Last night, I went to the theatre and I was healed. Healed, you ask. Yes, I know. It does sound weird. Nonetheless, at the Print Room's Devils festival , a programme of work by emerging artists, I found myself, semi-inadvertently, undergoing something called "sound healing". Petra Jean Phillipson's Of the Things We Do Not See is presented as a "sound and light installation". It involves lying on the floor listening to – or rather, I suppose, absorbing – the sonic vibrations of Mongolian throat-singing, as the lighting cycles slowly through the colour spectrum. It feels rather like sitting inside a didgeridoo. Under a rainbow.
You might sense my scepticism. Not least because I was asked to don a white paper suit in order to minimise what the explanatory leaflet calls "colour pollution". Many would no doubt regard the idea of physical realignment by vibration vaguely scoffable.
And yet, it's the next morning and my legs still ache. They've got that low-level, burning stiffness that comes after exercise. The experience itself felt odd: my stomach seemed to croak; my chest to twinge. Walking home afterwards, I felt decidedly out of sorts: bloated, tingling and sweaty. As a sceptic and a practising hypochondriac, I'll willingly put it down as psychosomatic. But, if we assume that Phillipson's method works, as she must do, her intentions throw up some whopping great ethical questions.
It's important to note two things. First, that the piece attests to "healing intentions." Phillipson does not ask us to consider the process; she asks us only to experience it. Second, that the explanatory leaflet, handed to participants in advance, forewarns of "a three-day adjustment period", which may involve "aches and pains as the body integrates the healing you have received". So audience members know, at least in part, what we are going into.
Yet something still rankles. By entering the auditorium, am I giving really full consent for any consequences? By way of analogy, imagine an installation that involved being injected with a supposedly curative drug. You're told there are possible temporary side-effects, but it is, eventually, restorative. Would you go in? If you take physical health out of the equation, replacing the injection with, say, a tattoo, you still end up with a permanent change – even if it's one we signed up to.
Yet isn't that exactly what we hope for whenever we go to the theatre – the idea that it will change us? The change may not be as visible or permanent as a tattoo, but we go to the theatre in order to be affected in some way or other. And entering any performance space involves a granting of consent. Becoming an audience member is an act of willing submission. We allow ourselves to undergo an experience constructed by the artist, whether that be watching a play or something more participatory. To some degree, we relinquish control. We accept the artist's terms.
But that consent can't be absolute. Just because you attend a stand-up's gig, doesn't mean that you're consenting to public humiliation. What about the audience at a stage hypnotist's show? Even warning signs cannot prepare many theatregoers for the horrors of Sarah Kane's Blasted, which rely, to a certain extent, on being unanticipated. Our consent can't be absolute. Sure, if you don't like it, you can always leave, but for any number of reasons walking out isn't as easy as all that.
And the after-effects of theatre are necessarily unpredictable. We can't anticipate the way any piece of theatre will resonate for individual audience members. Ontroerend Goed's Internal left me feeling particularly bashed about, but even less interventionist, immersive shows can have a powerful effect. Attending Romeo Castellucci's On the Concept of the Face, I was braced for a certain level of repulsion, but not for the taste that stuck around for a couple of days afterwards.
I can't shake the feeling that perhaps Phillipson entices her audience in under slightly false pretences. We go in for an installation; we get to be healed, at least in theory. More generally, though, how much does theatre have to warn us about potential side-effects and at what point do we, the audience, have only ourselves to blame?
