As our group want to explore vulnerability on society intimacy is an element which can take its place in our performance as you can become vulnerable when exposing intimacy. What makes a performance intimate? This is a question asked by many performers. Can an intimate performance happen with a big audience? There are many ways to explore intimacy in performance, and this is exactly what we did in one of the workshops at university.
The questions explored when exploring the notion of intimacy in performance, does it give the performance a sense of honesty? Are the audience more honest when it’s just a one to one performance? I chose to do a one to one performance in the workshop exploring loss; this is a subject very close to my heart as I have been through loss a lot since I was very young and find this subject very intimate for me. Letting people know into my mind when exploring loss and letting them know how I experience it. Maria Chatzichichristodoulou and Rachel Zerihan describe intimacy as,
“Intimacy enables two sentient beings, who feel comfortable enough with each other on an emotional and/or physical level, to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange”
(2012, p. 1).Taking this into account I devised a one to one performance with 5 minute slots. Before I started the performance I asked the spectator to think about this question through out the performance, “if you were to see a relative that died now, what would you say to them?” In front of me I had two pieces of paper which had numbers on it, all the audience had to do was choose one and I would describe in detail how one of my relatives died in detail and what I would say to them if they were here now. The two people I chose to talk about in my performance was my little sister that died and my nana, two very close people who died very differently, one from cancer and one from meningitis. Letting the audience into my mind left me feeling very vulnerable, letting them see me breakdown I feel was quite intimate. Relating back to what Chatzichichristodoulou and Zerihan said “to reveal something about themselves and connect in some form of meaningful exchange” (2012, p.1) I asked the spectator to write down what they would say to a certain relative if they where here now and told them they could take it away or let me read. 50% of the people that came took it away and the other let me read it. The audiences reaction to my performance was different every time, some cried, some just stared and some showed emotion towards me and wanted to hug me. I feel I got an honest reaction from everyone cause I had such a variety of reactions.
This experience really helped me in relation to my group’s performance as it; let me explore vulnerability and intimacy in a different way. Instead of exploring intimacy of the body I exposed my mind to other people, some who I didn’t know well enough to tell. This made my relationships closer to the people who heard.
Chatzichichristodoulou, Maria and Zerihan, Rachel (2012) Intimacy Across Visceral and Digital Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.