In the early morning hours October 15th, 2009, I placed five 11"x17" hand-written signs in high-traffic locations of the University of Hartford campus. Each sign gave a single instruction: "Look Up", "Look Down", "Look Left", "Look Over There" (with an arrow), and "Look Behind You."
This piece is intended as a follow-up to my previous performance using index cards with instructions to manipulate an audience, in effect making the audience perform and the performer an observer of the results. In this piece, I did not observe the results of my actions, leaving to chance that someone will view the sign and follow the instructions presented. Placing the signs in areas of high foot traffic, making them large and prominent, and keeping the instructions simple but unusual (for a sign) were methods employed to increase the odds of someone following the instruction.
Assuming that a person noticed the sign then followed the instructions, it can be said that my actions the night before in some way manipulated that person into doing my bidding. Even if no one followed the instructions posted, I can state my intent as merely wanting people to take notice of the sign in some way, and then with a high amount of certainty can consider the piece a success (barring wind or some other force removing all the signs and depositing each of them in a place where they will never be encountered again).
Poker
This piece was in response to an assignment to "tell a story." In order to do so, I took on some of the "classic" persona of a poker player, and presented to the audience a single hand of poker. The audience members were seated as individual players, told the game was texas hold 'em, given stacks of poker chips, and dealt cards by myself, who played the dealer. In this way there were two levels of involvement - myself as storyteller with an audience, and myself as a poker dealer with players (enhanced by the fact that the members at this point likely believed that they were actually going to play the game).
After encouraging each person to look at their cards, I then began narrating the game, describing each player's action and placing their bets or folded cards into the middle. I then dealt the community cards and narrated each round of betting. In addition to giving the plays, I began analyzing the actions from the perspective of the other players, describing what each person may hold or may be thinking. In this way I was inhabiting three roles - the dealer, who described the play ("action to you", "3000 chips in the pot"), the storyteller ("you raise to a total of 500" "you decide to fold"), and the minds of the players ("if he did have an overpair, you probably have him beat"). The audience is now just that - observers with no real influence on the action, despite what may have been suggested at the beginning.
The hand came to showdown, and I then described the actual intent behind the actions of each player, comparing that to what I gave as an analysis. The performance lasted about 15 minutes.
Light and Sound
For this piece I placed myself in between a speaker attached to a laptop producing high-frequency attenuated white noise and a light attached to an automatic dimmer at the "off" setting. For exactly 60 minutes the light linearly increased to its maximum setting while the sound linearly decreased to zero. I was positioned in a cross-legged posture, with the light to my left and the speaker and one wall of the room to my right. As the light increased my silhouette formed on the wall.
The very start of the piece included two elements - the sound and myself. When the piece began the light entered as a third element, slowly trading places with the sound. The end of the piece saw the sound disappear, with the silhouette created by the light taking its place.
Manipulation I
In this piece I wrote a number of actions on a large set of index cards, separated them into individual piles, and placed them on a table with instructions for each person to pick up a stack and perform the actions written. The class decided to following my directions, and began to perform.
The actions themselves were meant to be comical - examples include "do 30 jumping jacks" and "shout someone's name to get their attention." Events were loosely timed as to create interesting interactions, but mixed up cards and actions performed out of order prevented these from happening, creating some interesting, though unplanned, situations. Each deck also included certain actions of varying levels of extremity, some which were tame enough to be performed ("bite someone's toe"), but many that were skipped.
The inspiration for this performance was literature on various psychological tests done in the 20th century on the tendency of people to obey authority figures. I used my roles as member of the class and "performer" of the day to convince the class to follow my instructions. In other settings it would be unlikely that anyone would do what was presented, or at least to the degree in which the class participated. As noted before, though, not every action was performed - the class's drive to create a good performance and participate for my piece's sake had limits. This did not cause a stop to the performance, though - people merely skipped the cards and continued onto the next one, actively adapting the piece to meet their own standards.
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