In today’s session we had 3 first years coming in at allocated slots to come view the performance. As our performance is in 3 weeks we felt this session was crucial as we could trial our ideas and hopefully get feedback afterwards.
The first 2 people arrived as a pair and came into our space, I and Sam beforehand prepared the space with the materials we had and got into position. With the pair of us being still my only concern was keeping still and making our performance message and intentions clear to the audience.
When the two first years arrived they got told to sit either side of me on the sofa. The pair had mixed reviews on what they had to do after they had sit down, One of them just sat there for a minute taking everything in and the other was constantly questioning what they had to do. As well as this, the pair tried interacting with us both, not knowing we wasn’t going to respond. As I was in the middle of them both I realised how unfocused I was, I kept corpsing which I realise now is something I need to work on. The first years wanted to get up and look around which I found interesting then it suddenly dawned on me that only one of the pair would be with us on the actual performance and then made me wonder what one of them would be like just on their own. Would they still try to interact? Or would they just sit there. After ten minutes was up the white rabbit came in and took the audience members away into her room.
Half an hour later a new spectator arrived to come see the house. When he entered the living room I felt I different atmosphere and when I realised he was on his own I knew this was going to be a completely different performance than the pair that we just had in. This spectator didn’t interact, didn’t talk he just sat there watching the T.V. This was a lot easier as I could just get completely focused on what I was performing.
At the end of the session I met up with the three spectators and asked for feedback and what they got from the performance in the living room, I had an interesting response. The first two said that it was weird and it took them a while to figure out what actually was the performance and said when they realised that the message of our performance was clear. The spectator that came on his own got the message straight away and thought that the performance was good and it was clear.
What I got from them watching the performance is that we need more leaflets, newspaper, junk mail and more lists for the audience to look at. We need to fill the space and make it look more extreme to make the performance become clearer on what we are trying to show.