Sounds like an amazing situation. Kudos to director, actor, and audience.

I worry that Aus audiences don’t enjoy theatre enough. They see pleasure as lying back and getting entertained, they don’t see pleasure as being something you have to seek, to work for. Is it possible to have a parochial attitude to pleasure?

The Germans seem determined to anjoy the act of theatre, no matter the form or the level of quality. You have to appreciate that, it gives theatre a life beyond the marketplace, and makes the playhouses more than the emotional brothels in Aus. It opens up new possibilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IeMtQ-SZtA

Here’s a video of Mike Daisey being walked out on mid-performance. It’s interesting how he responds. And the way he looks at the guy who pours water on his notes.

The lesson of last night, for me, was that there is a great sense of joy and liberation in open outrage, even rudeness, and that it probably does not disturb the bystanders much; probably the opposite, actually. But the most difficult part to describe or explain is the most tactile: the feeling of freedom that overcomes you when you are in an audience prepared to have a discussion with the piece as it is occurring. The realization that this power, this agency, was always there, but you never took it. The problem with stressing politeness is that politeness is often an enormously passive-aggressive attitude.

Alison – I had that image of you booing opera very much in mind when I was organizing my thoughts about audience. I, of course, don’t remember any other thing from the story, but it is one of my favourite stories about you, and one of the most vivid. In fact, I was a bit surprised that you didn’t mention it in your etiquette piece.

There are audience sins of commission and omission, and I think the former are simply less annoying, because more appropriate to the situation. A person loudly booing, or attempting to stop a performance with applause, is actively involved in the theatre situation, and is much less quietly annoying than the person checking one’s phone, or loudly chewing. But, equally, the person who turns around towards the smartphone-user and hisses a loud “Shhh!” is much less annoying than the one who gives them offended looks and thinks downfall-of-civilization thoughts for the duration of the show. And then tells the story to everyone later. Or rather, complains – because there is no story to tell. There has been no engagement.

One if my most memorable nights of theater was being called onto stage to play musical chairs with Nicola Gunn. After this she sat me down and asked me to hold a photo of her while she berated it — or her, or me — repeatedly calling it a cock-sucker.

Your piece has come at the perfect moment. I’m off to a one-on-one show at the Arts House, tonight at 9pm. The rendezvous had been organized by SMS this afternoon and the “performance” length will depend on my level of engagement. I am, predictably, nervous.

Reading this fucking awsome review three and a half decades on, I still learned a thing or two about her and her clan. (Cale and Xenakis?! Who knew?! But, how right it seems.) The contextaulisation is amazing. The understanding of the artist as a poet performer — that Smith’s kind of poetry can’t be written down with reducing it (*) — is breathtaking.

(*) My favourite line from Horses, from Land I think, is “Johnny gets up, his sperm coughing…” But, as Smith chants it, it’s also a “sperm coffin” [little deaths an' all that jizz... sorry] and so much besides.