Hi William, I’m really pleased you found so much to like in it. Immersive and participatory work is, of course, a deeply subjective experience and so I can only reflect on my own pathway through the work. It’s really great to have a counterpoint here from you, so thank you. Sounds like you had the experience I was hoping to have. I’ll try and clarify some of what I felt here in response…

I’m curious about your description of the experience as “participatory in a deliberate workerly way.” Do you mean that we were involved in the staging of the imagery of the show like the performers? I can’t say I agree that I felt like a co-creator of the show, I certainly never felt any agency to contribute to the show or effect its outcome. Rather I felt more like a prop to be used by the performers. So immersive, yes, but the participation is limited.

As a parallel for our inaction on climate change, well, yes, I suppose so. We’ve certainly been pushed around by our various leaderships into a range of fantasy non-responses to the climate emergency. If this is the intent of the work, to parody that political inaction, then for me this needed to be clearer in its articulation. I think your interpretation here does a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of the work itself.

I can’t really agree about the complexity of the work. Whether the artists are unthinkingly or knowingly using “drama school tropes” doesn’t change the banality of those images for me in the moment of the encounter. If I have to be preloaded with knowledge of the artists body of work in order to fully understand the work (if i have to be “in on the joke,” as it were) then I think that’s a dramaturgical problem which needs to be solved rather than pushed onto the audience.

I’d also agree that the response required to climate change itself is immensely complex, so I wonder how it can also be very very simple. This dichotomy strikes me as hedging the issue. I think the strength of someone like Greta Thunberg is the clarity with which she articulates the complexity of the problem. Trying to reduce that complexity to something simple, sound bitey or catch phrasey, is a quick path to inaction. So, the naivete of the images presented by the work, I felt, were inadequate to the task – which, as you suggest, is a tall order. I can’t say I saw depth where I didn’t. Lots of aesthetically pleasing constructions, definitely, but not more.

Finally, I’m also curious about the distinction you make between participation and consumption. I would argue that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As you illustrate, the audience for this work were both creators and observers – which is a transaction common to immersive work – and I would suggest that the experience of this is a kind of consumption. It seems like you equate consumption with passive experience here, and I’d argue that it’s not solely so.

Anyway, like I said, I’m really glad it had more resonance for you and I’d certainly agree that WAISTD does provide a reflective space for processing the feelings and thoughts generated over that weekend.

Maybe I was just hoping for more than was on offer.

Having seen both Andi Snelling & Bryony Kimmings I could not agree more – this was my exact thought – Snelling in the Fairfax with actual budget – that would be wonderful. The audience that loved Kimmings would love Snelling. A journey of laughter and pain deeply moving. Get a ticket if you can, Arts Centre minds, they’re rare as hen’s teeth.

yep, i felt the same. Lazy, cheap gag. sad that audiences still respond to those kind of jokes really….
r