Becoming Audience

As a personal blog would do, I ought to be writing a conclusive all-around review for 2023 at the end of the year. Yet my procrastination caught up and it’s not until now that I start typing. It’s February, but it is still considered as festive time for Chinese due to the Spring Festival. I am not too late.

Not a lot of people would find 2023 an especially thrilling year, this might be even truer for theatre world. London theatres were still London theatres, the West End was still the West End. I think a calendar year goes by much quicker for them than it does for me - just like all those shows that go by in a flash. A show is selling well? It will pass. A show is selling poorly? It will pass sooner. West End lacks memory, except for when it is needed for commercial marketing purpose. It may just be the case that it is exactly because West End is like this that it allows people to enjoy and project their emotional reactions onto it. These projections were then self-enhanced to become seemingly personal connections which were in fact predictable decided outcomes that eventually fuel the business.

In this sense, show business might just be colder than any other entertainment business: they enjoy seeing their fuels burning in front of them, with no barriers, or measurable distance in between, and celebrate this burning all together at the end.

The prosperity comes with inflation. Inflation in a sense signifies the diminishing of the substance. There is less substance of theatre in West End than before. For instance, if we all agree that the ‘talk’ about the show is - if not more - as important as the show, then it is hard not to feel disappointed at how people conduct discussions about the shows nowadays. I often reluctantly overhear, in such speech, an either excessively dramatic tone or some totally irrelevant combination of terminologies. These people are unfortunately immovable, like the speed bumps on the road. We are having more of them now. West End loves them. They are the fuels. Yet what really is being burnt down here, irreversibly, is the audience, the idea of audience, or audience-ship, if you like. It may sound confusing, allow me to explain.

What is an audience? Or what is audience-ship? I have no settled answer, but I am more than happy to do a little comparison.
If we define the definition opposite to audience as viewer:
Audience penetrates. Viewer remixes.
Audience breathes. Viewer swallows.
Audience grows. Viewer enlarges.
Audience flows. Viewer floats.
Audience lives. Viewer exists.
So on and so on.

Audience sees the world while viewers see themselves. West End, or what it stands for, talks back to itself via this forever mirroring process that it happily created.
If it is too harsh to say there is anything wrong about it, then it is too ignorant to say the contrary. It is not the status quo that needs to be blamed, it is the dying of audience-ship that deserves remorse.

It was in 2023 I started to write about theatre. The change in perspective gave me new eyes in looking at what I once deemed way too familiar. Generally, I think I have watched more shows in 2023 than any other years and these shows, for some reasons, gradually made me feel worn down like a long heavy coat wears your shoulders down after a long day.

These shows, especially West End ones, sadly obtained almost the same face and voice as each other. You cannot not notice this when you step into those theatres that give you Deja-vu. Shows were merely products of the same equation, same mould. Narratives once considered ground-breaking had become gimmicking with full awareness and full consent from both parties on and off the stage. The more shows I watched, the less impressions they left in me. The perpetual cycle of stimulation and disappointment burns your nerves out. This is a game of desire; West End imitates a ruthless organ of temptation - with every expansion and contraction that manifested as one and another shows, it drags you into it and corrodes you. Sometimes you would feel like that West End is a sufficient analogy of London and a lot of other subjects alike, and in this resemblance, you find more ‘theatre’ than you can find sitting in those theatres.

The situation is bad, but what is even worse is that the whole degradation does not only restrict itself within West End - the ‘anti-audience-ship’ is trending, the contemporary living experience that current possibilities of theatre fall short to represent or express is hovering in the air.

It is now safe to say 2023 was the breakout year for artificial intelligence. The adaptation and sometimes excessive usage of AI interfered every aspect of life - theatre world was no exception. Theatre people got alerted: some started to emphasise a more tangible and traditional understanding of theatre, others effusively welcomed and embraced the embedment of AI.

Some would argue, the ability to be a ‘creator’, or let’s say, to be able to wield the specific ‘creativity’, is something innate, is something one was born with, is a gift that cannot really be learnt by those who are not lucky enough to be gifted - this has always been the justified rhetoric of those who wish to distinguish ‘artists’ from others.

If this is true, then audience, on the contrary, is something that you need to learn to become.

Yet we are now having more and more art schools to try to produce artists, and less and less sincere and independent aesthetically materials to cultivate audience.

Hence, while most people are worrying that AI is taking over the jobs of creators, I, conversely, wonder why we are not worrying that AI is taking over the jobs of audience.

If ‘creative ability’, as stated above, is truly innate, then the very existence of this fact will be no difference from us tragically acknowledging the possibility that this long-considered human-exclusive ‘ability’ is eventually going to be destroyed by its counterpart that could be found ‘innate’ in artificial intelligence. Bad news is that AI’s version, or level, of ‘ability’ seems now way better than ours.

Fundamentally, the question is about how we perceive ourselves when positioned in front of AI. Think of it this way: the identity of ‘audience’ is roughly the only thing we could imagine to really own and be proud of as contemporary human beings.

Not everyone is an audience, it is not easy to be one, we do not have many - that is why the craftsmanship of becoming audience might serve as our final forte as well as the last position in the so-called battle against the taking over of computing power. AI, by its definition, and its way of functioning, contains the attributes of audience naturally. Its ongoing study on human language is its process of self-construction. The consumption is its production – it manages to transform the long-considered contradiction into a convergence, or an annexation. Ironically, in the making and rising of AI we might be granted a glimpse of a potential future for the definition of audience-ship: its total obsolescence in the mania of generating.

The doom never arrives in an instant, normally, its unannounced advent infiltrates into current living and replaces it quietly without anyone realising. Before it does, let’s celebrate another wonderful year of West End once again.