There are many different circumstances in which you can be waiting for something and many of those circumstances involve carrying on with your life.  In our public survey two answers involved waiting for a wedding; you can imagine that there probably isn’t a great deal of sitting down and reading newspapers during that wait.  Our piece also focuses on all the pilots and soldiers that would have waited at the number 4 aeroplane acceptance park (The Grandstand) for their chance to test their planes or learn to dig trenches on the common.  These men would not just have been sat around, they would have written to loved ones, they would have played football, they would have talked with their friends.  The Waiting Room Piece is making strange all of these things by putting them into a traditional waiting room setting, as you would imagine them now.

John Cage’s “4’33′” is a piece that is very much an inspiration for the setting of our waiting room.  The sounds you hear are not deliberate as they encourage listeners, or in our case audience members, to listen for things they wouldn’t usually.  This performance of the piece features the sound of a child crying and people moving around etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAdR5N7eXog
[accessed March 28th]

The point in relation to our piece is that we want to include moments of silence and yet we want for the audience to realise that they aren’t moments of silence at all; in much the same way that this is not really how you wait.