A Blog About Audience Participation. Oh No It Isn't!

I was talking to a creative friend of mine about performance and she mentioned that people like to have an experience that they can be part of now. This is something that I had thought about before. Some of you will notice that at charity concerts, I tried to make a singalong song the end of each act. It seems sensible to let the audience join in and I can tell that a lot of people enjoy it. A lot of people do not enjoy it but the lovely thing about singalongs is that you can be involved as little or as much as you want to be.

I have been thinking for a while about how I might expand this concept, but I had not thought about it as a generational move (not least because the majority of my audience does not tend to be in its twenties). I also think that people misunderstand Millennials (and we can argue pointlessly for another three blogs about what age makes someone Gen Y and what age makes someone a Millenniual so we are not going to bother). I was once talking to a 16 year old who said that she did not like having her picture taken. ‘You take hundreds of selfies though’ I countered and she explained to me that selfies are not about being selfish, they are about controlling your image. If you are 16 years old, you assume that people are taking your picture all the time and that you are going to appear on social media whether you want to or not, so your only hope of having some control over it is to take the photos yourself.

Although I do think that since the 1980s we have grown into a society more concentrated on individuals as a primary focus than before, I also think that those who think Millennials are self-obsessed have missed the point. If you accept that you are going to be part of the social media arms race whether you want to be or not, then it does make sense to take some control over what exists about you. Mind you, I am going to find it hard to defend people taking a picture of themselves standing in front of a picture in the Tate Gallery rather than just the picture itself.

Perhaps this is also a misreading of our history. I remember reading an article in The Economist about how Generation X were consumers, consuming television or video games that were put in front of them, whereas Generation Y interacted with their television or their computer and used it to contact other people. This was written before smartphones, YouTube or the news being something you comment on rather than watch. I think that there is much to be said for this and just as babies sometimes press books because they do not realise that they are not touchscreens then so if you grow up with entertainment being interactive, then you will expect more from an experience than just sitting and watching something without participation.

Mind you, think about Brian May writing ‘We Will Rock You’ because he wanted to give crowds who turned up to Queen gigs knowing all the words to the songs something to do. That was the late 70s. In fact, go back to the Shakespearean theatre and were not ‘groundlings’ who stood in the cheapest audience area expected to heckle and interact with those on stage? Could it be that what has happened is that television and radio made us numb to interaction in the twentieth century and only now are we rediscovering it?

I have seen some very good interaction done by comedians. I have also seen some very bad interaction. In terms of musical comedy, I do not think that I have seen anyone better than Johnny & The Baptists when it comes to working with the audience. I have also seen comedians who think that the occasional suggestion that someone sitting in the front row is gay is the height of hilarity. Frankie Howerd could do it because times were different and he was Frankie Howerd, someone third on the bill at the Glee Club in Cardiff Bay cannot make it anything other than homophobic.

However, that does bring us to the point of how audiences like to react. My friend pointed out to me that people like to react as part of a group to avoid the fear of getting it wrong. Hence, singalongs work. I was reminded of a definition of individuality in the teenage years – everyone wants to have the same mobile phone but they also have to have a different cover for it. It is that tension between conformity and individuality that perhaps is never truly resolved.

For the performer, the fear is that something goes ‘wrong’. Once you give control of what is happening to an audience, then you have to hope that what they do fits with what you are doing. Sometimes it works – I will never quite forget hearing the audience sing the chorus of ‘Bannoffee Pie’ back at me in the Cameo Club in 2017 - and sometimes it does not quite work ... though I will admit that my singalong song about men who send dick pics on dating websites is designed to be very singable and yet also something you really do not want to sing.

When I think about it, the best example of this that I have written to date is a song called ‘Roomful of Beanbags’. This is rather a surreal song which I performed in Swansea once just as a filler when I had nothing else to sing that week. When I started working at the college in Cardiff, I had spare time and an interest in which doors my new pass card could open. One time I found a room full of beanbags, but I never found them again. It seemed like a surreal premise for a song.

At the time a friend had sent me some links to songs by Flo & Joan. You may know them from their recent starring roles in adverts for Nationwide, adverts which garnered them praise, interest and death threats. You really have not made it in online musical comedy until someone has threatened to kill you, have you? Anyway, I was interested in their audience interaction and so I added a ‘call and response’ part to ‘Roomful of Beanbags’. It was pretty simple – ‘I say bags and you say bean ... bags!’ and the audience shouts back ‘bean!’ for instance. This slowly dissolved through increasingly confusing calls and responses until I sang, ‘I say I’m a bit short this month, will you get me a drink and you say sure David, no problem, what would you like ... I’m a bit short this month, will you get me a drink?’ There was a pause and then a group of people shouted ‘beanbags!’ and I adlibbed, “Dammit! I thought that might work!”

I do think that people have become more demanding of their experiences and they want to do more than just consume entertainment. That may be a generational thing but, if it is, I think that it is a throwback to previous ages and that the exception to entertainment has been a quiet audience taking in what is done on stage. The challenge for those who perform is how they can involve their audience while also keeping things moving in the way that they want them to move. Passive consumption is just so 20th century, dahling.