‘For my work I do push the format; there is more of an immersing experience for the audience. With the audio walks I want people to be inside the filmic experience and have the real physical world as the constantly changing visuals of the screen. Every person will have a different experience of the piece depending on what happens around them or where and when they walk.’ (Egoyan, 2002, 62)
This statement by Janet Cardiff is one that as a group we found interesting. Upon more research we discovered Forest…(for a thousand years) by Janet Cardiff and were inspired by it’s immersive and sensory nature. Forest is an immersive “sound installation [that] blurs distinctions between site and art” (Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, 2012) and takes place, as the name would suggest, in a forest. The audience members are free to sit or roam wherever they please. Noises and sounds are played over a speaker system. These sounds tend to vary from the average woodland noises such as the wind and birds to a storm building to explosions and gunfire as if you are caught in the middle of a war.
What interested us was the way that the sound transports the audience to a different dimension. The piece disrupts and manipulates the senses; the audience can see the forest and hear the sound of footsteps and believe someone is walking behind them even though they can see no one is there. We felt this inspired us to develop our piece further. We want the audience to know they are not in 1963 even though their senses are telling them something different. To do this we will keep the interior of the room the same and just make the room resemble a box office from the 1960s, just as we as performers will be dressed in 1960s clothes to resemble that time period. We then plan to have music from 1963 playing, along with the smell of smoke and the taste and smell of popcorn. The performance will be interactive as the three of us plan to interact and talk to the audience: offer them refreshments, offer to take their coats and tell them stories about the night of the 31st December 1963.
“The homogenisation of the audience […] problematically presumes that audiences consistently do the same thing. But there clearly exist many different understandings about what audiences do, and especially about whether audience participation is fundamentally active or passive.” (Allain and Harvie, 2006, 133). Active audience participation is not necessarily required in our piece. If the audience do not actively ask us questions or engage us in conversation then it is possible to continue with the scripted text regardless. Similar to Forest, the audience are only required it sit a listen they do not have to partake in any other activities if they do not wish. An element of the two performances that is both similar and dissimilar is that each of the audiences are on show to one another however in Forest this could leave the audience feeling vulnerable and exposed to each others reactions to the noises and sounds happening around them, which is an atmosphere we aim to avoid by having only three audience members at a time and giving them things to look at and interact with in the hopes this may put them more at ease.
As a group we look forward to developing our piece even further and experimenting with more ideas.
Allain, P. and Harvie, J. (2006) The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. New York: Routledge.
Egoyan, A. (2002) Janet Cardiff. BOMB, (79) 62.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2012) Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. [online] Available from http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/forest.html [Accessed 7 March 2015]