Classifications of communication strategies

The investigations into the realm of face-to-face social encounters seem to adopt a non-spatial direction. The social encounter, it is true, takes place within physical space. But often in these analyses, this appears to be a formless, universal space that has little impact on the encounter, as it is mainly regulated through masks and performances. The difference in location is often a social and institutional difference; space is no more than a stage set and a backdrop. Yet we know that space plays a crucial role in these encounters.

We have already seen (in Chapter 1) how interpersonal distance, or personal space, is an index of, as well as a mode of regulating, social communication. The same is true, even more crucially so, of the way space is being subdivided. Through these subdivisions, of which the most important is perhaps that between the public and the private, do societies express individual differences and preferences, power and identity, social institutions and organizations.

The public sphere is the place where individual masks are displayed, compared and reshaped. In the same way that public space is articulated through the display of the building fronts, public sphere is the place of social fronts of individuals. Indeed, the fagade of the buildings plays the same role as the masks of individual (albeit as a fixed rather than an easily changeable one): a boundary between the private and the public realms, a medium of representation and communication, a tool of hiding and suppressing what needs hiding.

If social life is interpreted as an ongoing drama on public and semi-public stages, what can be learnt from the design of theatre stage and its parallel with the theatre of social life? In buildings for performing arts (Appleton, 1996), design focuses on the relationship between auditorium and the platform/stage, which is the main function of the building.

4.5 There are many parallels between city design and theatre design. Flexible public spaces can easily be used as a theatre stage for festivals and performances (Aarhus, Denmark)

The platform/stage may be designed for a particular performance, such as music, dance, drama, or designed to be flexibly used with the help of mechanical devices. The stage becomes a neutral container that can be adapted to a wide variety of performances.

Although the interior of a performance hall may have a certain character and a large number of other considerations to take into account, the stage will have to be as flexible and as neutral as possible. Is there any parallel here with the design of cities, where flexibility of public open space used for countless forms of social encounters would require the neutrality and universality of the space design (Figure 4.5)?

We know that in theatre design, when different forms of performance use the same stage, some performers can be undermined. Dancers, for example, may suffer from sharing the same stage with others. Their bodies can be damaged by dancing on stage floors that may be appropriate for other performers (Foley, 1994:26). These floors may be fitted with floor traps or cable ducts, considerably abused when heavy objects are dropped and dragged, leaving the surfaces badly damaged, or have an inconsistent structure, all inappropriate for dancers. Is there a parallel with city design, in the sense that public open spaces that are presumed to be used by all may be inaccessible to some performers, e.g. young skateboarders, or those with some physical disadvantage, such as the disabled? Are neutrality and flexibility enough to make the place ideal for social

performance?

Through its focus on articulation of the relations between the audience and the performers, the theatre design has evolved to separate the two from each other. This has established a one-way visual relationship, in which the audience is a passive recipient of performance from a distance. But the root of all theatrical experience, as Molinari (1975) shows, is participation, as exemplified by the theatre of tribal communities, the early Greek drama, medieval religious drama and secular Elizabethan drama. In contrast, the theatre of imperial Rome and the aristocratic and bourgeois theatre of the modern age have inserted a distance between the audience and the performers. We can see how this separation of audience from the performance developed in the modern period at the same time as the separation of the family from the public realm. They both were signs of new divisions of labour in society and, subsequently, new divisions in society and space.

In the revolutionary Soviet Union of the 1920s, before Stalin’s purges, many artists were searching for new forms of expression and the state was promoting arts to support agitation and propaganda. According to the Soviet Commissar on Enlightenment at the time, ‘Art is a powerful means of infecting those around us with ideas, feelings, and moods’ (quoted in Baer, 1991a:35). The Commissariat’s Head of Theatre was asking designers to come up with ideas for an environment of participatory involvement, a structure for acting that would also unite the stage and the auditorium. One result was a system of staircases, bridges and scaffolding surrounding a partial globe that extended into the first rows of the theatre. According to a critic at the time,

There is no stage…There is a monumental platform half moved out into the auditorium. One senses that it is cramped within these walls. It requires a city square, a street. (quoted in Baer, 1991a:46)

The idea of uniting stage and auditorium was also advocated by Tairov in 1921, who encouraged designers to abandon their fascination with the backdrop and concentrate on the stage floor, to break it up to different levels and angles, so as to help the artistic expression and ease of movement by the artists’ bodies (Baer, 1991b:182).

In France in the 1920s, Antonin Artaud, and later his followers in Europe, advocated involvement by the audience to become once again a part of the theatrical experience. It was thought crucial for theatre to create direct communication between members of audience and between spectators and actors (Molinari, 1975:312). This ideal of audience participation in performance was of course well known for centuries by religious leaders and was one way of encouraging the audience to share religious beliefs. Its secular version was articulated by Rousseau:

In the middle of a square erect a pole decorated with flowers, gather the people round it and you have a feast Better still: present the spectators as the show, make them actors themselves, make each one see himself and love himself in all the rest, so that their oneness grows’ (Lettre à d’Alembert, quoted in Molinari, 1975, title page)

We can identify, therefore, two ways of treating space for performance, focusing on the

relationship between auditorium and the stage: one that keeps them separate and reduces their relation to mainly visual; and another that brings the two together and creates participation and two-way communication. Both these trends can be found in the design of public spaces: one that treats public spaces as a backdrop, at best articulated to have a monumental effect, where display is the primary function; and another that treats space as a place for communication and social encounters, where the space is understood to have an active part in the performance. Public space, therefore, is treated as a backdrop and a setting; as part of a social front to perform various tasks by individuals and institutions as well as the container in which these acts take place.

In both cases, in theatre and in city, the space is required to offer a degree of flexibility and neutrality. Whatever the nature of relations with the audience, the space is needed for a variety of performances by different actors in different conditions and for different reasons. Public space may have been designed and organized for a particular social ritual, such as an annual festival or religious and state parades. But it becomes the setting for a whole range of other, less specified activities throughout its life. Similarly, a place may have been shaped as the setting for a particular routine during the day, such as a marketplace, but left to be used in a less restricted way at night, when it can be taken over by different routines and activities. It is this possibility of flexible use that differentiates a public place from those that have strict controls.

It is important to remember that social encounters with strangers are not constrained to formal settings. The theatre of social life is not limited to the public streets and squares, as so often the design literature emphasizes. The public places in which masks are displayed are everywhere, in shops, restaurants, buses, airports, libraries, beaches, museums, theatres, etc. In other words, anywhere that social life is going on, where social encounters with strangers take place.