Often having lots of ideas can be a good thing to have and can lead to vast amounts of work being created. However, on reflection there always seems to be a hidden idea or a hidden underlining theme which links all those initial ideas together. As a group we can came up with a multitude of ideas which on reflection could all be substantial as ideas for performance in the Site of the high street, however, in analysing the through-line of these ideas it was evident that words, the personal and interaction were the principals which anchored these ideas. What I found excting about this process was that by identifying these aspects it led us as a group to create a brand new idea that we were all ready to jump at and experiment with.
We knew that certain elements of this idea had been performed before in a prior year such as to ask for free hugs and hi fives in the high street, but we still wanted to use this method as an experiment in order to gauge how participatory our audience on the high street could be. We started off at the bridge area of the high street (where we believed to be the busiest part). However, in order to prove this, we moved the experiment after some time further up the high street, beyond the arch into the more rich district of Lincoln. The engagement of people on that part of the high street proved to be less so than people that were passing by the bridge. So in essence, through this experiment we found our site and to a degree saw that a participatory performance in that space on the high street could in fact work.
Our idea that we experimented with on the high street was to use paper signs that invited the audience to interact with his. Our starting points was when I stood in the middle of the high street holding a sign in front of me that I had no idea what was written on it. I personally thought this was particularly interesting as all I could really judge on the signs nature was the audience’s reactions as they passed by. Some were smiling and laughed, others looked fairly confused and it was hard to gauge what kind of statement or question was written on the piece of paper that I was holding.
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