Spectatorship Analysis

Abstract

Analysing spectatorship involves examining how performances affect spectators and how they are invited to make sense of this address. How do shows direct attention, play into (and play with) expectations, desires, conventions, habits, and frames of reference? How do they engage spectators as bodies via various sensory dimensions? How do they trigger associations and invite interpretations? How do experience and meaning emerge from this address and the audience’s responses to it? This text looks at spectatorship in 03:08:38 States of Emergency (2019-2022) by Tore Vagn Lid and Transiteatret Bergen (Norway) to show how this performance engages the audience in a collective and embodied working through of a traumatic historical event, namely the blowing up of a Norwegian government building in Oslo and the massacre of sixty-nine young social democratic politicians at a summer camp on the island of Utøya in 2011. Spectatorship analysis can also be used to unpack real-life events. This will be demonstrated with an analysis of the arrival of the remains of the victims of the MH17 (the Malaysian Airlines flight shot down in 2014) at Eindhoven Airport and the procession through the Netherlands that followed.