Audience Applause Research Articles

Understanding performance responses: Instructional transitions in musical masterclasses

This paper extends analysis of the ‘assessment receipt’ to include talk and embodied interaction during ‘performance responses’ in music masterclass interactions. By grounding the analysis in questions of performance completion and audience applause onset, it details the utility of variously position assessment tokens, during performance, before applause, during applause and after applause. These different verbal assessment positions afford, in different ways, instructional interaction by situating the instructor as next relevant speaker. They also help coordinate performance completions and audience applause onset. The paper also identifies the ‘receipt assessment’, which reverses the component ordering of the earlier phenomenon. The paper is relevant to those studying performance as interaction and extends and deepens the growing insights into musical instructional settings.

AMERSA sponsors debate on deregulating methadone

This month's annual AMERSA (the Association for Multidisciplinary Education and Research in Substance use and Addiction) conference featured not a “spicy debate,” but a debate nonetheless, in which proponents switched sides midway. While it was clear from audience applause that the 400 or so attendees were on one “side” — the side of deregulating methadone for opioid use disorder — the Nov. 3 discussion was still important to the physician members. ADAW could not be there, but Stefan Kertesz, M.D., a professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, attended and posted a YouTube of the debate after obtaining permission from the speakers. Here's what Kertesz reported:

COUNTERMYTHOLOGIES: IPHIGENIA'S ANIMAL PART

Early in the first act of Shorter and spalding's …(Iphigenia) the carousing band of Argive soldiers cum frat boys dumps the body of a deer stage left, close to the audience. A spotlight is trained onto the carcass, and there it remains: as the bodies of Iphigenias pile up alongside it through Act I; as the Iphigenias are revivified and we enter a new conceptual plane in Act II; as the mythic plot reconvenes in Act III; and during the curtain call, when the cast, musicians, and crew come onto the stage to take their bows. At one point, I half expected the ensemble to smile wide and extend their arms towards the rigid body of the deer, inviting audience applause for their fellow performer, still, even now, fixed motionless under a spotlight.

COGNITIVE FEATURES OF THE VALUE CONCEPT "CUNNING" IN HUMOROUS DISCOURSE OF MODERN ANGLOSAXON LINGUISTIC CULTURE

The article examines the praised characteristics of the value concept "cunning" in humorous discourse. The author studies humor from the point of view of axiological linguistics. The research is based on the recordings and scripts of English stand-up comedies and sitcoms. The value concept "cunning" refers to one of the basic utilitarian values. The main components of the value concept “cunning” are smartness and insincerity. In humorous discourse the value concept "cunning" is praised primarily through the means which help to achieve a particular goal. The following main means of achieving various goals while actualizing the value concept "cunning" are analyzed in detail: the ways of avoiding problems, variable interpretation of events, finding an obvious / beneficial solution, distracting attention, fake stupidity and obvious lying. The article reveals that actualizing the value concept "cunning" can also be accompanied by the audience's applause in addition to laughter.

Gagaku, Ensemble OnoTeruhisa Fukuda, maître de shakuhachi. Offrande musicale

Gagaku, Ensemble OnoTeruhisa Fukuda, maître de shakuhachi. Offrande musicale

Six by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss

Reviewed by: Sixby Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss Horacio Sierra SIX. By Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss. Directed by Lucy Moss and Jamie Armitage. Brooks Atkinson Theatre, New York City. October 9, 2021. In a theatrical landscape regularly awash with jukebox musicals that cull the catalogs of big-name pop artists such as ABBA, Alanis Morrissette, Gloria Estefan, the Go-Gos, and more, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's Sixarrived on Broadway with an original score of radio-friendly hooks, TikTok-ready dance moves, and a racially diverse cast of tabloid-worthy divas that gave legitimate pop stars a run for their money. The musical's selling point is that its supersonic score takes inspiration from King Henry VIII's six wives as much as it does the pop sirens of the last twenty years. This dynamic combination gave the audience the chance to veer from silently thanking their high school history teachers for giving them the ability to laugh at puns about the Protestant Reformation to priding themselves for recognizing choreography indebted to Beyoncé's "Formation." By amalgamating the academic humor of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)with the rhetoric of superficial third-wave feminist pop stars, Sixcreated a frothy but provocative musical that offered bespoke narratives for sixteenth-century women whose travails are all the more relevant in the #MeToo era. Whether on London's West End or the various cruise ships where Sixwas staged before it debuted on Broadway, its creators proved that they found a formula that caters to an audience of pop music–loving millennials and Generation Zers who, in a post-Madonna cultural landscape, are liable to see Catherine of Aragon, Gloria Steinem, and Selena Gomez as equals in the feminist canon. Like a Black Pink music video, Six's plot was threadbare but straightforward enough: the women form a girl group and each one is competing to become the sextet's lead singer. The sole criterion for becoming the leader is winning the audience's applause by proving they suffered the most during their marriage to King Henry VIII. The competition format is more akin to the messy politics of twenty-first-century reality TV shows that pit women against one another rather than the sororal communities portrayed in actual early modern literary works such as Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies(1405), María de Zayas's Desenagños amorosos(1647), and Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure(1688). The show's earnest though superficial take on feminist discourse attempts to mirror Zayas's work wherein a safe space is created for women to be candid about the ways in which men belittle, deceive, and murder them without repercussions in a patriarchal society. Six's opening number, "Ex-Wives," encapsulates how the show borrows from the historical lore of England, Broadway, and pop music. Each character is given a verse to flesh out the details of the dreary-but-catchy refrain of "divorced, beheaded, died / divorced, beheaded, survived" à la the imprisoned women of Chicagoin "Cell Block Tango." But unlike the "merry murderesses of the Cook County Jail," these women were unable to exact revenge on their husband. Catherine of Aragon's (Adrianna Hicks) stature as a regal Queen Bee was solidified with its keen homage to Beyoncé at her peak with the fist-pumping "No Way." But more could have been made of how Earth-shattering her divorce was. As the daughter of Europe's most powerful royals, Spain's Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabel, Catherine was a queen among queens. Her fierce devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and twenty-four-year marriage to the king proved her as a loyal steward of traditional monarchies. Henry's divorce from Catherine ensured that England, Europe, and the world would never be the same as the Reformation ushered in religious wars, geopolitical standoffs, and a refreshing stream of liberal intellectual discourse. Anne Boleyn, played by the addictively charming Andrea Macasaet, garnered hearty laughter every [End Page 77]time she reminded the other wives and audience about the horrors of being beheaded. Lily Allenesque lines such as "The rules were so outdated / Us two wanted...

“Stirring it up!” Emotionality in audience responses to political speeches

Speaker-audience interaction in political speeches has been conceptualised as a form of dialogue between speaker and audience. Of particular importance is research pioneered by Atkinson (e.g., 1983, 1984a, 1984b) on the analysis of rhetorical devices utilised by politicians to invite audience applause. Atkinson was not concerned with emotionalisation in political speech-making, rather with how applause was invited in relation to group identities through ingroup praise and/or outgroup derogation. However, his theory has provided important insights into how speakers invite audience responses, and a powerful stimulus for associated research. The purpose of this article is to address the shortfall of emotionalisation research within the realm of political speeches. We begin with an account of Atkinsons influential theory of rhetoric, followed by a relevant critique. The focus then turns to our main aim, namely, how key findings from previous speech research can be interpreted in terms of emotionalisation. Specifically, the focus is on audience responses to the words of political speakers, and how different forms of response may reflect audience emotionality. It is proposed that both duration and frequency of invited affiliative audience responses may indicate more positive emotional audience responses, while uninvited interruptive audience applause and booing may provide notable clues to issues on which audiences have strong feelings. It is concluded that there is strong evidence that both invited and uninvited audience responses may provide important clues to emotionalisation - both positive and negative - in political speeches.

Holocaust commemoration and affective practice: a rhetorical ethnography of audience applause

ABSTRACT This article examines the affective practice of applause at the 2019 Holocaust Memorial Day national ceremony in Britain. Every year, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust organises a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, all other victims of Nazi persecution, in addition to those killed in subsequent genocides perpetrated in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda. At the start of the 2019 ceremony, the audience were asked not to applaud in response to speakers and texts, and yet at five points in the ceremony some members of the audience still clapped. I approach applause as a collective behavioural sign of an emotional response to semiotic stimuli, reflecting routinised (that is, socially organised and patterned) relational actions which are shaped by and yet contribute to particular settings and circumstances. Utilising the theoretical insights of Wetherell, and the emplaced and embodied character of rhetorical ethnography, I position the discourse of the ceremony and audience reactions as an intertwined affective practice. The instances of sporadic, hesitant, clapping indicate an affiliative response on the part of (some) audience members, when their nation, life-story and/or experiences of genocide are acknowledged in the ceremony.

Applause Invitations in Political Speeches: A Comparison of Two British Party Political Leaders (Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn)

AbstractThis study was focussed on 11 rhetorical devices used to invite collective applause in speeches by two opposing British party political leaders, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. The analysis was based on 14 speeches (delivered at party conferences in 2016 and during the general election campaign of 2017), transcribed verbatim from video recordings. These speeches were closely matched between the two politicians in terms of speech duration, and when and where they took place. Almost all the incidents of collective audience applause (98%) occurred in response to the 11 rhetorical devices. Regardless of their opposing political views, the two party leaders used similar devices when delivering a speech. While they did not differ significantly in the mean duration of collective applause received, Corbyn was significantly higher in terms both of the frequency of his rhetorical devices and in the frequency with which he received collective applause. Given the careful matching technique employed in this study, it arguably provides us with the clearest demonstration to date of the role played by rhetorical devices in inviting collective audience applause.

Effects of applause magnitude and musical style on listeners’ evaluations of choral performances

Applause, an overt expression of approval from audience to performer, is one of the most common forms of audience response to live musical performances. In this study, we examined the effects of applause magnitude (high, low, or no applause) and musical style (motet or spiritual) on listeners’ ratings of choral performances. A secondary area of interest was the degree to which these effects might differ between music majors and non-music majors. University singers ( N = 117) listened to six excerpts recorded by a university choral ensemble and rated the performance quality of each excerpt. Across these recordings, they heard three identical recordings of a motet and three identical recordings of a spiritual with unique applause conditions attached. Listeners’ ratings were influenced by the magnitude of audience applause to a limited degree, but this effect interacted with musical style and presentation order. We observed no differences between the ratings of music and non-music majors, however. Results are interpreted in light of previous research on majority effects, and implications of these results regarding performance evaluation and concert programming are discussed.

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Broadening the Contestation of Norms in International Relations

Theatrocracy Unwired: Legal Performance in the Modern Mediasphere

Writing in the middle of the 4th century BC, in an age of mass trials and dramatically trained rhetoricians, Plato worried that Athens was becoming a “theatrocracy” – a state ruled by theatre – in which audience applause or catcalls determined verdicts and established laws. In the 21st century – with legal news, television trials, reality police shows, YouTube execution videos (etc.) shouting at us from our many screens – Plato might think his theatrocratic nightmare had come true with a vengeance. In our theatrocracy, where the media and its ever-online TV spectators can determine guilt or innocence, are the boundaries of the legal system beginning to dissolve? Does theatrocracy threaten law's “stability,” “legitimacy,” “autonomy,” and “authority,” as some have argued? Is theatrocracy a threat to nomocracy, to the very existence of law? “Theatrocracy Unwired” looks at the nature of our legal theatrocracy (from the age of television to the age of the Internet), theoretical discussions of law and media (Deleuze, Virilio, Rancière, etc.), the (antitheatrical) anxieties awakened by the swelling of the legal mediasphere, and the significance of these to the force and meaning of law.

The dynamics of audience applause

The study of social identity and crowd psychology looks at how and why individual people change their behaviour in response to others. Within a group, a new behaviour can emerge first in a few individuals before it spreads rapidly to all other members. A number of mathematical models have been hypothesized to describe these social contagion phenomena, but these models remain largely untested against empirical data. We used Bayesian model selection to test between various hypotheses about the spread of a simple social behaviour, applause after an academic presentation. Individuals' probability of starting clapping increased in proportion to the number of other audience members already ‘infected’ by this social contagion, regardless of their spatial proximity. The cessation of applause is similarly socially mediated, but is to a lesser degree controlled by the reluctance of individuals to clap too many times. We also found consistent differences between individuals in their willingness to start and stop clapping. The social contagion model arising from our analysis predicts that the time the audience spends clapping can vary considerably, even in the absence of any differences in the quality of the presentations they have heard.

Selling Celebrity: Actors’ Portraits in Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, John Bell commissioned hundreds of actor portraits in dramatic roles, which were published as book illustrations in the series Bell’s Shakespeare and Bell’s British Theatre. These portraits contributed significantly to the emergent culture of theatrical celebrity. While paintings and engraved prints of actors mostly peddled a mode of celebrity that was sustained by audience applause within the theater walls, Bell’s illustrations created a parallel visibility for the performers outside the theater, which was only tenuously and unevenly associated with their stage celebrity. The performers’ images circulating through Bell’s books realigned the contours of the late eighteenth-century market for theatrical celebrity.

Punishment’s Prisms: Execution and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

Law's Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America STEVEN WILF New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010 248 pp. Hanging between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and Theology in Early New England SCOTT D. SEAY De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009 230 pp. Executing Democracy, Volume 1, Capital Punishment and the Making of America, 1683-1807 STEPHEN JOHN HARTNETT East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010 336 pp. During a recent GOP debate, audience members cheered when the moderator noted that, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas had authorized the of 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. Pressed for his interpretation of the audience's applause, Perry responded, I think understand justice. [he execution cheer, as it was soon named, triggered consternation and head scratching as the media sought to reconcile the sober business of state-sanctioned death with the crowd's perceived enthusiasm and Perry's untroubled response. Perry's explanation invoked a particular strain of American exceptionalism, one that interpreted the shouts of the few as the mark of consensus and an emotional outburst as evidence of careful reflective practice-of Americans understand[ing] justice. The incident cemented the strong association between the death penalty and American identity while highlighting our own historical amnesia. Support for and opposition to the death penalty have long been argued by asserting our nation's claims of justice against another's, whether by arguing that the death penalty is essential to America's practice of democracy or the reverse. The movement between affective response and sober reflection, between consent and repudiation, lies at the core of our historical response to the death penalty. Influential histories of early modern punishment theorized public as a form of public theater, enacted on bodies for spectacular effect and reliant on the sensational display of bodies in pain. A subsequent body of scholarship by literary historians recast this narrative, highlighting the role of print culture in shaping the ritual effects of punishment. Many witnessed executions, but even more imagined them; the particular strains of gallows literature that took hold in colonial New England and proliferated throughout the eighteenth century appealed to readers' powers of reflection and imagination, embracing the power of print to convey the pedagogy and the sensational effects of public execution. Narratives on the American history of punishment frequently construct the colonial era as the barbaric forerunner to a more enlightened form of justice that would evolve after the American Revolution, when the penitentiary replaced the public scaffold and more scientific forms of bodily control (confinement, discipline, labor) replaced spectacular punishment (branding, whipping, cropping). More recent work has complicated this divide, particularly by highlighting the ways that violence and torture were constitutive of the penitentiary and its regimes of reformation, not merely unfortunate side effects. Static notions about colonial rituals persist, however, most readily through arguments that rituals of public were crafted by colonial elites to enforce social control and hierarchies. A notable body of work, most of it by literary historians (including Daniel Williams, Daniel Cohen, and Karen Haltunnen), contested this narrative by analyzing the diverse effects of colonial rituals, from eliciting sympathy for the condemned to contesting the authority of elites, to inspiring the proliferation of a diverse tradition of American crime writing. Yet histories of punishment generally ignored the implications of literary historians, content to invoke the colonial era in cursory strokes in order to foreground the emergence of a privileged era of reform that emerged by the 1790s. …

Narrative vs Evidence-Based Medicine—And, Not Or

THE WEEK BEFORE THE US PREVENTIVE SERVICES TASK Force (USPSTF) released its recommendations against routine prostate screening for healthy men, celebrity patients including Joe Torre and Rudy Giuliani had already lined up to challenge the populationbased recommendations. To promote their position that screening for prostate-specific antigen is lifesaving, these individuals relied on a powerful tool: their own personal narratives. However, the experts whose goal is to disseminate and translate population-based evidence will, in the name of science, shun individual stories. This one-sided use of narrative has played out repeatedly, from the USPSTF recommendations on screening mammography to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) labeling hearings on bevacizumab for advanced breast cancer. Each time, those who espouse only evidence—without narratives about real people—struggle to control the debate. Typically, they lose. Patients and families have a right to tell their stories. But what about scientists? Facts and figures are essential, but insufficient, to translate the data and promote the acceptance of evidence-based practices and policies. Narratives—in the forms of storytelling, testimonials, and entertainment—have been shown to improve individual health behaviors in multiple settings. Moreover, evidence from social psychology research suggests that narratives, when compared with reporting statistical evidence alone, can have uniquely persuasive effects in overcoming preconceived beliefs and cognitive biases. Therefore, although narrative is often maligned as anecdote and thus scrubbed from the toolbox of guideline developers, epidemiologists, and regulatory scientists, these experts should consider narrative to develop and translate evidence-based policies. This is especially important because the federal government has made substantial investments to improve the dissemination and translation of evidence from comparative effectiveness research and patient-centered outcomes research. Scientific reports are genuinely dispassionate, characterless, and ahistorical. But their translation and dissemination should not be. Stories are an essential part of how individuals understand and use evidence. A narrative—defined as a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end— includes information about scene, characters, and conflict and raises questions and provides resolution. From this framework, stories that link individuals and their experiences to evidence are tools to translate (not drive) science without introducing anecdotal bias. Scientists can use narrative in at least 2 ways. First is in the form of counternarratives, designed to neutralize stories that promote disproven theories. Take the largely negated theories of a causal link between childhood vaccines and autism. As recounted by Offit in his book on this topic, a celebrity actor claimed that she does not need real science to know that the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine triggered her son’s autism: “[My son] is my science,” she stated on television to thunderous audience applause. Such narratives, challenging scientists who come to the table (or television studio) armed only with data, often succeed in the court of public opinion and weaken efforts to promote evidence-based health decisions. When scientists encounter stories that promote unscientific approaches to health and health care, they should deploy an evidence-based counternarrative. The story of a mother in San Diego whose infant, too young for the MMR vaccine, became sick after exposure to an unvaccinated child with measles would add persuasive weight in a debate with the actor mentioned above. These counternarratives may also be useful when the evidence addresses individual risks as well as effectiveness. The FDA’s decision to remove breast cancer as an approved indication for bevacizumab was based not only on the absence of evidence to support its effectiveness in a general population but also on the relatively high risks of serious individual adverse effects, including death. In such cases, real and personal narratives can be told that embody, with characters and action, the evidence of a risky intervention. The public needs to hear the stories of patients, and their families, who encountered a drug that offered hope but was ultimately ineffective and even dangerous. Another role for scientific narrative is found within the process of evidence discovery and translation. Typically, experts present a “clean” version of their findings without any narrative about how they made sense of the data. This ful-

Gyamfi’s Golden Soap: Commodity Marketing, Reform Legitimation, and the Performance of Cultural Authenticity in Ghana’s Popular Theatre

GHANA STUDIES / Volumes 12–13 ISSN 1536-5514 / E-ISSN 2333-7168© 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 189 GYAMFI’S GOLDEN SOAP Commodity Marketing, Reform Legitimation, and the Performance of Cultural Authenticity in Ghana’s Popular Theatre DAVID AFRIYIE DONKOR In June 1997, the multinational company Unilever relaunched its Keysoap product at the National Theatre of Ghana. The re-launch featured an “allstar group” blending “seasoned and delightful” popular theatre actors in a “concert party” play entitled Gyamfi’s Golden Soap. In the play, a royal chief offers his daughter to whoever can perform her marriage rites “in the traditional way.” One suitor brings money, a second brings alcohol, the third brings cloth, but the chief rejects them all. The fourth, Gyamfi, conjures a giant-size bar of Keysoap, which descends from above on to the stage to audience applause. He presents the giant soap to the princess and assures her “of a cleaner, healthier and better life.” The chief, satisfied that Gyamfi has properly followed tradition, offers the princess to him in marriage (Eshun-­ Baidoo 1997: 1). In this paper I explore how popular theatre and multinational commodity marketing intersected with authenticity, as a national-cultural style in Ghana during the 1990s.1 Through an examination of the lived Ghanaian context, I suggest that the deployment of Keysoap represents a recuperative and inventive dynamic that draws on a conception of culture and tradition . It is a narrative that has informed Ghanaian leaders’ effort to redress colonial cultural alienation after the country’s political independence in the 1960s. The interrelationship of popular theater and commodity marketing, I argue, is no coincidence, but discloses a process of legitimation. Further, this process reveals the doctrine of neoliberalism that is operating in the socioeconomic, cultural and political context of late twentieth-century 1. For a history of commodity marketing in Ghana, especially as carried out by Unilever , see Murillo 2009a, 2009b. 190 Ghana Studies • volumes 12–13 • 2011 Ghana. Crucially, this doctrine appropriates a localized “alternative” sense of modernity to facilitate its global spread.2 Unilever and the Concert Party: Brief Histories The concert party is a genre of popular theatre in Ghana. It originated in the performances of a “partially educated” intermediate class that burgeoned in the Gold Coast at the turn of the nineteenth century as colonial commerce and education generated new social formations.3 With “neither firm roots in English cultural traditions nor a complete allegiance to their native heritages,” this class, exemplified by the “ordinary salariat” of clerks, interpreters, catechists and pupil teachers, was the most open to emulating colonial behavior (Agovi 1990: 10–11). One form of emulation was the “concert,” which developed from the “amateur British Theatrical” events held in colonial schools on Empire Day. For this occasion, African schoolchildren danced “Scotch reel” and “sailor’s hornpipe” and enacted “Britannia ’s Court” (Agovi 1990: 7; Cole 2001: 24). From the 1930s onwards, “concerts” developed beyond the colonial school to acquire a broader audience by becoming itiner ant, appropriating the characters and style of local folklore, using the widely spoken Akan vernacular language and faithfully dramatizing its expanded audiences’ 2. For discussions on “alternative modernities” see Appadurai 1996; Gaonkar 2001; Hefner 1997; Holston 1999; Knauft 2002; Rofel 1999; Spitulnik 2002. For discussions of an alternative “African” modernity see Comaroff and Comaroff 1993; Ferguson 2006; Deutsch et al. 2002; Diouf and Rendall 2000; Donham 1999; Englund 1996; Geschiere 1997; Hodgson 2001; Larkin 1997; Paolini 1997; Piot 1999; Pred and Watts 1992. 3. The word “education” was used in the Gold Coast in a narrow sense. “Namely, formal instruction in European-type schools.” School took ten years, from infant classes through seven elementary “standards,” with a Standard Seven Certificate upon completion . Many schools crowded “half-taught subjects into an ill-regulated curriculum” and, lacking trained instructors, relied on post-standard—five boys as salaried “pupil teachers.” Retention was poor but the schools produced interpreters, catechists and others who found salaried jobs in “commerce” as “government clerks” (Kimble 1963: 62–64, 75–76). Donkor • Gyamfi’s Golden Soap 191 frustrations and aspirations.4 With this, the itinerant concert parties played a pivotal role among...

Welcome to the Vibratorium

ABSTRACTThis article proposes the Vibratorium as a model for thinking about the transmission of affect in the theater. This proposal arises from a consideration, by way of Marcel Proust's account of a performance by the great actress “Berma,” of the way in which an audience's applause seems to “make” an actor's performance. The familiar idea of a reciprocal “energy exchange” between performers and audience is developed by way of an Artaudian conception of theater, in which the vibrations of sound and light are manipulated, not for their signifying potential but for the ways in which they might work upon the body of the spectator. The intimacy of this work on the body also binds together the spectators in the sociality of an audience, as the vibratory transmission of affect between bodies requires, or perhaps even constitutes, their being together. The work of Romeo Castellucci with the Italian theater company Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio furnishes a concluding example of how such a theater might work in practice. The Vibratorium is the theater auditorium in those moments when signification and representation have yet to establish their sway: it is where the vibrations get right into you, before you start making sense of them.

From Politics to Comedy

This study aims to identify key similarities and differences between the affiliative behaviors of audiences to political speakers and stand-up comedians. Four televised stand-up comedy routines were analyzed in terms of three dimensions: invitationality (whether the audience response is invited), rhetoricality (the use of rhetorical devices associated with audience applause), and synchrony (audience responses judged to commence either just before or immediately after the intended completion point of the speaker's utterance). Three different forms of asynchrony (“mismatches”) were also identified, where the audience response was isolated, delayed, or interruptive. Stand-up comedians were found to invite similar proportions of affiliative audience responses to politicians, with comparable degrees of synchrony. However, they were less similar with regard to the rhetorical devices employed and the types of mismatch that occurred. Future investigations will focus on those aspects that are more specific to the genre of stand-up comedy.

Invited and uninvited applause in political speeches

According to Atkinson (e.g. 1983, 1984a, 1984b), a limited range of rhetorical devices are consistently used by political speakers to invite audience applause. A detailed review is presented of the research literature relevant to Atkinson's analysis, including a series of evaluative studies conducted by the author. From this review, it is argued that Atkinson overestimated the role of rhetorical devices in inviting applause and underestimated the significance of other features, such as asynchronous applause, speech delivery, speech content and uninvited applause. To integrate these features, a re-conceptualisation is presented of how audience applause occurs in political speeches, based on a fundamental distinction between invited and uninvited applause.