“Here, the audience adds something. Through perception, through listening ‘from outside,’ the ‘unheard’ becomes possible.”
This is how author Marc Vereeck describes it in his article “Listening While Acting.”1 Listening is essential for a play: the transformation of written text into living language and characters. The audience adds something—or, to be more precise, the audience gives the play its listening. The actors who, as in the work with Rudolf Steiner, have “listened” to the script and have “listened” to their characters from the sounds and gestures in the language, have experienced a metamorphosis of listening from outside and from inside. For the audience, it begins with the event. While the actors, with all their senses, give the spiritual a new body, the audience “disembody” themselves. They sit as motionless as possible, attentive and perceiving, all concentration focused “outside themselves.”
A theater hall is a physical mirror for how the processes are turned inside out. At the “front” is a small space upon which the attention of all our senses is concentrated—fully illuminated, a sensual feast. At the “back” is the audience space—dark, made invisible, but much larger. From there, all attention is directed to the “front;” from there, the resonance flows back into the play. It’s a bit like our head: in front, the face, the essential body openings, the center of sensory experience, and in back, a dark, closed space where we listen, feel, and think. But it is only through the backspace, our hidden side, that we open the connection to the spiritual sphere.
The theater makes a truly spiritual experience possible for those who open themselves up to it. I could say that the theater spiritualizes the audience, but when we pull the curtains back, the audience is the spirit of the theater.
Translation Laura Liska
Illustration Graphics team of the Weekly
Footnotes
- Marc Vereeck, “Listening While Acting,” Goetheanum Weekly Issue 7/2025.
