Saturday, May 29, 2010

Organic Self#2

While in presenting Organic Self for the Interim Show I had aimed at making the relationship between performers and audience members evident through the interaction of sound (produced by spectators) and movement (produced by performers), Organic Self#2 was entirely about audience and their interaction with one another.
It focused on touch and hearing, while vision was eliminated at the very beginning by blindfolding all participants. The 'flute players' were seperated in two small groups of six people each, facing each other within the space. Were they not blindfolded, they would have been able to see each other and their reactions would have been largely dependent on seeing. Once vision was eliminated, they could feel more free to interact and would feel less inhibited. Of course, this meant that they would have to trust their sense of touch to understand how the organ worked. Considering that vision is the sense we rely on most, everyone took their time until they realised how things were to work. Especially those sitting in the back row, whose 'task' was to pass the signal by touching the people in front of them, left themselves be entirely manipulated and rarely passed the signal; this was very different when audience members were not deprived of seeing in Organic Self.
On overall people enjoyed it. No doubt some were uncomfortable in a situation like this, exactly becasue we do everything by looking first and then turning to our other senses as reference. Somebody said they were 'unnerved' by the fact they couldn't see, while another said 'It made me feel calm'. Surely, all of us discover how their other senses work when we are deprived of one of them.
Some pictures, courtesy of Liushan Lin





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