Audience

The audience play an extremely important part in our piece as not only are they spectators to the story but they also play a pivotal role in our main character's journey. They play the attendee of the main character's book launch in the present day, and then the main character begins to tell them her life story and the basis of the book. As they travel through the space, different situations and truths are revealed and presented to the audience, they are then left to make their own judgement about the character and the decisions that she makes.

Our site is comfortable for the audience as the majority of people use stairs every single day. I feel the comfort found in the familiarity of the space will enable the audience to be more engaged and captured as they will not be pushed out of their comfort zone in regards to the space they've been placed in. Although this could possibly play to our disadvantage - due to the space being so common and overly used - I feel it pushes us creatively to develop a piece that engages the audience so deeply that such trivial things do not matter.

The audience's journey parallels with the recalling of our main character's history and story. As they ascend the stairs and onto different levels, different situations from the character's past are revealed and played out. As the audience ascend through the levels, the story ascends through time. Without the physical journey of audience, the impact of our story would definitely not be as great and the piece would fall flat. It allows the audience to travel alongside the story; instead of being simplistic spectators who's only purpose is to view, be entertained and then leave.

By looking at our audiences journey and role in the piece we are able to begin to develop our ideas on how it would effect them and what impact we want to leave on them once they've viewed the piece. It's extremely important to think about the audience when devising as they are ultimately the ones who will view the piece, and specifically with site specific theatre, we need to think about what role the audience will take and how that will help us a practitioners to tell our story and the different ways to send across our message in the most creative and engaging ways to appeal to those viewing and taking part. We need to keep the audience completely engaged and entertained throughout, and the only way to do that is by devising ideas with the audience's journey always in mind.