Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
4th INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP BRIDGE SOCIAL SCIENCES CONGRESS, Dubai, Birleşik Arap Emirlikleri, 14 - 18 Şubat 2026, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.1, (Özet Bildiri)
Res. Asst. Yağmur Sevim PARİM SAĞLAM
Istanbul Yeni Yuzyil University, Faculty of Fine Arts
Yildiz Technical University, Faculty of Art and Desing
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4092-1341
yagmur.saglam@yeniyuzyil.edu.tr
THE ETHICAL-POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE AUDIENCE IN POSTDRAMATIC THEATRE THROUGH SPEAK BITTERNESS
Abstract
The study examines how postdramatic theater shifts the audience from their passive position in conventional theater to a political subject position where they are compelled to become agents. Dramatic structure is shaped by emotional response, narrative consistency, the psychological dynamics of the characters, and the audience's immersion in an illusionistic world. In postdramatic structure, these mechanisms are suspended. The audience's emotional response is not directed towards identification with the character or the resolution of conflict, but is instead reproduced through confrontation, exposure, or cognitive discomfort. Rather than being invited to empathize with a character, the audience is thrust into a situation where they must endure, negotiate, and reflect on what is happening in the present moment of the performance. Whereas in the classical structure the audience places an aesthetic and temporal distance between themselves and the representation, postdramatic theater consciously suspends this distance. In postdramatic theater, which operates through presence rather than representation, emotional effects are produced not by illusion but by the intensity of the situation, physical exposure, process, duration, and the momentary rebound of reality. The audience encounters feelings such as discomfort, shock, distress, admiration, or ethical unease. These feelings are often unstable and unbalanced, resisting cathartic release. In this sense, emotions are not purified or processed; they remain unresolved, forcing the audience to confront their own perceptual and ethical positions. An important result of this change is that the audience becomes the perpetrator. The audience is included in the situation through strategies such as direct address, long-term performance, physical proximity, or risks taken by the actors. Here, perpetration means ethical exposure rather than passive observation. The audience becomes aware of its presence, its gaze, and its responsibility for what is happening on stage. However, there is no policy of perception; postdramatic theater does not convey political meanings through themes and messages. Instead, it disrupts conventional patterns of meaning, reorganizing the audience's ways of perceiving, watching, and responding in a way that makes them conscious of the process of interpretation and judgment. Thus, the audience, which generates reflexive emotional responses, has the opportunity to observe not only the performance but also their own reactions to it. Post-dramatic theater produces a regime of witnessing in which conventional forms of seeing, feeling, and interpreting become unstable, perception and reaction become reflexive, responsibility replaces emotional comfort, and the audience can no longer remain neutral observers. In this context, the work focuses on the performance Speak Bitterness, first staged by Forced Entertainment in 1994. Often lasting for hours and structured around a strict verbal protocol, the performance consists of the artists presenting an uninterrupted series of confessions beginning with sentences such as “I am guilty...” or “I blame myself...”. These confessions range from ordinary, socially acceptable actions to extreme, violent, or morally disturbing confessions, and the narratives contain no psychological motivation or attempt at resolution. Rather than inviting the audience into an emotional harmony with the performers or the confessions, the work places them in a position of prolonged listening, confronting them with their own reactions to disclosure, repetition, and moral ambiguity. The audience is not asked to judge the individual confessions within the narrative framework, nor are they offered any commentary or narrative that might fix the meaning. Instead, they are compelled to witness a continuous flow of confessions in which they are involved as listeners and perpetrators. The ethical dimension of Speak Bitterness stems not from the moral content of the confessions but from the perpetrator-audience position it produces: endurance, complicity, discomfort, curiosity, and the inability to connect what is heard to a cathartic or moral conclusion. From this perspective, the work analyzes the Speak Bitterness performance, which positions the audience as a political subject by making the audience's perceptual and emotional participation an ethical act in itself.
Keywords: Postdramatic Theatre, Speak Bitterness, Forced Entertainment