Directing audience’s gaze

Electric Hotel is an experimental dance performance, which natives story through body language. It presents the facade of the hotel, and the wall faces the audience is made of glass, so that the audience can see into hotel rooms and corridors. Action takes place in the different rooms at the same time, and these story lines for each character interconnect during the performance. However, various actions are presenting at the same time, how do Electric Hotel communicate to audience? Which room to view?

This piece makes interesting connections to ideas of voyeurism and to how to direct the audience's gaze in a performance. Audiences are sitting outside wearing headphones, watching the performance like voyeurs who voyeur a hotel’s residents in their private room. This is very similar to the arrangement in Alfred Hitchcock film 'Rear Window'. The audience are deliberately placed in the position of voyeurs. This is normal in theatre, but in this piece that position was clear.

In Electric Hotel, the director has used this design to engage with the basic human desire described by Freud as ‘scopophilia’, which is the pleasure of gazing at people’s bodies as objects, and this is connected to voyeurism and notions of the gaze..

Here, it connects to the notions of the gaze, Lacan states that not only is the object of our gaze something we desire, but also that the act of looking is also what we desire. The desire to look, and desiring what we look at, should inform the understanding of the use of multiple viewpoints and multiple screens.

What is more, the viewing conditions, Electric Hotel, as Chandler points out that, emphasise voyeuristic nature because there is a sense that you are not observed, in the dark room, by anyone else (Chandler 1998). The viewing conditions in Electric Hotel emphasise this even more because the audience members are isolated from each other by the wearing of headphone sets.

In some ways, Electric Hotel is similar to an outdoor movie because the audience is outdoors wearing headphones and watching action take place behind a glass wall. However, it is more complex because in fact the performers are live, and because, as mentioned before, the action takes place in different rooms at the same time. So, which room to view? In this point, sound from the headphone is the medium drawing audiences’ attentions.

Although the audience member can choose which part of performing to focus on, or which performer to favour in terms of gazing time and identification. Interestingly, audience’s gaze is still heavily controlled by the sound, by directors and they are very selective in what they reveal.

These sounds direct the audience gaze to a particular room or performer, and when the sound changes to the one from another room, the audience gaze is moved to that new room. So, although there are many simultaneous actions to view in different parts of the hotel, the soundtrack controls where to look for the audience.

Here, the way that direct audience’s gaze remind me to my research, how to utilize digital screens in onstage action communicating to audience. Video and live video projections through flashbacks, POV and close-up shots could lead the audience to experience story or emotion through the gaze of screens, a gaze that can be very controlled by the director, especially when the gaze upon the live performance is less controlled.