Considering everything going on is it time to start making smaller, quieter, more intimate performances?

Convener(s): Ben Eaton 

Participants: Aaron Minnigan, Rhiannon Armstong, Sarah Flayol, Gerard Bey, Albashe Chaunte, Dan Koop, Martina Vowholn, Peader Kirk, Mary O’connor, and some others who came and left

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Every where I listen everyone is wanting to make something bigger, something louder, perhaps we can stop and make something quiet and maybe it can be intimate, between me and you.

In the silence perhaps an audience can learn to be itself, perhaps in the smallness they won’t be dazzled by spectacle, perhaps an idea can be small in physical size but large in scale.

I think we would all like to feel less distance, I think we would all like intimacy, I think we all agreed that we need space as an audience to exist.

Some of us have had one on one encounters some haven’t we would all like and want to make them.  But how? Perhaps on the upstairs seat of a bus, using only your oyster card.

Does being close mean you are intimate?  Does touching mean you are intimate, when you read this on a computer screen or on a page is this intimate?  Are we being intimate right now?  Perhaps the internet is the most intimate moment some of us have had?

We talked about us and where we feel we exist as an audience, we talked about making a big Greek man cry.

Do you have to be on your own to be intimate, how can we bring intimate off the street and out of the abandoned buildings and back onto the stage.  Are we too divided, us and them, performer and audience.  “Remember there are more of you than us and in a fight you will probably win”.  Do we respect too much, perhaps we should respect less, behave less as an audience.

Do we invite them onto the stage, do we let them press the buttons, touch them only in places where they allow us.  Do we push it, do we hold their gaze longer than needed, try and make them smile back at us, do we get them lost in places they don’t understand.  Do they control intimacy or do we?  Is it wrong that I am discussing this in terms of us and them?

Are we ever intimate with each other as an audience.  Some kids watching a performance laugh sigh gasp out loud, people are angry then they do it too, Do we need more of that, can intimacy exist then?  Can intimacy exist in a large group, can it exist in a small group can it exist between two people, and where is it?

We talk about being friends and being lover and enemies, can we be all those things at once, how much do we need to give back.  How much of us do the audience need before they will give some of themselves?

I didn’t take any notes, I probably forgot a lot.  There weren’t many of us we talked and no one shouted it felt a bit intimate.