I think this may be the most intimate I've ever felt with the performer at a piece. The two acts, different though they were, directly targeted the gap between the performer and the audience at the start - how little we all knew them or anything about what we were going to see - and just by moving around the stage, interacting with props and talking, at the end I felt closer.
I still felt some level of distance, mostly when the performances were at their most self-referential Stacy kept qualifying her performance, referencing the creation of the piece and its "1980s confessional bullshit" quality, embedding the origin of the work within the work itself and reminding me every moment that this was a performance. But sometimes it felt like she really was my grandma, who was both afraid and desiring of intimacy, scared of losing people if they really loved her. The oscillation between serious and comedic really hit those moments home, when rolling a mattress and being zipped into a suitcase had a totally different meaning because of the confidence she had in her audience.
There was also something somehow much more powerful for me in the self-referentiality of the Bi-Curious George performance, presenting the relationship between a father and daughter and their relationship with different kinds of performance. Even though their entire performance had very traditional circus elements, which can feel really distant and particularly affective rather than emotional, these felt like they emphasized the authenticity of the interview pieces where we got much closer to the essential nature of their relationship and the difficulty of creating this performance together. This acknowledgement of performance worked to their benefit in minimizing the audience distance.
Additional Material: A piece on the process of making Bi-Curious George, which reinforces a sense of authenticity in the performance - https://vimeo.com/209257626
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