Join us on Monday, Nov. 12, from 1-2 for an exciting talk about The Culture of the Spectator.
It is well
recognized in theatre and performance studies that each spectator at an event is
likely to have a unique physical and psychological encounter. This recognition,
important as it is, has actually hindered full discussion of the spectator,
since many scholars are reluctant to ascribe interior attitudes or responses to
anyone other than themselves. Further, it is obvious that audiences as groups
react outwardly in ways substantially determined by the type of performance, so
that live spectators at a football match as a group behave differently than
those at a tennis match or a classical concert or a Shakespeare performance. This
lecture puts these two issues together to consider how (in the philosophic
sense) spectators might react, inwardly and outwardly, as a result of the conditions
of the performance itself. The examples, from sport, popular culture, and the
theatre, open discussion about a ‘culture’ of the spectator in the present.
Dennis Kennedy, Beckett Professor of Drama Emeritus in Trinity
College Dublin, is the author or editor of many award-winning books, notably The
Spectator and the Spectacle, Looking at Shakespeare, Foreign Shakespeare,
Shakespeare in Asia, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, and its shorter
version, The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance. He lectures and
gives acting workshops around the world, and has held distinguished visiting
professorships at universities from Berlin to Beijing. A member of the Royal
Irish Academy and Academia Europaea, he has also frequently works as a playwright and dramaturg in
professional theatres internationally. In 2005 he
directed Shakespeare’s As You Like It in Beijing
in Chinese.
