For You, On Audience

A single green folding chair. Photo by: Robbie Sweeny

What do we mean by audience? 

We’ve been looking for a new concept of audience in our arrangements with twelve strangers. We focus on those small or extraordinary things that make them strange. We work to know more about their strangeness, to become more familiar without betraying the peculiar. When we say audience of twelve, we blur the line between twelve witnesses and twelve actors. We turn the house lights up, so to speak, to see who’s there and craft opportunities for our audience to see each other differently. We ask them to become the adventurers, detectives, lovers, villains and heroes of their own stories and the stories of others. By attending our audience, we discover how they give themselves to be seen. We cultivate attention, first through one to one encounters (e.g. first dates, drinks at a bar, home-visits), then through a shared daylong adventure. Our sharp focus on any given individual is expanded to all twelve, then blurs into the halation of the day. Our audience takes time and we make time for our audience. We care for our audience through learning and, in doing so, learn to care more.

- Ryan Tacata

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Join us in For You (Round 2)
Apply here | Applications due August 20th, 2017