Who is your audience? What do you expect of them? What do you want them to learn from you? What do you want to learn from them? Whether a performance is interactive or not, you are working in relation to the viewers. An exchange is always taking place between you and them.
An audience who actively chooses to come to see your performance engages with the work differently than the audience who unintentionally encounters your work in a public context on their way to other activities in their life.
Meanwhile, the context in which your work is seen – your location, the time of day, other activities that are happening in the vicinity of your work, what you wear, how you initiate an action, all impact how the viewers will engage with you.
This workshop examines different ways of working with an audience in a live event. You will design and perform different kinds of actions that experiment with your relationship to the viewers. In each case we will consider different strategies that you can use to engage them in the work.
A significant component of the workshop will be private reflection and writing, as well as group discussions on questions related to the topic, not just in the context of creating performances but in our everyday lives as well. We cannot separate our performance art from our daily life. Our lives continue to proceed even as our performances take place.