Yannick Trapman-O'Brien
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June Archive Highlight - "Make Him An Offer(ing) He Can't Refuse"
🕑 Added 2024-06-30 22:52:16 +0000 UTCJune Archive Highlight - "Make Him An Offer(ing) He Can't Refuse"
In celebration of the first announcement of the Undersigned Summer tour (New York, Philly, Boston, Salem, and Los Angeles, get ready for it!), I thought I’d cover a favorite topic through the lens of one of the gradually developing aspects of Undersigned.
MILD UNDERSIGNED SPOILERS BELOW THIS LINE
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In Undersigned, participants make a mysterious appointment about which very little is known save that it will involve “an invocation, a blindfold, and a pointed discussion,” and that each participant may rest assured that “you stand to gain as much as you are willing to venture.” Indeed, aside from a date, time and place one of the only instructions given before arrival is a suggestion:
“You are invited to bring an offering to assist in the process, but are not required to do so. The most successful offerings are small in size—able to fit in one hand— but not small in meaning.”
This offering serves a few different purposes for the show, narrative, emotional, and flatly logistical. Some participants take it as an opportunity to bring something they wish to leave behind them: some bring an object of comfort or safety: some leap at the rare chance to do “show-and-tell” as an adult: many bring nothing at all.
Because it’s hard to build a successful experience when the first narrative beat is “you forgot your homework” (and because any homework demanded of an audience should be regarded as a very energy intensive ask), it was important to me from the start that participants have options they can choose from on sight. For early playtests I tried to cut across a broad range of possibilities, surprising and less so: early playtesters found a black cloth on a vitrine with a key, a poker chip, two choice books, a few religious texts, and a pocket copy of the US Constitution. All of these were things from my personal life that I held some meaning or attachment to. Next we added to that by receiving small “tokens” from some of our playtest spaces - a knick-knack from the City Reliquary, a Zoltar token from Liberty Magic in Pittsburgh. But almost immediately, our collection began to grow from people choosing to leave their own offerings behind. Sometimes this felt like roleplay; a satisfying conclusion to the story they had authored in their time with us. Mostly, it felt like a show of gratitude; “thank you, this meant this much to me.” I tweaked instructions to ensure that participants knew this was a choice and not a requirement, and then leaned into the gradual stream of gifts.
-which quickly was not gradual at all, especially once we began running simultaneous performances, sometimes seeing as many as 12 participants a day (a STAGGERING throughput for my line of work). And all of this brings me to one of my favorite opportunities in immersive and interactive performance: Accumulation.
Any space or experience where humans flow through, they leave a mark - words scrawled on walls, stones stacked in a cairn, grooves worn in a set of stone steps over hundreds of years. If you’re thoughtful and create an invitation (and even sometimes if you aren’t, or don’t), participants in immersive experiences will help create a record of their experiences - mostly commonly in words, objects, or other physical marks. I think these opportunities to say “I was here” are an excellent chance to allow a participant to deepen, affirm and extend their own experience, and often they are a phenomenal means of increasing production value. When I was in University, I did a show and some workshops with Dan Safer and his dance theater company Witness Relocation. Dan loves seeing real actions on stage; he’ll often have one of his actors come onstage and try to do 50 push-ups, or eat a whole box of donuts, or try to balance a shoe or object or other dancer on their head. Dan finds actual human effort fascinating, and because it’s so striking and specific, he believes audiences will project their own meaning onto it. I find I feel the same about people’s stuff. The objects and artifacts and thoughts that participants leave behind in my experiences have an intimacy and specificity and strangeness that I doubt I could replicate - and I’m rarely inclined to try. The closest I get is seeding objects, like our playtest tokens, almost all of which were quickly replaced by real participants bringing something similar or nearly identical. As I’ve often said - “the story of what really happened is generally more interesting - and almost always a hell of a lot easier to keep track of, narratively.”
Eventually you pass the point of any Sorites Paradox and you just end up with an indisputable Heap
Offering Tray at a glance - June 2024
—and what’s fun about a HEAP is it creates new problems to solve, and new opportunities. We’re currently toes-over-the-line past which the offerings don’t actually fit on the tray we’ve been using for their display. This invites questions of curation: do we show just a few, or expand the gallery space? Do we cluster like objects, such that “a key” becomes “this bowl of keys?” What used to be a split-second choice between 10 objects now may be better suited to careful consideration while in a waiting room. Similarly, as emergent participant patterns are discovered, they can suggest changes for audience and actor alike. When we noticed that some offerings tend to be chosen again and again (people just love Zoltar), we experimented with letting each offering be used only once in a day. This resulted in an odd little pile of offerings at the end of each show day, which proved such a striking little altar to the generosity and courage of participants that my actors and I now end every show day by arranging these chosen offerings in order and saying a quick word of thanks.
As the size and nature of Accumulating Things grows and changes over time, they provide a gentle but steady pressure on a piece to continue to evolve, and on creators to reflect on the show that’s occurring, as opposed to the one that was intended.
