Project Description

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This work looks at relationships between performers and audiences, in continuous conversation on Instagram, and in live performance on Zoom. In collaboration with Lucy Flippen and Rachel Orji, I have been analyzing power structures at play in audience-performer relationships. 

 

We have used Instagram to explore how these relationships exist online: thinking about the posting of content as a performance and the engagement of that content as an audience act. Further, we question how dance and art exist on social media platforms, not only considering the levels of engagement, but how the audience’s gaze- specifically the male gaze- influences the algorithm to the user’s favor. Each of us has access to this Instagram account and use it in different ways to explore how the algorithm works with the content we post.

 

Zoom is being used to explore how audience-performer relationships exist in live performance, but within the limitations and opportunities this platform gives us. This live performance on Zoom immediately engages with its audience. Within this research, we explore participation, consent, perception, spectatorship, viewership, the fourth wall, and power dynamics. This Zoom presentation consistently engages in questioning the male gaze, objectification and sexualization from each of our experiences both in performance and everyday life. 

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We acknowledge that while some of our experiences intersect with each other in similar ways as women, we have to look at this research through an intersectional lens to find a wider perspective in the specificity of our work.

 

My hope is to eventually explore this research with audiences in person when it is safe to do so.

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