The spectator’s score

The programme note, that document we read or don’t read, because it was handed to us as we entered the house and we are waiting for the show to begin, is often the first written word the institution addresses to its audience. It provides information, and it also gives a place to those who receive it. I propose that we think together about this object, which is part of the theatrical apparatus itself, and about how it can serve, in the light of cultural rights, the encounter between works and spectators.

In the profession, this document is called the feuille de salle

The presentation text handed to the audience at the moment of entering the house, as each person comes to take their seat, has a name in the French profession, the feuille de salle, sometimes the programme de salle, what English-speaking theatres call the programme note. It is this document, simply photocopied or carefully printed, that we leaf through while waiting for the lights to go down. In my own experience, it most often contains the names of the artists, the cast and credits, a statement of intent, biographical notes, sometimes an interview with the director. There are other ways of doing it, and that is what I would like to question here, our ways of writing and giving this object, so as to enrich the work done in the performing arts.

This object is so familiar that it seems self-evident. It serves to provide information, and that is true, it does. But Pierre Bourdieu, in “Language and Symbolic Power” (1982), showed that words do not merely describe reality, that they produce it, and that the language of an institution exerts a power all the more effective for presenting itself as neutral. When the programme note announces that the show is “a major work”, that the director is “one of the most singular voices of her generation”, that the text “probes with great acuity the tensions of our time”, it describes a show and, in the same movement, it prescribes the appropriate attitude towards it. The person reading it learns what they are supposed to feel, and what they are supposed to be, a spectator capable of appreciating at its true value what is about to be offered to them. The programme note provides information, and first of all it gives a place.

The teams who write these texts think about them, many work on them with inventiveness, and very interesting things are surely being done with this object. If I write, it is because in my personal experience, the programme note seems to me capable of being, often, more fully at the service of cultural rights, that is, of a better encounter between works and spectators. What I propose is therefore neither a judgement on practices, nor a right way of doing things that would only need to be applied. These are supports, conceptual, political in the sense of cultural policy, and methodological, to nourish a work we hold in common. For this modest object engages, as I will try to show, the place that the theatre gives to the people who enter it.

Two airlocks, and the note at the threshold of the second

Whatever the motivation of the people present, they are there. Some have freely chosen to come, others were obliged to, notably within a school setting, others still are accompanying someone. Entering a theatre is a passage that happens in stages, and on closer inspection, there are two successive airlocks. The first is that of the building, the threshold, the box office, the bag check (whose normalisation raises a real problem, by the way, because in making this gesture routine we believe we are protecting ourselves while we are installing fear at the very threshold of the place, and perhaps summoning what we dread, but that is not the subject of this text), the lobby, and often a space of sociability, the foyer, the café, the restaurant, the bookshop, where we wait, talk, run into acquaintances. The second airlock is that of the house, the doors we pass through, the words of welcome, the seating, the settling in. I have described in other articles what these stages do to the people who pass through them. Together they carry us from everyday life into the time of the show.

The programme note belongs to the second airlock. We do not yet have it at the café or the bookshop, it is handed out at the moment of entering the house. We take it or not, indeed some people choose not to take it, we read it or not, and when we do read it, it is in that suspended time when we are already seated and nothing has yet begun. This moment precedes the show and yet is already part of it. The person holding out the note is playing a role, so is the person receiving it, and the gesture of taking it, sitting down, leafing through it, is already theatre, the theatricalisation of the experience began well before the lights went down. An airlock can open, create availability, awaken the desire for the encounter to come, and it can just as well install everyone in a prescribed role before anything has taken place. The programme note partakes of one or the other of these movements, depending on how it is written and on the person it addresses.

The spectator’s score

Let us consider the workings of a theatrical performance as a score in which each person holds their part. The author has written, the director has composed, the performers play, the technicians operate the technical apparatus. The audience also holds a part, even if no one names it as such. Their score is the role of the “good spectator”, arriving on time, sitting in the assigned seat, switching off one’s phone, not talking, not eating, watching attentively, reacting at the right moments, applauding at the end. There is nothing natural about this behaviour, it is learned, and it is learned, among other ways, by reading the texts that psychologically prepare us to adopt it.

Giorgio Agamben, in “What Is an Apparatus?” (2006), calls an apparatus anything that has, in one way or another, the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, shape, control and secure the gestures, conduct, opinions and discourses of living beings. He distinguishes two broad classes, living beings on one side, the apparatuses that capture them on the other, and he calls subject what results from their relation, from their hand-to-hand encounter. This distinction shifts the question. The “spectator”, in this perspective, does not pre-exist the theatre; they result from the meeting between living persons and the theatrical apparatus, the frontal architecture of the house, the rituals of welcome, the signage, the expected codes of behaviour. The programme note is one of the parts of this apparatus, and so it does not merely inform an already constituted spectator, it contributes to making one.

To describe an apparatus, in Agamben, is not to say that the apparatus is bad. Apparatuses exist, we live with them, we become subjects through them, and the point of naming them is to become conscious of them, so that each person can be more fully the subject of their experiences. Faced with apparatuses, Agamben does not in fact propose their destruction, but what he calls profanation, the gesture that returns to free use what the apparatus had separated and captured. I will come back to this at the end of the text, for a programme note can be thought in that direction.

Cultural capital, or why we agree to play this score

Coming to the theatre, and agreeing to hold this score, engages, to my mind, two dimensions that are knotted together, and it is their dialectic that sheds light on the programme note. There is what we come to live there, and there is what is socially at stake there.

What we come to live, first. Aesthetic pleasure, emotions, a narrative, the particular quality of a moment shared in a house, all of this lived experience is real, it is the reason for the whole thing, and no sociological analysis should crush it.

What is socially at stake, next, and Pierre Bourdieu offered an analysis of it in “Distinction” (1979). By coming to see this show, by understanding it, by being able to talk about it afterwards in one’s social circle, one accumulates cultural capital, a form of prestige that distinguishes those who frequent these places from those who do not. The mechanism is circular, the spectator accepts the dominated position assigned to them by the institution’s discourse because this acceptance confers on them, in turn, a power of distinction over those who have no access to these spaces. This mechanism weighs heavily, very heavily to my mind, and it is interwoven with the lived, sensory experience; it is on the same evening, in the same house, that experience and distinction are both played out. The programme note addresses both at once, since it programmes admiration before the show has begun and indicates which attitude is legitimate and socially rewarding.

What Marjorie Glas calls the heroisation of the artist

The sociologist Marjorie Glas published in 2023, based on her doctoral thesis, “Quand l’art chasse le populaire” (PUG), a socio-history of French public theatre since 1945. She traces how a theatre born of a project of social utility, carried by decentralisation and close to popular education, progressively refocused on its internal stakes, through processes she documents with precision, the professionalisation of teams, the institutionalisation of structures, the hierarchisation of aesthetics, the constitution of a field where recognition is played out among peers. She writes: “Founded on the belief in the social utility of theatre, in its political function and its openness to all audiences, public theatre has progressively refocused on itself and on its internal stakes. The heroisation of the artist went hand in hand with the marginalisation of the lay public. Leading to the erasure of the working-class audience, and even of the audience altogether, from professional and aesthetic concerns.”

The symbolic barriers of subsidised theatre, she shows, do not stem from people’s ill will; they are the sedimented product of this history. The language of programme notes, with its lexicon of legitimation, the “work”, the “singularity”, the “writing”, the “acuity”, is an inheritance of this history, which each writer receives along with the customs of the profession and most often perpetuates without having chosen it. This is why intentions of openness, however sincere, are not enough to cross these barriers, as long as the apparatuses that produce them remain in place and beyond question.

Writing this while funding is being cut

We are going through a period of very significant cuts in public funding for culture, and one of the arguments put forward to justify them consists in saying that these places address only elites, and that the money of all citizens has no business being invested in them. If I write this text, it is not to feed that argument, it is on the contrary because I am one of those who defend culture and the funding of culture. A theatre is, for me, a place where important and founding things can happen, on the personal level as on the collective and democratic level. Understanding the mechanisms that can produce social closure, down to an object as modest as a programme note, is working to ensure that this promise is kept more often.

Questioning ourselves in this way does not weaken us, it strengthens us. Nassim Nicholas Taleb gave the name antifragility to this property of what grows stronger through shocks, instead of only seeking shelter from them (“Antifragile”, 2012), and I have proposed elsewhere to make it a support for the cultural sector (Towards an antifragility of cultural projects). A sector capable of questioning its own apparatuses holds up better against external challenges, because it can answer them with real work rather than with defensiveness. It is by thinking together about what we do that we move forward.

If we follow Dewey, the programme note is part of the work of art

John Dewey, in “Art as Experience” (1934), distinguishes the art product, that is, the physical object, the painting, the book, the show as a regulated sequence of actions on a stage, from the work of art properly speaking, which is, in his words, “what the product does with and in experience”. The work does not exist on the stage, it takes place in the experience of the people who encounter it, in that space between the stage and the house where something is built. Dewey also describes what it means to live an experience, that moment when the lived material goes all the way to the end of its own development and forms a whole that can be designated afterwards, that show, that evening.

If the work takes place in the experience of the audience, then everything that prepares this experience partakes of its conditions of existence. The airlock is part of it, and so is the programme note. We should be careful, all the same, not to give it disproportionate importance. Many spectators choose not to read it, to continue a conversation with their neighbours, or deliberately, to receive the show without preconceptions, without letting themselves be programmed, and others read something else while waiting, the season brochure picked up in the lobby for example. But even those who choose not to read it make that choice in a context where there is a programme note. Its importance lies for a good part in what it symbolises of the apparatus. We know it is there, we know what it is supposed to do, and each person can, knowing this, exercise their freedom, take it or not, read it or not, keep it for later. People who go to the theatre are not, for that matter, objects of the apparatus; many of them reflect on it, love this place, want to live emotions there in their own singular way, and play with these codes in full knowledge of what they are doing. It is in this sense that I write, to offer tools of understanding and awareness, so as to be a little more fully the subject of one’s experience, and to think about a possible cultural opening. Writing the note remains nonetheless a dramaturgical act in the same way as set design or lighting, since this text partakes of what people bring with them as they enter the house. It is one of the first gestures by which the work begins.

Will people read it, and what place does it put them in

Cultural rights, as formalised by the Fribourg Declaration (2007), recognise each person’s right to take part in cultural life from their own identity, and not as the mere recipient of an offer conceived without them. Applied to the programme note, they shift the questions we ask ourselves when writing it. The question is no longer only what information to give, but whom we are addressing, and what this text does to the people who receive it. Will people read it? Why would they read it, or why would they not? What does reading it bring them? And above all, what place does this text put them in?

I have carried out elsewhere the qualitative, detailed analysis of one of these texts, the document handed to the audience for a performance in a theatre in Saint-Denis (What artistic discourse reveals about itself, January 2026). That analysis brought to light a text entirely turned towards the legitimation of the artists, without one sentence addressed to the people who were about to sit down in the house. I refrain from drawing a generality from it, since I have not made an inventory of the programme notes being written. This case served me as a magnifying glass, it makes visible mechanisms that the professional language of the sector carries with it. There, I look closely at one existing note; here, I look for ways of setting this object in motion.

Profaning the programme note

From there, I can formulate a few leads, which I offer as working hypotheses and not as recipes. They join what I have developed elsewhere on cultural mediation, the idea that mediation consists in creating the conditions for an experience to come about, and that the shared object, what I call with psychoanalysis a symbolic third, allows an encounter that the frontal relation does not allow. Jean Caune, who devoted a large part of his work to these questions, defines cultural mediation as what founds the sensory bond between subjects who are members of the same collectivity (“Pour une éthique de la médiation. Le sens des pratiques culturelles”, PUG, 1999). A programme note can be thought of in this way, as a common object placed between the team and the audience, which each person appropriates freely. A few directions:

• Question the ritual within the note itself. Handing out a note at the threshold of the house is a ritual, and I have nothing against rituals, they are languages, and it is interesting that there should be a language, protocols, an apparatus. But this ritual can be questioned in the very place where it happens. Why are you given this sheet of paper at this spot, and what is it for? Sharing a reflection on the apparatus that is ours does not weaken it, it establishes a complicity. It is recognising that the other person may not feel completely at ease within this apparatus, not in a paternalistic mode that would claim to know what they feel, but by sincerely sharing questions we ask ourselves and allow ourselves to ask.
• Say why we are together. The aesthetic or thematic focus on the work makes us miss something important. At the theatre, we do not just go to see a work, any more than at the cinema we just go to see a film; what counts is the experience we live. We may come because someone we trust told us “I won’t tell you anything, I’d rather you discover it”, and in that case we will not read the note, we trust the place, we know that in that particular theatre we will find that kind of proposition. The note can speak of this, of what the show proposes to live together, of what this place is, of why theatre is made here, rather than of the excellence of its signatories.
• Say what we do not know. The note can formulate the questions the team is asking itself and would like to ask with the audience, what it hopes to discover in the encounter. It can leave room for uncertainty, the audience’s and the artists’, and acknowledge that the presence of people in the house is not a given.
• Entrust the note to those who have seen the show. One could propose to a school group that has come to see the show to write the programme notes for the following performances. Imagine fifty pupils who are offered, after the performance, the chance to write, each of them, freely and anonymously, on an A4 sheet, what they want to say to the people who will come to see the show. A real visual arts workshop, with work on layout, on letter sizes, and above all work on the address, “I have seen this show, and here is what I would like to tell you before you see it yourself”. These pupils are placed in the position of mediators, which makes them reflect on their own experience, in a space where one has the right to say what one wants. One of them might write in big letters “I hated this show”, and this would be welcomed. The evening’s spectators would then receive notes that are all different, some furious, others studious, others carried by a reflection; we would glance at our neighbour’s sheet, we would know that pupils saw this show before us, and a complicity would settle in before the lights go down.
• Prepare in other ways than by talking about the work. The stated purpose of the programme note is to help people receive and live more fully the experience being offered to them. Yet to prepare, nothing obliges us to focus on the work. I imagine, for example, a note written on the very afternoon of the performance, about an event of the day, political, sporting, whatever, with a partial, not at all consensual point of view, perhaps a point of view one will not agree with, and printed for the evening. People would be surprised, everyone would read this unexpected note, and it would set people in a movement of thought that would prepare them to receive the show. It would be a profanation in Agamben’s sense; nothing would be destroyed, we would play with the codes, we would be subjects with the codes rather than objects of the codes.
• Move beyond the fixed object. Why should the programme note be an object printed once for the whole run of performances, always the same? It can change from one evening to the next, follow the life of the show, of the team, of the world. And the concept itself can travel; one could imagine programme notes elsewhere than in theatre houses, wherever people are welcomed to be offered an experience.

I will be told that these participatory modalities scatter attention, whereas the aim is for everyone to be concentrated and available. But feeling connected to the other spectators, making this moment the occasion of an encounter between persons, is a way of preparing for the show and of concentrating, in a modality which is not that of deference but that of the bond, of one’s place as a subject, of the possibility of expression. There is a kind of presupposition according to which one absolutely must fall silent before the artist, who has worked so hard and is about to tell us such powerful things. Yet admiring is not bad in itself; there are evenings when we want to fall silent to listen to something we find beautiful, and that kind of deference is precious as long as it remains a personal path, a freedom, a choice. What makes a problem is when it becomes an injunction. This is where cultural rights, that is, respect for the dignity of the other, must be present at all times, in every detail of the apparatuses. From the outside, it can look identical, people coming to sit down and watch a show, and from the inside, what happens for these people can be essentially different.

I will also be told that all of this adds work. But we are here to work, to bring something to the spectators through our work. The aim is not to work less, it is to work well, in the right places, and it is not because work habits are entrenched that we are obliged to respect them and have no right to question them. I am simply pointing to one spot and saying, well, what if we worked a little more right there? It would bring things.

And for the teams who would like to reread their own texts, a few questions seem useful to me. Whom does this text address, someone who does not know the artist, or someone who already belongs to the system of legitimation? Which words in it raise symbolic barriers, and could they be replaced without losing precision? Does the text describe what the spectator is going to live, or what the artists wanted to do? Does it act as a third, that is, does it place between the team and the audience an object that each person can freely appropriate, or does it assign a place? Have we tried writing it with others, with the front-of-house team for example, who are the ones who hand it over in person, or with spectators? And if someone who never goes to the theatre read it, would they want to come?

These questions do not ask us to give up artistic rigour. They ask us to put that rigour at the service of the relationship with the real people who, that evening, freely or not, will be sitting in the house.