Bi-social By Jove

Last night, I found myself embroiled in a vigorous discussion with a puppeteer about "suspension of disbelief." I firmly believe that this is an unhelpful way to describe an audience's response to performance. We'd just been watching Neville Tranter's puppet Hitler, and suspending disbelief would have meant thinking that Hitler and his crazy pals were in front of us. Tranter might have lent his puppets some degree of humanity - certainly, against the ranting anti-christ in Downfall, this Hitler was almost human - but I hope that should I ever believe that the most notorious mass-murderer of the twentieth century is standing in front of me, I'll do a little more than applaud him after ninety minutes.

Suspension of disbelief seems very demanding: how do I switch off my natural inclination to believe or disbelieve? Is it the performer's responsibility to suspend my belief, or do I need to do a spot of yoga before the show to make me gullible? And even more worrying - I don't think suspending disbelief is a good thing. Sure. Mr Cameron, let me suspend my disbelief in your willingness to help the socially excluded. I'll believe every word you say, Mr Obama. I didn't actually see you in bed with my best friend, lover with a track record of infidelity.

After a week of manipulate, I am still scrambling around for something to replace this idea. I came up with the suggestion that the magic of theatre resides in the audience's ability to see two things at the same time: the literal presence (say, of a man with his hand up a Hitler puppet's back) and the suggested presence (the man is Hitler's servant, and this is the speech Adolf made in the bunker). I never lose either perspective.

I have experienced moments in which I have believed a performance to be literally real. There was that time during Audience when the actor abused an audience member. I thought it was not a plant, and I threw my shoe at the stage.

Then there was that time when I was frightened of The Tiger Lilies. They had sung a song about crucifying Jesus for a laugh, and I really did think they were that evil. Seeing the band in the bar after I show, I ran away in a miasma of fear.

Those were pretty intense moments. Having experienced it twice in ten years of theatre, however, suggests that if the success of a show depends on it, there's very little art that is going to work.

However, once this is replaced by the idea of bisociation, success becomes easier. Inevitably, the big concept I thought was going to be my contribution to critical theory had already been described. And, inevitably, it comes from a writer on the fringes of respectable academic philosophy. Arthur Koestler defined bisociation to explain how the human mind can hold two contrasting ideas about the same thing at the same time.

I discovered his definition in a book about conspiracy thinking. Oh, my impeccable sources.

Back to puppet Hitler - or the Live Art influenced work in progress by Sarah Hopfinger during Buzzcut@manipulate - the viewer's ability to read each moment in two ways ought to account for the power of their presence. Does a double perception of an image mean that twice as much information is being taken in?

And does a piece like Paper Cinema's Odyssey, which deliberately shows its workings and it surface, use bisociation to make tears come to my eyes?