‘Last Audience’ Grapples With What to Do with an Audience (The NoPro Review)

In the lobby of New York Live Arts, Yanira Castro holds a microphone and asks for someone to feed her lines. A volunteer from the audience stands up next to her and whispers what turns out to be the beginning of Last Audience, an interactive art piece conceived by Yanira Castro in collaboration with her interdisciplinary collaborative group a canary tosi, an anagram for ‘Yanira Castro.’ Castro is a Puerto Rican artist based in Brooklyn. Her work mixes dance, performance, theatre, and visual art to form hybrid projects that explore “the significance of gathering and watching — the historical, political and social resonances of the act of being present together in performance, investigating the encounter of public bodies: the event and the audience.”

Speaking the lines fed to her by the volunteer, Castro let us know that she would like the audience to agree to a contract. In fact, she tells us, we’ve agreed to the contract just by being there, an odd contractual arrangement that foreshadowed the piece’s relationship to its stated themes of “agency and manipulation.”

Castro assures us that while she would like us to participate in what follows to the extent that we are able, we are fully empowered to decline as well. “You must take care of yourself,” she says, before reciting a list of what theatre “is”: theatre is manipulative, theatre is about power — statements that offer a bit of context for what the show might be about. This would be the last bit of context we would encounter in the piece.

The audience then enters the performance space — two at a time — through doors on the far sides of the lobby. We are asked to “match the pace” of the person who enters through the opposite door, walk through the space, and go through a curtain. This creates a long bottleneck in the lobby, one of a number of lengthy transitions in Last Audience. Once we get into the space, little LED keychain lights are handed out, the lights go down, and we spend some time following instructions from Castro and her collaborators, making shadows with our hands.

What follows is a series of non-narrative interactive sections, some involving “aerobic movements,” some involving audience members speaking lines fed to them by a canary tosi members, and some involving being told to move around the performance space alone or in groups, creating stage pictures that changed soon after they were created. In one piece, a man first commands one person to be the “watcher,” then separates the audience into two halves, then singles out a couple more people to stand alone, then had the rest of us look into another audience member’s eyes, and so on.

All of these actions were requested with no context and seemingly no connection to any other section. Transitions between these sections, like the bottleneck in the lobby at the beginning of the show, feel empty. That shape may have been intentional, but it gave the piece an unfinished, imprecise feel, exacerbated by the announcement that the piece would be run 90 minutes when in fact Last Audience ran for over two hours.

Even by the end of the evening, each individual section did not seem to cohere with the others. While a few of the sections had audience members speak sparse, poetic lines, most of the sections seemed to be about bodies in space. Participants created stage pictures, or I imagined we did, because it seemed impossible to have a sense of what was going on while being told to move around onstage.

Often in immersive pieces, especially ones created by those with fine arts or dance backgrounds, one has the sense of being both inside of and witness to the artwork all at the same time. In Last Audience, I never had that feeling. I felt more like a leg than a dancer, and at no point could I see the dance itself.

What the evening often felt like was a series of setups for the filming of a video installation at a contemporary art museum, the sort of thing where you walk into a sparsely decorated gallery filled with video projections on various walls, and you stay long enough to see a few of them cycle through, and the meaning or aesthetic or point of view either comes through for you or it doesn’t — or maybe you come to realize that the search for coherence is the point of it all. But Last Audience never reached that point for me.

The feeling that we were part of a fine arts video shoot was exacerbated by the filming and photographing of the event. In addition to the contract Casto touched on in the lobby, securing a ticket (the event is free) to Last Audience constitutes consent to be recorded, and for those recordings to be used in perpetuity at the sole discretion of Yanira Castro. The lack of coherence in the sections and the video recording and photography lent the evening an air of deferred creation, as if we were not the intended audience for the piece. It felt as if we were moving props in a piece to be compiled later, to be viewed by someone else.

The only clue that Last Audience had any theme at all is the one stated explicitly in the description from New York Live Arts, which said, in part: “the piece grapples with agency and manipulation, negotiating the individual and the collective inside a theatrical context.”

In that case, the fact that we were being asked to do things and the feelings following those instructions may have been intended to hold more meaning than any of the sparse text or insrcuitable images themselves.

That theme was most explicit during the section where we were asked to move around the stage in various ways. Some moments in that section felt rather uncomfortable. At one point we were all in a circle, and the man issuing commands for that section asked a few people to gather in the center. They were then asked to stomp, raise their hands, and then to get down on their hands and knees, and bark or howl. At one point, one of them stopped making sounds, and the man said, with a stern, sharp tone, “Did I tell you to stop?” The person went to barking loudly on all fours, being filmed all the while.

A few moments after that, the man asked a woman in the outer circle to step into the middle and point at another audience member. The woman shook her head and said “No.” The man then gave her a look that read to me as stern and disapproving, a look that did not seem in concert with the spirit of consent. When an audience member declines to participate, and encounters anything other than total acceptance, consent is in some way compromised. That moment felt uncomfortable to me, something that could lead the next audience member to feel pressured to say “Yes” to the next request.

The next audience member was asked if they wanted to speak some lines. In this case it turned out that “speaking some lines” meant being fed a long series of intense, poetic bits of language, while being told what emotion to express while saying them. The audience member spent the next couple minutes kneeling, crawling, standing, shaking, pointing, yelling, crying, and whispering the lines. The request seemed a bit disingenuous, because the initial description of what would be asked of the audience member squared only in the most general sense with what the commands actually were. Afterward, as the participants milled about uncomfortably, I remembered, with a sense of dismay, that the whole thing had been filmed and could be used at any time in any way in perpetuity.

I found very little of value in Last Audience. As a piece of contemporary interactive art, it lacked a clear aesthetic and articulated no specific point of view. As an investigation of “agency and manipulation” the piece did not go far enough to push its audience into place where they had a truly sharp encounter with their own agency. The commands and requests, while uncomfortable, were about on par with an acting class. Whatever manipulation was applied to the audience operated on a strictly superficial level. And for me, the piece had a murky relationship with consent that got in the way of whatever conclusions might have otherwise been drawn.

By the time the piece ended — in a pretty standard no-ending sort of way, without curtain call, finale, or messaging that the piece had come to a close — I had no clear sense of what Last Audience wanted to leave me with. Maybe we’ll get to see the whole picture later on, when the footage has been compiled and projected on the white wall of an art gallery in Manhattan.

Last Audience has concluded.

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