Abstract

An extract of The Beginning (2012) will be published in the Routledge Twenty-First Century Performance Reader in 2017/18. The extract directly addresses the implicit contract between performer and audience and questions the symbiotic relationship between the actor and the spectator, in doing so, it offers an invitation to become Augusto Boal’s notion of the ‘spect-actor’. Inspired by Peter Handke’s Offending The Audience (1966) and Forced Entertainment’s First Night (2001), the extract draws attention to what it is like, sitting in the dark, watching a story being told in which you, the audience, have a central part to play. The question is: will the audience sign the contract, on the dotted line, or will they rip it up?