A significant influence on our work during this project was being an audience member of ‘The Justice Syndicate’ by performance group fanSHEN. The performance constituted of audience members sat around a table, recreating a jury room, each with an iPad. Evidence of a crime was presented to the audience, and after a full and detailed discussion the audience was asked to come to a verdict on the guilt of the fictional defendant. This performance for me raised many questions around the ideas of audience interaction, and audience collaboration. In the moment of performance, we the audience were being asked to work together with the artists to ‘create’ the performance, without us (the audience) the show couldn’t exist, the whole premise of the work was based around an audience consenting and agreeing to be involved in the work.

This raised questions on how we might work with collaborative audiences in our own work, and what challenges that might raise for us in performance. We didn’t want to create a piece of work that was full of technology, rather a piece of work that engaged with an audience.

It was important for us at this stage to understand that audience interaction didn’t have to be as complicated as involving audiences in the creation and development of the work (like The Justice Syndicate) but rather that audience interaction could be as simple as talking to our audience in a story telling narrative.

When I began researching more into the ideas surrounding audience participation/interaction it became ever clearer to me that there are so many different ways to engage your audience without having to involve them in live action playing in a stage space. This has ramifications for us as theatre makers though, a ‘traditional’ theatre audience may not know how to respond to questions being raised and may become unsure as to how they should be responding to such works.  

Arts journalist Mark Lawson writes on such type of interactive work, in reference to Headlong’s performance,1984;

‘There’s an unsettling moment, for example, in 1984 – an adaptation of Orwell’s dystopic novel that has just transferred to the West End – when the dissident Winston Smith, enduring torture from the state enforcer O’Brien, suddenly catches sight of the stalls and pleads: “You – I can see you all sitting there. Why don’t you do something?” The intellectual point being made is clear enough: we should be doing more to protest present-day government-sponsored torture in Guantanamo Bay or Syria. But, as a theatregoer, it seemed unfair – had we tried to storm the boards and free Winston, we would we have been ejected by ushers – and it interrupted my appreciation of an otherwise engrossing production.’ (Lawson 2014)

It is this danger of audience interaction we where aware of from the beginning of our process, we wanted to create a work that engaged with our audience, but at the same time didn’t make them feel uncomfortable about their experience. The type of audience interaction we wanted to create was something that spoke to our audience, and it was from this moment on that we decided that direct address, eye contact, and presenting ourselves as performers, versions of our selves rather than ‘Actors’ was the way to go forward. We wanted the role of the audience to be more ‘traditional’ but to also feel as if they where being engaged with intimate moments within the performance.