18. much 'i do' about nothing

Hi there friends,

I’m going to do a few end of the year blogs - my other modes of reflection are 90% visual so I’m finding the blogs are a great system to ensure I continue with some textual reflections as well.

People keep asking what I’m doing a masters in, and I always reply that I don’t know, that I haven’t decided yet. Which is kind of feeling very liberating, I’m not putting things in boxes, I’m letting them come to me. But I’m also putting the hard work off, of defining - not to say I think defining necessarily actually makes anything clearer - but because it needs to be done. For me. Institutionally. For me.

This blog will be dedicated to that line of questioning: What is this? Where is the red thread? 

I’m on the MAPP Dance (Specialisation) course - which means I will define what I specialise in. 

It’s going to be a long blog. I will do some exercises to try and put names on things. 

It’s something about the audience. It’s something about form. With reference to some of my previous work:

Title of Work	The Audience	The Form
the crisp sandwich cafe	autistic young people (aged 14-21)	semi-immersive, half package half live performance
mrs dalloway: the one man show	queer liverpudlians	immersive, 3hr durational, interactive, part scavenger hunt
george nickel’s 9th birthday party	artists and people who watch trailers	make-believe immersive trailer and visual story
the crisp sandwich cafe (coming soon)	your average jolene - on a quick trip to tesco in her work break	durational, outdoors, interactive
my cigarette is on fire! (& other stories)	individual queer people	one-on-one co-authored films
movement studies	film lovers and film haters	split-screen instagram reels

So, audience and form feels really good, the marginalised audience and the unconventional form in particular - this isn’t for a traditional theatre audience in a traditional theatre. So what might that be called?

New Ways of Being with Audiences

Non-Conventional Forms and Audiences

Interactivity and Immersion

Tangible Ways of Meeting Audiences

The Audience Experience

It’s always hard to name things. Some exercises (I love a good exercise). 

What Would it be Called if it was a…

…Self-Help Book:

Finding The Audience: A Guide to Being Yourself with Others

Form - the work on/beyond paper

…Wes Anderson Film:

an unabridged guide to the lavish and slapdash ways of making dance

The Graphics Society

…Cocktail:
Red Seats (on The Rocks)

Celestial Forest

…Friends Episode:

the one where they dance in the streets

the one with a new system

But Form and Audience feel like complicated things, because everything has a form and an audience - I think? Of course maybe it has no form, or no audience - but that would be very interesting within this debate in itself. And it’s also hard when things are easily defined by what they are not. This is not conventional. This is not for the majority. So what is it? It’s sometimes intimate, sometimes epic (scale), it’s sometimes playful and sometimes dark (theme), it’s contemporary dance maybe with some text (style), it’s sometimes political and hopefully always queer (context). It’s not necessarily interested in pinning itself down too much, though - which makes this very difficult.

It’s also been given titles which I like a lot by other people:

Beyond Immersive Theatre (Adam Alston, 2016)

The Post Immersive Manifesto (Jorge Lopes Ramos, Joseph Dunne-Howrie, Persis Jadé Maravala & Bart Simon, 2020)

Creating Worlds (Jason Warren, 2017)

Tandem Dances (Julia Ritter, 2020)

I broke it down into some titles in my area of learning essays:

Developing Autonomy in Performance

Choreographed Objects as Immersive Stimulus

The Participative Audience in a Digital Space

Creating Accessible Spaces

The first of these feels less relevant, it’s an area of interest which allows the other things to blossom. It’s more concerned with the way I work with the performers, rather than the relationship with the audience. The final three are all about creating something tangible: connections, objects, spaces. Creating New Worlds. Designing Audience Experiences. 

Audience Connectivity and Immersion.

The Audience: Immersion, Participation and Relation.

Designing the Audience Experience. 

Some of this language could be confused with marketing, i've even seen coding courses for computer games with titles like those above!

When I applied to the Masters I had the idea of focusing on Immersive Theatre, after the masters I would focus on Neurodivergence, Autism and Autism Friendly Theatre. This would then situate me in the position to consider the intersection of Immersive Theatre and Autism Friendly Theatre.

Sensorially: The Intersection of Immersive Theatre and Autism Friendly Theatre.

Immersive Theatre is just such a loaded term, like how much that relates to specific work and ideals. Also how much of a buzzword it is - it’s become very meaningless somehow.

…

Okay - so I got some clarity. It’s definitely best understood in consideration of it is most imperative two elements, the form and the audience. I do not like to discuss it through weird negatives: un-conventional, non-traditional etc. Even though that’s very important - it’s actually more that I prefer positive language. Who cares what tradition is? As long as we know what it is? It should be a deeper thought than just doing what isn’t being done. It is about making work that reinvents itself depending on what the story or the idea needs. 

I’m writing an Arts Council funding application at the minute and they would call it innovation. But that also sounds self gratifying or egotistical. It’s actually not new vs old, like it’s not doing something that hasn’t been done before, it’s doing things that I haven’t done before. I’m so flexible on the form, as long as I have an active choice or interest in how the form serves the work - so that results in many new formats.

So - my favourite title so far is actually one of the first suggested:

New Ways of Being with Audiences.

It could also be something really simple like:

Audiences and Forms.

If you have any approaches to share on how you title things I’d love to hear them! Or just some peer dramaturgy if you can see something obvious in these ramblings that I’m missing - I’m all ears.

-

'Much 'I Do' About Nothing' - Gossip Girl, Season 1, Episode 18