foundations

What Else Was Happening Post 1: Audience Participation

As ballet began to evolve into the ballet we know and love today, performances became more open to the public. Theatre performances in England (Shakespeare era) were entirely public up until the end of the sixteenth century. Performances would take place in open, public areas, and audiences did not have to pay to watch and could leave at any time. This meant that the performers had to engage with the audience directly, and in turn, it became common for the audience to directly interact with the performers as well. Sometimes, the audience was even written into the script as a character. Even as theatre transitioned into indoor spaces with paid admission, these practices of audience participation still carried over. At the same time ballet was coming into existence, audiences were expected to be loud, rowdy, and responsive. It was very different than the dark, silent audiences that we are familiar with in the fine arts world today.

Ballet started out as a ceremonial court dance that was mainly used as a status symbol. At first, the audience consisted of only the nobility looking down upon the “Sun King”, Louis XIV in all his regal glory. As ballet slowly began to transition into more of a performing art than a court dance with the establishment of the Royal Academy of Dance, it also became slowly more available to other social classes outside of the nobility. With this change, the audience became more and more integrated into the show, mirroring the behavior of theatre audiences.

In the 18th century, ballet moved towards more of a method of storytelling than a political statement. Ballet began to stand for itself as an art form as more emphasis was put on the emotions being portrayed by the dancers and the dancing itself. However, audiences still behaved in the same exclamatory way they always have. Jean Georges Noverre strove to increase the drama of ballet and fought against the notion of a vocal, crowded audience. Noverre advocated for making the theater a dark, quiet place. He also believed that backstage areas and set changes should be hidden. These ideas were obviously highly influential because this is still how we experience ballet today. In today’s world of concert dance, the audience is hardly ever involved, and we almost always experience dance sitting silently in a dark theater. Switching to this atmosphere of a silent audience really began to put even more emphasis on the dancers. Hiding set changes made the audience even more immersed in the story because it seemed more realistic this way. Having a silent audience paved the way for ballet to become even more of a story-telling, dancer-centric art form. If we had never switched to having no audience participation, ballet may never have had a chance to continue evolving into what it has become.