Performances, Audiences and Ventriloquising Prince Charming

 “Once the audience is committed to the realness of the performance, it is only the socially disgruntled who have any doubts about what they see.”

 

In week 5 we addressed the creation of self and society’s influence. Week 6 has us looking into dramaturgy, essentially how we present one’s self and most importantly how/why we manipulate it for the public.

I was intrigued by the correlation between the two topics. Society affects the individual self that each person creates, and each person conveys their perceived ‘self’ through ‘performances’ to the public. The ‘self’ is fluid, and its presentation is different depending upon which ever social situation we stumble into.

We perform whole-heatedly what we want others to believe,“to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them”. However we manipulate our performances based on what we think they think. We internally ventriloquise the audience before us and adjust our performance accordingly. While it doesn't directly relate to my train of thought I found an interesting article relating to the Royal Wedding and explored how the media ventriloquised Prince William using reporters as commentators who attempted to give him a voice based on what they thought/believed.

We as performers intend to present a specific self to our audience, however we manipulate how we act based on how we think the audience receives our performance. Example...

The media commentators would have reported the Royal Wedding based on what they thought Prince William was thinking, and it is likely that much of the Prince’s performance on the day was moulded by what he thought people were thinking of him. Every part of his performance would have been manipulated based on the media and public reaction to his performance. And no doubt he was ventriloquising his own interpretations of his audience and realigning his performance to suit their needs.

Did Prince William deliberately perform as a Disney Prince?

I guess we'll never really know.

Dekavalla, M 2012, ‘Constructing the public at the royal wedding’, Media Culture Society, vol.34, no. 3, pp 296-311, accessed on 29^th August 2012 http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/34/3/296.short.

Goffman, Erving. 1971. “Performances.” Pp. 28-82 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

http://vi.sualize.us/disney_funny_royal_wedding_disney_kate_middleton_picture_nRdG.html