Aching today after an exhausting but exhilarating show last night at Wistaston Memorial Hall. This was the third live event and each one is different. My mum said later than the mood was a little subdued at first, perhaps this was true. Perhaps because of the light outside made the night feel early. Perhaps I needed some sort of engaging uplifting start to bring the night to life. The evening was complicated and disrupted a bit by the comings and goings of many people during the performances. This is always a potential problem. Of course, we want as many people to see the show as possible and locking the doors at 7pm wouldn't be a good idea, but people arriving or leaving in the middle of acts is always disruptive to flow. Perhaps the skill of the performer is to lead off these things. Part of the aim of ArtSwarm is to refine the skills of performance on a stage environment that is different and more challenging than that of an intimate venue made up from friends.
This night was broadly a mix of poetry, music, and the odd video and slideshow, with more music than previous events. Generally I tried to interleave poetry and music. I opened the show by singing Life Beyond Mars to a backing track that I designed with some spaces for live synth playing. I did that again with One Day at the end of the show, which went much better than I had expected - I've not sang the decade old song before and I had to learn the words in the day. Live bands work better than backing tracks because everyone can react with each other and the audience a bit, creating a dialogue, a teasing of emotion. Backing tracks can be designed to react with the singer though, if carefully made. Usually, karaoke style music is really badly and electronically sequenced to kill any feeling, but acts that create their own backing tracks can make these sound as good as those by any live band. Ideally some control over the playback itself is needed, and some live elements too. Of course, even a deejay playing records can be a performance, so all is not doomed.
For my parts I developed a few sections where I encouraged audience participation. I handed round a toy horse with wings and sang "Fly horsie fly... over the fields of Birmingham..." and other places, asking members of the audience to pass it around and suggest placed for the horse to fly to. This was one of the most interactive parts. It made me think that a performance has two levels of interaction: hard and soft.
Hard interaction is like my example, where the performer demands some response from the audience, from Bruce Forsyth (who I quoted on the night) saying "Nice to see you to see you..." and the audience must answer "Nice!", or a pantomime "He's behind you!" response, or an audience might even sing, such as in Vic Reeves' shows, or asked to pick a card in a magic act.
Soft interaction is perhaps even more powerful, but more difficult to master. It one that has an equal level of participation but it is silent and emotional. The performer must still ask, talk, and answer but in complex ways. This is perhaps the secret of any art.
The quality of the poems and concepts was as good as any previous event. The technical aspects; sound levels, changes between acts, were probably the best of the events so far. I'm still learning in leaps for this sort of thing, as I'm sure the other performers are. For the game-show segment, I connected my camera to Steven Goodwin's projector by HDMI cable to give a live feed.
Perhaps one important thing about these shows is that if they are to succeed, they will always need more audience members than performers, which sounds like an obvious statement, but for many poetry groups and communal music groups this is not the case. It is this challenge and this environment that makes these events different, more challenging, and more exciting to perform at. Performing to friends is easy. The skill, and elation comes from performing to strangers who will judge you.
I ended the night with a sing-along of Tony Christie's Amarillo song, which is more entertainment than 'high art' because it's known and popular and catchy. If it were rare, unknown, and a bit weird sounding, I'm sure it would be considered a masterpiece. Still, the aim of this show is to showcase our original work, and I included this mainly for the benefit of an honoured guest who had left by that time. It was great fun to sing though, and a superbly uplifting song to end the night with. It's the communal aspect that made the song art.
I slept with vivid dreams and strange nightmares and have spent today recovering physically while documenting last night's event, and preparing for the next one, inspired with ideas and new energy.
