Danish theatre teaches its audience to boo — and sliming awaits

On 27 February at Dansekapellet in Copenhagen, a theatre group will stage an event titled "Audience workshop (boo!)" — an interactive cabaret that doubles as a clinic in negative feedback.

The mechanics are simple. Host Hávard Magnussen walks the audience through the act of booing. Then award-winning cellist Jonathan Swensen, the LuLu Quartet and other musicians play virtuosic works, live, as guinea pigs. If they can't hold the room, they get booed off stage — and slimed, Nickelodeon style.

The workshop targets what Magnussen frames as the inflation of the standing ovation. Standing ovations, once reserved for career-capping performances, now greet almost anything. That ubiquity has hollowed out the gesture. A boo, by contrast, remains rare enough to register.

Why does this matter now?

Standing ovations have migrated from concert halls to corporate keynotes, from prize speeches to school assemblies. They no longer encode a judgement of quality. They encode a politeness reflex. Magnussen argues that, when praise becomes automatic, criticism has to be relearned deliberately.

Danes, the framing goes, are polite people. Booing does not come naturally. That restraint makes the project stranger and more pointed at once — a society built on quiet applause, asked to rehearse its loudest.

What changes for the performers?

For Swensen, the LuLu Quartet and the rest of the lineup, the trial is unusually transparent. A loose passage, a dropped phrase, a sagging tempo — an audience primed to react can answer any of these in real time. The usual buffer between a rough performance and a critical response collapses.

The Nickelodeon-style sliming pushes that collapse further. Failure becomes physical, public, faintly absurd. The performer walks off covered in green slime. Recovery is part of the show, and so is the laughter that follows.

What changes for the audience?

It reframes the listener's role. Classical etiquette traditionally privileges restraint — applause on entry, silence during the music, ovation only when earned. Here, booing becomes a craft, coached and deployed. It stops being a lapse of manners and starts being a tool of attention.

The workshop implicitly asks whether audiences can teach themselves negative response the way they've absorbed positive response. Danish crowds, schooled in polite applause, may need a curriculum. Magnussen is offering the first page of one.

So what?

The event runs once, on 27 February at Dansekapellet. Its wider test is whether the format survives beyond a single cabaret room — in larger halls, in other genres, in cities where booing is already part of the vernacular. Magnussen's bet is that the boo, properly staged, can do critical work the standing ovation no longer does.