After witnessing ‘The justice syndicate’ two weeks previous to this workshop I had a feeling of the kind of work that I wanted to create for our collaborative performance.  I was intrigued by the ideas of the use of technology in performance and working with an audience as a collaborator, but as a collective the collaborative decided that although technology was an interesting avenue to explore, we didn’t want our work to be solely driven by it. It was decided then that our work take more on an intimate feel, intimacy not in the conventional sense of one on one performance, but rather to create a collective feeling amongst our audience.

To do this we investigated the ideas surrounding audience intimacy, and with the aid of Rachel Biscoe artistic director of FanSHEN we started discussions around the idea of using music in performance to create intimacy with our audience. Although we had already ruled out our work as being a one to one work, we decided in this workshop moment to explore this avenue to understand how an audience might respond to it and what it might evoke for us as theatre makers. We created a response to audience intimate work thinking about the notion of individualism explored in The Justice Syndicate, by giving each audience member their own iPad for the exploration of evidence.

Working with technology, in this instance, a pair of wireless headphones with soft jazz playing into our sole audience members ears, eyes blindfold, we placed two pieces of Lego in their hand. The natural instinct upon feeling the object was for our audience to place them together and build something out of the objects given to them. We proceeded by giving more Lego to our spectator until the track had ended. By the end of this process our sole audience member had created a mis-mashed Lego sculpture, and we the makers had witnessed something quite inspiring.

Our audience member, eyes blindfold, and deaf but only to the soft music in their ears began to negate this task, a non-verbal communication ensued, we handed over the Lego, placed it in their hands and allowed them to work. It was a strange encounter to watch our audience engage in the way they felt necessary and it transpired from that moment on that there was an unspoken set of rules being uncovered. This non-verbal moment had allowed us to create a work that put us the makers in a powerful position and it was important to understand the significance of this.

Performance maker and researcher into the field of audience intimacy Adrian Howells speaks of the reception that audiences feel to his work;

             ‘In the one-on-one performance piece that ensued, I simply washed, dried, anointed with oils, massaged and kissed the participant’s feet. Intimacy was engendered not only through the touching of the feet but also through the silence and stillness that surrounded the performance, as well as through my supposed ‘act of servility’. For many it was a deeply profound and moving experience that often triggered specific memories associated with the experience of the foot.’ (Howells 2012)

It is this notion of a moving experience that we had created in our short response that had put into perspective for us as makers what intimacy was for us. And we began to ask questions about how we could explore group intimacy.

Music was always a big factor in the work we were creating, the songs we had all started with had a meaning to all of us individually, and they all evoked feelings that we knew could be transported into our work to create an intimate feel but within a theatre audience setting. It was from then on that we decided to make physical and textual responses to the music we had started with, bringing to life the emotions we had felt in the music.

Rachel’s workshop has enabled us to have a real insight into what audience intimacy meant for our work, yes, we had created a one on one interactive short, but what we took away from that was the experience that this non-verbal element could have on an audience. Creating images and responses to the music was our next step and we were going into it with a much better understanding of how to create an intimate feel for our audience.