Participatory Art

This week I want to discuss ‘Participatory Art’ and the new narrative possibilities that it presents. A presentation given by my peers on this subject dove into the history of Participatory Art and linked contemporary work across various participatory media; be it live art, online collaborative documentary or ‘polyvocal’ participatory documentary. The group brought up Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011), a work that I’ve engaged with and studied heavily in the past. In this post, I want to discuss my experience of the participatory performance and how the approach can be translated into new media forms.

Sleep No More (Punchdrunk, 2011) is an immersive, experiential re-telling of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1699). It uses contemporary dance to replace the dialogue, and a transformed hotel, in which the audience roams freely, as its stage. When my partner and I arrived on New Years Eve 2014/2015 to the NYC base of Sleep No More (Punchdrunk, 2011), we arrived with a mixed bag of emotions. She wasn’t good anxiety-inducing experiences like this, I wasn’t good with the cold. This night promised both. When we arrived, as a Theatre & Performance major I thought I knew all the ins and outs of what to expect. Then we were given masks, robes, and a shot of Absynthe (neither of us drink). Next thing, we were pushed into an elevator. I was expecting to be split up, from what I’d heard, so we held each other closely, freaking out a little as to where the night might take us.

(Image Credit: Punchdrunk, 2011)

It was genuinely terrifying for the first, maybe 20 minutes or so. It felt like another world. You could hardly identify your own partner. You didn’t know the rules or the boundaries; how much would the actors interact with you? What’s expected of you interacting back? Are others watch you? Judging you? How do they know it’s you?

But soon, you got over that initial anxiety and became free to explore. This is where the vast possibilities of participatory art reared their heads and presented themselves to the audience. Free to roam, you could choose to witness whatever you could find – read whatever you’d like; stay wherever you like for as long as you like; do whatever you like; create whatever you like. You could, if you so pleased, perform for the actors as much as they perform for you. It became your show. In fact, it was more than that. The audience became a group creating a show together; a cast; a community. We could not identify one another individually, but we didn’t need to. We were a people, a populace, a body politic; and this was our show.

So, why let the audience take the stage from the artist? Arts scholar Claire Bishop explains the revolutionary act that is inherent in reversing, or at least, equalising, the roles of audience and artist, explaining that “it rehumanises a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production” (2012). Bishop sees the handing of power back to the people as a kind of socialist revolution within the work of art. It is, at least, a shift in the way we tell stories. Participatory Art positions the artist at the desk of the curator, who provides an easel and canvas, then hands the paintbrush to the audience. It is an approach I’m interested in exploring through practice, to see how the gathering of stories can form a larger one, and the forming of a larger story can form a community. Even if just for the duration of a play.

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Works Cited

Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.

Punchdrunk . (2011, March 07). Sleep No More. McKittrick Hotel, 530 West 27th Street, New York City, New York City, NY, USA.

Shakespeare, W. (2010). Macbeth. (B. Smith, Trans.) Boston, MA: Play Press.

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