Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Helping an Audience Collaborate with One Another
HowlRound: The first immersive play I ever created was a short devised piece exploring the nightmares that mothers have when they are pregnant. In the third act of our four-act structure, we created a moment where the audience had to work together to solve a children’s jigsaw puzzle. We gave each audience member a single jigsaw piece at the top of the show, and when the time came, our main character pulled the puzzle board out from a part of the set and placed it before the crowd.
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3 comments:
The idea of an interactive theatre production is always one that I have been just a little uneasy about. Going into a show in which you know you will actually have to work in order to get the full experience of the production can be intimidating-- what are they going to make me do? Is it going to be embarrassing? I'm not an actor, why should I have to go up on stage? What (as an experience brought up in the article pointed out) if I fail and the rest of the show doesn't work? Of course, the few times I have gone to a show in which the audience members were interactive with the physical production, none of these worries have become a reality. Theatrical productions for social change are the best places to use interactive experiences with an audience-- in fact maybe they are the only places in which this really works, because as the article pointed out, theatre for social change is there to make people want to collaborate with others in order to achieve or at least think about real social change. Collaboration is the most important concept in the making of theatre of any kind, so why shouldn't non-theatrical working audience members be able to experience at least some kind of that collaborative process for themselves?
Collaborative theater is such a hard thing to do, but when well executed I think it could be such a powerful thing. It is so risky because you can never predict how an audience will react or if they are able to perform the task at or in a timely manner. There are so many variables that are extremely hard to predict that have to be considered when executing collaborative theater. But, just because doing collaborative theater is risky, that should not be something that stops it from being g produced. Theater is a place where risk should be taken. In collaborative theater there is the possibility of really impacting your audience in a new way and that’s such an important component of theater itself. I think the best solution to this is to select your audience members and find a way to know exactly who is in your audience.
Putting on a show for a live audience is an incredibly challenging task in and of itself because you can’t possibly guess where you will get a laugh or applause or any sort of reaction really, so the idea of making the audience a part of the show is a daunting task. Some people go to the theater so they can be removed from themselves, and be simply a silent witness to the story unfolding on the stage, so the interactive idea will definitely not appeal to everyone. That being said, collaborative theater has the possibility to open up a whole new side of the art. People can join what they see as a sort of ethereal idea that is the show. The universe of the production will no longer be locked off to the audience, as the interactive aspect will welcome them in, and that could be an incredible experience if you have the right audience. So the question is really, is this a production that will invite an audience willing to participate?
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