Introduction
Viewing and understanding performance: in light of other minds
In the opening of his book, The Empty Space (1968), Peter Brook famously remarks, “I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”1 However, while theatre may occur with just a single person watching, what happens to understanding (of the performance) when an audience is composed of two (or more) people?
Thought to originate from the Indian subcontinent, the parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” was made most famous to the West by John Godfrey Saxe’s 1872 poem of the same name. The (generic-version of the) parable tells ...
