When I walked into Hannah Jane Walker & Chris Thorpe’s show I Wish I Was Lonely last night at the LPAC, my first thought was oh no. Please, not another avant garde piece of nonsense. The chairs were set out in a haphazard fashion across Studio 2; there was no set, only a couple of microphones at either side of the room. We had already been asked for our mobile phone numbers as we came into the room, and were told we were allowed – encouraged, even – to keep them with us and on during the performance.

Once in a blue moon does a show genuinely surprise me. This show, I am happy to say, is an addition to that very small list. Walker and Thorpe’s conduction of the some thirty to forty people in attendance was exquisite, leaving almost everyone comfortable enough to put their phones in the middle of the space and even take calls during the show. The way they handled the subject material – the use of technology, particularly of the mobile variety, and how it has changed and reshaped our society to the point where we are never really away from each other even when we’re physically apart – was with the utmost care and trepidation. I certainly didn’t walk away feeling as though technology had ruined my life, and that a time before it was better, but rather with a wider understanding of both the positives and negatives.

Walking out of the show, I felt a connection to the other audience members that I rarely feel when leaving the theatre. It’s ironic, how a show about how technology could potentially be driving us physically apart while keeping us forever together left me feeling physically connected to a group of strangers. We engaged together; we laughed together, we felt sadness, grief. In allowing us to keep our phones present in the performance, we no longer worried about what could be happening in our pocket while we watched. In including our phones, we were more engaged with the world around us – a feat, I feel, was extraordinary.

Based on a list of instructions, our aim this week was to pick a task and perform it. Alys and I chose to “leave messages of friendliness and enchantment on trees”. We modified the task a little – there are surprisingly few trees in Lincoln Central – and instead stuck the messages to lamp-posts and phone boxes. We had video evidence of this but I can’t upload it, so I’ve screen-grabbed some of the footage instead:

In her work Pervasive Games: Representations of Existential In-Between-Ness, Jane Tapper explores a great many things, most notably that of an “in-between-ness [that] generates an existential dialogue into which players and non-players are propelled.” (Tapper, 2014, p. 143) The idea of performance is called into question here – is an audience really an audience if they aren’t aware, and is a performance therefore really a performance, and not a performative act, if there is no audience? Is a performance ruined if the “players” have to explain what they are doing to “non-players”? Or is there, as Tapper suggests, a “dialogue” created between “players” and “non-players” that begins with “the sudden recognition of the odd behavior of the players in quotidian space [that] generates feelings of uncertainty, danger, even fear amongst the non-players” (Tapper, 2014, p. 147) to create an even bigger sense of relief once the “non-players” realise what they have just witnessed is a performance and therefore not reality?

In our workshop this week we investigated further the potential relationship between performers and audience with Makey Makey machines. This can be something as simple as a banana hooked up via crocodile clips to a computer, and using small electric charges and complete circuits, becomes a drum set. The potential uses for this technology in a pervasive sense are endless, and would offer a unique performer/audience dynamic in our final performance.

Tapper, J. (2014) Pervasive Games: Representations of Existential In-Between-Ness.Themes in Theatre, 8, 143-161

Site specific performance is a term and therefore concept that is notoriously difficult to define. The details of said concept seem to change all the time; Pearson suggests that, while more traditional performance “is scheduled” and “the audience is fixed”, in site specific performance “there may be a transitory discontinuity in the social fabric” and “the audience may be incidental – those present in the same place at the same time – and obdurate”. (Pearson, 2010, p. 17)

In our performance we aim to take the concept of site specific performance one step further and include Pervasive Media; this is technology that aids in the betterment of understanding in a certain situation. With a starting theme of liberation and two possible sites in which to perform (Brayford Pond and the High Street), we hope to interact with a great number of people and impress enough to then go on to perform our piece to a much larger audience at the Lincoln Frequency Festival later in the year.

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