“In their dissertation Close encounters. Issues arising in one-to-one performance from 2010, Mike Pony (artistic director of the Submerge festival) offers several interesting perspectives on the one-to-one format. Even though they claim to have been young and not very academic at the time of the writing, the thesis suggests a phenomenological framework which makes it possible to analyse and, importantly, to critically review one-to-one works.
Mike goes through several issues that might rise in one-to-one art encounters:
- Format’s relation to therapy and confession procedures.
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- Ways of building up the relationship between the audience and the performer, and dealing with issues of risk and trust.
- Different meanings of intimacy and proximity.
- The ways performances play with social etiquette and expected social behaviour in a certain time and place, sometimes challenging them and thus offering shocks and surprises, sometimes conforming to expected behaviour and thus creating safety and making risks more possible.
- How does repeating the same performance with different audience members affect the experience? What issues of authenticity arise and how different performances deal with them?
The essay goes through these themes with a rich variety of examples from past one-to-one performances in the UK one-to-one scene about 15-20 years ago, always open to thank or criticise the practises, which is certainly not as common as it should be to help the artists improve their work.
Full essay can be downloaded Here.