Professional Picnic @ Stern Grove

http://www.sterngrove.org/07202008.html

• Organized (even a bit strict)
• Donation system (but with a bit of "pressure" like the stickers and several demands before, still it's understandable because it's a difficult Business Model today, maybe the mindset will change ... soon)
• Spectacle (link to the dance page)
• Audience (Pincic, Champagne, Sangria, pate, salad, muffin, ...)

Art performance at Stern Grove (written the 20/07/08) Body communcation preceded spoken language (evolutionary study ?) The attitude is part of every communication process

• posture of a single body (equivalent to a musical note)
• position on the stage but also related to others
• movement as the evolution of the position over time
• speed and rythm

(one could even imagine a "partition"(french!) like in music) but all this is also happening in an environment, a visual environment (like the stage), a sonor environment (like the music) and overall social. All those parameters allow to express a message. It can express any type of message : actions, intentions, feelings, opinion, ... Maybe the most "basic" messages are easier to express like this as performers, despite their extreme implication in the mastery of the technique are still social being living in a different environment than the stage. The difficulty for most to understand such performances is probably rooted in the constant habit to use another mean of expression and to focus especally on more complexes messages. We can thus expect to be more prone to get verbal messages (spoken or written) more easilly now than non-verbal ones, at least consciously (as some studies show that 80% of communication is non-verbal). The lack of "habitude" to use and thus read expressions based on posture, position, movement and all that compose a performance make us miss a lot of subtilities. It impairs us to actually get the messages as clearly as we usually do also because we are used to have verbal support. This actually can makes us wonder if this originally natural way of expression is still "natural" for us. Maybe it still is but unconscously but then how important it is daily ? during a performance ? What should be our mindset when desiring to appreciate a performance ?

In order to answer such questions I paid attention to the perfomance itself but also to the response of the public. By measuring how the public respond to specific part of the performance it is possible to correlate an action with a response thus what the public appreciate. A very obvious way (but with an important bias we will discuss later) is to simply listen to the public. What I think received the best responses were, ordered by amplitude :

• high energy (chapitre XII and XIII especially)
• clear message
• technical difficulties

and ...

• popularity. This is the tricky part that makes it difficult to take measurement as a relevant way to understand the correlation. A snowball effect is probably changing the measure, especially being in a social environment.

written by Fabien.