I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on it because, and here’s the thing, it does.aGoffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) We’re all doing this twenty-four-hour-a-day show that nobody bought tickets for and nobody can leave, and if you fuck up your lines, if you stand too close or laugh too loud or just generally fail to execute the choreography everyone somehow already knows, you pay for it. Maybe with embarrassment, maybe with your job, maybe with something worse. The show must go on because the alternative is getting kicked out of the theater, except the theater is society and there’s nowhere else to go.bIbid.
Everyday performance is enforced. End of story.
Now Erving Goffman figured this out decades ago. That we’re all actors on stages we didn’t build, performing roles we didn’t write. And everyone treats his work like it’s this cute metaphor, this clever little way of thinking about social life.cIbid. But that’s bullshit. Goffman wasn’t being metaphorical. He was describing a prison. Frontstage, backstage. These aren’t just academic concepts, they’re survival zones. You slip up frontstage and you get punished: shame, exclusion, unemployment, violence. The backstage is just wherever you’re allowed to drop the act for five seconds before somebody walks in and you have to snap back into character. This isn’t theater as art. This is theater as control system. And you can’t refuse to participate because you’re already in the show, you’ve always been in the show, you were born into the fucking show.
Which brings me to the problem, the real problem: actual theater (you know, the kind with stages and lights and programs you pay money for) is supposed to be different from this nightmare.dIser, The Act of Reading (1978) Wolfgang Iser talks about theater as a bracketed space, an “as if” world that’s deliberately separated from reality, and he’s right, that’s exactly what makes it powerful.eIbid. In the theater you can stage murder, betrayal, revolution, impossible desires. All the things that would destroy you in real life. Because everyone agrees it’s not really happening. The distance isn’t a bug, it’s the entire point. That separation is what lets you think instead of just react, what lets contradiction and impossibility breathe for a minute without getting someone killed.
Here’s where I’m going to fuck with you: that distance is also the problem.fIbid. The same thing that gives theater its power (that safety, that separation) is what makes it ultimately toothless. When the bracket becomes absolute, when the audience is completely insulated from consequence, theater stops mattering. It becomes beautiful, sure. Skillful. But it’s a corpse. The alibi that enables thought becomes the excuse for doing nothing. And I don’t know how to resolve this paradox and I’m not going to pretend I do. Theater needs distance to work but distance kills its ability to change anything. Sit with that. I have to.
This is where paratheatrical work comes in. Not as some avant-garde novelty but as a desperate response to the fact that the alibi is failing. Paratheatrical work doesn’t invent performance, it just points at the performance that’s already happening everywhere, all the time, crushing us. It says: look, these aren’t natural laws, these are aesthetic rules, and someone made them up, and someone else enforces them, and we’ve all agreed to pretend they’re inevitable when they’re not. Once you see that, once those rules become visible, power stops looking like spectacle and starts looking like what it actually is: repetition. The same gestures over and over until they feel like the only possible way to be human.
And meanwhile American theater (I’m talking about the big institutions, the subscription-series bourgeois comfort zones) has turned into a fucking museum. You know the drill: sit down, shut up, receive your Culture, clap at the right moments, leave feeling vaguely improved. Herbert Blau was right that audiences are never truly passive, that watching is always an act, but decades of institutional discipline have trained us to be safe. Meaning arrives pre-digested. Risk is cosplay. Nobody’s in danger, least of all the people in the expensive seats.
And look, popular performance promises us something else. Danger, transgression, the real thing. But it’s lying.gDebord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967/1994) Guy Debord saw this coming when he wrote about the spectacle, but his critique needs an update because spectacle has gotten smarter. It doesn’t need passive consumption anymore. It wants your participation, your comments, your shares, your feelings. It wants you to feel implicated, like you’re part of something wild and real, while keeping you structurally insulated from anything that might actually cost you something. We get to perform transgression as aesthetic experience (look how edgy I am!) without any of the ethical exposure that makes transgression mean something. The spectacle doesn’t suppress dissent anymore. It sells it back to you as content.
The whole thing comes apart most clearly when the containment fails and nobody meant for it to fail. The Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter is the perfect case study because it’s a document of exactly that collapse.hMaysles Brothers, Gimme Shelter (1970) The Altamont concert was supposed to be this countercultural performance, this ritual of freedom and intensity and collective rebellion. Instead someone got murdered. Meredith Hunter died on camera while a hundred thousand people watched or didn’t watch or watched without understanding what they were seeing. What collapsed wasn’t just crowd control. It was the entire distance between performance and consequence. The bracket broke.
And here’s what really gets me about Gimme Shelter: it’s not just what the film captures, it’s how watching itself becomes unbearable. The camera doesn’t fix anything, doesn’t stabilize the chaos. It just witnesses the failure. The worst moments come later, when the performers watch the footage trying to figure out what they were part of, what their responsibility was. And their attention changes nothing. Recognition comes too late. The spectacle promised us transgression and delivered blood, and nobody knew what their role was supposed to be once the rules dissolved.
Altamont shows what happens when aesthetic distance collapses by accident: not political awakening, just catastrophe. The audience didn’t become emancipated. They became exposed, implicated without consent, and their attention without responsibility meant exactly nothing.
Now let me tell you about Victor García’s production of The Balcony because this is where someone actually figured out how to stage this problem deliberately instead of letting it explode in everyone’s face. Genet’s play is already obsessed with performance as power. These pathetic men rehearsing authority in a brothel, dressing up as bishops and judges and generals while real revolution happens outside. Power as image, power as role-play, power as spectacle that doesn’t need any actual power to function. García doesn’t clean this up or make it easier to swallow. He makes it architectural.
He built this cylindrical, vertiginous space and stuck the audience around and above the action, suspended in positions that make you feel like authority (elevated, surveying, safe) while simultaneously making you physically vulnerable through height and instability. There’s no innocent place to sit. You can’t just watch and decode meaning from a distance. You have to feel how your looking participates in the whole machinery of domination. Attention isn’t contemplative here. It’s positional. The act of watching aligns you with the thing you’re watching, whether you like it or not.
This is spectacle without the reassurance. García refuses to give you the moral high ground, refuses to let you judge from outside. You’re not outside. There is no outside. Theatrical distance still exists but it’s compressed until it hurts.
And here’s why García matters alongside Gimme Shelter: Altamont shows the chaos that happens when distance collapses and nobody has an alternative framework ready. García shows what becomes possible when you destabilize the distance on purpose, with structure, with intention. He doesn’t invite you to intervene physically and he doesn’t let you off the hook through passivity. You just have to sit there feeling complicit while the performance stays intact as performance.
This is the distinction that keeps me from giving up entirely: danger doesn’t have to mean physical risk to be real. Ethical danger (recognizing your implication in representation and power) can be staged without dissolving theater into chaos or abandoning public accountability. García proves you can expose the audience without erasing them. He offers a counterpoint to Grotowski’s trajectory, which I’ll get to in a second, but the key thing is: he keeps the theater as theater while making watching unbearable in all the right ways.
If Gimme Shelter shows spectacle losing control, García shows spectacle weaponized. Both prove that spectatorship is never neutral, never innocent. But García insists (and this is crucial) that audiences owe more than attention. They owe an awareness of their position, an acknowledgment of complicity, and a willingness to stay with discomfort instead of retreating into safe interpretation. Watching isn’t innocent but it’s still accountable.
The most extreme response to all this is to just burn it down completely, which is basically what Jerzy Grotowski did after 1975.iGrotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) He said fuck public theater entirely and disappeared into paratheatrical and ritual experiments where the boundary between performer and spectator doesn’t exist anymore. Everyone’s participating, nobody’s watching, and theater as a public art form just dissolves. This functions less as a model than as a warning about what happens when you follow this logic all the way to its conclusion. What remains might be transformative for the people actually doing it, but it stops being accountable to anyone outside the room. It becomes private, hermetic, sealed off.
So the task (and I’m being dead serious now) isn’t to destroy theatrical distance and it isn’t to preserve it like some precious artifact. It’s to destabilize it deliberately, to keep it uncertain and alive. And just dragging performance outside institutional spaces doesn’t do this automatically. Site-specific work can reproduce the same hierarchies under new management. What’s required is a complete renegotiation of roles, and this is hard, this is the work nobody wants to do.
Performers need to learn listening and responsiveness instead of mastery. Designers need aesthetic systems that accommodate contingency instead of control. And audiences (fuck me, audiences need to be retrained from the ground up).jRancière, The Emancipated Spectator (2009) Not as consumers buying experiences, not as passive receivers of meaning, but as co-present bodies whose attention and choices and refusals carry actual consequence.
This is the ethical demand: not belief, not interpretation, but responsibility. To be present is to be implicated. To watch is to act. Theater stays alive only as long as it keeps testing this unstable boundary between representation and reality. Risking transformation without abandoning public accountability.
That’s the tightrope. That’s the whole game.
Because without that risk, theater just hardens into museum practice. Skillful, elegant, expensive, and completely detached from the conditions under which actual people actually live. I can’t accept that. I refuse to accept that. Theater matters or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t matter then what the hell are we doing here?
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