Audience experience in Rimini Protokoll’s Outdoors

Abstract

This article details audiences’ responses to Outdoors (2011–2012), the first U.K. commission for contemporary performance company Rimini Protokoll. Collaborating with Wales’ brand new English language national theatre, 13 members of a Welsh community choir were asked to film a series of narrated journeys around the town of Aberystwyth. By watching choir members’ pre-recorded videos and listening to their memories, audiences followed the lead of these absent performers around town. Drawing on findings from The National Theatre Wales Audience Research project, this article asks how participants managed their performative engagements with Aberystwyth, which was simultaneously presented on iPod screens and experienced as a guided tour. It argues that audiences’ mediated engagements were a process of simultaneous remembering and forgetting: a dual-perceptive balancing act in which feelings of immersion and distance were processed contemporaneously. While Aberystwyth was presented by Outdoors as a place twice lost, audiences’ responses suggested that the experience of place hadn’t quite been found.

Keywords:

• Rimini Protokoll
• audience
• immersion
• participation
• National Theatre Wales
• technology
• mobility

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank John E. McGrath, founding Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales, for supporting this research, as well as the NTW and Rimini Protokoll teams. Thank you also to Professors Martin Barker and Carl Lavery for years of invaluable advice.

Notes

1. As Jan Roselt explains, one of the most pressing questions for anyone writing about the company is what to call these ‘real people’. ‘Actors? Performers? Players? Amateurs? Or experts of daily life?’ (2008). Following the 2008 publication of Roselt’s chapter, Rimini Protokoll have used the term ‘real experts’ to describe their collaborators, whose personal stories, emotions and, in many cases, physical/aural presence are used to direct the performance process (Garde and Mumford 2012, 16, 17).

2. Lone Twin’s ‘ecological’ performances investigate the interplay between rootedness and travel (Lavery and Williams 2011; Overend 2013); Forced Entertainment’s Nights in this City (1997) problematised its own positioning of audiences as tourists on a coach trip through Sheffield (Tomlin 1999); Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead (2010) drove a truck around a working-class suburb of Detroit (Wilkie 2012, 208). Within Wales, too, Brith Gof and, later, the company’s director Mike Pearson have been especially influential in asking what it means to ‘move through space rather than occupying enclosed performance arenas’ [original emphasis] (Turner 2004, 377): a practice that has been clearly embedded within particular discourses about located performance, in which formal experimentation has historically been used to ask unsettling questions about local/national spatial politics and Welsh identity formation (Sedgman 2016).

3. A more detailed explication of the research methodology can be found in Sedgman (2016), along with a copy of the post-show questionnaire.

4. Numbers in brackets refer to unique respondent IDs. This allows the interested reader to track the trajectory of responses across a range of fields and publications.

5. It is important to recognise the difficulties inherent to any artistic production that relies on the input of volunteers, who frequently give their time for free or for minimal rewards. Indeed, in preparing Outdoors, Rimini Protokoll needed to work to extremely tight deadlines, with many choir members organising the production process around work and other commitments. As a steward, I previously had a taste of this responsibility, working with other individuals all under pressure to achieve a full take with no errors. There was therefore a palpable sense that in order to ensure manageability within the timeframe, the journeys had to be scaled back.