Audience Behaviour

[Melody]

There are going to be more and more cases of audience members who are tipsy and looking for bathrooms during the performance if theatres continue this trend of allowing people to take drinks into the auditorium and also keep the bars open so people can get up during the performance to buy more drinks.

[capybara]

Drink spilled in several  places near me in the Coli Stalls last night. Had to negotiate smelly puddles on the way out. Ugh!

[alison]

Drink spilled in several  places near me in the Coli Stalls last night. Had to negotiate smelly puddles on the way out. Ugh!

 

Ridiculous.  It's really time this stopped.  But I noticed at the end of one of the intervals in Swan Lake on Thursday that people were still queuing up to buy champagne from the "champagne bar", so guess they were allowed to take it in with them.  (Call me a snob, but the thought of sipping champagne from a plastic "glass" doesn't really do it for me )

[Fiz]

I agree, Alison. Crystal glasses or nothing!

[FLOSS]

Oh the difference in between audience and audience. Occasional ballet goers and occasional opera goers seem to belong to two totally different tribes. Last night at Glyndebourne, I had a very cheap ticket, you could have heard a mouse fart as the audience watched and listened intently to the Ravel double bill. On Thursday at Swan Lake you could not hear the music for the noise that was generated by an audience who clearly were of the opinion that a ballet is only being performed when there are dancers on the stage. My visit to the Coli was a very dispiriting experience.

 

It left me wondering why the bulk of the audience was there and what they were getting out of the experience. They certainly were not there to listen to the music and seemed to be more taken by the Jester than virtually anyone else.There were quite a few people round me who felt the needed to maintain their alcohol level but then perhaps they felt the need to block out the boorish behaviour going on around us from an obsessive hair flicker to all those people playing musical chairs.There seemed to be more people with weak bladders than you would expect to encounter at a pantomime matinee. I'm afraid that I came away wondering whether it wasn't rather a good job that most of them were unlikely to darken the doors of a theatre at which ballets other than Swan Lake, Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet were being performed. I know it sounds mean spirited but I don't want to sit through too many more performances like Thursday night's.

Edited August 22, 2015 by FLOSS

[capybara]

 

It left me wondering why the bulk of the audience was there and what they were getting out of the experience. 

 

Well, I was taken by the (possibly unusual) number of enthusiastic comments about Swan Lake at the Coli overheard as one sat in one's seat, passed people in the intervals, queued with them for the toilets, and shuffled out with them afterwards. I really felt that there were many people there who had had a wonderful first experience of ballet and who might, therefore, want to try other performances.

[MAB]

Hold on, there's one thread going decrying the dwindling audiences for ballet whereas here new audiences are decried for being loutish and shouldn't darken the portals of any theatres showing ballet.

 

I'm confused.

[Ian Macmillan]

In the immortal words of Chairman Mao: "Let a  hundred - or was it a thousand? - it was certainly a number conveying variety - flowers bloom!"  Perhaps someone has unleashed a Forum Cultural Revolution? 

[FLOSS]

Concern has been expressed from time to time about the limited number of ballets that a company like ENB is able to tour because the occasional ballet goer seems unwilling to buy tickets for anything other than Swan Lake,Nutcracker and Romeo and Juliet. I started a thread to see whether anyone had any ideas about why the audience was so unadventurous and what,if anything, might be done to encourage people to try something different.

 

There is the long term thread about audience behaviour.I happened to attend the Thursday night performance of Swan Lake at the Coliseum. It gave me no pleasure to say that the audience where I was sitting was incredibly noisy,drowned out the orchestra when there was no one dancing and gave the impression that the ballet was an unwelcome intrusion into the more important activities of talking and looking at their mobile phones.Attending last night the audience was smaller, far less mobile phone fixated and far more attentive as far as the performance was concerned.

 

I can not say whether Thursday night's behaviour was typical of the entire run of Swan Lake, that night's audience, or whether it was limited to my part of the theatre. If it had been my first time at a ballet it would have put me off going again.

 

I am not sure how these two threads are cause for confusion. On the one hand there is, apparently outside London, little interest in a wide repertory which invites the questions why? What,if anything, has altered? On the other hand there is a potential audience which,for whatever reason, does not know how to behave as part of a theatre audience.Now I know that it is quite likely that someone will remind us that being quiet in the theatre is a relatively recent phenomena but bobbing about, flicking your hair. standing up as people traipse out to the bar or to the loo five minutes after the performance has begun does spoil the performance for that part of the audience whose view of the stage is obscured by these activities.

[LinMM]

I agree absolutely about the totally annoying habits starting up surrounding drinks in the auditorium etc I'm just lucky so far not to have actually sat next to anybody.....yet!!

 

However Glyndebourne is Glyndebourne and hidden away in the glorious debts of the Sussex countryside!

The type of audiences here are from a comparatively small niche and I don't think you can take drinks into the auditorium anyway......unless God forbid .....its started happening even there now.

 

I can only afford to go in the Autumn period to see the touring company there. I must admit it's usually so cold by October that the only drink one would want to have is a nice hot coffee or chocolate but certainly up to last year have never seen in the auditorium.

All very respectful there but a less wide clientele I would say!

[Mary]

I agree too re the drinks in the Coli. But I had an even worse experience at SL-the woman across the aise from me arrived early as did I and sat very quietly throughout the 15 minutes before the performance began, and throughout the first Act. Come Act 2, a lake....monnlight...those beautiful shimmering chords...at this moment she decided it would be just the right time for a snack, and after rummaging in her bag as the swans glided on to the stage, took out a family size pot of coleslaw and started to eat it with a large plastic spoon.

 

Yes it did put me off I must say.

Last winter at the EB Swan Lake the woman behind me in the stall was eating a burger before curtain up.

What is it about that theatre?

[alison]

But I had an even worse experience at SL-the woman across the aise from me arrived early as did I and sat very quietly throughout the 15 minutes before the performance began, and throughout the first Act. Come Act 2, a lake....monnlight...those beautiful shimmering chords...at this moment she decided it would be just the right time for a snack, and after rummaging in her bag as the swans glided on to the stage, took out a family size pot of coleslaw and started to eat it with a large plastic spoon.

 

 

I noticed someone (or several someones?) kept shouting out throughout Bayadère on Saturday night.  I couldn't work out where they were, or what they were shouting, but it was distracting, to say the least.

[SusanR]

Yes, I noticed that too, Alison

[MAB]

 

However Glyndebourne is Glyndebourne and hidden away in the glorious debts of the Sussex countryside!

The type of audiences here are from a comparatively small niche ...........

 

 

Exactly.  To get to Glyndebourne you either need a car or have to make a complicated journey by train and coach, there is no 'footfall', no one strolls by and decides to go to an opera - frequently sold out long in advance anyway.  Comparing a privately owned theatre with its own traditions and dress codes and tucked away on the south downs with a central London theatre is ludicrous.

[FLOSS]

Is the reference to Glyndebourne ludicrous if on consecutive days I had two such wildly contrasting theatrical experiences as far as audience behaviour was concerned? I could just as easily have made a list of every central London venue at which opera is heard on a regular basis and those at which it is only heard occasionally and said quite simply that the audience for opera performances is consistently better behaved than the ballet audience is and that the Swan Lake audience last week was merely an extreme example of the ballet audience's behaviour and,perhaps, its indifference to music.

 

While it is true that the behaviour of the Swan Lake audience was very different from that of the audience at the performance of La Bayadere by the same company and at La Sylphide a couple of weeks ago I have come to believe that there is an element of every ballet audience that does not care that much for music.In the past I would have denied this even when the argument was put to me that the evidence was clear because of the ballet audience's readiness to sit through performances of ballets for which Minkus had composed the score. I used to think that the argument was easily refuted by the fact that the audience went willingly to performances of ballets whose scores were written by Stravinsky,Prokofiev,Schoenberg and Hindemith but it is now clear to me that there are a considerable number of ballet goers who have difficulty with much twentieth century music. My comment is not concerned with musical taste however but with the audience's perception of what constitutes a ballet performance.

 

There is, it seems to me, an element in every ballet audience that equates a ballet performance with what happens on stage when the curtain is up and there are dancers moving about on it. So it is acceptable in the eyes of that element to talk during the overture and during music that links scenes.This is a comparatively recent development in my experience.Unfortunately it is not confined to performances of Swan Lake but it is probably seen at its worst at performances of that ballet. It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching a time when the ballet audience is not only told to refrain from applauding during certain ballets but is told to be quiet.

 

For anyone interested in going to Glyndebourne the journey from London is very easy as there is a coach laid on from Lewes station.As to the comment about Glyndebourne not having "walk in audiences" that applies to performances of opera and most ballets at Covent Garden. I wonder if the decline in audience behavior is attributable to the fact that communal entertainment is not the norm for most people now and that what we are experiencing is people treating the theatre much as they do their home when they are watching television and that the overture and linking music are being equated with the adverts? At present the audiences for classical music and opera still behave themselves but how long will it continue?Perhaps it will not succumb because 99.9% of the audience are agreed about why they are present and are better able to police the 0.1% who are inclined to be disruptive?

[Jan McNulty]

 

There is, it seems to me, an element in every ballet audience that equates a ballet performance with what happens on stage when the curtain is up and there are dancers moving about on it. So it is acceptable in the eyes of that element to talk during the overture and during music that links scenes.This is a comparatively recent development in my experience.Unfortunately it is not confined to performances of Swan Lake but it is probably seen at its worst at performances of that ballet. It seems to me that we are rapidly approaching a time when the ballet audience is not only told to refrain from applauding during certain ballets but is told to be quiet.

 

 

 

 

And the sooner that happens Floss, the better (telling the audiences to be quiet, that is).

 

At Northern Ballet's children's ballets there is a pre-performance announcement that explains theatre etiquette in simple terms for the youngsters and I have got to say that even the tinies have been very well behaved at all the performances I have seen.  Perhaps that type of announcement could be used for all performances.

[alison]

I wonder if the decline in audience behavior is attributable to the fact that communal entertainment is not the norm for most people now and that what we are experiencing is people treating the theatre much as they do their home when they are watching television and that the overture and linking music are being equated with the adverts?

 

I think that is a lot of what it is, and perhaps even more so now a significant number of people seem to have "home-cinema" level equipment at home and don't necessarily even go to the cinema that much nowadays.  Also possibly the breaking-down of (or perhaps simply lack of perception of) boundaries between different forms of entertainment: "I go to a gig and take my beer in/go to the cinema and buy popcorn - and talk to my friends during it, so why shouldn't I do the same at the theatre?"

[MAB]

 

 I wonder if the decline in audience behavior is attributable to the fact that communal entertainment is not the norm for most people now and that what we are experiencing is people treating the theatre much as they do their home when they are watching television and that the overture and linking music are being equated with the adverts? At present the audiences for classical music and opera still behave themselves but how long will it continue?Perhaps it will not succumb because 99.9% of the audience are agreed about why they are present and are better able to police the 0.1% who are inclined to be disruptive?

That's probably right, behaviour at cinemas now is frequently atrocious apart from the designated 'art houses' and I'd rather wait for the DVD now than waste money to sit in a cinema with a frequently intimidating audience.  I watched a prom on TV the other night where to my surprise the audience applauded between movements, though being more Wigmore Hall than Albert Hall I've no idea whether this is a new trend or a one off.

 

As for ballet audiences having a low regard for music, you may be right on that too.  Some of the comments on recent performances of Song of the Earth shocked me and I've noticed complaints when choreographers use vocal works in general.   Actually the worse aspect of StPBT for me personally was walking down Villiers Street towards the tube afterwards and having to negotiate a path between pools of vomit and streams of urine.  Bad behaviour seems to permeate every aspect of life now.

[capybara]

 and I've noticed complaints when choreographers use vocal works in general.  

 

It will be interesting to see how people take to having a Mezzo Soprano involved in Carlos Acosta's Carmen.

[Bluebird]

 

I noticed someone (or several someones?) kept shouting out throughout Bayadère on Saturday night.  I couldn't work out where they were, or what they were shouting, but it was distracting, to say the least.

 

I also heard this and, since the ushers were clearly not taking any action, I assumed that the shouting was coming from someone who had the kind of disability which means that the calling out is involuntary. 

 

This raises a very difficult question.  These occasional outbursts can be distracting for other members of the audience yet we wouldn't want to prevent people with this disability from watching and enjoying ballet.  There's no real solution to this.

Edited August 25, 2015 by Bluebird

[Jacqueline]

I agree bad behaviour does seem to permeate everything at the moment. Too many people seem to have the attitude that they can do exactly as they please and two fingers and/or a mouthful of abuse to anyone who doesn't like it. Whether it is part of the home entertainment generation or just a sense of entitlement or a combination of a number of factors, it is certainly very unattractive. 

I also had the misfortune to walk along Villiers Street on my recent visit to London when there were no buses. When I left the underground, I was almost knocked back by the gag inducing stench of drains, urine and vomit,and piles of rubbish. It was a very warm day but even so, the whole length of the street was utterly disgusting. Another aspect of human behaviour I find mystifying, was how many people were sitting outside cafes, eating and drinking in all this squalor when there is no need. You don't have to go too far to find some decent places. Perhaps they just like that sort of thing. One group was having a selfie taken right next to an overflowing wheelie bin and a hole in the ground decorated with a circle of cones. I felt like asking if they knew Trafalgar Square was just up the street.

I also find audience behaviour almost unbearable now. I don't pretend to be an expert in these matters, my interest in ballet is just that, an interest. I go when I want to see something and I either enjoy it or I don't and I can go for months and not see anything. But when I do go, I can at least be guaranteed to behave well and be considerate towards others. This subject has been discussed at length and in my opinion, it boils down to good manners. You either got 'em or you haven't and at the moment, too many haven't.

[Sunrise]

I also heard this and, since the ushers were clearly not taking any action, I assumed that the shouting was coming from someone who had the kind of disability which means that the calling out is involuntary. 

 

This raises a very difficult question.  These occasional outbursts can be distracting for other members of the audience yet we wouldn't want to prevent people with this disability from watching and enjoying ballet.  There's no real solution to this.

That's true. I think some cinemas and plays (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) do more relaxed screenings for people with autism, though I don't think I've ever seen this kind of option for the ballet.

[alison]

I also heard this and, since the ushers were clearly not taking any action, I assumed that the shouting was coming from someone who had the kind of disability which means that the calling out is involuntary. 

 

Well, that was what I'd assumed at first, too, in which case I wouldn't have mentioned it.  But I think I heard two distinct voices at different times (and from different locations), and didn't think it applied to the second voice.

[zxDaveM]

That's probably right, behaviour at cinemas now is frequently atrocious apart from the designated 'art houses' and I'd rather wait for the DVD now than waste money to sit in a cinema with a frequently intimidating audience.

 

I find the trick is to go at 'unpopular' times/days. So early showings that end before 7pm, or on Mon-Wed. - even with new, popular films, I've sometimes only had 4-5 people in there with me

I used to love going to the cinema and seeing a film on a big screen, but with all the distractions once inside - all the slurping, burping, texting, chatting, visits to the facilities, visits to top up refreshments - just drives me potty. Why pay your entrance fee if you're not going to watch what you've paid for? That and the sheer drag of waiting for 'refreshments' to be served to the people in front of me in the queue to buy a ticket (I actually have missed the start of a film cos of this), limits my visits now to only the times I can go when I know no one else does (which isn't that often, what with work and all). Otherwise, the DVD it is....

[alison]

It's a bad decision by management to combine food sales and ticket sales, in my opinion - or at least not to have one till which is for tickets only.  My local cinema hardly ever has the ticket desk manned, it seems to me, even at what are expected to be peak times.  On the other hand, I've had the opposite problem to Dave, when going to live showings, in that it's taken so long to get served with interval refreshments that I may miss the beginning of the next act!

[zxDaveM]

I can happily survive 3 hours or so without the need for refreshment. Especially at cinema prices! Yowlee!

[Coated]

Well, that was what I'd assumed at first, too, in which case I wouldn't have mentioned it.  But I think I heard two distinct voices at different times (and from different locations), and didn't think it applied to the second voice.

It was a group of people with carers sitting in stalls, and two of them occasionally talked. It can be a bit distracting, but I tend to focus on the fact that it is a special night out that hopefully gives a lot of enjoyment.

 

That woman eating crisps however - don't care how much she enjoyed her crisps, and thankfully she didn't enjoy Bayadere enough to stay for the last act.

[Jacqueline]

In the immortal words of Chairman Mao: "Let a  hundred - or was it a thousand? - it was certainly a number conveying variety - flowers bloom!"  Perhaps someone has unleashed a Forum Cultural Revolution? 

Did Chairman Mao really say this? I love his uncertainty about the exact number.

[alison]

It was a group of people with carers sitting in stalls, and two of them occasionally talked. It can be a bit distracting, but I tend to focus on the fact that it is a special night out that hopefully gives a lot of enjoyment.

 

Must have been someone else I heard, then, because it was definitely above stalls level.

[capybara]

and thankfully she didn't enjoy Bayadere enough to stay for the last act.

 

It is often the case that people miss the last (white) act of La Bayadere because the betrothal scene for Solor and Gamzatti can give the impression that it is the end of the ballet. I once had to forestall a mass exodus from the Mariinsky's production in Edinburgh (Lopatkina!) by running ahead of the departing throng in the street and turning them back into the theatre.

[John Mallinson]

It is often the case that people miss the last (white) act of La Bayadere because the betrothal scene for Solor and Gamzatti can give the impression that it is the end of the ballet. I once had to forestall a mass exodus from the Mariinsky's production in Edinburgh (Lopatkina!) by running ahead of the departing throng in the street and turning them back into the theatre.

Now that's what I call public-spirited!

[Timmie]

And definitely a laugh-out-loud post!

[Balletfanp]

Especially if they had actually known it wasn't the end and just wanted out!