For a few eyes only

Published on Saturday 8 August 2009 00:04

THEATRE has always been a communal experience. From the Greeks who sobbed cathartically at Sophocles, to the Elizabethans who pelted mediocre Hamlets with rotten tomatoes, the point was, they did it together.

But in the 21st century, the rules are being rewritten. Theatre is bigger than ever – like the 5 million epic version of Ben Hur, being staged at the O2 arena in September, with live chariot racing and gladiatorial combat. It is also smaller. Experimental theatre makers are investing a lot of time and energy in exploring how to create work for an audience of one. The Fringe has always provided a home for experiments, and there is a range of shows in Edinburgh this year designed to be experienced individually, from an intimate one-to-one encounter with a single performer to a journey taken with an MP3 player as your guide.

But what is the appeal of these projects? One-to-one theatre is a challenge for both practitioner and performer. It's hardly economical – why sell only one ticket when you could sell 100? – and a show's exposure will, inevitably, be limited. Equally, many potential audience members balk at the idea of interacting with a single performer. In an audience of one, there is nowhere to hide. One of the most talked-about shows on the Fringe in 2007 was The Smile Off Your Face, by the Belgium-based company Ontroerend Goed. Members of the audience, blindfold and in a wheelchair, were taken on an individual journey through a series of encounters with performers.

The company returns this year with Internal, a follow-up show for an audience of five, each of whom will spend time in a one-to-one encounter with a performer, then talk in a group, answering questions about themselves in a format somewhere between speed-dating and group therapy.

It might sound daunting but, according to Joeri Smet, dramaturg for Ontroerend Goed and one of the performers, audiences so far have been more than willing to participate. "People seem to use it as an outlet to be able to talk about personal things without feeling it's going to have consequences in everyday life. We're really surprised by how fast people can tell really intimate things, we feel they have sometimes the need to do so."

He says the key to making successful work of this nature is a strong underlying structure: the audience need to feel their participation matters, but not that they carry the responsibility for the whole show. Smet says: "It's about activating the audience, we consider the audience the creator of meaning, it is a very interactive process. Even in Once And For All … (last year's Fringe First-winning show on a conventional stage) we were activating the audience in that sense, confronting them with the way they look at teenagers."

The Forest Fringe, an experimental venue based at Forest Caf, has several one-to-one pieces. Co-director Andy Field says they are indicative of the cutting-edge work being produced, often by artists who have moved into theatre, film-making, visual art or games design.

The success of such works under the umbrella of venues like Battersea Arts Centre prove to him that today's audiences are more than ready for them. "With the internet, we're seeing an incredible rise in user-generated content. With YouTube and blogs there is instant feedback; the old idea that the artist projects and you receive is being worn away. I think people are tired of being passive, they want to feel they are engaging.

"I think this work comes out of an excitement about discovering what live performance can do that no other medium can do. One-on-one performance is that taken to an epic endpoint. It stays with people for a long time, you can't distance yourself from it. It can't help but become an experience that's happening with you and to you, not just in front of you."

That's certainly true of the work of Glasgow-based Adrian Howells, one of the more radical practitioners of one-to-one theatre. His work at the Fringe, Foot Washing for the Sole, is an intimate one-to-one encounter where he washes the feet of his audience of one. Howells says that as a performer, he became disillusioned with large audiences. "Directors would always articulate this idea that when you are performing, what you're really trying to do is make a direct connection with one person in an audience of 500. I thought, 'Why don't you take away the other 499 and just do it for that one person?' To make it a really special, memorable, cherished experience for that person and me.

"The more we become technologically advanced, the more solitary our existence. We communicate on e-mail and Facebook, but nothing can substitute for the nourishment of interaction with human beings."

Howells, whose past projects have involved holding hands with audience members and holding them on a bed, says his work is "as much about the other person as about me". Most of his audience members are nervous, but steel themselves to the task because "people crave meaningful human contact". There is a risk involved for both parties, but from that sense of risk a shared experience is born. It's therapy almost as much as theatre. People often leave "walking on air", he says (and with clean feet).

The other main strand of theatre for the individual is that which removes the performer altogether. To experience David Leddy's 'Susurrus', you need only don a set of headphones and follow a map around Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden.

Leddy works both in large and small-scale theatre, but says an intimate recording was the ideal medium for Susurrus, with its whispers and secrets.

"I wanted to create the sense of someone whispering in your ear, and we used very sensitive microphones to do that. I think it comes back to the notion of intimacy; there's something very exciting about getting that emotional charge when we have less and less direct contact with other people."

Brighton-based Blast Theory ask rather more of their audience in their show, Rider Spoke, which has a brief Fringe run as part of the British Council Showcase. For a start, you need to get on your bike (bring your own or borrow one from the company).

Equipped with a hand-held, touch-screen computer on the handlebars and an earpiece, cyclists will make their own way around the city, find a secret space and record a secret. On the way, they can hear the secrets that others have recorded.

With a background in location-based gaming and an interest in technology, Blast Theory is keen to explore new ways of communicating with audiences outside theatres. "We have an incredible faith in devices that we carry around and its interesting to make people think about that. We want to create a really personal experience, make people think about themselves and their relationship to the community."

Surroundings are key both for Blast Theory and Rotozaza, whose MP3-based show Wondermart is available in Edinburgh as part of Forest Fringe. Individuals become performers in their own dramas set in a local supermarket. It's about drawing out the theatrical, the mysterious, in ordinary life, the polar opposite of large-scale spectacle.

"I've been really interested in public spaces and turning reality into a spectacle, but doing so without reality being disturbed by an audience standing around," says Wondermart creator and co-director of Rotozaza, Silvia Mercurali.

"A supermarket is a kind of non-place, like an airport or a railway station, and we're trying to look at it in a completely different way. Normally we see people shopping and don't take any notice. What I'd like to create is that sense that people around us are people who have stories that are important. By enhancing the boring, then you can turn it into a spectacle."

Audiences today, she says, are looking for a unique experience, and sitting in the dark with 100 other people doesn't necessarily deliver that.

"I feel that increasingly audience members want more. People are wanting to be part of something, more than just spectators."

&#149 Internal, Traverse @ Mercure Point Hotel, until 30 August, various times. Foot-washing for the Sole, The Arches @ St Stephen's, 25-29 August, various times. David Leddy's 'Susurrus', Assembly @ Royal Botanic Garden, until 6 September, various times. Rider Spoke, Dance Base, 24-27 August (at departing 15-minute intervals, 5-9pm, limited places available). Wondermart is part of the Forest Fringe, 17-29 August, noon-10pm daily. For more information on this and other shows at Forest Fringe, see www.forestfringe.co.uk