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The Film Spectator as ‘Bricoleur’; an Ethics of Viewing and Poaching.

The article builds on previous research and writing on the ethical knowing spectator, employing material from outside theatre, such as relationship theory, in an original way.

The article argues for an ‘ethics of spectatorship’, repositioning a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to a ‘knowing suspension of disbelief’ with the audience as ‘ethical spectators’ in relation to the stage. The six sections (ethics of recognition, looking, materiality, complicity and empathy, participation and imagination, attending) characterise a collaboration and dialectic I have termed as ‘spectatorial dramaturgy’.

Spectatorial dramaturgy is argued as empirical, an ethical economy of regard rooted in the material and social body in reciprocal concert. Resting on the complicit, knowing, empathetic imagination manifested in the engaged but distanced ‘spect-actor’ as social agent, I suggest this relationship between a presented ‘mise-en-scène’ and the always-present spectator entails the spectator always being active. An ethical spectatorial dramaturgy, therefore, places the work of the spectator’s actions within the ‘weave’ of the theatre event.

A number of key paradoxes are identified: the implications of ‘looking-being looked at’ (opposed to ‘gazing’) suggests a fundamental human trait essential to our ‘being among others’ that draws on concepts from relationship counseling; that agency is always qualified and qualifying; that unavoidable re-cycling makes the spectator an inevitable poacher and nomad; that the theatre requires the presence of both actor and spectator in an uneasy alliance.

The scholarly context may be located in the earlier volume Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction (Routledge 2007) and subsequently developed in a chapter on ‘recycling’ published in 2009. The concerns outlined above are therefore part of ongoing lines of enquiry concerning spectatorship.

Research disseminated as article in Performing Ethos 1:1, ISSN: 1757-1959.

Dissemination has continued as the article and it’s materials are used in further work.