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.



The conversation picked up in pace when it became clear that the staging of the work, gallery or theatre, was still open. A discussion developed around the possibility of chosing a viewpoint, to be able to come closer, to look what's behind the corrugated cardboard, to be able to move around, leave and come back, to see the artwork separately, to be invited to record your own video of the performers. Then an important question emerged around the notion of comfort. Can you break conventions related to personal space and boundaries in a welcoming kind of way? Why would you do this and how?

'I need to be able to see a space for myself in it' was the audience quote that will want me go back to the studio and ask some more questions, ...

and read a bit more of Liz Lerman's book 'Hiking the Horizontal' (2011). There is a chapter on 'abstraction'. Here she describes the moment when she saw Edward Hopper's 'abstract' drawings and recognises the ''representation of a very long evolution of ideas and images". She goes on to state that "by the end of this exhibit, artist and viewer had come to an essential place." (91) I am looking for a process that equally puts its trust into the body, its movement and the everyday imagery that evolves alongside. A work that has the potential to respect and bring together the performers' and viewers' individual and diverse interpretations within a shared experience.

Participating in the feedback process as an audience member on a different night of the Touch Wood season was quite therapeutic. I guess it must have helped that I came to see a performance by one of my favorite artists, Brian Lobel, who collaborated with Catherine Long on a new work entitled 'Grinding Thoughts'. The work-in-progress explored interesting relationships and  tensions between the immediate rewards of being physical, being in the body and having fun, and the authoritative and potentially competitive context of a frontal group exercise class/ regime. Discussing the work afterwards allowed a space for me to reflect on how I have arrived at my interpretation of the work and on my own process of forming an opinion.