Let me hear you make some noise
Why should culture vultures hog all the safe spaces, asks Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Once on a ship I met an elderly woman who was married to an American submarine commander. I met him too, but she was the more interesting party, because she only had one hand. Every time I asked she would gravely explain what happened: it was an incident with a combine harvester on the small Kansas farm where she grew up; it was an unfortunate incident involving petting the jaguar at the Brooklyn Zoo; her hand was severed in a lightsabre fight with a man who subsequently turned out to be her father; she was arrested and handcuffed to a lamppost and “I pulled and pulled. Something had to give. I hoped it would be the lamppost.”
On another occasion, she told me it had happened after too heartily applauding a performance of Cats.
“It was worth it,” she said defiantly, waving her wrist aloft like a truncated Statue of Liberty. “That Grizabella really sang her heart out!”
I was thinking about her last week when I read the suggestion that applause should be banned from some productions in London theatres, in order to make them more accessible to anxious people who might be upset by sudden bursts of sound. This isn’t a new idea: at some universities, including most recently the Oxford Student Union, clapping is already outlawed during debates and speeches. They request that people perform jazz-hands instead, where you hold up your hands, palm-outwards, and with a snappy wrist-action silently shake them from side to side.
At first I had questions. “But how many people suffer from applause-related anxiety?” I asked a millennial of my acquaintance, who hadn’t previously appreciated the cruelties of applause but is quite willing to recognise that we live in the worst of all possible worlds and that any sort of ban is a step in the right progressive direction. “Surely it must be a vanishingly small percentage of the population?”
“Excluding anyone is unacceptable,” she told me sagely, and quite possibly intersectionally. “Even one person feeling uncomfortable is one person too many.”
I suppose that’s true. After all, the 2016 estimate for transgender people in the US suggests about 0.6% of the population, but that hasn’t stopped us trying to redefine the word or concept “woman” to include folks with beards and penises. Numbers don’t matter when it comes to improving the world.
Nor, I see now, should the argument hold water that clapping appears to be a fairly ingrained human instinct, that successful hand-clapping is in fact one of the developmental stages of infancy. Human nature is just one of those oppressive vestigial hangovers from our embarrassing past. Society is a perfectible machine, so long as we don’t let nature stand in the way of progress.
But why just clapping then? Let’s ban all loud noises from the theatre. If those two in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf would just stop shouting and have a nice conversation, the whole thing could be wrapped up in 15 minutes. And consider the insensitivity of Chekhov’s gun “If a gun is introduced in the first act of a play,” said Chekhov, “it must go off in the third.” Think how many highly strung theatregoers have eyeballed that rifle in The Seagull, anxiously aware it’s just a matter of time before there’s a sudden loud bang.
But are jazz hands really the way? What about blind people? Imagine the anxiety of not knowing whether or not you’re the only person in the audience applauding. What about chirophobics, who are afraid of hands? Don’t they have rights? Plus, weren’t jazz hands made famous by Al Jolson singing Mammy in blackface in The
Jazz Singer. Blackface! It’s 2019, people! Should we really be greeting the final curtain of Kinky Boots with a mass display of white supremacy?
And come to think of it, why should intellectuals and culture vultures hog all the safe spaces? Just the other day I had a nasty start when an ambulance went whooping past me — can’t we remove sirens from our emergency vehicles? Why shouldn’t the streets be a safe space too?
And what about other anxieties? Why should the fear of sounds be the only ones we worry about? What about people with cynophobia (anxiety around dogs)? Why should they have to share public spaces with guide dogs? There should be safe spaces for cynophobics where if the blind want to enter, it’s white canes only.
I have a friend who seldom ventures out because she’s enochlophobic, so mortally afraid of crowds. Couldn’t we arrange that each week, everyone has to stay indoors to create a safe space for her and other enochlophobics to go out and feel included in the city? So long as there aren’t too many enochlophobics at the same time, I suppose. Two enochlophobics are company but three would require a whole new safe space.
As a society, we have a long way to go. Banning public applause is a good start, but it’s only a start. If we’re going to make the world perfect and inclusive for all, we need to start banning a lot more things.