his washing and massaging of their feet. He employs the familiar social form of massage therapy to chaper-one the encounter (see Iball 2012). As is evident from the Footwashing video clips, the ‘accelerated friendship/relationship’ (Howells 2009) expressed so intensely in this example is facilitated by the ‘particular intimacy’ that ‘seems to subsist between textures and emotions’ (Sedgwick 2003: 17).

The title Footwashing for the Sole plays on the homophone sole/soul. In a concordant realm, the recognition that underpins Eve Sedgwick’s book Touching Feeling is that ‘the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the single word “touching”, equally it is internal to the word “feeling”’ (2003: 17). The potential for meaningful contact in Footwashing operates primarily at the level of ‘touching feeling’. However, this is also a site of particular vulnerability: not everyone likes, or wants, or responds well to such contact under these conditions, and even when/if they do, that inti-macy can be fragile and susceptible to rupture. Furthermore, in the ethi-cal review during the Footwashing research workshops, an unexpected risk became evident. At the centre of the piece is a monologue during which the content becomes overtly political in referring to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.


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Howells acknowledged that this had caused discomfort, particularly amongst some of his Jewish participants, in response to the opinion of a psychologist at the workshop who articulated how:

It [the Footwashing performance] changed for me into something differ-ent, from the foot washing of the participant into a political message that took me aback and I felt more uncomfortable with that. Personally, it is a political message which I condone but it’s one which I might not have expected to appear in that context and I think as an audience member it is what I might have felt most uncomfortable about. I have come in expecting one thing, which I have been told about and now I feel I have been a bit caught. I’m getting a political message that I don’t think you can assume – I’m sure you don’t assume – that the person will agree with. That’s what I feel a bit uncomfortable about and what I don’t think is communicated at the start.

It is not only the range of possible responses that make attentiveness a crucial component of one-to-one theatre; it is also the temporality of performance as a medium. Particular issues arise in the challenges of time allocation, the convention of repetition and, indeed, expectations about the ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’ of repeat performances. Certainly, ethical issues might easily be anticipated to arise from the conjunction of repetition with ‘accelerated’ (Howells 2009) intimacy. Temporality is a realm of intimate audience where performance conventions wrangle with the quality of engagement; perform-ance repetition is a particular instance where Noddings’s concept of the ethical self is required and perhaps, expected, anticipated, accepted and investigated, as I will consider. During stints at theatre festivals, as Howells explained to me in an e-mail (6 October 2011), he usually does ‘ten performances in a day, but have done sixteen, and have also done six’ and he usually does ‘three or four’ before he takes a break. The form might be decried as unethical – and even elitist in its limited availability – because it is to some extent unsustainable and, on this basis, potentially discriminatory and exploitative of performer and audience alike. The practitioner responds to the demands of, and the demand for, repetition by complying with the ‘script’ s/he has created with the aim of achieving parity in the quality of the experience for participants, regardless of whether their allocated timeslot occurs early or late in the day. The practi-tioner is vulnerable to exhaustion, to the pressures imposed by self-regulation, by the contract with the venue and an awareness of audience expectations. During workshop discussions, Howells recognized that:

The repetition is problematical. For example, in Brighton, to do sixteen performances a day, because I get really tired and although on the one hand I want to work with the real, and what is happening in that space at that time, I also want to ensure that that person has a qualita-tive experience and so if I really allow myself to be as tired as I am, that does impair their experience and so it becomes about discipline and it becomes about a discipline of performing.

Whilst repetition is understood and expected by participants, there are inevitable discrepancies between freshness and tiredness. In worst-case scenarios, the freshness of expectation and heightened anticipation on the part of the audience-participant collides with the strain of repetition for a



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performer who has done the performance several times already that day. As well as being the first occasion Footwashing was performed in front of an ‘audience’, the Theatre Personal workshop also created a situation in which the participant in the first performance was able to see another participant taking part in what she had just experienced and where the same witnesses were present for both performances. The research method caused a shift in perspective, which brought to light potential consequences that might otherwise remain concealed. A key example of this during the perform-ances of Footwashing was Howells’s awareness that observers were hear-ing him make the same claims twice. What the participants and observers experienced were two different responses and two different interpersonal dynamics in response to the same basic scripted structure. What Howells experienced was his repetition:

Doing Footwashing a second time, I became so aware of you all spectat-ing, while I was speaking about humility and what have you. I was so conscious of the fact that I had already said this, and that you would be thinking ‘he is such a cheat’. I was conscious of that more so than I was engaging with the participant, and that has quite upset me actu-ally, because I was not really there and present in the moment for the participant - because I was so aware that I had already said those words and you had heard them.

Howells’s concern was contested by one of the witnesses, an ethicist, who said that ‘it never crossed my mind that there was some kind of inauthentic representation in what you were doing’ and by the first participant’s response to seeing Footwashing performed a second time, both akin to Noddings’s understanding of the importance of how care is being received:

His [Howells’s] integrity is what makes it authentic for me. That it is not just a case of running through the motions and that, for all it being staged, in the time that’s about the human connection between two people there’s enough authenticity there to outweigh all those other things. Clearly it did connect with me very strongly. I think that I moved in and out [of connection with the performance] because, in my own response, I became very suspicious at various points. I thought there was something in the drink [of water] and I had to smell the drink [laughter in room] and I think it is because of my own vulnerability – because I’d been vulnerable. So that was all going on for me and I got a little bit paranoid at points, and so [when I was] watching you [the second person to participate in Footwashing] it was much easier for me to accept that Adrian was being genuine. Watching him, he was very in that moment – although he said that it was a very different experience because people are watching – [to Howells:] you looked engaged to me, and that was very reassuring having been on the other side of it because I think there’s this huge trust issue.

Whilst there may be concerns that repetition is perceived as false or decep-tive (and indeed is an ethical grey area for which, it seems from the work-shop discussion, the benefits usually outweigh the risks) there is an expectation that such structures are in place, as is clear in the first partici-pant’s recognition that ‘my expectation was that this was a performance.


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Adrian will have things that he wants to do, things that he repeats.’ From the evidence of the first Footwashing, the variation – which ‘personalizes’ – is with the audience-participant. She acknowledged her experience as one that became separated from Howells’s input, because ‘at the end I just felt a bit overwhelmed and shell-shocked because of my journey, in a sense regardless of Adrian’s journey’. It is the predominance of touch in the performance that, with a receptive audience-participant, has the capacity to facilitate this private time for personal reflection:

I need to get to the soles of your feet […] This is an opportunity for us both to be silent; and perhaps my hands and your feet will have their own conversation.

(Howells in Footwashing)

5. ‘eTHICAL seLVes’ As oBsTACLes

The notion of ethical care as defined by Noddings already has a performa-tive component at its core: the need to invoke the ethical self – ‘the image of ourselves at our caring best’ – to which we resort when there is ‘one thought too many’. That is, ‘when we are too tired to care or when the one cared-for proves difficult’ (Noddings in Walker and Ivanhoe 2007: 9):

There are times, of course, when we do not feel like caring, and then I’ve said we have to draw on our ‘ethical ideal’ – our history of caring and the high value we place on ourselves as carers. In this approach, care theorists are close to virtue ethicists who depend heavily on the character of moral agents. Our priority, however, is on natural caring, and our efforts at ethical care are meant to establish or re-establish the more dependable conditions under which caring relations thrive.

(Noddings 2003 [1984]: xv)

This idea is one that offers a particular slant on the term ‘virtuosity’ in thea-tre practice, and this model is one that resonates for the Theatre Personal project in terms of the contracting and code of practice that might be most appropriate for engaging an intimate audience. What emerges is a theat-rical virtuosity that is capable of sustaining the practitioner in the face of competing pressures (time limits, repetition, tiredness, hostility, resistance) that are also a result of – and subject to – the ‘perform or else’ (McKenzie 2001) mentality of theatre culture and its paying audience that allows little room for deliberate compromise, postponement or withdrawal. Under such circumstances, practitioner virtuosity or, indeed, virtue-osity, might be understood as a combination of being good, in both senses (high perform-ance proficiency and moral virtue), and being careful. Footwashing passes on the baton of care to its participants: in response to Howells’s question whether she could do the same for other people, the participant says that ‘it feels like it is connected to goodness, so I would push through the reserva-tions [she would feel] to give someone the experience’ and here a direct link might be drawn with the ethical self. However, as Noddings acknowledges and as is evidenced in the next section:

Ethical caring, as necessary as it is, is always risky because the ethical agent’s attention is diverted from the cared-for to his or her ethical self



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[…] If the cared-for sees this and calls us on it – ‘you don’t really care’ – relations are likely to become even more difficult.

(2003 [1984]: xv)

In relation to his ‘most radical project to date’ The Pleasure of Being, Washing, Feeding (BAC London, July 2010) in which he invites his participant to be ‘bathed naked, cradled and fed’, Howells admits he is ‘really pushing the form’ and emphasizes that ‘the audience member will be able to stop the perform-ance if they are uncomfortable’ (Howells in Mansfield 2010). In conversa-tion with me in November 2010, Howells described how he had come to recognize the value of preparing the participant in a vestibule outside the performance space as a direct result of the Theatre Personal workshop prac-tice and discussions. This understanding also resulted in the consensual information being delivered by an usher possessing a detailed understand-ing of the piece; because Howells had learnt that by giving this information himself, audience-participants’ concerns that their responses might sabotage Howells’s artwork tended to increase. One-to-one theatre creates a particu-lar kind of loop where the audience-participant is observant to the way that her/his response is received by the practitioner, with the practitioner becom-ing audience to the way that her/his work is being received. Borrowing again from care theory, sometimes it is the case that ‘the one-to-be-cared-for turns about and responds to the needs of the one-caring’ and Noddings discusses how this might ‘diminish the ethical ideal’ yet might also be ‘ethical heroism’ (1984: 77). These are eventualities that map onto the Footwashing workshops and, more broadly, to other examples of intimate audience experience, as I will discuss. From the research that I have conducted in the field so far, and in collaboration and consultation with UK colleagues, audience-participant concern to ‘give good audience’ appears to be widespread (see Iball 2012; Heddon, Iball and Zerihan 2012). Howells acknowledges that:

It’s really important that they [audience-participants] have agency, because even more in a One to One show people feel that they have to go along with things in case they sabotage the piece. It’s about creating a safe space.

(Howells in Mansfield 2010)

However, being instructed to stop the performance if you are uncomfortable and feeling able to put that instruction into practice are very different things. The evidence gathered by Theatre Personal so far indicates that counterbal-ancing, or somehow overcoming, this high level of compliance in one-to-one audience-participation is one of the two biggest challenges when approaching an ethics of intimate audience. Indeed, from the research conducted, it seems that the capacity to address one’s own needs compassionately is a tricky issue yet to be addressed satisfactorily by practitioners and audience-participants alike. As discussed earlier, the other big challenge for intimate audience is time and, particularly, repetition. Anecdotal evidence from a number of audi-ence-participants in a recent one-to-one event indicates that, from a position of awareness about the time-limited conventions of theatre, compliance is often related to a conscious acceptance of the endurance required to stay until the end of the piece; thus avoiding disrupting the performance and enabling audience-participants to acquire a sense of the whole show.

A significant risk of intimate audience is the mismatch of audience- participant expectations with the experience. For example, the instance


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from The Pleasure of Being, where an audience-participant’s anticipation over the preceding weeks resulted in significant disappointment at the performance. She had been inspired to book tickets following her experi-ence of Footwashing. She described how The Pleasure of Being was intro-duced clearly and carefully by the usher outside the performance space but also how the impact of this preparation was undercut by the fact that Howells was behind schedule due to earlier overruns. Indeed, she overheard Howells discussing this lateness with the usher, before the usher arrived in the waiting area to introduce the piece. The participant went on to describe an experience compromised by the evidence of repeat performances on Howells’s body. His clothes were damp from bathing previous participants and he was sweating from the exertion of these prior engagements. Again, I look to Noddings who recognizes the ‘diminishment’ of ethical ideals – and in this she includes the diminishment of the ideals of others – when they are placed ‘in conditions that prevent them from being able to care’ (see Noddings 1984: 116–19) and the potential conflict in caring when there are multiple needs at one time (1984: 54–55).

Other of Howells’s audience-participants describe the extraordinary power of their experience (e.g. Clifford 2011), and the range of responses to such a particularized piece in which there are vulnerabilities on both sides is evidently personalized and particularized from performance to performance, with numerous variables. So, might it also be ventured that it is not only the reluctance to sabotage a piece of theatre that operates in audience-participa-tion but also a protectiveness born from recognition of the caring intentions of the practitioner? The evidence would suggest that this is the case, based on responses from audience-participants and echoed in my own experience. It seems that what underpins audience-participant engagement with intimate audience is a recognition that the moral status of an action depends less on what actually happens than on the intentions of the person who performs it and, furthermore, that spectators also recognize and accept responsibility for decisions that they make during the event, even if there is some ambiva-lence, eagerness to please or rationalizing here. There is an understanding that performance happens within constraints that may themselves have wider benefits – for example, in enabling more people to attend the performance, or in being more worthwhile for some spectators than for others. From the evidence so far, spectators generally seem to understand this bigger picture because they recognize the overarching ‘motives’ of the performance/practi-tioner. Indeed, Footwashing is a situation in which audience-participants are invited to consider the repeat performance as an act of humility and compas-sion, in order to reflect upon their own capacity to do likewise. Noddings proposes that the ethical self is ‘an active relation between my actual self and a vision of my ideal self as one caring and cared for’ (1984: 49). The Theatre Personal in this iteration could thus be described as evangelism for the ethical self. This connects with audience-participant recognition in the evidence so far, that virtue ‘lies as much in someone’s attitude’, ‘innermost desires’ and ‘intentions’ as in her/his ‘actions’ (Foot 2003: 108).

6. soMe CoNCLUsIoNs

In defining ‘intimate theatre’, Gardner cautions practitioners that, when audience participation is employed as an integral component of a perform-ance, it ‘signals to the audience that its presence matters’ and, if audience



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presence ‘really does matter, it changes the contract between artists and audiences’ (Gardner 2010). The Theatre Personal project is founded on the proposition that ‘intimate audience’ might be a more resonant term than ‘intimate theatre’; implying the need for a code of practice given the direct involvement of an audience through personalization. An ethics of intimate audience might be viewed as a search for points of balance along a contin-uum from could to should; a negotiation between contemporary ‘work that pushes at the edges of our expectations of what theatre could be’ (Keidan and Brine 2007: 6) and the recognition that ‘often it seems artists get so excited by the new situations that they put people into that they don’t stop to consider if they should’ (Yarker 2010, original emphasis). Through fieldwork and workshop investigation, we might begin to establish what constitutes ‘proper preparation’ (Cavendish 2009) for contemporary forms of audience participation.

Student theatre-makers who participated in the Theatre Personal work-shops acknowledge that it was ‘useful to have points of view on what effect things might have on people participating because as theatre-maker you tend to think of it in terms of theatrical effects but you don’t think of the effect of how that will resonate’ and so the workshops provided opportuni-ties for ‘learning to think about caring for people, not separating performer and audience from that concern’. As a suggested checklist for ethical review – or, indeed, a strategy for situating ethics at the heart of creative theatre-making – the following areas for consideration have been identified during the project so far:

How freely does the participant participate and to what extent does s/he •feel able to withdraw or end the piece of her/his own volition? How/is this freedom supported by the practice and setting? •Is the distribution of flyers and other forms of advance publicity a •guarantee that the information will have been read before a ticket is booked? Is the description a fair and accurate representation of the performance’s •content? Will the box office reinforce and supplement the information? Will the ushers and/or the practitioner do so on the day? Do warnings and age (and health) limits need to be agreed and •enforced? At what point and by whom should information be delivered in order for •it to be absorbed and acted upon by the audience-participant? Is it clear what is being asked of the participant? Are the reasons and •outcomes of this request clear? Is the participant given a choice of options? •If things go wrong or make a powerful impact that the performance •cannot accommodate, what support is in place to deal with the conse-quences or repercussions? Or if the impact of the performance is felt retrospectively?

That ‘real caring is difficult to achieve’ and that there are times ‘when there is one thought too many’ and ‘when we are too tired to care or when the one cared-for proves difficult’ (Noddings 2007: 9) may be set as a reminder that theatre is not creating a inevitably damaged version of care – although there are difficulties that are particular to the theatre contract to be acknowl-edged and addressed, as this article has explored. Reflecting with me on


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their witness to the Footwashing workshops, the ethicists questioned whether performance repetition is a form of deception and whether there is a ‘sort of deception in leading people to believe they are special’. And yet, resonating with Noddings’s concept of engrossment:

Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers […] as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.

(Phillips and Taylor 2009: 12)

This powerful claim is one that casts as intensely meaningful the phrasing ‘friendship/relationship’ that Howells describes his practice as inducing (Howells 2009). Phillips and Taylor add to their assertion the observation that kindness ‘is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others’ (2009: 12). The ethicists wondered if Footwashing’s constructed special attention becomes unethical because it makes the partici-pant even more vulnerable to the feeling that this connection is short-lived, fickle and therefore bogus. Yet, as they went on to acknowledge, some may prefer the knowledge of repetition as a cushion to make the intimacy – and being the focus of attention – more bearable.

Intimate audience is about getting close to us and inviting us to be open, and the dynamic is a fragile one that depends on the contingency of a meet-ing of ‘ethical selves’. The imbalance between the anticipation of a one-off experience and the frequency of the activity for the practitioner differenti-ates intimacy in theatre from the (aspirant) qualities of intimacy in daily personal relationships; whilst at the same time there is a recognizable align-ment of one-to-one theatre with therapeutic, medical and pastoral dynamics, where what is unusual or loaded for the participant may be a more regular-ized and habituated daily occurrence for the professionals involved. A thea-tre dynamic, with the practitioner holding the ‘map’, is one that suggests Noddings’s model of ‘inherently unequal relations’ where one person ‘bears the major responsibility for caring’ such as ‘parent–child, physician–patient and teacher–student’ (2007: 42). However, the evidence of the two perform-ances of Footwashing during the research workshops – in addition to other evidence gathered from my own one-to-one experiences and anecdotal evidence from fellow theatregoers – suggests that there are aspirations for the dynamic as one of ‘mature, equal relations’ where the carer and the cared-for ‘exchange places regularly’ (Noddings 2007: 42). Indeed, this is a shift-ing dynamic that Howells’s The Garden of Adrian (2009) facilitated (see Iball 2012) and that Footwashing asks audience-participants to consider. As one of the workshop witnesses from applied ethics observed, the areas for ethical review in Howells’s theatre practice are tangible and participants ‘have them-selves exposed in a very intimate and explicitly clear way’ where there are ‘obvious risks’ and ‘obvious potential goods’. Such tangibility is a reason why Footwashing formed a useful pilot case study for this research.

Dominic Cavendish uses the example of his unwitting implication in a scenario where a fellow audience-participant fled the theatre in tears at Uninvited Guests’ Love Letters Straight From Your Heart to frame his criticism of an ‘intimacy’ in participatory theatre that he finds ‘coercive’ and ‘bogus’:

It was a real eye-opener […] as to how dangerous it is to get audience-members to ‘participate’ without proper preparation. And I hope it’s



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the kind of instance that serves as a warning to would-be pioneering practitioners.

(Cavendish 2009)

Conversely, the Theatre Personal project workshops discovered that the situation is more nuanced than Cavendish’s objections might suggest. To comply is not necessarily to be coerced and intimacy achieved by means of performance techniques is not necessarily bogus. More crucial to the ethics of the experience is how the vulnerabilities of practitioners and audi-ence-participants are handled, recognizing the relation between kindness and the capacity for ‘bearing other people’s vulnerability’ which ‘entails being able to bear one’s own’ (Phillips and Taylor 2009: 10). In this context, crying has proved a revealing theme. In one of the given examples tears are signs of damage whilst, in the other, they are a well of compassion. These contrasting episodes of tearfulness express the difference between being reduced to tears and being moved to tears, between ‘taking it personally’ and an ethical expansiveness that finds empathetic support in the theatre that has produced it. In the workshop, Howells observed that it was vital for the practitioner to be ‘really present, really listening’ but it might be ventured, on the basis of research so far, that this is a culturally acceptable attitude (given the intimacy invited by the encounter) rather than a matter of fact, where what is perceived by the audience-participant is key and it is the practitioner’s performance skills (virtue-osity) that are engaged at the limits of physical capacity, in order that the impression of presence and atten-tion might be received. This is a responsible performing ethos in the face of logistical challenges, and thus Noddings’s care theory model provides a useful interface between relation and virtue in theatre-making, because it frames ethical practice in performative terms.

ACKNowLedGeMeNTs

Huge thanks go to the artists, participants and witnesses in the Theatre Personal pilot workshops in 2010, and to the Making Spectators class of 2011 at the University of Leeds. I am grateful to the British Academy for finan-cial support, both for this research and towards the broader project Theatre Personal: Audiences with Intimacy.

reFereNCes

Cavendish, Dominic (2009), ‘Edinburgh Fringe 2009: Is Increased Intimacy the Future of Theatre?’, Telegraph, 28 August.

Clifford, Jo (2011), ‘Diary: Edinburgh playwright Jo Clifford’s online diary’, 19 August, http://diary.teatrodomundo.com/2011/08/adrian-howells- pleasure-of-being.html. Accessed 9 January 2012.

Foot, Philippa (2003), ‘Virtues and Vices’, in S. Darwell (ed.), Virtue Ethics, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 105–20.

Freshwater, Helen (2009), Theatre & Audience, London: Palgrave Macmillan.—— (2011), ‘“You say something”: audience participation and The Author’,

Contemporary Theatre Review, 21: 4, pp. 405–09.Gardner, Lyn (2007),‘There is something stirring’, in L. Keidan and D. Brine

(eds), Programme Notes: Case Studies for Locating Experimental Theatre, London: Live Art Development Agency, pp. 10–16.

—— (2009), ‘How Intimate Theatre Won Our Hearts’, Guardian, 11 August.


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—— (2010), ‘Wisdom of the crowd: interactive theatre is where it’s at’, Guardian, 2 March, http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2010/feb/28/interactive-theatre-connected-coney-lift. Accessed 20 August 2011.

Grehan, Helena (2009), Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Heddon, Deirdre, Iball, H. and Zerihan, R. (2012), ‘Come Closer: confession of intimate spectators’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 22: 1, pp. 120–33.

Hoagland, Sarah Lucia (1990), ‘Some Concerns About Nel Noddings’ Caring’, Hypatia, 5: 1, pp. 109–14.

Howells, Adrian (2009), ‘The Burning Question #3: What’s it like washing feet every day?’, Fest, 16 August, http://fest.theskinny.co.uk/article/96651-the-burning-question-adrian-howells. Accessed 20 December 2010.

—— (2010), ‘Adrian Howells: research ethics processes’, YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHhVlTDzE1g. Accessed 4 January 2011.

Iball, Helen (2011a), http://theatrepersonal.co.uk/support-materials/footwashing-documentation/. Launched 1 July 2011.

—— (2011b), http://theatrepersonal.co.uk/workshops/with-adrian-howells/. Launched 1 July 2011.

—— (2012), ‘My Sites set on You: Site-specificity and subjectivity in “intimate theatre”’, in A. Birch and J. Tompkins (eds), Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–18.

Keidan, Lois and Brine, D. (eds) (2007), Programme Notes: Case Studies For Locating Experimental Theatre, London: Live Art Development Agency.

Lamont, Tom (2011), ‘Edinburgh Fringe Theatre Roundup’, Observer Review, 14 August, p. 26.

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McConachie, Bruce (2008), Engaging Audiences, London: Palgrave Macmillan.McKenzie, Jon (2001), Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance, London:

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Boundaries of Theatre, Performance and Philosophy, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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—— (2003 [1984]), Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press.

—— (2007), ‘Care as Relation and Virtue in Teaching’, in R.L. Walker and P. J. Ivanhoe (eds), Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 41–60.

Phillips, Adam and Taylor, B. (2009), On Kindness, London: Penguin.Rancière, Jacques (2009), The Emancipated Spectator, London: Verso.Ridout, Nicolas (2009), Theatre & Ethics, London: Palgrave Macmillan.Sedgwick, Eve K. (2003), Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity,

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Yarker, James (2010), ‘Remembering Our Humanity’, Iflair, 6 March, http://www.iflair.biz/connected-uk/tag/james-yarker/. Accessed 12 July 2011.

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SuggeSted citation

Iball, H. (2012), ‘Towards an Ethics of Intimate Audience’, Performing Ethos 3: 1, pp. 41–57, doi: 10.1386/peet.3.1.41_1

contRiButoR detaiLS

Helen Iball teaches at the University of Leeds (UK) in the Workshop Theatre, School of English. Her current project Theatre Personal: Audiences with Intimacy involves interdisciplinary workshops and conversations with theatre-makers and audiences, disseminated through the project website and publications. Helen is the author of Sarah Kane’s Blasted (2008) for Continuum Modern Theatre Guides and a contributor to Bobby Baker: Redeeming Features of Daily Life (Routledge, 2007). Her recent and forthcoming publications address scenography, site-specificity, audience participation and one-to-one theatre.

Contact: The Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

Helen Iball has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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