Further to Mark O’ Thomas’ question on Jimmy’s post about performance space:

There was a discussion within our group about pathways. There are ways we could have used game/chaos theory and they could have worked well. For example, we could have had our audience issued with a single dice and a map of numbered rooms where performances of individual scenes were to take place. Our audients could have shaken the dice and rolled, for example, a four. The object then would have been to find room number four on the map and go there to see the scene in that space. After seeing this scene, they would then roll another number and continue in this way until they had seen all of the scenes we were to perform.

The advantage of this approach is that each member of the audience sees the same play but, due to the differing order in which they see the scenes, each has an individual experience of the play and draws their own ideas and conclusions about it. To me, this is a wonderful concept.

However, a disadvantage would be that the actors for each scene would repeatedly perform the same scene, who knows how many times, before they got any respite. Each time they performed it would undoubtedly be different (that’s chaos theory for you, I guess!). But would that be an advantage or disadvantage?

As it is, we decided to make our performance a little more structured. The nature of the LPAC building’s architecture is great and offers many little nooks and crannies in which to perform. However, our cast really isn’t big enough to apply the random approach discussed above, at least, not with any credibility. Our performance would have been a series of scenes which were only a minute long, due to the nature of the text and the number of actors in our scene. By the time our audience have made their way through all the scenes, our 10-15 minute assessment slot (for our Dramaturgy module) would have been well exceeded.

We feel that if we give the audience a structured path by leading them ourselves (in character), then our piece would flow with better continuity and our time limit for this assessment wouldn’t be too badly affected. The only disadvantage, for me, is that the audience don’t get that individual experience, but this is perhaps something we can look into for our full length production in May.