Meeting your audience

As part of the Touch Wood sharing at The Place last month we had the opportunity to discuss our work with some of the audience members, following the Critical Response Process designed by Liz Lerman. This involves four steps to foster a dialogue between artist and their audience: 1) the audience share moments they have found exciting or memorable in some way, 2) the presenting artist asks the audience questions while the audience members should not deviate from the question in their responses, 3) audience members put questions to the artist but must phrase them in a 'neutral' or unopinionated way, 4) audience memebers offer their opinions with the permission of the artist. (Liz Lerman, 2011: 275)

This feedback process was somewhat imposed on both artists and audience members. However, the intention was good, to get artists and audiences to talk in the spirit of caring for each other, emphasised in the relaxed introduction to the evening by The Place's artistic director Eddie Nixon. And having participated in this from both sides, as an audience member and as a presenting artist, there were some positive outcomes.

After we performed an extract of Tracing Gestures within the evening's mixed bill the audience was split into small groups and paired with one of the artists. I was suprised how much time people had to sit with us and unpick and elaborate on the experiences they had just made with what we presented and to come up with some exciting suggestions of where the work could go from here. A lot of the discussion evolved around the relationships that had been observed between the performers with each other and with the visual materials, the visibility of physical experiences, the invading of intimacy, the play with surfaces and the tensions between moments of clarity of what the performers were doing and (at times) dissatisfying moments of confusion.