“A basic aim in site-specific work is to encourage audience to see and experience more of their surroundings, and/or to see their surroundings differently; this volume rethinks not only what that might be but how they are experienced”. (Tompkins, 2012, p.11)

Our performance is something that we slowly pieced together to gain a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve. We have always liked the idea of waiting and how the grandstand has been waiting for many things over the years. As the quote above says, site-specific work is about making the audience see the space in a different way. We want the audience to feel like their experience of waiting has been changed. We want the audience to think about the performance 3 weeks later when they are sat in a doctors waiting room and think about the passing of time and the decomposition of the environment around them. We want them to have a changed view of the grandstand as a place that has only been used for horse racing to a place with a lot more history, but our main aim is to make strange the idea of waiting and have them constantly question the passing of time.

To do this we will set the room out like a waiting room, placing the seats close together and using the painting on the wall as a focal point. We will then place envelopes on the chairs of the audience members that contain instructions. These envelopes will be labelled with times and the audience will be instructed to open them when the time arrives. This means there will be a focus on the passing of the time. We want to do this firstly as the room has been used as a waiting room on many occasions. But also as the grandstand has been and still is waiting for something. This is symobolised within the work.

Tompkins, Joanne (2012) The ‘Place’ and Practice of Site Specific Theatre and Performance. [online] London: Palgrave Macmillian. Available fromhttp://www.palgrave.com/PDFs/9780230364066.pdf [Accessed 5 April 2014]

The idea of waiting is one that seems so normal as we do it all the time. However, in our performance we are wanting to make strange of the idea. Make people really think about the idea of waiting and the passing of time and what this does to them and the environment around them. After doing audience research, we have discovered many normal and rational reasons for waiting. Its is a normal thing that people do on a daily basis. So how does this become a performance?

In Marc Auge’s ‘Prologue of non-places’ he describes the behaviour of a man and what he does as he arrives at an airport and leaves on the plane. These are normal behaviours that people do all of the time. However, he describes them in a way that becomes a performance in itself. Everyday life, no matter how mundane and boring can become a form of performance. These activities can easily become a performance and this is something we want to incorporate into ‘The Waiting Room’.

For example, when someone is comforting another person it would not necessarily be seen as a performance, but within our performance it will be. Also,in Auge’s chapter he talks about the man waiting, “he had nothing to do but wait for the sequence of events” (1995, p.2-3). In a sense, this is what our audience/participants are doing throughout the performance. They are waiting for the performance to unfold so they can stop waiting.

References-

Auge, Marc, 1995, Non Places- An Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York, Verso.

Upon deciding on the waiting room formation for our performance, we have decided that we want to control the audience by using envelopes. We really like this idea but have decided to explore other ways of doing this. In Rotazaza’s work ‘Etiquette’ they used headphones and seated the participants in pairs in a coffee shop. Each participant would have different instructions in their headphones which would tell them when and how to interact with the other audience member.This results in the participants creating a meeting between them that they have no control over. Rotazaza describe the experience as “expos[ing] human communication at both its rawest and most delicate” (Rotazaza, 2007)

Another performance where they use headphones as a way of controlling participants is ‘Radio Ballet’ by LIGNA. This performance consisted of audience members turning up to a location wearing headphones that were tuned to a certain radio station. Instructions were then given over the radio and the audience members completed the movements. This once again takes audience participation to a new level. The audience become the performers rather than an audience in the most basic form.

We really like the idea of using headphones and this is something that we would be able to achieve at the grandstand, but this would mean having an audience of only 2 people or just 2 channels of instructions. The minimum audience we are looking at having is eight all with different instructions as this is how many people we currently need to make our piece effective. The concept of the instructions will work in the same way but for our piece the envelopes will be better suited.

References-

Rotazaza,2007. Rotatzaza’s Etiquette [online]  Avaliable at: <http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/ETQ_press_release.pdf> (Accessed 30 March 2014)

Radiodispertion, 2008. Radio Ballet Leipzig Main Station Part 1 [online], Avaliable at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI3pfa5QNZI> (Accessed 30 March 2014)

This week we looked at ‘The Many Headed Monster’ which looks at different ideas of audience and how these are portrayed in contemporary performance. It looks at examples of audience in pre-performance, performance and post-performance. Obviously as our performance uses a lot of audience participation we found a few similarities between some of the performances and ours.

The first one that pushes the idea of audience is Joshua Sofaer’s Scavengers during which teams of participants travel around the host city finding a number of absurd items. These are then all put on display in a museum post performance. I really like the idea of displaying what is used within the performance in a post performance environment. I think it could be interesting to see what kind of installation we could build using the airplanes and letters that we use during the perfomance. Sofaer says that he want to “use art to enable people too see the world as a place of potentiality and to become more active citizens” (Sofaer, 2014). I think this is something at also applies to our performance in how it is completely reliant on audience participation and without it the performance would fail. This is the same for Sofaer’s work- without participants there would be no art.

The next piece of work that interested me was Oreet Ashery’s ‘Say Cheese’ (2002). In this one to one performance a woman is dressed as a Jewish man and performs something that resembles a therapy session with the participants. The performance is very intimate and the audience members at times can be made to feel uncomfortable. Within our performance this is something we are want to achieve. Although our performance is not one to one there are still moments when we will be able to address one participant in an intimate way. For example laying your head on their lap or shoulder and holding their hand close to you. Some participants may not find this awkward and off putting but many of them will. Pictures were taken of each audience member with Ashery and these were sent out at a later date so the audience were reminded of the performance once again a few weeks after their initial experience. This is another idea we could toy with. We could send them away with a memento of  the experience so that every time they see it their feeling towards the performance are reinstated.

Another piece of work that shows a fully co-operative and active audience is Hermann Nitsch’s Action 122 (2005). If you examine this work carefully you can see that there are several types of audience within this performance. Firstly, there is the audience that comes along to participate and help create the work. Secondly, there is the audience that come to be an audience. Thirdly, there is the unknowing audience who catch a glimpse of the performance as it leave the theatre and spills out onto the street. This is definitely something that we will want to look into. There is the audience currently that participates in the performance and the those that do not take part and just watch the action unfold in front of them. It would be interesting to see if we could some how incorporate the third type of audience. This could possible be done by letting the third type of audience observe the installation that we may include or maybe we could somehow incorporate the  general public that pass the grandstand on a daily basis.

References-

Sofaer, Joshua, 2014, About Joshua Sofaer [online] Avaliable at:http://www.joshuasofaer.com/about/ [Accessed March 29th 2014]

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