I am just back from a weekend in Brighton performing the Customer in the Artist’s Open House Festival with the assistance of Permanent Gallery. The performance took place in Spiral Charity Shop a warm and cluttered old fashioned charity shop. I was nervous at first about the space but it tuned out to work rather well. I was aided by Suni La who took the role of translator delivering the Chniglish text to the audience. This she did well finding a nice balance between being present and not like a robotic voice and at the same time not inflecting the text too much one way or another so as to allow the computer generated language constructions to stand for themselves.
The space was small and on the Saturday evening overflowing to the point we had to turn people away. I brought small plastic stools and had everyone sit low on these. These were the type I found in China and which are rare but not impossible to find here. It worked very well as it reduced all the sightline problems that usually come with having a group of people sitting on chairs with no raised performing area in front of them or rake in the seating. They even looked slightly cute.
A significant part of the audience spoke some Mandarin as there was a Chinese teacher there and her adult pupils. This made for a good concentration and afterwards during the talk for many questions on language and translation, indeed the talk went on for at least an hour. This was in fact one of the best UK audiences I have had yet and this further convinces me that in the UK at least, it is a performance that works better within an art context than within a theatrical frame. Many of my pieces manage to adapt to both but the difference here between the two has been so marked that I will not stress myself about theatres and instead concentrate upon now presenting it further in an art and language context. Elsewhere it is another story.