A few years ago, I went to a dance performance that made me feel physically unsafe, where sweaty performers crawled on top of me and the other audience members. I worried for the performers’ safety, too—at one point one of them accidentally kicked and broke a house light, sending glass shards flying.
In the time since, I’ve wondered if I was being too sensitive. Was I truly unsafe, or just uncomfortable? Was I too dismissive of the artist’s prerogative to take risks and challenge audiences?
Dances that put artists and audience members in close proximity—whether they’re immersive, invite (or demand) audience participation, or have moments where the fourth wall is broken—can foster a powerful sense of intimacy and immediacy. “It keeps me in this agile space of responding,” says choreographer and performer Tess Dworman on the moments of audience participation in her work. “It keeps the space really alive.”
But at these kinds of performances, questions of consent and safety—for both performers and audiences—can become complicated. Sometimes the manufactured high stakes of a performance can feel like, or become, actual high stakes, whether that involves audiences or performers getting hurt, unwanted physical contact, or verbal interactions that cross a line. What can and should be done to ensure that artists can play with the boundaries between performer and spectator without compromising the safety of anyone involved?
The Complexity of Touch
Physical touch in performance can be a powerful tool for dance artists. “I often think about how I could see you without you seeing me, I could hear you without you hearing me, but I can’t touch you without you touching me,” says choreographer Faye Driscoll. “We’re meeting each other, and we’re in something that’s co-created.”
But touch can be loaded, and, as choreographer Raja Feather Kelly notes, boundaries around touch and consent have changed over the last decade or so. In 2009, when he was just beginning his career as a performer and choreographer, “If I would’ve walked up to someone in the audience and kissed them, that would have been radical and wild,” he says. “Now, if I walk up to someone and place my hand on their knee—that’s as big today as kissing someone would have been in 2009.”
Does that mean that performers in immersive shows need a verbal affirmative consent every time they touch an audience member? Not necessarily, but touch does require awareness and sensitivity, even in immersive environments. “What I’ve gleaned is that sometimes there’s this feeling that if someone buys a ticket to an immersive world, they’re yours—performers can do whatever they want to them, they’ve given consent by buying the ticket,” says Jennine Willett, the co-artistic director of Third Rail Projects, the company behind hit immersive shows like Then She Fell. But that’s far from Willett’s approach at Third Rail.
Priming Audiences
Thoughtful training can help prevent dancers from initiating unwanted interactions, and Willett says performers at Third Rail are taught gentle, noninvasive ways to figure out which audience members might be open to involvement. “We talk a lot about how to invite the audience and listen to their cueing about where they want to go next,” she says. “So if you offer your hand to someone and they don’t take it, that’s a very clear cue.”
The sense of shock and startle that comes from an unexpected interaction with a performer or a sudden breaking of the fourth wall can serve a performance purpose when done with intention. But often, signaling to audiences—whether directly or indirectly—that they might be part of the performance can help prepare them for what’s ahead, and make interactive moments go smoother. Driscoll often makes it a point to prime audiences in this way. For instance, in her Thank You For Coming: Attendance, there’s a “constant upping of the degrees of engagement throughout the work,” she says. “We worked a lot on how to charge up that space to the point where there’s a real energetic dialogue going on, and then the further ask of a handhold or moving a body is not such a drastic cut from what’s been happening.” She says the frequent presence of test audiences at rehearsals was key for fine-tuning that escalation.
Similarly, all of Third Rail’s immersive shows have some sort of “onboarding” process, where audiences are greeted and given a framework for what to expect from the performance, including the fact that their relationship to the performers may be different from what they’re used to. In the company’s recent show, True Love Forever, “there’s this scene where you begin by just offering a hand, and depending on how that goes, you might end up slow-dancing with the person,” Willett says. “It’s kind of a scene about consent. It takes us 10 minutes to get to a slow dance, and it looks different based on every person. And if someone doesn’t want to dance, we don’t make them dance.”
Protecting Performers
Giving performers the agency to decide who to interact with can also help them curtail or avoid aggressive audience behavior. Stefanie Batten Bland—who makes immersive work with her own company; has worked on shows like Sleep No More; and last year launched CONCRETE, an intensive focused on immersive work—teaches dancers to identify physical signs that an audience member will interact safely. When inviting audience members to participate, “we look for people whose sternums are open,” she says, “as opposed to someone whose spine is hunched over and heart-body is closed.”
Willett says the design of Third Rail shows helps create an environment where audiences respect performers. “We see our audiences, we take their names, we welcome them into the space, we know them—you’re not anonymous in our world,” she says. “So we haven’t really found that people feel free to be bad actors.”
If a performer does feel unsafe, Third Rail has procedures to follow, which might involve the performer leaving the space and reporting the situation to a stage manager. Kelly, too, makes plans for participatory moments gone awry. “What are the safe words and what are the exit strategies?” he says. “How can we communicate without setting off alarm bells for everyone else in the room? It might be that if I take off my hat and put it on this chair, that means find an exit. Or if I say this particular phrase, it means we’re going to skip a section. Those guardrails are about performer safety, and performer safety is audience safety, because if they’re uncomfortable or in danger, the audience will immediately pick up on that and feel it too.”
The Role of the Presenter
When it comes to immersive or participatory dance, how should presenters be involved in questions of performer and audience safety? Chloë L. Zimberg, creative director of ODC Theater in San Francisco, says that inviting artists and audiences to the venue is like hosting a dinner party. That metaphor captures the responsibility she feels for what happens in the space: Though there may be challenging moments or periods of discomfort during a performance, ultimately, she sees it as her job to make sure both artists and audiences feel safe, cared for, and welcomed.
Though Zimberg typically doesn’t weigh in on the art itself, she is concerned with “people’s experience of the art—the step-by-step, the how-you-get-here, the how-we-prep-you—that is the presenter’s responsibility,” she says. Usually, that involvement looks like conversations around ways audiences may perceive or experience a given moment, and whether any of those moments might merit, say, an “FYI” in the program.
Megan Kiskaddon, executive director at On the Boards in Seattle, says that sometimes providing information about immersive or participatory moments before the show is a way to respect audience members’ agency. “I never want to be patronizing, but I like to give people enough knowledge that they can make their own choices about what they feel like experiencing, without telling people exactly what they will experience,” she says. “Because that’s some of the magic of seeing live work, and I want to preserve that place of imagination for audiences.” She says she often works with artists to determine how much they’re comfortable revealing, and how much “responsibly needs to be told to folks,” she says. “But it’s always a conversation.”
