An audience of one performance based on the color yellow, designed by Marilyn Arsem. It was performed eight times for eight different individuals.
13 ACTIONS IN YELLOW was the first piece in a series of performances for an audience of one person. The performance took place on Boston Common in June 1988, and was done eight times, for eight different people. The person was led to a particular park bench, where s/he received a very simple set of instructions. Each was to be the sole knowing-recipient of a series of l3 actions based on the color yellow, which would take place both as near and as far away as could be perceived, involving all the senses, and occurring in the full 360° around the bench. It would take half an hour, and s/he would be told when it was over. Then the person was left alone on the bench to wait for the events to occur.
Not wanting to create a narrative, we simply worked with objects that were yellow, and found activities associated with them. The result was a series of actions that were essentially playful. I was particularly interested in examining the levels of subtlety required to blend performed actions into the real life of the park. I was also curious to discover how far away you could actually present an image, and still have it perceived as part of the performance. Performed actions are particularly difficult to execute realistically, when set next to real life in an uncontrolled environment.
Thirteen performers, for the most part unfamiliar to the audience person, executed the series of actions according to a timed/mapped outline. They were given locations and time spans for the actions, but how they actually executed the actions was open to the moment and their own inspiration. The major stipulation was to behave as normally as anyone else in the park. The actions took place in a full 1/8 mile circle around the bench, and included three women in white at a yellow picnic tea party; the audience’s first name being called out by different people, so that the sound moved in a circle around her/him; someone dropping a large bag of lemons which rolled down the path; someone sitting on the opposite bench reading “The Yellow Fairy Tale Book”; a waft of lemon scent emanating from a woman going by; a man walking up the path holding a picture of a young boy in a yellow tee shirt and asking everyone along the way if they had seen his son; another person eating bananas and cheese popcorn; taped sound, moving past behind the audience, of vocal and orchestral music that contained the word yellow in the lyrics or title; five people strolling with yellow umbrellas intersecting in the middle of the park and then moving away from each other; several people playing with nine yellow balls, which always attracted groups of children to play as well; and yellow umbrellas opening and closing, like eyes, throughout the park. During the entire length of the piece, a woman walked in slow motion across the park, always approaching the audience person. When she reached the audience member, she informed her/him that the piece was over and offered a yellow flower.
Several days after the performances, we videotaped interviews with each of the audience people alone. They described their experience, and what events they thought were created by us. In each case, there were several random events in the park that they mistook for ours. Nevertheless, given the single organizing principle of yellow, the audiences were very adept at picking out events, and for the most part accurately identified which were performed and which were random. If anything, we discovered that we could create even subtler images, and that the heightened level of awareness of the audience would still allow her/him to pick them out. And we found that as the images were more ambiguous and difficult to separate from the reality, the more likely the audience was to see the whole life of the park as being the event.
What was particularly interesting were the different considerations the event provoked for each audience person: issues of reality/artifice, the concept of different systems of organizing and interpreting the world, the feeling of being one of the elect, the vulnerability of sitting alone in public, not knowing and not having anyone else with whom to consult. The experience was one of heightened perceptions and a renewed awareness of space and time, color and rhythms. And it extended beyond the time of the performance, making each audience conscious of yellow actions after leaving the park and throughout the day.
