Playing with the audience

We love Edinburgh and all the glorious, brave performers that come here every year to work their arses off to do what they love.

We have been here before, but this year is shaping up to be the most fun yet because this year we are getting to know our audience almost as well as the other performers - and they are certainly getting to know us!

In the renegade tradition of street performance and busking we like the possibility that anything can happen and we do have quite a bit of fun with folks. In doing so, we share an experience that you don’t get in a lot of shows.

There is a great risk in directly playing with your audience – an audience volunteer can make or break a show in seconds. While the risk would seem to reside with the unsuspecting volunteer, they have the entire room in the palm of their hands, and lord knows they can give just as good as they get! Or, they can resist and withhold and change the beautiful alchemy of a thoughtfully constructed moment and make the performer dig even deeper into their bag of tricks to make it work. When people are invited to sit at our table and embrace this sense of openness, intimacy and unpredictability it can be everything from challenging to hysterical! It is part of the thrill of live performance - it's the anti-sitcom!

So far the audiences here have been brilliant and boisterous and bawdy and brave, and are making our show endlessly thrilling for us to do. We challenge and adore the folks that play with us in the show, whether they are cheering in their seats or goofing onstage and by the end of our show every last nail in the fourth wall has been destroyed in the service of a building a room full of joy, freedom, carnality, and abandon – and we have the pictures to prove it!

So, Edinburgh, if you feel a tug at your arm, in any show that trespasses by that fourth wall – feel the pull and go with the tug – you may very quickly be having the time of your life in a 5-star show!