Uncomfortable Seats: “Enactive Spectatorship” Explored through Sarah Kane’s Blasted
Uncomfortable Seats: “Enactive Spectatorship” Explored through Sarah Kane’s Blasted

Summary/Abstract: Cognition occurs not only within the boundaries of the human brain but it also involves active participation of the physical body. Likewise, in theatre, the spectator does not cognise a play purely mentally but also bodily as the performance awakens certain bodily feelings and memories of the spectator and invites them to view the stage actively from a certain standpoint. Theatrical plays are staged to be viewed and to be enacted by their spectators, which constitutes the gist of “enactive spectatorship.” I examined Sarah Kane’s polemical play Blasted (1995) through the lens of “enactive spectatorship” and disclosed how the play affects the audience and how the audience develops an enactive and embodied understanding of its performance. In Blasted, the audiences’ bodies in Britain or in any other land, are taken to the battlefield of the Bosnian War, where they experience the violence in war and no longer feel secure. The representation of violence on the stage evokes the audience’s embodied experiences associated with violence, which is one of the basic reasons for the play causing a lot of controversy and uneasiness. The shocking scenes to the point of absurdity as well as the highly sensational effects affect the audience while the ambivalent positions the audience is expected to occupy prevent them from watching the play comfortably in their seats from a safe distance. Blasted, with its violent and shocking scenes, is a play that fairly shakes the audience; however, it is not the violence on stage that matters as much as what it does to the spectator in enactive, embodied, and affective terms.

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