Cloud Nine: relationships between performers and audience

Audience Engagement

Addressing the Audience:

Performance techniques used in Cloud Nine often involve breaking the fourth wall. Characters directly address the audience, pulling them into the narrative and facilitating dialogue.
Direct addresses to the audience make the social commentary more poignant. Audiences are called upon to consider the issues of gender, race, and power dynamics presented.

Audience Expectations:

Cloud Nine subverts audience expectations through its use of cross-gender casting and time jumps. This disorientation encourages the audience to question societal norms.
Transgressive themes of gender, sexuality, colonialism, and racism often challenge the audience’s comfort zones, initiating thought-provoking debates.

Performer Techniques

Characterisation:

Character portrayal is complex in Cloud Nine, with performers often playing multiple roles, and roles that contrast their own gender, race, or age. This demands a high versatility and adaptability of performers.
The cross-dressed characters and role reversals in Cloud Nine offer an innovative portrayal of identity that directly engages the audience and highlights themes of gender fluidity, stereotypes, and societal roles.

Use of Drama:

Performers use various dramatic techniques to engage with the audience, including physical theatre, tableau, and multi-rolling.
High-energy performances with a blend of absurdity and realism, comedy and tragedy engage the audience while conveying the paradoxes intrinsic to societal norms.

Plot Delivery:

Non-linear plot presentation adds an additional layer of complexity and requires the performer’s skill to present clear transitions.
The transitions between Victorian colonial society and late 20th-century London are stark and sudden, highlighting a dramatic shift in social norms over time, thus challenging audience perspectives.

Both performer techniques and audience engagement in Cloud Nine serve to blur the traditional boundaries between performer and spectator, creating a thought-provoking and dynamic theatre experience.