When our company first entered the venue nine days ago, we decided that we’re going to work in the framework of our topic – kitchen, but if we get inspired by the atmosphere, we’re going to follow through with the exciting ideas even if they’re not directly connected to kitchen and eating. Thus we gave ourselves immense freedom, and the brainstorming over the first four days was highly productive. The members of our team scavenged the space, and there was no doubt about the quality of inspiration. Our company has never worked together, so during these days we also found out how the members of our company come up with ideas, the ways they share them, and how quickly we can find a common language to work together as a company.
Half way through our residency we began to find the inner connections between all of the different elements, and we concluded that there’s no linear story within the scenes of the production. We didn’t find this devastating because we had only worked for less than a week, and every artistic process starts from numerous ideas, which will later be developed, organised and reorganised. We hoped that for the audience this would be an exciting journey through the building and it would present visible outcomes of the inspiration the spaces offered us.
Today we had the first run-through of our ‘work in progress’ showing. We had a test audience of ten people. During our performance we lead the audience around the entire building, so today we tried out the logic of the journey, all individual scenes in the correct sequence and technical aspects.
Generally our audience was polite, curious and collaborative. After the run-through we had a discussion with some of them to get feedback and to know what they found exciting, and what didn’t quite work for them. Many interesting topics emerged and the company got the idea of the impact of our production.
One of the discussions we had was about the audience’s freedom of movement in our piece. That’s actually one of the most important choices companies working on site-specific productions have to make. Do we let them roam freely in the space? Or do we guide them around in a unison group? In our production the audience is guided around the space as one group. Some audience members felt that they would have liked to have more freedom, and to stay longer in the scenes they especially enjoyed. I think for our ‘work in progress’ it would have been difficult to have all the scenes running simultaneously, because it would have generated many practical issues. In general we had decided to do everything with maximum artistic interest factor and minimum hassle factor.
Another part of constructive feedback was about the structure and content of the scenes. The general feeling was that certain scenes were predictable. If this was the feedback on our final performance, it would be something to be seriously worried about. But at this point it made us realise that by now we worked on some initial storylines, and followed our first impulses. By the end of the week we polished those choices and made the presentable. The next step is to find out what other possibilities do the bases of our scenes offer us, and how can we make those surprising and fresh.
At the end of the discussion we asked every audience and cast member to say one thing we should follow through and continue for our final performance in October. Many exciting ideas came up, and gave us a good understanding of how to continue working.
Tomorrow we have another showing. This will be with an audience of 30. I’ll keep you posted!!
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