Audience response to the performance are hard to record as the majority of the audience were members of the public, unaware they were going to be witnessing a performance, there reactions to our presence contributes to other peoples interaction and response to our performance. As Mike Pearson explains:
Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves, as ‘audience’, as a collective with common attributes. All three sets of relationship, performer/performer, performer/spectator, spectator/spectator become part of an active matrix of interaction and available for negotiation: momentary and durable, individual and collective. (2010, P.175)
Our audience have experienced interaction momentary, durable, individual and collective. The momentary interaction is caused in part through the layout of the shop floor. Shelving blocking the view of performance has both positive and negative contributions on the impact of performance. An audience reaction to suddenly being greeted with our performance, on turning an isle corner, will of course be a different reaction to that of a performance capable of being viewed for the entire duration.
Audience not needing to consider themselves ‘audience’ (2010, P.175′) is an important aspect of the intentions of our performance as the public will not have considered themselves an audience therefore notions of a ‘collective with common attributes’ (2010, P.175) should have been forgotten. This created freedom from the attributes of an audience, importantly for the public, a freedom to discuss the performance without fear of disrupting performance, be those discussions away from the performance or not. Any discussion of our performance allowed that member of the audience to transcend the three performer/spectator relationships Pearson has described.
Attempts to record the performance were made through photographs. One of which will be published in an internal magazine for the staff of the company. Another means of recording the performance would be to obtain the close circuit television recordings of that day. An interesting idea this may have also captured the public’s reaction to the performance. However this idea is complicated as obtaining security footage from a large corporation, even for private use, would involve certain procedures and approvals from different people within different departments of the company.
Works cited
Pearson, Mike. Site-Specific Performance, 2010, Palgrave MacMillan: Hampshire.