So for our second week of performance extracts we created an apple circus. I was the ring master character, whilst other characters consisted of; apple juggling, apple mime, apple poi and various carnival games that used apples instead of balls. What we tried to do achieve in this performance was injecting fun and humor into a performance by almost satirizing circus performing but at the same time showing something new and exciting by replacing circus equipment with apples. However what became apparent in this performance was that even when creating something to be laughed at, it doesn’t necessarily mean an audience will laugh at it.

So far we have been at a disadvantage, in the sense that our audience are our colleagues and friends. Erving Goffman says  that ‘Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.’ (Goffman, 1959, p 24) This relates to our circus performance, as we as a group of performers have, whether consciously or unconsciously created and tailored a performance that will make our friends and peers laugh. Our moral right in this case is that our audience will laugh, which of course they will because they are of our social group. Goffman goes on to tell us that humans, when interacting avoid conflict wherever possible and take precautions to prevent disruption, so therefore negative feedback among friendship circles is often sparse. Although special interest in these disruptions plays a significant role in a social group in the form of ‘Practical jokes and social games are played in which embarrassments which are to be taken unseriously are purposefully engineered.’ (Goffman,1959, p, 25) In other words, when performing a piece of comedy in front of an audience that knows you well, they will not take faults in the performances seriously, and take it in more of a practical joke way. In terms of the amount of laughter our circus performance produced you would think our presentation would have been a raving success, but allowing time for self reflection I can see that in front of different audience our piece would topple like a precarious tightrope walker, whose only previous experience had been with a safety net.

Through this discovery, as a group we have decided to look again at how we can make the relationship between audience and performer different between the traditional  spectator that would enter a theatre with certain expectations. After all Mike Pearson comments that ‘Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves, as ‘audience’, as a collective with common attributes.’ (Pearson, 2010, p, 175) In a conventional theatre the actors have the power, they are the ones that are the sole captives of the audiences attention. What we have decided is to give the audience the power. By performing our whole piece in a shop window with no sound to attract audience, it is the passers by who have the power to stop and view the performance, or even to turn their head and acknowledge it. We realized we don’t need to ‘spoon feed’ audiences and entice them into a performance space, as human interaction is more complex than that. If we as performers create something engaging it wont go unnoticed. ‘All three sets of relationship, performer/performer, performer/spectator, spectator/spectator, become part of an active matrix of interaction and available for negotiation.’ (Pearson, 2010, p, 175)

Goffman, E (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, London: Penguin Books

Pearson, M (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.