When I was 16, a man sitting two seats down from me had to be hauled away by the police during a Metropolitan Opera performance of Turandot in Miami. Granted, Monserrate Caballe had just taken the stage when the culprit erupted into a combination of sobbing and shouting.

Caballe's voice was quite capable of shattering your soul to smithereens if you weren't paying attention, but control yourself, sir. I came to hear the great soprano, not you going ballistic. And the funny thing was Caballe had not even opened her mouth yet. Really, at least wait until there's something to holler at.

Audience enthusiasm can be a good thing. Houston's beloved dance son, Trey McIntyre, had no problems when the Boise, Idaho, audience gave his dance company numerous curtain calls during its inaugural show in the group's new hometown. "There was this incredible outpouring of love. People were just so happy we were there," McIntyre recalls. "We felt like rock stars." McIntyre, contemporary dance's tall, talented and handsome "it" choreographer, has a way of getting audiences all worked up.

Houston Ballet experienced stoic audiences in Spain on last year's tour until the very end of the show, when they went nuts, with seven curtain calls at some shows.

A few weeks back, the normally uber polite modern dance audience at New Dances/Edition 2009 at Juilliard turned into a screaming TV dance show mob during Larry Keigwin's Megalopolis. Now, Keigwin's piece, with its glittery Vegas futuristic costumes and electric mixed beat score, seemed to be saying, "Go ahead and yell, baby." And yell they did. It came close to being part of the piece. During the next piece, Aszure Barton's whimsical Happy Little Things (Waiting on a Gruff Cloud of Wanting), they returned to serious mode as if nothing happened. Maybe they were trying to figure out what the title meant. Society for the Performing Arts is bringing Aszure Barton & Artists in this April. I know for a fact, she doesn't mind a little hollering during her dances.

Audiences have a dark side, too. Let us not forget the passive-aggressive types who tiptoe, walk or storm out of the theater. So many people left Maguy Marin's danceless but captivating performance of Umwelt at the American Dance Festival that I started counting them and even considered running into the lobby to try to talk them into staying. The piece was really getting juicy at the exact moment they were leaving. Dance audiences get particularly huffy when there isn't any actual dancing in the show.

Where to begin with historically unruly opera audiences? Recently Met Opera fans did not sit well with Swiss director Luc Bondy's new version of Puccini's Tosca. So they booed. The New York Times review tells the whole story, and the incident coughed up a whole new examination of the dreaded "boo." Even Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, blogged about it on The Huffington Post. Apparently, it's not nice to mess with a death at the end of an opera.

Anthony Freud of Houston Grand Opera warns us to consider some cultural differences between audiences in the United States and Europe. "In Germany, booing is not necessarily a negative thing," he says. "They are expressing their displeasure. They are saying they don't agree with what they have seen or heard. They are not saying they had a horrible time." Next week, HGO launches a new production of Tosca directed by John Caird. Mums the word on the ending. So you will just have to go to find that out for yourself.

Houston audiences are generally a polite and grateful bunch. They leap to their feet quickly, or are they just getting a head start to the parking lot? In all these years of attending shows I have never heard a mean-spirited peep outside of the mandatory boos as part of Stages Repertory Theatre's recent Panto Sleeping Beauty.

Although I must admit to getting a bit annoyed at a man whose phone rang during The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, a stunning production by Stagger Lee Presents. He answered it and proceeded to chat with this friend. So instead of listening to Pinter's stinging prose, spoken by such noted Houston actors as Sean Patrick Judge, Matthew Carter and Greg Dean, this guy's inane phone conversation was ringing in my head. Pinter won a Nobel prize in 2005. This guy never will.

So behave yourself people, unless asked not to. As they say in the movies, "Let the wild rumpus begin."

A contributing editor at Dance Magazine, Houston and Dance Source Houston, Nancy Wozny blogs at dancehunter.blogspot.com.