This performance, however, refuses the audience the opportunity and satisfaction of constructing one. Fragments are assembled, but do not cohere, provoking confusion, frustration, and anxiety. Interestingly, as the performance unfolds, these activities slowly dissipate. The struggle to impose a meaning upon the chaos surrenders to the affective force of the performance itself. The performance is permitted to move us. If the performance refuses the establishment of a narrative, it is because the disaster is not understood – it’s felt. It is here that something rather remarkable happens. These affects facilitate processes of bottom-up self-synchronization and emergence. Chorus and audience become enjoined within a wider resonance machine. The battle-rhythms of the performance intensify to a crescendo. Tension ?lls the room. Suddenly, and without warning, an absurd comment – irrational, over-exaggerated or just plain stupid – cuts the tension. An eruption of laughter washes over the audience emptying the room of the mounting anxiety. The performance is involved in the creation of a dynamic affective ?eld comprised of multiple feedback loops. Ampli?cations of intensity tip across unforeseen critical thresholds. Something new is being created that does not share a purpose or a meaning, but is organically glued together through the transmission of something less, or more, than a feeling. This is not the story of a well-de?ned, uni?ed community moving forward in history. It is an account of the emergence of the crowd: disoriented, fractured, disjoint that is subject to reversals and collapses in its coherency.
FUCKING BONKERS AUDIENCE
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