On Being a Great Audience

from poetry sighs to ABBA

“To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.” — Walt Whitman

“I’d hate the sound of thirty thousand people booing.” — Benny Andersson, ABBA

I was at a poetry reading recently, rolling my eyes at the usual poetry sigh that happens between poems, but it got me thinking about different types of audiences. 

If you don’t know, the “poetry sigh” is what (some) poetry audiences do after each poem, in lieu of applauding, booing, finger clicking, laughing or vomiting. It’s an emotional release. If poetry is as Jerry Seinfeld said (I can’t find the exact quote, sorry) “comedy without the punchlines”, then the poetry sigh stands in place of a laugh. It’s an audible acknowledgement that the audience is listening and along for the ride. 

And it can be useful. Doing poetry readings can be terrifying, especially when you start out and you’re not used to seeing a sea of people all staring at you. Some people’s default listening face is worse than a resting pitbull, and some people listen by closing their eyes and looking asleep. It’s hard to know how things are going, until you learn how to read silences, and sighs, and body language, and the extent to which people are or aren’t fidgeting. 

Poets generally leave a big pause after finishing reading a poem, a way of signalling its end without shouting “TA-DAAA!” and doing jazz hands. Although the poetry sigh can feel artificial or cosy, I think at least part of it is that people sometimes listen so intently, they hold their breath a little. The poetry sigh is a response to the reader, but also a source of literal physical relief to the audience.    

Poetry readings are, for the most part, a private experience in public. Although there are participatory poetry events (I recently went to see Anne Carson, and she had the whole audience shriek in joy for ten seconds in tribute to Yoko Ono), it’s not usual. Poetry audiences are used to sitting on uncomfortable chairs in dimly lit rooms, focusing their attention on one person, and sighing intermittently until the reading is over, when they can clap and go to the bar.

This feels like the opposite of immersive theatre like Punchdrunk, where there is no division between audience and stage, and the audience have agency, moving in groups, or as individuals, running around complex sets, following actors and poking about in corners, picking up and dropping storylines at will when something more interesting runs around the corner to distract them.  

The audience members all wear masks at Punchdrunk. This is to differentiate them from the actors. It makes them identifiably part of a herd, a sort of mute Greek chorus. It’s also to render some form of anonymity, so you feel less self-conscious as you decide where to look. It also, of course, makes you part of the show, conferring the role of “audience” upon you. 

When I went to see The Burnt City last year, I remember feeling intensely (and, I’m sure, intentionally) uncomfortable at being part of “the audience”, part of the performance, especially during the fight scenes. I found myself standing just a few metres away from actors having a distressing emotional and physical confrontation, as a circle of masked, passive watchers stood around, doing nothing but tilting their heads like birds as they watched. I couldn’t not watch the audience as part of the show. Our chorus was complicit in it, and in its violence. 

At Punchdrunk, although each audience member chooses their own bespoke path through the narrative, a fundamental part of their job is to not react, not even sigh. It’s not an escape room, or a place to dress up and sing along. You watch in respectful silence, en masse, following the rules of theatre audience but in motion. You can move on in boredom, walking out halfway through an impassioned plea. You can stay glued to one character because you can’t take your eyes off them. 

You have your voyeuristic experience, and then leave, never knowing who your fellow audience members were. There is no clapping, no release — just the exit into fresh air away from the group fantasy, all of which has been experienced uniquely in your own head. Another private experience in public, and an effectively disturbing one — surely in some way a reflection of society’s broader cow-like inaction in the face of real-world violence.  

And then there’s ABBA.

At ABBA Voyage, you are performed to by holograms. You already know going in that none of it is “real”, that their vocals are all pre-recorded, that you will not see any of ABBA in person, and that you mysteriously paid an extortionate amount of money to do so. 

There is a live band on stage for some songs, with live backing singers, but with projections of the band members five times bigger than any actual humans on stage, it’s hard not to focus on the fictional ABBA before your eyes, even in awareness of their pre-recorded vocals. We all cheered in absurdity as the gig started, thinking, “What are we doing?” 

When the avatars took to the stage, my husband turned to me and said “They’re not even here! Why am I clapping?” and I replied, “Why am I crying?!” It was our first gig (“gig”?) since Covid, the first time we’d visited such a large packed room full of people, and with so many ABBA songs engaged with the joy of music itself, I felt unavoidably moved as it all started. (If you want a detailed writeup of the gig, Kieron did one here.)

We go to clubs and dance to prerecorded music. This was just that, with a special lightshow, a specially chosen narrative to guide us through the night, an endlessly repeating set that everyone (for a price) can experience in the exact same way — the Big Mac of gigs. The lights circle around the auditorium, around and over the audience, and you are frequently reminded you are in a shared experience, one where you can look around and see everyone’s faces engaged in confused delight.

No one’s faces are hidden here. Joy is expressed through motion. Everyone dances. No one is cool and everyone knows it. 

And, of course, ABBA’s songs are largely bleak as fuck, the finest Divorce Pop around. The focus, ultimately, is on the music. That is what we realise we are actually all there for. The music, and to experience it with other people; to dance in such an absurd situation, and feel ourselves in communion. 

This all has me thinking about what I can do to change the context in which people experience the things I make. It’s easier in a live setting of course, but it’s interesting to play with linguistically too. What does it mean to change the conditions in which readers meet the page? (That’s a whole other essay, of course. Plus, readers set their own pace, tone, etc — the epitome of audience with agency). 

Jorie Graham said, in an interview with Paris Review, “A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public.” I think this is true of most art. The encounter between private and public is where art lives. 

So what is a great audience, then? Perhaps one who meets the expectations of the artform in front of it and allows it to go to work. An audience who does not resist what is being asked of them.

Easier said than done if the art is bad, of course. 

Maybe I just mean being open? So you can find what is good for you.