The Art of Hospitality

The performance begins well before the curtain rises, in the street, in the lobby, in the queue, in the text that announces it. Yet these moments are rarely worked on as artistic material. I propose here to look at them as a dramaturgy in their own right, along with methods for taking hold of them.

No one knows where the performance begins

A person coming to the theatre has first crossed a city, walked along a façade, pushed open a door, stood in line, handed over a ticket, looked for a seat. All of this they live, and that lived experience belongs to their evening just as much as what will happen on stage. Where the work begins within this continuity, I do not think we can say with certainty, and that uncertainty is worth pausing on. The building’s architecture, the urban fabric around it, the lighting of the forecourt, the signage all play with the performance, prepare it or contradict it, without anyone being named its author. Street theatre knows this from experience, since the street is its very scenography, with its passers-by, its cars, its façades, and the artists compose with it as with a living set. In a permanent venue, these moments do have people responsible for them, but they are scattered. The architect fixed them sometimes forty years ago, the box office and security manage their flows, the communications team writes their texts, and the artistic team comes into play when the lights go down.

Jean Vilar, in Avignon, chose to make theatre in places that were not theatres, the courtyard of the Palais des Papes, and he thought of the audience’s presence in that space as a political act, well before any question of logistics. Putting theatre outside its traditional walls was already deciding that the place is part of the work. Ariane Mnouchkine, at the Théâtre du Soleil, says there is theatre everywhere, and she has been answering this question for decades by considering that everything belongs to it. The shared meal at the Cartoucherie, the crossing of the courtyard, the actors putting on their makeup in full view of the audience, the people serving soup or staffing the box office belong to the artistic project just as much as the staging does. Choosing one’s seat follows the same logic, you are still outside the house, you discover a projection of the theatre’s interior on which you watch your seats being assigned to you, and that moment is itself theatricalised. She has been able to theatricalise the whole Cartoucherie de Vincennes, that cluster of buildings you enter knowing you are in a place of theatre. Around the large tree-lined courtyard, there are theatres other than her own, restaurants, and the children’s house, a parental school created originally by actors of her company to look after their children while they worked, which then opened up more widely. My own children went there. At the time when I was taking them there and was involved in that school, I had never yet seen a Théâtre du Soleil production, which remained a myth for me. And yet I was already inside its theatre, outside its walls, because it had produced changes in the reality around it. The sector knows these examples, admires them, cites them, and did not wait for me to reflect on them. The question I would like to work on here is rather a question of organisation. Why does this awareness, praised everywhere, so rarely translate into the ordinary functioning of organisations, and how might it be inscribed there?

Audiences that learned another freedom elsewhere

This question takes on new significance today, because the people who come to the theatre have, through digital technology, an access to works that has no precedent. This access is permanent, personalised by algorithms, and it offers everyone the possibility of choosing their pace, commenting, sharing, creating in turn. In digital space, you take whatever role you want. In a performance house, the roles are distributed in advance, and that of the spectator is narrow, I have described elsewhere this implicit “score” of the good audience member, which consists in arriving on time, sitting down, keeping quiet, applauding at the right moment. I have also argued that the slightest restlessness in audiences, which people readily put down to a loss of attention, instead reflects an expectation that has grown with this abundance. People compare, even without putting it into words, what an evening at the theatre makes them feel with what the other cultural spaces they frequent make them feel.

What remains irreducible to the physical place is experience, in the sense John Dewey gives the word in Art as Experience (1934). The same work, seen in a house or on a screen, does not produce the same lived experience, because leaving home, settling among others, sharing a common time transform the state of reception. It is this experience that people come looking for, and it is on this that the singularity of venues is now played out. The success of the Atelier des Lumières, in Paris, gives an indication of this that it would be a mistake to dismiss. One can debate the artistic depth of these immersive exhibitions, but what can be observed there is hardly in doubt. Visitors move about freely, sit on the floor, photograph themselves, talk, stay as long as they like, and feel free to exist there. Part of the success has to do with the projected images, another part, to my mind at least as large, has to do with this freedom granted to bodies. If we take this observation seriously, the welcome, understood as everything a person lives through between the first piece of information received and their return home, becomes the terrain on which a theatre plays out its differentiation. It then ceases to be a peripheral cost and becomes part of the artistic proposal itself.

The threshold, where the roles are distributed

Serge Saada opens Et si on partageait la culture ? (2011) with a reported phrase, “it’s not for me”, and describes people who, when they manage to cross the threshold of a cultural venue, feel they have “entered as if by breaking in”. What a person lives through in the twenty minutes before the performance partly decides the place they will feel entitled to take. If they cross an organised indifference, procedures, flows, ticket checks carried out by people looking elsewhere, they understand that they are a body to be channelled, and they will adopt in the house the corresponding posture, docile or defensive. If they meet attention, someone who looks at them, who knows what is at stake tonight and can talk about it, a space designed so that strangers can meet there, they understand that they are expected, and this hospitality benefits the reception of the performance itself. Dewey wrote that art should “free anyone from the intimidating myths that obstruct artistic experience”. And it is at the threshold that these myths come undone or are reinforced, in the tiny gestures by which an institution makes a person feel they are expected.

Three logics that separate the lobby from the stage

If these obvious things are so often lost, this has less to do, in my view, with the values or intentions of the teams than with logics of organisation that can be named, and that naming helps to loosen.

The first is the separation of functions. The artistic team and the front-of-house team form two worlds, for perfectly understandable accounting, union and organisational reasons, with the consequence that the people responsible for welcoming are not associated with the making of the performance, with its intentions, with its questions, even though they are asked to be its first carriers to the public.

The second has to do with what leaves traces. The artistic project produces files, reports, archives, which feed the evaluation of a season, whereas the quality of what people lived through in the lobby is recorded almost nowhere. The energy of management goes where traces are formed, towards the programming and the files, far more rarely towards the question of how people concretely live their presence in the place.

The third is the idea that welcoming is a matter of technical skills, the box office, seating, flow management. These skills are necessary, but what makes a welcome is a posture, a way of being present to someone arriving towards something that matters to them, and this posture is not acquired in a ten-minute briefing before the doors open.

Bringing the front-of-house team into the performance

The principle is not complicated, it is its implementation that calls for steadiness.

It begins with something obvious that is not always applied, that the people who welcome should have seen the performances they let the public into. A person who has not seen the performance cannot answer the one who hesitates, who is afraid of not understanding, who does not know whether it is meant for them. They manage a flow. Having seen it changes something else too, even when they do not talk about the performance. Carrying something of it, being able to talk about it with colleagues if there are several of them, feeling connected to what is at stake tonight, makes them exist in their humanity inside the theatre. They are no longer a lowly pair of hands kept at a social distance from what is happening on stage, they take part. For them to be able to create a link between the proposal and the person arriving, they need something other than a summary sent by email, they need to have been touched by something in this performance, to have had a question about it, to have something to say that comes from them. This is why a moment of real conversation between the front-of-house team and the artistic team, before or during the run, about what the performance is seeking and the questions it raises, changes the nature of everyone’s work. This moment of conversation is a beginning, not a solution. It improves things within organisations as they exist today, but what should evolve is the whole web of links between functions, so that together they serve the theatre, that is, a reality whose staging we choose.

The pre-performance briefing can also carry something other than logistics. Five minutes on the life of the run, this is the fifteenth performance, last night the audience was particularly silent, tonight there is a school group, give each member of the team the awareness of taking part in something that is unfolding, that has a history, rather than in a series of interchangeable evenings.

Another gesture, simple and rarely systematic, consists in watching, not to monitor but to understand, what people do in the twenty minutes before the performance. Do they talk to each other, and with whom? Do they stay alone with their phone? Are there closed groups and isolated people who do not know where to put themselves? Is the bar a place of encounter or a point of sale? This watching reveals the space as it is, which is not always the one we intended. The venues that have drawn the consequences place presences in the lobby, not security guards but people who are there so that something can happen, who can approach a hesitant spectator and talk about the performance because they have seen it.

Finally, what keeps all this alive over time is rarely a matter of conviction, almost always a matter of the calendar. In organisations where this attention remains alive, there is a formalised moment, regular, written into everyone’s schedule, where the front-of-house team and the artistic team talk to each other, before each run, after certain performances, at the start of the season. These moments exist because they were decided and maintained, even when the schedule is tight.

The presentation text, the first gesture of the performance

There remains a site of welcome that is underestimated, the texts that present performances in programmes, on websites, in communications. They are the very first contact between the institution and people, and they are often written for those who already read texts about theatre, with references, a vocabulary and ways of framing experience that presuppose a prior familiarity with the world of live performance. I have analysed elsewhere what this kind of discourse reveals in spite of itself, in particular the place it assigns to whoever reads it. A simple test gives the measure of this. Give the text to read to a person who does not frequent theatres and ask them, not whether they understand the words, but whether they feel concerned. The answer is often no, with no relation to their level of education, because the text does not speak to them. Rewriting these texts does not call for simplifying them, it calls for deciding whom one is speaking to, and asking what that person needs to hear in order to want to come.

“When does our performance begin?”

I will end with a proposal of method that can be held in one sentence: when does our performance begin? Ask this question, each season, of all the teams gathered together, artistic, technical, front-of-house, communications, and draw the concrete consequences together. Depending on the answers, the performance begins at the first poster glimpsed, at the text read on the website, at the arrival on the forecourt, at the crossing of the lobby, and each answer designates people, spaces and gestures that then become shared working material. This shift costs almost nothing in budget. It calls for shared time, and the decision to consider that the welcome is part of the work.