Theater can physically coerce audiences into witnessing simulated atrocity

Evidence

For the first twenty minutes or more, Africans were taken one by one screaming onto the ship and forced into the hold, the horror heightened by the accompanying drums. The score by Archie Shepp drew on traditional African songs. The benches were positioned so that the lower level was barely at eye level. Not only were actors and audience impossibly close together but spectators were compelled to slouch forward to see the enslaved cargo vomiting, moaning, crying, given birth, enduring rape, and committing suicide. … Adding to the discomfort, members of the audience were directly addressed by the actors and urged to join in their cries. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1501

Categorization

• SEED: “When the audience IS the spectacle” — immersive theater’s debt to 1960s avant-garde confrontation pieces like Slave Ship, which weaponized proximity to break the fourth wall.
• XREF: connects to: Disturbing art must also exploit the audience’s attraction to what disturbs — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 408; Trial preparation treats jurors as an audience to be persuaded through staged presentation — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 850