Any sporting event is, at its heart, a show. It has the actors on center stage, performing for the rest of us. It has the …
Any sporting event is, at its heart, a show. It has the actors on center stage, performing for the rest of us. It has the spectators, sitting in their seats watching raptly. And — in modern times, at least — it has the « home » audience, which in the past half century of growing video viewership has far outpaced the numbers of those actually in attendance. At their halfway point, the Tokyo Olympics are still grappling with the fact that in that equation, the middle group — those spectators on the scene who cheer, gin up enthusiasm and add texture to the proceedings — couldn’t come. And in the COVID era, a key question presents itself: If an Olympics falls in the forest and nobody there hears it, did it really make a sound? The Japan organizing committee’s president, Seiko Hashimoto, thinks it will. She said a couple weeks ago that she wasn’t worried that a locked-down, crowdless Olympics — what she calls the « `Tokyo model » — would fundamentally change the experience. « The essence of the Games, » Hashimoto said, « will remain the same. » They won’t, of course. They already aren’t. And in fairness, how could they, when part of that very essence — the roar of a real, live crowd — has been excised out of (you know the phrase by now) an abundance of caution? During the 18 months of the coronavirus pandemic, the relationship between the watched and the watchers in audience-based public events has shifted tectonically. Productions that normally happen in front of crowds — crowds that, it’s worth noting, both watch performances and sometimes become an integral part of them — have changed in various ways. Some entertainment venues turned to presenting performances to people in parked cars, much like drive-in movies; one comedian, Erica Rhodes, filmed a TV special outside the Rose Bowl in California and relied on honking horns for the bulk of her audience response. It added a kinetic, if cacophonous, energy. On TV, the iconic game show « The Price Is Right, » whose fundamental DNA relies on audience members to « come on down! » and become contestants, shut down for six months and then returned with mostly empty seats and contestants who aren’t surprised to be chosen.
