Audience Response and Participation
“When speaking to the audience, people are going to respond to you as you speak and when they do, look at them. If someone laughs, look their way, if someone sighs, see who did it. If someone smiles, check them out.”
What I love about Seth’s direction for actors is that he does not tell us why we should look at the audience when they react. He just lays out what to DO, an intention. Look at the audience when they respond to us.
I can guess what might happen. Can you? My guess is that by looking at the person or people responding, we allow them in, we allow a relationship and connection. As public speakers, we will be influenced by the audience and the audience by us, and the talk will become a conversation.
Once, in Seth’s class, I was doing a very sad scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. I was hiding a bit from the audience as it was such an intimate moment. I found myself looking at the floor, the walls, glancing quickly at my scene partner. Seth asked me to open up my face and my eyes towards the audience. A completely counter-intuitive, public, and vulnerable thing to do. When I did this I was immediately swept over by emotion, tears wet my cheeks. Just opening to the audience can open us to the present moment and that is the aliveness we seek.The best talks are buoyant because they are influenced by the life around them: the space, the tech, the feel of the air, the stage manager’s thumbs-up, the hug from the host, the sweaty hands, and most importantly, the other, the audience, our raison d’etre.
Every audience is different. Some are quiet, some are tired, some are open, some are reserved, some are skeptical, some are expectant, some are excited. Like people. The speaker’s job is to start with where the audience is, to notice the reality, to take them in. An inexperienced actor might do the same performance every night without taking in the nuances of the other actors on the stage, the questioning look, the subtle sigh, or even the crashing of the prop phone to the floor. They might assume the audience has no impact on them and ignore that whole part of the theater. An experienced actor would take in all of that reality and respond to it as their character with those given circumstances.
An experienced actor would welcome the constant mystery of the other actors and of the audience, knowing that allowing in those uncontrollable others is a gift to the performance.
That is what the audience gives us, the speakers: the chance to be in relationship and respond to the reality of the moment. And this is what makes a performance come alive. So many of my clients ask how they can make a one-sided talk feel conversational. This is how. No talk is one-sided. We are in conversation just by taking the audience in.
One way to make sure we include the audience is to build-in audience participation. I think of every talk I give as a workshop, no matter the number of people in the audience. I ask real, not rhetorical, questions. I listen to the answers and address what the audience members have offered me. And I always have some sort of interactive exercise for participants to do in pairs or groups. Sometimes, I invite a few of the audience members to join me on stage for coaching.
When the Holistic Life Foundation came to speak at Charlottesville TEDx, the three adult founders brought three of their students onto the stage with them. Just having kids on stage is a thrill for the audience because we know that anything can happen! The kids taught mindfulness exercises to the audience and made sure we did each one fully! I remember a young boy chiding us, “No, really! Look them in the face! Say it loud! I LOVE YOU!” It is still one of our most memorable talks.
So, next time we speak in public:
Include the audience by looking at them when they respond, take them in, interact.
Find a way to build interactive exercises into our talk. Give the audience a role and an action.