Label Me: a response to a three-day residency at The Shop of Mortals and All Fools

This work emerged from a three-day residency focused on immersive theatre, presence, and audience encounter within The Shop of Mortals and All Fools. The residency offered time to learn and create within the space of the shop/stockroom. Risk was not something to be avoided, but something to work with. 

What are performers for anyway?

One way of defining what we as performers do is to make ourselves vulnerable. In public, on stage - bearing everything. Easy, right? But even humans who are trained to do this are very good at finding any excuse they can to prevent vulnerability, even when, on the surface, it appears they are embracing it.

Me? I have a tendency to use character or comedy as a way of mitigating risk and smoothing encounters. While effective, and often enjoyable, it can also function as a mask between me and the audience-participant. The encounter remains playful, but the dynamic shifts into something more familiar: performer and audience, leader and follower, controller and controlled.

So I challenged myself to create something in which there was a genuine question about who was controlling the encounter - one in which I couldn’t talk my way out of vulnerability. More importantly, it was an attempt to create a situation in which I did not know the answer beforehand.

Label Me (what I made)

It begins with a note that reads ‘Look down’, followed by a trail of crumpled paper leading towards a person standing still.

They are positioned as an object of attention, unclothed and still. Their body slightly twisted contrapposto - so a life model, perhaps.

She holds a chalice from which beads spill outward. Around her are various objects: a porcelain figure, tights stuffed with filling, a half-eaten apple, and a magazine displaying semi-naked bodies.

They are surrounded by chairs. Behind them is a large mirrored wall covered in foliage, old boxes stacked up, and a chaise longue partially visible behind them.

The light is low, with individual lamps illuminating fragments of the room, while the body remains clearly visible.

On the floor, an instruction: ‘Label Me’. On the table, pieces of paper and pens.

After five minutes, a timer sounds. There is a pause, she walks away and the labels drop. She looks behind her as she leaves.

Labels: Venus, Heart, Cybele, Mother, Confidence, Goddess, picture of a bird

Um…yes, but why?

Prescriptive ontology suggests that an artwork not only presents us with an object, but also encodes rules for how it should be encountered. A painting tells us to stand while stroking our chin and saying ‘hmmmm’. A life model invites analytical observation so we may draw. A naked stranger in everyday life asks us not to stare. Pornography invites erotic looking, while a medical photograph invites diagnosis.  My work deliberately destabilised these familiar ontologies. Was I an artwork, a person, a model, an object, or a performer? The only clear instruction was the sign: ‘Label me’.

Victor Turner describes liminality as a threshold state in which ordinary social rules are suspended, where you go from one state to another (‘betwixt and between’) - not what you were and not yet what you are to become. This space was neither quite a museum, nor quite a theatre, nor quite a shop, and the body inherited that ambiguity. 

Here audience-participants are no longer operating according to everyday conventions surrounding nakedness, nor according to the settled conventions of the gallery or theatre. Instead of relying on familiar rules of encounter, I offered a new instruction: ‘Label me’.

For some, label = interpret, for others, label = describe. So the work isn't just exploring how bodies are seen, it explores how different encounter rules generate different kinds of seeing.

Additionally, the instruction did not ask the audience to interpret privately, but to act publicly. Writing a label transformed interpretation into participation. Each new label became part of the artwork, shaping how subsequent participants encountered me: meaning accumulated socially rather than individually. 

Woman with a goblet

One of my favourite labels was ‘a woman with a goblet’. Everyone else may have accepted the invitation to categorise, but this person stayed with ‘I'm not going to decide what kind of thing you are. I'm just going to tell you what I perceive’. They were resisting the social expectation that artworks invite deep interpretation. 

So what? 

Well two things. Firstly, within this frame, interpretation becomes participation rather than just analysis. The act of naming the body is not simply descriptive; it is performative - in other words, it alters the conditions of the encounter as it happens. 

It moves beyond audience participation into something more fundamental: the audience-participants aren't just engaging in meaning-making, they're also determining what sort of encounter this is in the first place. Audience-participants aren't just asking ‘what does this mean?’ They're first asking ‘what is this?’ And until they answer that question, they can't know how to behave. Immersive theatre doesn't just redistribute (or queer) meaning - it can also queer ontology.  

The end 

We began the residency exploring a simple question: who has control in immersive theatre?  The idea that agency moves between performer and audience-participant fascinates me. What surprised me was that at the end of this piece when we returned to that question, it wasn’t possible to answer it. And in truly immersive encounters, I’m not sure it is.