Thanks! You’ve been a great help.
I’ll try to get myself to the next one ( April 14th, right?). In the
meantime, I’ll hope that others are intrigued by my loose description,
which I’ll copy below, as I sent it to just you, not the group, last time.
that’s what comes of replying three seconds before leaving to pick my kid
up from school.
I’ll do my best to explain it here, but I may not do very well.
The idea, roughly, is to adapt a theatre training game called the Applause
Game. Here’s a description of it from my blog:
--------- One person is sent out of the room, and the others decide on
something simple they want the person to do. Walk to the third chair along
a row, for example, and sit down. It’s a bit like the children’s game
hot/cold. John Wright presents it as a game for building complicity with
the audience and for being comfortable on stage as yourself. I think it
does those, too, but it’s even richer than that.
Comments
This was an absolutely fascinating game for me, as one of the things I’m
most interested in is the communication (I almost typed ‘communion’) among
audience members, and from the audience to the performers.
This is a problem-solving exercise with the audience providing the clues,
not just with their applause, but also with body language and facial
expression. One task we set up so that the performer would have to spend
much of her time looking away from the audience; as we suspected, it slowed
her down and made her less interesting to watch. You couldn’t see the
expressions, puzzlement, frustration, curiosity, playing across her face.
One of the very interesting aspects of this game is the degree of
negotiation it requires within the audience. You make collective decisions,
wordlessly, about how to delineate degrees of rightness, what if, for
example, the performer is in the right place, but facing the wrong
direction, or touching the right object, but with the wrong hand?---------
It can be made more complex than I describe here, a sort of obstacle course
or maze. I was thinking that it would work well with two opposing teams,
each trying to get “their” actor to reach the end of a series of tasks
first. A race.
A remote audience could participate by some virtual equivalent of clapping,
in more or less real time. I was thinking of Twiter because I’m reasonably
familiar with it, but it may be that there are more appropriate media. I
also have no idea what the virtual equivalent of clapping would be. mouse
clicks per minute translated into sound? something visual?
I’ve got actors, a technician, and a tiny present audience. Those, my time,
ideas and enthusiasm are all I can bring to the table. I’ll be grateful for
any advice, but what I’m really looking for is someone interested in
hands-on full collaboration. I can offer a room in Lancaster should they
need to spend the night, traveling expenses, and meals (I’ma good cook).
AlikiOn Mar 29, 2010 5:43pm, Jon Spriggs jon@spriggs.org.uk wrote:
Sorry, that’s what comes of writing an e-mail at work without checking it
properly before sending it!
HacMan meets at MadLab in the Northern Quarter on the second and fourth
Wednesdays of each month [1] from 7pm (or at least, thereabouts!) If you
can come along to that meeting, on top of having the best brains from the
list looking at it, you may have some incidentals from the Fly The Coop
team on the middle floor wander past and look on in interest, and also
those who turn up can maybe convert the problem into some other format,
that could help you understand what we can do with you.
Ultimately, the easier it is to understand the problem, the better the
chance of getting it solved 
–
Jon “The Nice Guy” Spriggs LPIC-1 Certified
This message was sent from my mobile device. Please excuse any top
posting and typos that may occur as a result.
On 29 Mar 2010 16:46, “Aliki Chapple” alikichapple@googlemail.com> wrote:
Sure, I’d love to come to Manchester and talk it over. What’s a good time
to come? Hardware driven is fine, so long as someone can come and run the
hardware.
I’m glad you think it’s fun. I think there’s a lot of potential in such
collaborations, and I’m very eager to start one.
I’m sorry if I’m being dense, but how, other than this email, do I bring
it to the group?
Aliki
On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:12 PM, Jon Spriggs jon@spriggs.org.uk> wrote:
Your best bet is to k…
