Generous Acts: Performances for an Audience of One as Pedagogical Practice

My fourth-year student greeted me in the basement hallway and gestured for me to sit on an old wooden bed as she sat on a stool across from me that was resting in a small mound of dirt. She was wearing a light beige slip and was gently running her fingers over two white paper flowers. The sound of cello music from a practice room provided a sad accompaniment as she quietly lamented how the paper flowers in her hands and at her feet had wilted and were tired from dancing. She looked me in the eyes and asked if the flowers could sleep in my bed before placing them on the mattress and curling up beside me. At that moment, my perception of her performance suddenly shifted, zooming in to a tight closeup as I noticed the dirt under her finger nails and the goosebumps on her skin (fig. 1). A joyous waltz started playing from the end of the hallway, and as I lifted my head, I saw six figures dressed in suits and formal gowns wearing large, colorful paper flowers on their heads emerge from the practice rooms and start dancing. One of the women took me by the hand, and we raced down the hallway, giving chase to the other flowers as they departed. We arrived at the rear basement exit, where all the flowers greeted me before gesturing for me to leave. My heart was racing from running and having momentarily participated in this celebratory encounter. I looked at them as I ascended the stairs, embracing their glowing faces before turning back and returning to the gray winter morning.

Naomi Worob staged this intimate encounter for her "Performance for an Audience of One" assignment as part of my Performance Art class at Grinnell College in the spring of 2019. Her short immersive, promenade performance incorporated music, dance, text, costumes, handmade props, an ensemble cast, and audience interaction. And while it is easy to focus on these technical aspects of Naomi's production, of equal if not more importance is the ethos of generosity at its core, a generosity of time, effort, care, attentiveness, and self as she delved into her own personal experiences and staged her moving meditation on death and rebirth.

In this note, I introduce the "Performance for an Audience of One" assignment that I began incorporating into my Advanced Performance class at Grinnell in 2013 and examine its efficacy as both a core component of theatre training as well as part of a broader liberal arts education. The basic structure of the project is simple: each student writes, designs, directs, and performs a five-minute production staged for one audience member at a time. For the assignment, students shift from performing for an audience "in general" to actively engaging the person directly in front of them. The fundamental questions of Why this performance? Why now? What do you want to give your audience? are heightened in these encounters because the audience's response is immediately perceptible, creating a space in which "the centrality of the spectator[s] becomes constitutive of the performance event" (Zaiontz 407). Students are encouraged to view their productions as personal gifts to the audience, sharing not only their artistic praxis but also themselves.

My first encounter with performing for an audience of one was in a lecture given by Bostonbased artist Marilyn Arsem in 1991, in which she detailed her production of Red in Woods. Arsem

Fig 1.

Naomi Worob lying next to the audience in her performance for an audience of one. Grinnell College BCA, April 2019. (Photo: Craig Quintero.)

began the project by interviewing hundreds of prospective audience members in her studio before choosing the one person she would invite to participate in the actual event. Although these interviews were not the formal show, they functioned as pre-performance "performances," in which Arsem and her guests engaged in brief, intimate one-on-one conversations. The actual performance began with Arsem driving the lone audience member to a forest outside of Boston...