Experiential – that was our performance. An experience. Not only for the audience members but for me as well. I will always remember what happened in the LPAC Stage on the 16th May between 1 and 5. The performance was much more successful than any of us thought it would be, I believe – more in the turn out of audience we had.
The Colour Explosion section was a resounding success and since having the audience pop the balloons, we have been asked if the LPAC would be able to keep the canvas to hang for further students to look at. I had friends, tutors, fellow students come up to me during the installation and talk to me about how they were feeling. I was relaxing in the Express Yourself section when one of my closest friends came up and joined me. All of sudden, a certain song came on and she turned to me, saying “I feel like I should go paint something with this song on”, and so I said to her “Why don’t you?”. It was very pleasing for me to see all the audience respond in different ways to each section.
My favorite section was Lose It, however unfortunately, due to the preservation of the stage floor, we had to stop that mini experiment just over an hour into the piece. Yet this was the most popular of all the sections to begin with. It was pleasant to see people scared to break something and then all of a sudden they came out of their ‘shells’ and began acting in a way that is seen to be acceptable in a performance frame work.
If I could re-do the performance I would change small things, like the projection, which was showing good and bad images throughout the four hours on loop. After receiving feedback from audience/spectators/participants it was evident that a majority of people did not want to see some of the bad images. Therefore, in order not influence the audiences mood before taking part in the experiment too much, in future I would not have the projection showing, but instead just have the music to create the atmosphere.
If I was to take the performance further, firstly I would look into creating a gallery piece where other audience members could explore the space, being shown how people reacted and being shown the tweets about how it changed their mood. From there I would experiment with each section on it’s own. Especially the section we name ‘Say Something Nice’. I would focus on this section because, during our rehearsal process this is what people struggled with the most.