WHAT ARE OTHER PEOPLE LIKE WHEN THEY ARE THEMSELVES - PART 2

(rehearsal process, 8 mins, JUNE 2016)

“Who is playing in whose story and who is entertaining whom?”

At the close of the improvisation session in part1 the participants are instructed to enter the marked-out performance space of part2. They are presented with five chairs with accompanying scripts (read more) and are invited to sit on the one that corresponds to the character they were given in the improvisation. They have hopefully brought their own narratives, feelings and memories to this stage and will now begin to speak lines of another person, known to them only by name but shaped by their own lives and relationships. They are now part of a group therapy re-enactment and a rehearsal, where they are held in an encounter performing themselves, someone they know and someone unknown.

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“There is no way to distinguish overt re-enactment from the kind we perform without knowing it...the whole world to some degree is re-performance” (Widrich, M. 'Is the “Re” in Re-enactment the “Re” in Re-performance?', Performing the Sentence, 2014)

The scripted performance ends and I, shifting from the facilitator character back to the artist, encourage the participants to talk about the experience of the improvisation and the performance. This is the key part to What Are Other People Like..., as I now peel away the layers of the imagined and enforced characters to see what kind of empathy and co-operation lies beneath. Any witnesses of the event can now see a real show. I chose to use children's chairs for the piece to add a heightened level of body awareness to the encounter, triggered when participants are asked to sit down. The style of chair eludes to the institution/community centre often used for encounter group sessions and when these are placed within the taped-off square an image of a mock-up of a theatre-set is created to emphasise that this is a space for performance above anything else.