Reflective Practitioner: Performance One

I was disappointed at the lack of audience tonight despite all of the advertising and promotion there was only a handful of people present. I was afraid that this would be the case as the main student body have all gone home. I instructed the ushers to ask people to sit in the horseshoe seats and not go up into the seating bank but unfortunately the majority of the audience ignored this request and scurried up to the back. It really confirmed my fears that the traditional seating arrangement would create a barrier and set up conventions and behaviour that would not be conducive to participation. Unfortunately there is nothing that I can do about this at all now for this round of experiments but will have to work hard to address for Camden.

The opening section of the entrances and inscription was not seamless but that is a case of more rehearsal needed but more worryingly did not seem to be effective in setting up to the audience the things that we wanted to explore with them in the performance (this became more obvious later on with the responses to the invitation to create with us).

The audience seemed to respond well to the question ‘why is she crying’ and without any explanation they began to write on their chalkboards. I think I left too long for this; both the performers and audience became restless after a while but I pushed the point because I wanted them to have time to reflect and change what they wrote (I will put up the pics after both of the shows). Rich, Deb & Nikki also felt that it was too long but I wanted it to be a creative challenge for the audience. I think that tomorrow I will need to watch the audience carefully and judge the time accordingly. I will also need to speak to Rich, Debbie and Nikki about not drawing attention to them selves during this section; they need to remain still and allow the audience to take responsibility for filing that space and time during the performance.

A similar comment was made an audience member about the opening She text, that it went on too long and they just wanted it to start. I understand how just the words hanging in space might seem empty but I wanted the audience to work to make her present in that space, in all the ways that they could imagine…once the text has begun, so has the performance.

I must admit that I was disappointed by most of the audience’s responses to the question ‘why is she crying?’ Many of the responses were really silly and did not engage with the debates and discussions that I hoped we had set up in the first section of the performance. In this way, I think that we obviously had not engaged them in the things that we wanted to explore with them; they were implicit but I had hoped that the audience would get a sense of what we wanted to investigate and play with. Maybe we needed to let the audience know the performance rules that we were working from in order to play with their ideas because there was a definite reluctance to take responsibility for their ideas in performance and what the performers did with them. I think that the seating arrangement contributed to this. Maybe the rules of engagement need to be made much clearer from the start in architecture and performance style.

Musical Chairs was much more successful than I had anticipated after the improve section had been so flat. The majority of the audience joined in and crossed over into the performance space. The created a liminal space by crossing over but I am not convinced that there involvement in the task was creatorly though. I think that I need to re-examine how this works as a performance device but it definitely has more potential than the texts seem to.

I think that many of the texts and the style of the performance perhaps alienated the audience rather than setting up the themes which was not my intention at all. I think that I need to maybe take a less postdramatic approach and think about developing techniques that are more engaging in a material way from the off. The theatricality of the texts and physical work did not serve the purpose that I though it would.

Only two people used the diary room, unless tomorrow is any different I am going to have to re-evaluate the ways in which I generate audience feedback.

I have to go to bed now….lots of work to do tomorrow.