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Comment by Deborah Powell on August 22, 2009 at 12:43

By all means John, call me Stella ... but really my name is XXX ?

Comment by National Theatre Wales on August 22, 2009 at 12:08

I loved 'Small Worlds' precisely for that experience of exploring the detail of a story without anyone else to judge.
Stella, I think you are right, both the intimate and the large scale have a 'tactile' appeal, and in looking at Debate and Resond, that 'tactile' experience should probably be a key ingredient.

Comment by Matthew David Scott on August 19, 2009 at 6:24

The first incidence I remember of Slung Low thinking about doing 'one-on-one' stuff a few years back was while developing our show 'Small Worlds'. Because our stuff is devised it is always difficult to pin-point the exact genesis of certain decisions but, for me personally, I remember the 'one-on-one' nature of that show certainly being discussed (amongst many other things) in terms of a desire to allow school pupils to 'honestly' experience it. In other words, for them to be allowed the space for intimacy with the piece.

'Small Worlds' was a commission originally intended to go into schools and, having a great deal of experience taking pupils to see theatre, I especially wanted it to reach the members of the audience that wouldn't usually 'allow' themselves to engage for fear of looking too keen in front of their peers. I'm not talking about the fear of 'Audience Participation' in the terms John mentions here, but in terms of participating at all in the communal event that is theatre.

Putting the performance of 'Small Worlds' in a series of totally self-contained spaces in which the audience member would be alone allowed us to really attempt to deal with this attitude. We even took it to a stage where another physical human being actually taking up the same space as the audience member was arrived at gradually: from voice, to image on screen, to audience sharing the screen, to shadow and the sharing of props, to eventually a live actor. 'Intimacy' too can be quite frightening and so had to be arrived at through a series of avatars less concrete than 'performer' and 'audience'.

However, intimacy can also be about the 'abstract' proximity an audience has to the action taking place - proximity to the intangible 'presences' in a performance such as narrative and structure; to the story itself. Although one-on-one experiences are often up close and personal, they are equally often bereft of any human physical presence at all. Intimacy doesn't have to be a concrete, physical kind. These one-on-one shows allowed people to become 'active' parts of the unfolding performance while remaining what seemed like 'passive' spectators. And not in terms of understanding or simply piecing the 'story' together; the audience became an intimate part of the show - in some cases they became the performance itself.

However, this was more about how a show was constructed than the number of people involved. In Slung Low, we quickly realised that we often like to give the audience member(s) an essential role in the show, even if it is one they may not realise has been essential until the end of the performance. And although this is a device well-suited to one-on-one performance it is certainly not exclusive to it. We are, for instance, just as interested in a how to make an entire town adopt this role.

So the 'short adventure for one' experiments of 'Small Worlds' and later 'Helium', allowed us to develop ideas about how were might like to utilise the audience and how this might drive our future work in certain directions. We also had wonderful feedback from audiences. Therefore despite not only being one-on-one. but for whole swathes of the performance also heavily media-led, the exchange of ideas and formation of a 'community' still all seemed to be happen in these shows. They also all had, very much at their hearts, a story.

These pieces ended up being was what we always thought they might be - definitely still theatre after all!

Comment by Deborah Powell on August 16, 2009 at 1:11

Well, perhaps its that 'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction'
or something like that. Perhaps increasingly digitised lives need a tactile, grounded counterpoint ... that could be why there's interest in both Intimate Theatre and the outside, larger-scale participative theatre.
Could also mean that NTW's Debate/Respond themes might find themselves very much in the right place at the right time in the public's eyes too.

Comment by National Theatre Wales on August 13, 2009 at 23:06

It's amazing how many people I know have been on the plinth! It might be an interesting survey to find out whether it has attracted a high percentage of theatre folk! I have to say I think it's a fantastic project. My mum is quite addicted to watching it on the web, though I suspect she might have gone to bed before your 3am slot Peter!
Deborah, thanks for the link to Lyn Gardner's article on Intimate Theatre. I think the choice of the word 'Intimacy' is a good one. I think it indicates that one of the things we are most looking for from theatre in the digi-global age is the presence of the performer. Intimate theatre takes both the presence and, in some ways, the artifice of theatre to an extreme: we really are here with this person, and yet this person is not really here, but a pretence/a character. (The Ontroerend Goed show, 'Internal', really works with this, in quite a disturbing way). I didn't really notice in my blot post that I was linking the intimate and the outdoor into one thing; while actually they are on two very different scales. But both seem to bring us closer to our own bodies in a way that maybe traditional theatre doesn't. Hmmm. None of these thoughts quite link up, but maybe in the wonderful group-intelligence world of the web someone can make sense of them for me...

Comment by Peter Cox MBE on August 13, 2009 at 19:06

Hi John

Just back from being on Anthony Gormley's Trafalgar Square plinth for an hour at 3.00am in the morning. I know there is a lot of debate about whether this is art but I now know from personal experience that it is definitely theatre - in the open air, in one of the most extraordinary venues in the world, with a self-selecting audience who pay nothing and stay for as little or as long as the experience engages them. Story was crucial to what we tried to do - loose and simple enough for me to be able to respond to audience and outside stimulus but still important. Given that it was 3.00am I was amazed by how many people came to watch, then stayed for the whole hour - and engaged actively through conversation about the piece, both amongst themselves and with me and Chaz the puppet way up above them. They also joined in by making music and dancing. Will blog more about the experience when supporting images come in. Chaz even took a bow at the end of her 'performance' and clapped the musicians who came to the square to play for her for the whole hour. Then she yawned and was ready for bed. Extraordinary experience!

Comment by Deborah Powell on August 13, 2009 at 9:50

There are enough recent examples of these experiments to say we are witnessing a new trend (or is that bandwagon?) Participation is one thing, but it seems that it's intimate participation that is de rigeur ...