The Goal of the Emancipated Spectator: A Dramaturg and a Museum Educator’s Facilitation of a Theatre and Museum Collaboration

Collaborations between urban cultural institutions are surprisingly uncommon, despite the reality that many organizations serve similar audiences and aspire to expand them to include more diverse and intergenerational constituencies. Although many of these organizations share likeminded missions of telling and sharing stories of and for their community, they often remain siloed, not only among different administrative departments internal to the organization, but with other institutions that make up the cultural landscape of their urban community. It seems that few collaborations exist between dance companies and theatres; when symphonies produce theatrical programming, they often do so independently; and museums rarely collaborate with other local museums, even though while their specializations profoundly differ, their audiences intersect. Perhaps this embrace of isolation is driven by a concern about losing resources and funding prospects to their potential partners; maybe the fear stems from methodological differences in how work is thought to be developed best and curated across disciplines; there are feelings of inadequacy—fears that one cultural partner lacks the skills to make a creative or organizational contribution; or, simply, there is a lack of interest in the other art form—no willingness to help create it, learn about it, or be a spectator for it. Although these partnerships may be tentative, every artistic and cultural organization is experiencing a change in its relationship with its audience.

In Getting in on the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation, a San Francisco–based study of audiences of cultural events, consultant Alan Brown writes: “People are thinking about the experience of culture differently than in the past, placing value on a more immersive and interactive experience than is possible through mere observation” (6). The study argues that cultural consumers increasingly want to meet the creators of the art and in some way participate in the artistic endeavor. A paradigm shift is occurring for cultural institutions in which the wall between the art and audience is breaking down, not only in the context of the performance or material on display, but vis-à-vis conversations between programmers and spectators regarding the work and its subject matter. Theatres, too, are acknowledging this change: with growing public programs and audiences’ active investment, dramaturgs and museum educators often serve as the interlocutors between the spectators and the art.

The role of the dramaturg is being reshaped by the addition of public programming. Besides their basic job requirements, production, and new play development, dramaturgs and literary managers also act as immediate conduits between audience and institution via engagement practices. Nationally, theatres like Northlight, Woolly Mammoth, Soho Rep., McCarter, Victory Gardens, Geva Theatre Center, and Cleveland Play House, among many others, are embracing this model of public programming, often designed by the artistic department and facilitated by the dramaturg. Additionally, the affiliated artists of the production are invited to address what they feel is important, what they hope to communicate to audiences, and whom they foresee as the audience for their work, often with the dramaturg serving as the liaison. Besides envisioning the programming and strategizing its goals in application to the immediate production and theatre, the dramaturg facilitates the events and serves as the primary contact with other affiliated cultural institutions, such as museums.

With this programming, instead of solely concentrating on the artistic merit of the work, there is a stronger investment in what the work is about, its themes, and their relationship to the audience. The desire to have these conversations and engender a relationship with the audience is fueled by the want to empower them, to learn what they value, and how the work may or may not have introduced them to new ideas. In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière acknowledges such audience members as active participants versus passive spectators, recognizing them as the “emancipated audience.” He writes that

[e]mancipation begins . . . when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms. . . . The spectator . . . observes, selects, compares, interprets. She links what she sees to a host of other things that she...