We've now done a week of performances of The Woods, and the installation has been open for just over a week. I am really pleased with both aspects of the project. The performance has a guide age of 14+, but it's been really great to see small children loving the installation and the novelty of being allowed to sit on the bed, pick things up and explore. People's responses to the installation have been positive, strong and immediate.It's harder to tell with the performance how it is going as it is not the type of show that people necessarily want to respond to immediately. Instead people's feedback has drip-fed back to me, perhaps a day or two days after watching it, and their reactions have been positive and engaged. The performance is a delicate beast, which we are getting better at taming. When the show works well it has its own rhythm: stemming from the work as a whole, rather than from individual performances. The flow of peaks and troughs really holds you as an audience member.
It has also been great to have new audiences along - to have unfamiliar faces amongst the crowd - particularly those who've discovered the installation by mistake and been curious enough to stay for the performance. Audiences were smaller than we'd like for the first week despite lots of publicity, but I am hopeful that it will gain momentum.