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  • “We are the Storm”:Audience Collaboration in W. H. Auden’s The Dance of Death
  • Ryan Sheets

the Group Theatre is a troupe, not of actors only but ofActorsProducersWritersMusiciansPaintersTechniciansetc, etc, andAUDIENCE

—W. H. Auden, “7 Points about the GROUP THEATRE” (1933)

In December 2009, Charlotte Higgins, blogging for the Guardian, laments the prevalence of immersive, interactive theatre, stating how “it is quite easy for the coinage of this type of theatre to get somewhat debased.”1 Higgins claims that the initial shock of such productions wears off quickly, making the drama “feel predictable and hackneyed.” Her description of companies like Belt Up and Punchdrunk is reminiscent of the reception given to Rupert Doone and Robert Medley’s The Group Theatre eighty years ago. The Times Literary Supplement unflinchingly declared that The Dance of Death was rife with “fundamental and rather adolescent flaw[s],” likening W. H. Auden himself to “a gamin jeering at the tumbril.”2 The primary reason that Auden’s The Dance of Death received such treatment from many reviewers was how it interacted with the audience. The Dance of Death treated spectators as vital members of the performing “troupe.” While The Dance of Death does not engage audiences to the same degree that contemporary productions such as Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More or We Players’ The Odyssey do, it nonetheless should be seen as part of a larger international collection of dramas that seek to alter the standard relationship between spectators and performers. Examining The Dance of Death [End Page 491] will allow for a discussion of how Auden’s theatrical techniques, which were largely unique to London interwar theatre, constitute an integral part of this wider movement. Revisiting The Dance of Death demonstrates that the current interest in—and resistance to—new forms of spectatorship has a long history.3

I begin with a few questions: When an audience becomes part of “the troupe,” as W. H. Auden suggests, what are the possible consequences of that inclusion? More specifically, in what ways does bringing audience members onstage, directly addressing certain spectators, and eliminating spatial barriers between spectators and performers work to cast audiences in the production?4 When audiences collaborate in a performance, the line between performer and spectator becomes blurred, a blurring that brings into relief the ways in which spectators are always potential actors, activists, and artists who perform in, transform, and can create the worlds in which they live.5 Jacques Rancière’s argument that the act of spectatorship and the observation, comparisons, and interpretations it requires have the potential to help spectators “arrive at a better understanding of how words and images, stories and performances, can change something of the world we live in” thus proves especially useful for considering the ways in which spectators contribute to the troupe.6 Given that the existing political, social, ethical, and economic frameworks were under duress in the interwar years, the stakes of this “better understanding” become quite clear: spectators are beginning to act, becoming active, and breaking traditional boundaries right when questions of who has a voice in the political process, who is responsible for whom ethically, and what denotes an equitable economic system could no longer be ignored.

Experimental performances that blur the line between spectator and performer, as Auden argues in “Selling the Group Theatre” (1936), are ones where “important avenues of development may be opened out, which would not otherwise have been noted.”7 For Auden, the opening out of these “avenues of development” and the drawing attention to their political and social potential serve as the center around which his drama and theory of audience revolves. The question, however, of what prevents this agential potentiality from making itself manifest is one that Auden had previously addressed in his Poems (1930, 1933) and The Orators (1932), and would return to in Look, Stranger! (1935). As his early poem “The Watershed” states, the land “will not communicate” because it is “cut off” from its surroundings; communication—the impartation of information so as to make it commonly held—cannot conquer division or isolation.8 Furthermore, poems such as “The Secret Agent,” “Missing,” and “Consider...

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