The Fourth Wall

So is the fourth wall necessary? Why do we have that convention in the first place? And why do we keep audiences in the dark expecting them to be silent?

It seems to me that it might be worth investigating a modern movement away from a passive, darkened, silenced audience - a movement away from the pretense of the fourth wall to a place where the actor and the audience interrelate in a way that still contains the pleasures of voyeurism inherent in the passive spectator, but opens up the possibility for more dynamic conversation on either side of the footlights.

My (limited, cursory) research into Victorian and Edward melodrama for my last project brought to my attention that there is a direct correlation between the use of electric light in the theatre (which allows for concentrated and controlled use of lights) and the previous lighting techniques (making theatre outside to make use of daylight, using chandeliers to light the entire theatre as well as the audience). In short, the practice of holding the audience in the dark and the spectacle in the light is a new one - perhaps 150 years old at the most. Why is it still intact? Why might it be useful to investigate the effects that presence (through lights) have on audiences?

Here are some other musings on the issue:

• When the audience was darkened, the theatre no longer could be a place "to see and be seen" - what does this mean for the socializing component of theatre?
• What happens to the status of the storyteller and the status of the listener when the storyteller is in the light? Why are the status differences important, or are they?
• it seems to me that the movement toward staging in the round comes from an attempt to keep the spectator conscious of his fellow spectators - but most of the shows that I have seen in the round, the audience behaves like a proscenium audience. I wonder if that was different when those theatres came into vogue, and if audiences were more participatory then than they are now in that configuration.
• Perhaps for my next project, we will keep the audience lit.

I'm sure that I will have more to ramble about on this topic in time, as I often leave a show wondering what my and my fellow darkdwellers experienced and what our relationship was to the piece and to each other in experiencing the piece. And since this space is about my musings on all things theatrical, I hope to be writing about them here.