 room full of men. May 25th 1968, fires of Paris were burning but behind the closed doors of the Theatre de la Cité de Villourban, 34 directors of theaters and cultural houses signed a joint Villourban declaration. Signatories, plancheons, barreaux, monnaies, jansons, plancheons, barreaux, monnaies, jansons. Stating. Divisions have only grown deeper between those who are excluded from culture and those of us who willingly or unwillingly have become increasingly complicit in their exclusion. Secluded they excluded them. plancheons, jansons, barreaux, monnaies. They call them the non-public, the excluded ones. Ones on the other side of division, 34 directors have opened a chest and the ghosts of the non-public are haunting Europe ever since. The non-public looks good in a policy paper, looks bad on a business card, the far ones, the invisibles, the uncountables, the multitude, the ones who do not take part. No, not the audiences but their absent relatives, the ones who could not be grasped, involved or included, the ones we cannot define, the ones that do not define themselves. The biggest annoyance in the orderly polis of European culture, the absent multitudes are haunting our premieres, our posters, our Facebook feeds, our rehearsals. They're haunting our hierarchies, our aesthetics and our salaries. Laughing without sound, crying without tears, demanding silently, nothing. They don't care. The non-public has left the building. Ever since, the way to deal with them is to colonize them. As a territory to be conquered, as a condition to be improved, as an opportunity to be used, as a duty to be fulfilled, as a goal to reach, as a thing to develop. Audience, development, audience, development, development, audience, development, development, audience, development, audience. Send sociologists, send some ethnographers and some anthropologists, biologists as well you never know. Why don't you go to theater, madam? Manage managers, produce producers, specialized specialists, audience, development, audience, development. Some also try to forget. There's no one in the dark, honey. Better not think about it. It will just go away. They're coming to save us any minute. Time heals, you know. Art for art's sake, the insulated windows, waterproof boots, resilience, independence, raincoats, antibiotics, virus always finds you. Forget them, we can't. The pink elephants try not to think about them. The unknown unknowns. Ones we don't know that we don't know. The absent presence, present as a void. The unknown unknowns. Ones outside our networks of empathy, outside our filter bubbles, outside our references, outside our theories, outside our policies. But the damn things cannot be completely excluded either. To exclude one has to know. But the headlights are off. The map cannot be drawn. There is no completion. No totality, no certainty. Just the never ending incompleteness. Staring at our souls. Liminal landscapes. They are not all in, but not all out. Creatures of the dawn. They are a missing link. A story unfinished, a question unanswered, a circle incomplete. Bugging, buzzing, bugging and buzzing and itching. They are the boundaries of our knowledge. Beyond the reach of our robotic arms, of our machines, our facial recognition technologies, our satellite communications, of our search and rescue operations, of our borders and our customs. The non-public persists. Without revolt, without struggle, accepting no deals. They cannot be reached. They cannot be bribed. The line is dead, sir. Unknown unknowns. Our societies and our landscapes full of them. Multitudes of different ways of being. Excluded as living. Returning as specters. Specters of the colonized. Specters of displaced. Specters of exploited. Specters of burnt forests. Of depressed and lonesome. Of the missing data. Specters of broken tools and bones. Specters of birds without nests. Specters of whales without seas and wounded. Specters lost. Specters extinct. Choirs of specters singing in many voices in weird harmonies in changing volumes. Silently, loudly. They are singing our last lullaby. You have to count them in. Without them we are crippled. We turn to zombies looking for another bite. Looking for another screen to stop looking, to stop the itching. Can't close the door. So open the gate. Instead of speaking about spectatorship and spectating, let us talk about spectership and spectering. Spectering is being un-present. Like Einstein's spooky action at the distance. A kind of a social quantum entanglement. Epsom presence. Being here and away. Being something and another thing at the same time. Spectering. Like a message in the bottle. Blind and ignorant. Wrecklessly hopeful. Lost and found. Spectership lives at the frontiers of our certainties. Before the formula underneath the paved road in a long forgotten suitcase. On a discarded hard drive. On a forgotten photograph. Spectering. Curiosity about a future that might never come. Truths that no one might ever find out. A love letter never to be opened. Useless bits of code. Genetic mutations of a dying species. Life despite the storm. Spectership is about reaching out in the dark with warm hands. No need to knock, just come in. A plate for a grown-up child who will not come to dinner. A sofa for a friend who will not sleep over. A flower pot in the desert. A gift for an unprobable stranger. An empty seat in a packed theme. Why? Because you can never be certain if you are the unknown. Unknown. Like the cheap detective story, the killer is the victim. Detective is the killer. No one is the victim. Everyone is the detective. Everyone constantly recreating the crime scene. The crime scene. The crime scene. You are someone else's unknown. Unknown. A hand that draws. A hand that draws. There is no us and them. No hierarchy, no void. Just tightly bit knits of sentient matter. Good at telling stories. Such a lovely identity, sir. And the watch. Was it on this count? We are all specters. Trying hard to be anything but that. Insider here, outsider there. You have to go to come back. We are building bridges over dry rivers. We involve the unknowns when we lose our precious selves. Planchon, barreaux, monnaies, jansons. The four walls. Flashy neon signs say theater. They chase away the dark and the non-public as well. But when the certainty is gone, fragility is the cure. At the end of the day, when the night falls, we are all weird, all in the dark. Sensing each other, excluding each other, inviting each other, haunting each other. Thank you. Maybe a short explainer to ruin the thing. I have spent the last 10 years researching audiences and audience development and how we relate to audiences and everything that. I've read a couple of books, one for ITM and many texts. At the end of the day, first I realized I still really don't know what the hell are we talking about. But what I did notice is that we have two, broadly speaking, two ways of relating to this scary thing called audience. One is to say, ah, fuck that. We don't care, audiences. We are just here for our own amusement and so on. And the other one is this institutionalized, pragmatic, industrial, scientific conquering of this area of vast diversity and vast spaces. So this idea of good practices and best examples and how to put people in categories so that we can define various strategies and tactics, how to best approach them and so on and so on. And I was really looking for a third way. Is there a third way? Is there a way in which we care but we care in a non-industrial way, in a non-colonizing way? And to be honest, I tried to write something meaningful on that and I failed spectacularly and this is why I turned to poetry as a different Maxis mode to the world and finally I felt good. I surely hope that you felt at least not bad about this. So thank you for your patience and I'm here for all your questions, answers, ideas, comments, whatever comes to your mind. And if you feel fragile and scared there in the auditorium, be certain that I'm even more scared, so just go ahead. Questions, comments, raise your hand. Just reactions, how you felt, what do you... Thank you, Gorham. I think the poetic way which you have found is one that many share with you but perhaps are not poets. So I would say find a way for the ongoing dialogue along that route because to me that is the way forward. Do you know what I mean? I think I do. Thank you, Osa. Thank you. Hi, thanks for that. It was a really interesting and I suppose touched what I think it did and I accept that not everyone's poets but actually poetry tells us truths we can't necessarily gather in any other way. For me what it did was it connected the challenge, the issue of audience development that we all face to a much deeper human condition and actually you could have been talking about... I mean you were talking about the excluded from society. That's why people don't come to the theatres because they're part of an excluded mass. So for me that approach was really good in kind of finding the language to talk about the sort of deep-rooted issues that connect in society that are then manifest on one level as our difficulty to attract certain audiences to. But I also think that there's a question and I read your article which sort of was really useful that actually there's sort of two levels where we which are ways that sort of drivers to going in continuing to try to talk to people in that way. One is the sort of one that goes well it's taxpayers money and it's actually one way of looking at that is you know it's the working class who don't go to the theatre subsidizing the pursuits of the middle class. But the other one which is more fundamental I think which is about the health of a society where the whole society participates in culture and a society where there is a large excluded mass is not a healthy society and so I think we have a duty to continue trying to if not colonize to make contact with that hinterland. Thank you I just think that there is a way to be democratic without counting people. I think there's a way to think of your performance to perform it and to be an institution without necessarily counting how many people come in and to be connected even if they are sitting lonely in their rooms. This was my attempt at this spectering because I think we can't be together even though we are not necessarily in the same room even though we are not necessarily in the same public sphere and so on and so on. I think that this whole discourse of you know structuring societies and solving problems have failed spectacularly so maybe we can try to fail in a different way at least or just keep a door open in our minds. This is what I wanted to see and of course I mean there are many examples and tools and approaches but I wanted to leave this hour without tools and examples and approaches if we can. Good morning everyone. Thank you very much. My name is Madiha. I think I speak on behalf of lots of people here that was a very creative way of presenting and I'm going to steal it so thank you for that. I think my favorite thing that I heard this morning was when the certainty is gone fragility is the cure. I think if we all feel excluded in somewhere or another and that's the biggest inclusion or the biggest thing that includes us together if you know what I mean so the fact that we all feel outside if we're all outside the outside is the inside. Does that make sense? Yeah so thank you very much. Thank you for the comment. I would just I have to do one reference and that's Judith Butler after 2001 in her grievance or I forgot the name of the book but you can find it she used to write how the moment when US citizens felt fragile and this is 9-11 what their politicians did is pumped up their muscles and say we shouldn't feel fragile we will kick some asses. This is what she says we are all fragile and that's actually a way to be with others. That's maybe our ontological fragility is maybe a missing link between us so maybe we can be together by all feeling fragile because we are all fragile. Thank you. Yes I wonder also if part of this third way this elusive third way is something around curiosity. I am really interested in not democracy but consensus and the role of consent in our culture at the level of individual interaction and at the level of social interaction and how we are forming binaries and othering each other all the time and going with the people in the arts trying to reach the audience is another binary division another way of going there's us and them and perhaps a way to break the binary is to be curious to be genuinely curious about each other. I find this when I'm tackling issues of prejudice particularly work a lot around LGBTQ communities and I see people calling out each other you're a turf you're a transphobe you're a racist you're this and saying you're not one of us you're one of them at each other and it's that polarization that binary thinking that's the problem and the way to address it is instead to go you just said something I'm not sure I agree with can you tell me a bit more about why you think that way that's much better than saying you're wrong to somebody so I just wonder I offer curiosity as a an option for the third way. Thank you I'm sure that that word is somewhere in the poem if it's not then it's a really bad poem but I agree I think we also need the census and we also need the ways to disagree but I find it also very interesting how we can come to certain kind of harmony or agreement or sharing and I just came came back from two months in Colombia and I've been gifted with so many insights there and one of these things that quite shocked me is that still a lot of tribes in the various parts remote parts of Colombia and Latin America have this idea very interesting idea of democracy in which we cannot vote each other out it's not 50 to 48 so we get out of EU you know we have to agree on it now what's interesting is that if we all have to agree on it we have to construct a completely different society in which we can all agree starting with the fact that their leaders for example are people without property people without any vices people without families who they want to support and so on so it's a it's a different idea of a leader and also different idea of democratic deliberation in which they talk over an issue that they disagree on until they agree and that sometimes takes a week two weeks a month or two months now can we in our industrial societies reach an agreement so it's a it's a very how to say foundationally shaking idea of a different democracy some would say the only democracy that is possible more questions I have just one comment I had the association that I have never heard so tender speech about our selfishness and I don't think I don't feel that it is about fragility I think it is about our fight for privileges to sit here and speak about art and culture without real without real action versus external world and I think it is amazing thank you I'll just take it take that with me without answering more okay this is it thank you for your attention thank you Gordon for this wonderful lecture