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| Questionnaire for performers directly after a show. (Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2014) |
Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels, 2014 Stuk, Leuven, season 2012 / 2013*
How was the audience tonight?
audience observations
The questionnaire How was the Audience tonight? is part of a long-term project called Audience Observations, which considers the performative qualities of audiences in theaters, concert halls and elsewhere.
Initiated by artist David Helbich, this project was running for the first time sporadically throughout the season 2012/13 in the art center Stuk in Leuven, where 28 artists returned one or more answered documents. During Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2014 it is integrated into the Quantifiction project by SPIN (see page 24 in the KFDA program).
Quantifiction looks at 'the tendency to measure all areas of society in economic terms (productivity, profitability, return on investment…), which has also seeped into the art world. The value of art as a ‘product’ is increasingly expressed in figures.'
In this context How was the Audience tonight? serves as a constructive counter strategy: it dives right into the complexity of hard-to-grasp knowledge, hidden in the backstage of the artists' ways of speaking.
The questionnaire is given to the artists of Kunstenfestivaldesarts "right after their show" and thus takes place mainly in the backstage areas of this festival. Still, it feeds back to the audience by a presentation throughout the festival in the SPIN space (festival center), with a selection of (anonymous) quotes.
The aim of a high quantity of answers is to accumulate conversational fragments until our relation between artists & audience, performers & spectators, actors & observers shines in endless diversity and peculiar detail.
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Check out the related project: Keine-Pause: audience observations (performance)
and Seated: audience observations (video, here under)
* For one season the arts center Stuk in Leuven/B is following my long-term project "'PUBLIEK', artistic strategies for the performativity of the open space" on the influence of audiences on performances and vice versa.
A two year 'trajectory', supported with a fund (trajectsubsidie) from the VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) containing theoretical and practical works and partnerships to reach a deeper insight into the performativity of public spaces and the publicity of performance spaces.
