Throughout the Patria cycle, the role of the audience is challenged and subverted. Schafer was an active participant of the Environmental Theatre movement of the 1960s and experimented with eliminating the distinction between audience and performer space.  The Patria works rarely provide a traditional concert experience and audiences must often be active participants and performers themselves. Schafer was incredibly specific about the setting of each work, not only for location, but for time of day, time of year, audience number and what would be asked of an audience. This places a higher demand on audiences, but Schafer was unperturbed about this, saying, “an artist can’t be concerned with an audience that doesn’t bring its brains to work.”[1]

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Please see below for brief descriptions of the role of the audience throughout my chosen Patria works.

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Prologue – Princess of the Stars – The audience are cast in the traditional role, but in a unknown environment, sat around the edge of a lake at sunrise to watch the dawn ritual begin.

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Patria III – The Greatest Show - the audience are a free-flowing organism, free to wander the carnival at will, and interact with the performers. The role of the audience flips between this to traditional passive spectating, causing a “disruption of [actor’s] play space and audience space.”[2] Mary Neill, a performer in the original production of The Greatest Show, writes eloquently about how this swapping of roles challenges the audience, highlighting how when audience have brief moments where they may assume the traditional role, it provides respite and reassurance; “the quest for tickets is a quest to secure a secure, defined place and role in this world of illusion. To gain entry to the theatre is to attain a positive identity.”[3] “You now have a place, an identity, a function.”[4]

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Patria V – The Crown of Ariadne – This work was originally meant to take place on a beach, with the audience taking part in the drama. However, due to logistical issues, it ended up being performed in a concert hall in a more traditional setting, and casting the audience in a traditional role.

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Patria VII – Asterion – This work is set in a labyrinth. It is a ritualistic experience which “initiates” (audience members), must experience alone, entering the labyrinth and descending into the depths, meeting characters from Patria along the way, before a final encounter with Asterion/Minotaur.

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Other Patria works where the role of the audience is particularly worth noting are Ra, where the audience gather as a group of initiates and are guided through a ritual that lasts from dusk till dawn, based on the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Epilogue – And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon. Among the most unusual of audience roles, in this work there is no passive audience or line between performer and spectator. All “participants” travel into the wilderness for a week and take part in a ritual to reunite Ariadne and the Wolf. This week long ritual involves the participants splitting into separate camps to create different part of the ritual, and each camp is often a good hike or canoe away from the other. The week ends with a final performance where the clans unite. None of this has ever been filmed or directly recorded as Schafer prohibited this, so the only critical writing on the topic has been created by participants of The Wolf Project, as it is colloquially known.

 

When putting on a performance of The Crown of Ariadne suite, it is interesting to ask how one might draw on this subversion of audience roles. Although there is no directive to perform this suite anything other than traditionally, Schafer asserted that it is “desirable to experiment with new modes of perception.”[5] Performers might ask themselves how best they might garner most enjoyment, understanding or empathy for a piece like this from a traditional audience. Might performers want to lean into preserving “the visceral uneasiness and sensual excitement of being under sun and stars”?[6]

 

Another intriguing aspect of audience involvement is how much extra information to provide an audience. In traditional settings, they are either provided with programme notes or a spoken introduction. In a piece such as this, however, decisions must be made about how much an audience needs to know. Which topics are most pertinent to their enjoyment? And to what extent does an audience need certain contexts to a performance for permission to break out of the passive roles which they are so conditioned to inhabit?

 

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