I conducted some further research on the work of Adrian Howells as I wanted to know more about his performances and how he uses different types of transaction. Currently, the transaction in our piece takes place in the form of cake being given to the audience-participants for helping us with our performance. However, I felt this type of transaction to be too impersonal and too forced rather than artistic and meaningful, yet the use of the cake as an incentive problematises this notion of meaningfulness, as it’s meaningful to us to get people to take part.
As a result of this, I read the article From Talking to Silence: A Confessional Journey by Dee Heddon and Adrian Howells, in the hope of finding out more about transaction. Heddon discusses how “the boundary between performer and spectator dissolves in the process of exchange, an exchange that asks for a very committed and at times vulnerable sort of spectatorship” (Heddon, 2011). Not only that, I found that in most of Howell’s work, exchange is “consistently dialogic […] performed within a wider cultural context of the mass-mediatization of the personal and private made public” (Howell, 2011). The use of dialogical exchange in Howell’s work is primarily used to help the audience-participants feel comfortable with sharing.
On Wednesday we wet out into Speaker’s Corner with signs advertising “FREE CAKE”. To our surprise (and contrary to similar experiments we have done in the past) a lot of people came over to talk to us. We generated more interest than ever before, simply by advertising something for free. I was delighted that we finally had participants, but somewhat disheartened with the lack of sustenance in our part of the transaction. Us giving out free cake lacks meaning and generosity, whilst somewhat telling people we’re only doing this for us, not them – the opposite of our purpose. So, we decided to ask our classmates.
Back in the seminar room we talked our classmates through our performance and our ideas, and asked them specifically about our use of transaction – what do you think to it? What does it say to you? What could we do instead? Some suggested that the transaction from our side is giving them the means to protest, giving them “free power”. Could we give them something physical to symbolise this? Perhaps a slip of paper with something written on it. Another person suggested giving them “free advice” on what they’d written down, like an advice slip you get from a cash machine, which are so present in Speaker’s Corner (this too plays on the idea of ‘transaction’ as that is what a cash machine is built for). Other more general ideas around our performance were born through this discussion, such as the placing of the placards into plant pots and allowing the audience-participant to do that themselves if they so wished – they are letting their idea grow and are nourishing/nurturing it. This triggered the idea of someone – perhaps one of us – going round at certain intervals and watering the soil each placard is planted in. Furthermore, the idea arose about having smaller signs branching off the larger placards once we run out to create a physical representation of a tree.
Works Cited
Heddon, D. and Howells, A. (2011) From talking to silence: a confessional journey. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 33 (1) 1-12.