ABSTRACT
Seeing, watching and looking at theatre do not begin to explain what happens between an audience and a performer. Regarding theatre is both the vision of theatre and the care the body takes in the presence of theatre to understand and value what is happening, to have belief in it. But the cultural predominance of sight as a medium of aesthetic reception hinders this ethical and political dimension of the perception of theatre. Vision has a history that profoundly affects the way theatre is witnessed. This history perpetuates the fallacy that an audience can remain aloof from performance. The political model that such distance endorses, an intellectual disengagement for the purpose of thought, seems to me a less than adequate response to the complex relations between theatre and its audiences. This discussion of vision and visionality is the terrain where the relations between the mental and the material in theatre are played out. This terrain raises questions of the image and imagination which this chapter takes as its object.
