So I have been wanting to perform my new material and therefore messaged my good friend Teddy Hunter who runs an art space in Cardiff called Curad. Teddy said that and artist will have an opening night soon so I could perform at that, sorted. The day came around and to be completely honest, I wasn’t really ‘feeling it’. I had spent the whole week in various primary schools filming their Christmas concerts, so I already had a headache and it was a long drive to Cardiff. I parked in the NCP so I knew I’d have to remortgage to afford the parking. I arrived about an hour before I needed to be at the venue so I got my guitar out in my car and had a quick run through of a couple pieces. When the time came I got up and headed across the road to the venue. Tyr’s work was great, he’d really used the whole space to engulf the audience into his artwork. We had a nice quick chat and he was really laid back about where I performed in the space and stuff. So I set up my little speaker which I had borrowed from the Riverfront and did a quick sound check on my own. It felt weird to be sound cheking myself. Not is a ‘I’m too goof for this’ way, but I think it’d been a very long time since I’d had to do it, mainly because I soundcheck people at theatres, at my recent gigs there’s been a dedicated sound technician and so it just felt a bit alien is all. I was going to try something this evening that I hadn’t done before. In one of the song stories, it talks about a relationship in high school, so like 13-14 year olds, its based of my own experience and the stories probably the most closest to the truth out of all of my stories. Basically there are a lot of break ups and getting back togethers. So, I want to involve the audience in some way, and to do that I encouraged people (before the performance) to secretly write down a break up line and fold it up and put it in the box. I also asked them to write down an insult and put that into a another box. The time came around and I got my guitar and the boxes ready on a table next to me, plus a bottle of water. I did a quick 1-2, uh1-2-3-4 into the mic and the audience started to gather around. I’df arranged some chairs and benches for people to sit on. There were quite a few people there, maybe 30ish, and I only really knew about 4 of them. I like it when the happens. Anyways, I’d planned before the show to hold the mic out of that stand, almost in more of a ‘stand up comedian’ type way, because I think that lets the audience know subconsciously that there’ll be a little more talking that songing. So I’d played couple songs and said some stories and it was going well. I think I did some improv about Spotify and stuff because my music was now on spotify but at the same time I don’t agree with spotify and stuff… It came to the audience participation song and I asked for a volunteer. A lady (Grace) in the front row put her had up so I invited her into the seat next to me. I then asked the audience if anyone wanted to be in a relationship with this lady. Another lady (Kat) put her hand up and then sat in a chair the other side of me. I explained to them how they are both in the same school and they are in a very very very serious relationship, its been almost three whole months. Both Grace and Kat were responding really well and so were the audience. I thought I’d get them involved in the storytelling a bit more, so I asked them when the first realised they had feelings for one another. “When she pulled my hair in the playground.” Said Grace. “When she fingered me behind the bikesheds” replied Kat. It was hilarious and the audience and everyone were all paying 100% attention to this little story that we were unravelling. Throughout the story, Kat breaks up with Grace on numerous occasions, each time reading a break up line from the suggestions box. You could sense the audience being engrossed in the story and wanting to hear their own suggestion. Grace would then always reply with an insult from her suggestion box. I feel like as I do this more and more, I will find a happy medium of timescale in relation to how funny is it to make the audience wait for a potentially hilarious of just as likely boring break up like/insult. But it felt good this time, though I did forget to include some parts of the story as I was distracted by the excitement of the suggestion boxes! Overall it went great and the audience participation really helped to break up the performance as a whole. There are a couple positives to take forward from this performance. The first being that the audience participation is fun and seemed to really get the audience even more engaged with my performance. Secondly, in regards to the whole ‘to script or not to script’ the show conversation that is happening in my head, this show made me feel like I didn’t need to script it. There were so many off the cuff comments and ad lib moments that turned out to be pretty funny. It’s helped me grow in confidence as a ‘comedic’ performer. I still would use the term comedian though.
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