Living gallery - Performance

Our living gallery exhibition went really well. We were able to produce something that most people understood and were eager to take part in. We had a Science beaker which held all of the questions that the audience should ask us. Everyone apart from two people understood what to do when they entered the room. This was most likely because ask people entered we all pointed towards the beaker and the rest was pretty self explanatory.

However, there was a couple that entered the room and were clueless. Mason, Nick and myself pointed to the beaker and the couple took a piece of paper and read it in their head and then just stared at us. This of course was not what we wanted to happen and eventually the couple left and saying 'this is awkward'. We hoped that our sign on the door that everyone entered which read 'Come in and ask us a question' would make it obvious as to what the audience members should do. But I think most audience members were oblivious to the sign but just figured out what to do once inside. To have insured that everyone know what to do, we could have verbally told them however this would have ruined our mannequin portrayal.

Something that worked well would have been the fact that practically everyone understood what to do and seemed to enjoy participating in our gallery. If the audience didn't want to participate then our living gallery would have been quite lifeless. Although our piece would have been even better if we had more paint and longer time to clean ourselves up before moving onto our other performance. This is because we were so immersed in our responses to the questions that the paint we were using got everywhere. This meant that by the time it came to cleaning ourselves up, we had to really hurry. It also meant that we didn't have enough time to completely tidy the space we were working in. 

Overall, I was delighted with our living gallery. All of the audiences comments were positive and questions like 'how does southern rail make you feel?' made them laugh and add there own little comments like 'i think I might need some of that black paint (black - Anger). This meant that there was a constant juxtaposition of light laughter and serious questions like 'How do you feel when people are stereotyped?'. Something that was unexpected but made me happiest was probably the fact that some of the audience members decided to ask their own questions. For instance a little boy asked 'How do planes make you feel?'. I think the variety between Mason, Nick and my answers was the most interesting because something that would make me sad, would make Mason angry and Nick jealous. This demonstrated the fact that all of us have different brains that react differently to different things.

Something that I will take from our experiment was the fact that my answers to most of the questions was 'Anger'. Maybe this was just because of the questions that the audience asked but either way it was quite sad. Even things that we are meant to have a positive view on such as the police, responses to them were either sad or angry.