My friends’ impressions:

Friend 1

-really disliked the sections of not knowing what to do, or rather, what she could do

-didn’t know bailey’s thing was about hiccups or that carina’s thing was about the syrian refugee crisis until someone told her later

-geography board thing broke her heart

-super impressed w/ Omar’s knowledge of the black panthers + his puns

-felt like kimmy’s ledge piece ‘got me’ as in understood her

-other impression of bailey’s thing ‘it was weird because it seemed like he should be the vulnerable one because he was naked in a box but once you put your head in the hole you’re the vulnerable one’

-several pieces ‘made me think about words’, paige’s genesis video, sarah’s federalist papers

-Would you recommend devised theatre to a friend? ‘I would recommend it to my friend who I see theatre things with’

Friend 2 (who had to leave midway through the milling-about portion)

-was one of the first people led into the room. Entertained herself by trying to figure out if the music was truly from beauty and the beast or a facsimile

-liked gabrielle’s letter thing

-volume issues with some of the ipads

-Paige’s OCD poster ‘i was into that’

-Kimmy’s barking was ‘scarily realistic’

-liked Paige’s genesis video. She saw it because gabrielle (a good friend of hers) directed her to the closet. same deal with bailey’s piece, saw it because a friend of hers in the class specifically directed her to it

-Would you recommend devised theatre to a friend? ‘not to anyone specifically empirical’

Mine:

The people I invited were both some of the first to be led into the room, and standing there for 5-10 minutes blindfolded with no direction while loud music looped was irksome. Both described an internal battle about whether or not to take off the blindfold, because they were standing there for so long that eventually they were sure that they had done something wrong and were screwing up the performance by not taking it off. Both eventually took it off, saw that everyone still had theirs on, and felt more bad for having screwed up the performance in that way. I don’t think we can make people endure stuff like that unless there’s some kind of point directly related to the thing they endure. For that piece, it seemed like the unreasonable duration was an unintended consequence, not related to the content of the piece, but for the people who came in early, the experience became all about the duration. They also both described feeling tentative about interacting with stuff for the rest of the presentation because of it.

I think a lot of things would be solved by just spending more time preparing for the presentation. We might have devoted more thought to the audience experience, specifically how we translate stuff from the context of being seen in class by each other to a presentation context. When we saw each other’s ELI5 pieces we for the most part knew their subjects ahead of time. The experience of watching Carina’s piece when we know it’s about the syrian refugee crisis is very different from watching it and trying to figure out what it’s about the whole time. We also might have communicated with each other better- I wanted to spend the whole presentation in the electrics closet without the audience knowing I was there, only to emerge at moments of my choosing, but I didn’t tell anyone except gabrielle. So maddie using the closet for the end of the opening piece and john checking twice to see if I was okay messed it up, but they had no way of knowing that. Actually maybe the communication thing is just a problem with me.