An established one-to-one performance practitioner, curator and scholar Brian Lobel gives us a wonderfull introduction to one-to-one format. Brian is also a professor of theatre and performance at Rose Bruford College (UK).
My favourite awkward human interaction takes place in airport duty-free shops, usually around the liquor counter. There, an employee offers a thimble-sized sample of an ‘airport exclusive’ spirit – a whiskey aged the length of an airline’s history or a seasonal liqueur with a lingering medicinal aftertaste. All of these thimble-sized samples are accompanied by a speech that lasts far longer than the drinking or even the aftertaste of the liquor itself. I nod, perform interest, murmur polite encouragement. It is 9am, I have been up since 5am, and what I want is simple: the free, thimble-full sample of alcohol.
Why I adore this encounter is not the alcohol, but the choreography amidst the airport lighting. A one-to-one encounter that is intimate but not personal, scripted but still with elements of improvisation, friendly, but not overly so. The choreography involves eye contact, timing, ‘manners’, body language and a careful management of expectations. I promise not to ask for more, you promise to not be offended when I don’t buy your acai-flavoured Baileys. Or whatever that was. It might not be theatre, but the theatricality and performativity from all players is undeniable.
Encounters like this remind us that one-to-ones are a bedrock of human existence. And we spend a lot of our human existence navigating and negotiating the interpersonal politics of one-to-one encounters. How long to listen, how much to give, when to nod, when to say thank you, when to disengage. When to flee. Therapy sessions, haircuts, cruising, doctors appointments, playing doctor, tarot readings, church confessionals, chess matches, intimate care – each of these one-to-ones involve a different choreography, but, in general, feature temporary redistribution of authority and care, and each feature service and role-play. One-to-one performance, as an isolated art form, did not invent questions of authority, care, service and role-play, but isolates, intensified and reframes them, and (in the cases I’m interested in for this short essay) asks us to reimagine these quotidian encounters filled with infinite possibility.
The lineage of ‘One-to-One’ as a professional performance practice is varied across visual art, theatre, performance and live art, and art therapy. I find myself personally most interested in one-to-one encounters that look and feel a lot like the one-to-one performances we are making at all times (and are being made upon us), and particularly those which, in their normal-ness, their down-to-earthness, their anyone-can-do-it-ness create truly unique spaces in which both creator and audience participant are reevaluating quotidian encounters with strangers, navigating these encounters in new ways, and opening up the possibility for societal (or interpersonal) change. Below, I offer a whistle-stop tour of the most potent issues related to one-to-one performance including the encounter, the material conditions of one-to-one and the relationship of one-to-one practices to therapy. I’ll also use my own performance installation Fun with Cancer Patients: Kanazawa, to demonstrate how one-to-one might renew a society’s interest in the art of conversation.
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On Encounters
One-to-one performance is less a specific genre than it is a commitment to centring encounter as the primary site of art. From Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic, to Tania El Khoury and Sonia Hughes, the practice shares a rare artistic insistence that performance can and does happen between people, rather than exclusively in front of them. An audience member is not an irrelevant bystander to a work, or a witness, but the precondition of the work existing. While a painting exists in a closed gallery, and a West End musical features the same lighting for a sold out house than one half-empty, the one-to-one depends on the presence (live/digital, I don’t care to fetishise one over the other) of the audience. The work cannot exist without their arrival, presence (active/passive) and their consent to be a part of the work. Non-consensual one-to-one performances (being pranked, harassed, scammed) will not be considered here. One-to-one feels exciting as a genre because the commitment to booking/arriving/participating in a one-to-one feels like a lot more work that is entrusted to an audience, more so than the usual artistic participation of ‘show up and we’ll entertain you’.
Grant Kester, writing on dialogical aesthetics, and Nicolas Bourriaud writing on relational aesthetics – although both writing more on contemporary visual art than performance – provide useful context for one-to-one. Kester, in Conversation Pieces (2004), places the focus of artwork in its impact on individuals and the reciprocal openness through which they experience an artwork (regardless of its form). And Bourriaud, in Dialogical Aesthetics (1998), similarly focused on art’s capacity to ‘tighten the space of relations’ between people. Though looking at examples between community conversation and public sculpture, there is perhaps no art form more radically capable of ‘tightening’ the space of relations than one-to-one.
When only two people are present, responsibility or even responsive-ness becomes nearly impossible to evade. Helena Grehan, in Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (2009), introduces the concept of active spectatorship, which further sharpens this point. Drawing on Levinas, she reminds us that when the Other calls us, we have no option but to respond, though what this response is is not predetermined. One-to-one performance makes the demand, or at least the insistence of the Other’s participation literal. Levinas, however, is insistent that the encounter with the Other is fundamentally asymmetrical. In Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, Levinas articulates that responsibility is not negotiated or exchanged: it falls to the individual (the ‘me’) first, regardless of whether the Other reciprocates. In one-to-one, the desire for neat, reciprocal exchange is often disappointed. At the same time, living with o(O)thers requires continual, imperfect attempts to make space for reciprocity or exchange, even while knowing it cannot be guaranteed. As Levinas states, ‘I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it’.
Equally central to Levinas is the unpredictability or indeterminate nature of the encounter with the Other. Ethical relation demands a person allow the Other the freedom to respond in ways that cannot be anticipated. In one-to-one, this raises difficult question about how much space is genuinely left for unpredictability, and whether artist can resist making assumptions about how an audience should or will respond to a work, choosing instead to ask, listen and wait. Levinas’ provocation lives in this tension: the ethical demand is clear, but its fulfillment never guaranteed. It may, however, feel harder to ignore a question when the questioner is the only other person in the room. And whereas with my thimble-full of liquor example above, one can try to escape or evade responsibility for responsiveness in day to day life… inside a one-to-one performance, such escape or evasion is unlikely. So the only option provided to the audience of a one-to-one is engagement – whatever that looks like.
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On Material Conditions
While one-to-one performance is often discussed in terms of the ethics of encounter, the material conditions for one-to-one performance are just as critical. One-to-one performance are often labour-intensive, expensive, and rarely scale easily. My hour-long one-to-one performance You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me, You Have to Forgive Me (2015), for example, in order to reach 400 audience members… had to be performed over 400 hours. This is not rocket science mathematics, but in moments of budgetary scarcity, ‘impact’ (measured in the traditional way of ticket sales/audience numbers) remains a sticking point for the programming and supporting of one-to-one practice. Most commercial theatre houses internationally can reach 400 audience members in a single night.
On top of necessarily-low audience numbers, the emotional cost of one-to-one performance is rarely compensated appropriately. For each of the audience members of You Have to Forgive Me (x3) I listen to an audience member’s problems and suggest a Sex and the City episode that would solve those problems before watching the episode together while cuddling. And for each audience member, my attention, emotional availability and care were demanded at equal levels. And, of course, artists will be underpaid relative to the intensity of the labour involved in one-to-one. While we wouldn’t flinch at paying a therapist, or a colonic hydrotherapist or nail technician their hour of work… what should a one-to-one cost?
One-to-one performances can be as pleasurable, sustaining or life-changing as many services people already pay for without hesitation. The difficulty may not be persuading audiences of value, but contending with inherited assumptions about art, care and money, and the discomfort of introducing payment into intimate encounters. There may also be something within one-to-one practice that actively resists monetisation, where financial exchange feels misaligned with vulnerability or emotional/spiritual exchange. If direct payment risks ethical compromise, this raises further questions about alternative economies. When I produced You’ll Have to Forgive Me (x3), I insisted that the audience complete an hour-long hand-written survey prior to the performance, which I kept. Though I would never need/want to read the thousands of pages of hundreds of surveys, for me, it was the literal payment of their hour which was the only exchange for my hour of labour. And when the (very few) audience members arrived and poo-poo-ed the survey (or say they simply didn’t have time), I would excuse them and say that I couldn’t do the performance without it. I could, of course, I just didn’t want to.
The material constraints on one-to-one shape not only what is possible to produce, but what is imaginable for artists themselves. Hence one-to-one performance remaining marginal as an artistic practice, despite its omnipresence in public and private life. And yet, and perhaps shockingly despite the radical imbalance of labour and compensation… artists continue to make this work. And love making it. There is a draw to the form and what it enables and engenders: depth over surface, presence over spectacle, the idea or hope of connection. But with such problematic conditions for one-to-one performance, one must raise critical questions about the sustainability and diversity of the practitioners of these forms. Who is able to make one-to-one work – who can afford this time and attention? As intoxicating a form as one-to-one is, the potential for exploitation and lacklustre support for its artists is legion.
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On (or Away From) Therapy
One-to-one performance has long been entangled with therapy, both structurally and affectively. Adrian Howells, for example, drew from counselling, massage therapy and intimate care, and my own work used the framework of seeing a therapist who would solve your problems via a Sex and the City diagnosis/prescription. Many other one-to-one practices take place in hospitals, care homes and community health contexts, and often framed as explicit care-adjacent. Put simply: if someone brings one person into their orbit – a stranger, one with whom they have little expectation of shared personal history – how could one not want to improve (or at least not destroy) another’s day? The proximity to therapy invites comparison, but also produces confusion: if one-to-one performance feels therapeutic, what distinguishes it from therapy, and does a distinction matter? Are there tools that artists and performers bring that might augment, add-to or even better therapeutic practices? What are the safeguards for artistic practices which might contravene an audience-participant’s mental well-being? Can anyone with just a Fine Art degree (regardless of how much care and dedication to ethical and therapeutic encounters), be health-fully engaging audiences in processes which might be perceived as unlicensed therapy?
Therapy and one-to-one performance undoubtedly share techniques. Both rely on listening, mirroring, carefully paced questions, ‘reading the room’, sustained attention, and a commitment to presence. Both create conditions in which disclosure feels possible, perhaps inevitable (and… encouraged)? Yet therapy and one-to-one performance operate on different temporalities, responsibilities and regulations. Therapy unfolds over time in the great majority of cases. It is accountable to professional standards, supervision, continuity, and aftercare and its power lies in duration, commitment and longevity. Therapy is also often more transparent about its theoretical grounding and intentions, able to articulate what kind of work is being undertaken and to reflect explicitly on process and outcome.
One-to-one performance, by contrast, operates through an intensive burst of engagement. It compresses intimacy, trust and relational intensity into an encounter that (by design) lasts minutes rather than months, and is untethered to longterm aftercare, follow-up and resolution in most cases. Through touch, conversation, and sustained attention, Adrian Howells cultivated what he called ‘accelerated friendships’, moments of intimacy produced within tightly framed temporal conditions. The trust and connection and disclosure that comes from an accelerated friendship can be life-changing and meaningful [and here I would like to make a specific and passionate defence of the power of the one-off encounter to be life-expanding as I’ve known so many of these moments myself]. That said, one-to-ones are still bounded by the acceleration of that friendship, and its inevitable ending.
The distinctions between one-to-one performance and therapy should not preclude one-to-ones from being therapeutic in some way, but rather, should caution/pause/ask for reflection to ensure that one-to-ones do not pretend to be therapy with its focus on standardised, longterm care. Where it does, one-to-one risks emotional capture, coerced disclosure or the quiet obligation to participate ‘well’, or at least politely. Shared vulnerability, so often celebrated within the field, is not neutral. Intimacy (particularly if it involves touch) can persuade as easily as it can support, focused attention can heighten senses of obligation as much as it can allow one to feel set free. As said previously, the difficulty of refusal is heightened when there are only two people in the room, particularly when one is positioned – however gently or humbly – as host, facilitator, guide, guru or expert.
For these reasons, the more interesting ethical question is not whether one-to-one performance resembles therapy, but how authority, responsibility and care, which all appear inside environments of therapy, are distributed within the one-to-one encounter. When the artist is positioned as an all-knowing healer or unquestionedly-ethical healer, risk intensifies. When the one audience member can see the one performer’s focused attention, care and labour, again, risk is intensified, and there is even more pressure to participate, and to participate ‘well’ for that artist. But, when authority, responsibility and care are distributed equally, or transparent about their inherent inequalities – this is where one-to-ones become a space not for fixing, or extracting, or proving, but for rehearsing new ways of being together. One-to-ones that are transparent about their hierarchies and pressure can become exciting spaces for listening, speaking, sharing (even disclosing), and role-playing which can impact the world far beyond the performance temporality.
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On Wisdom
From 2016-2018, I worked with a group of 45 cancer patients, nurses, therapists, doctors and allied health professionals in Kanazawa, Japan, to create a series of one-to-one performances between a member of our 45-person working group, and a stranger. Commissioned by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, I spent a year in dialogue and running intermittent workshops with the Museum and Hanaume (local cancer support organisation) focused on what cancer patients needed in relationship to their care. The overwhelming response amongst the 45 participants: better conversation about cancer. Or any conversation about cancer. I heard stories of people not out about their cancer to colleagues while undergoing the most horrific chemo courses or surgeries; I heard stories of grown children not speaking to parents about cancer because they couldn’t quite find the right time. These are, by no means, exclusive to Japanese society, but it quickly became our guiding mission: to move cancer into public dialogue.
In dialogue with the working group, I created a ‘benri’ (toolkit) which was a conversation guide, able to be performed by non-professionals who were ‘experts’ in cancer but all from different lived experience. As an audience member would arrive, I would welcome them with a short monologue in Japanese (which I do not speak), while working group members would actively correct my language skills. The opening one-to-one encounter (between myself and the audience member) framed cancer as a language – Cancer English – learned not by choice but by immersion. Languages, I suggested, are not simply collections of words, but entire cultures: they come with etiquette, perspective, and ways of moving through the world. You do not need to want to learn a language to become fluent; you need only to be surrounded by it long enough. This metaphor did important work. It positioned people with cancer not as patients to be interpreted, but as bilingual speakers navigating between worlds.
I would then match the audience member with one working group member/bilingual Cancer Japense speaker, who would dress them both in a jinbai top, and find a space to read through the ‘benri’ with them. They could choose a comfortable space in a black box theatre, find a spot in the Museum, or walk outside. The training I did with each performer coincided with building the ‘benri’ toolkit, but each performer knew they were able to improvise, cut sections or add sections. The purpose of the work was not to perfectly perform the ‘benri’ (there was no way to achieve such a thing) but, rather, to make it their own, engage with the audience member, and co-determine what they wanted to do. And how they wanted the conversation to go.
The working group members would often ask me if they could change a word or another – despite talking about it, participants in artwork will often still try to show the lead facilitator that they care to be accurate. I would simply say to them: ‘You’re in another room with them, and you are speaking Japanese! I have tried to build a system which encourages you to change/adapt/go your own way’. Rather than positioning myself as the primary site of knowledge, the work deliberately de-centred authority, distributing it across the working group filled with expertise derived from lived experience of cancer care.
The ‘benri’ was not a therapeutic script, but rather asked the working group member / performer and the audience to talk boldly through cancer and its critical aspect, to speak gently about fear, preparing for loss, or how to sustain humour under pressure. The performers were not trained artists, but (we realised) were highly skilled narrators of their own experience, having been required to explain, translate, and justify their lives repeatedly within medical and social systems. For the performers, the act of articulating these tools was itself a form of care. Speaking one’s life aloud, structuring it for another, and being received as an expert rather than a patient carried a therapeutic charge, even as the work refused clinical or therapeutic framing. For audience members, the encounter offered a rehearsal for the inevitable moment when a life unimpacted by cancer becomes impacted by cancer – directly or indirectly – and asked what kinds of language might be needed then. And the performances of the ‘beri’ varied wildly – from one duo taking 20 minutes to read the book together (the audience member was afraid to talk beyond the scripted text) and one duo (one of our oldest women performers, with a 20 year old university student audience member) taking 3.5hrs to read the book together and go for lunch and talk. A one-to-one script is also better if it allows plenty of adaptation.
The one-to-one encounters performed simultaneously across the theatre, museum and outdoor spaces acted as portals into a shared grammar rather than sites of individual transformation. In this way, Fun with Cancer Patients demonstrated how one-to-one performance can be both deeply individuated and deliberately de-centred, producing therapeutic effects without positioning itself as therapy, and opening a space in which futures can be co-created based on conversation and sharing rather than prescribed based on medical hierarchies.
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Beyond Endings
Much writing on one-to-one performance focuses on the intensity of the encounter itself, with less attention paid to what lingers. But one-to-one encounters rarely end when the timer rings. They leave behind hand gestures, phrases and remembrances of listening and being present. They become an additional option available to us in the pantheon of day-to-day one-to-one encounters. In Barbara Walters’ 1970 book How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything, she offers that conversation is a civic skill, something which one can be educated on, can practice, refine and become expert at. And writing after the tumultuous 1960s, she reckoned that this civic skill was more than a party trick or the domain of entertaining housewives, it was critical work en route to transforming the public sphere, one challenging conversation at a time.
The best one-to-one performances do not aim to resolve difference or meld opposing views into harm. The best one-to-ones engender more personal space to sit, listen, speak, and expand an individual’s understanding of how to be with others in the future. We shouldn’t always need a thimble-full of liquor to lubricate our conversations or our presence with strangers.
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Bibliography:
Bourriaud, Nicolas, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002)
Grehan, Helena, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Heddon, Deirdre and Johnson, Dominic, It’s All Allowed: The Performance of Adrian Howells (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016)
Kester, Grant H., Conversation Pieces: Community and Conversation in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004)
Levinas, Emmanuel, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985)
Walters, Barbara, How To Talk to Practically Anyone About Anything (New York: Doubleday, 1970)