Overall I believe our performance was successful, creative and meaningful. I would say the difficulty with our performance lay with the element of audience participation which we were aware was a risk. I felt it was executed well as we had prepared for any problems. As we had created a script and a narrative for our performance we had provided ourselves with a structure so if any audience participation started to show signs of going awry, each actor could improvise to ensure our performance stayed on track. On reflection we had a larger audience then our desired number of between twenty and thirty. If we had been more aware of this before the performance day, it would have been interesting to perform twice but to a smaller audience, so everyone could see without difficulty. I also think that the more times this piece is performed the stronger it would become as we would become more in tune with the audience.
A prominent idea that we discovered towards the end of creating this performance was that there was a real divide between male and female, with the males being more dominate in the piece. I think this was an interesting aspect that we had not considered as we had done this subconsciously. I think that it gave another dynamic to our performance regarding sexism which is also still relevant in today’s society.
I am proud of my portrayal of Unknown User/ Jane Smith because I wanted the audience to be fearful of what would happen to her and I think it was important to blend a sense of innocence and naivety into my character. I felt this was most effective when my character is hacked in the V.I.P toilets because the audience hear it and don’t see the act. This makes it more eerie and made my character mire vulnerable as they are invited to use their imagination on what is happening to her. I liked that a lot of our performance was an open dialogue with our audience and allowed gain different experiences from our performance which I think is more interesting than forcing them to have a certain opinion. It also meant that people still talked about our performance days later so the performance was more of an event.
Two of my favourite sequences occurred toward the end of the performance. Firstly, the use of blue feathers in Main Room created a string visual image for the audience. It highlighted the vulnerability and sadness of my character as I threw the feathers in the air and then covered myself an the audience. This reminded me of a snow globe and i was trapping them in this glass globe with me so they understood my sadness and vulnerability, as well as lack of control. It also meant the connotations of social media sites were abundant because the feathers were Facebook/Twitter blue. Secondly, I liked the Basement because we were basically chewing up half the audience and spitting them back out onto the streets. I think this made a strong but unexpected ending which hopefully left them not only wanting more, but also allowed them to think about how they are being manipulated by the social media.