Accepting the Invitation

This chapter focuses on the experiential aspect of the moment of response, and its effect on what follows. Ideas about the phenomenology of acting and spectating are deployed to unpick the peculiar situation of doing both at the same time, re-orienting Erica Fischer-Lichte’s concept of autopoietic feedback loops in performance. The questions of this chapter concern how accepting an invitation to participate has consequences for the reception of participatory theatre for the audience participant, as their ‘point of view’ in relation to the performance alters radically at this point. The key questions are: Tim Crouch’s The Author and I, Malvolio serve as illustrative examples of strategies that encourage reflexivity in the audience experience, using discrete and focused participatory procedures.