As I opened my twitter this morning, my eyes caught a glimpse of interesting short interview with a French choreographer at dwell, Xavier Le Roy. Somehow it bears a resemblance to the last week's "Mittwoch Macht Frei: Doddy Iswahyudi" about reading audience in different countries. Doddy, a Yogya-based cartoonist, said general observation over the news or things related to a country (in-depth and smart one, I supposed) is a key to captivate the audience in different places.
Here I quoted the short interview by Tiffany Chu on Le Roy's latest work "Self-Unfinished"
"Do French notions of space - acceptable personal space, audience space, public space - differ from that in the U.S. and other countries where you have performed? And how might that affect the way the audience perceives your pieces?
It's interesting. Obviously, there are cultural differences in the way that people perceive space -- from an upstanding American handshake to the easy closeness with which the French kiss both cheeks. I have not seen drastic differences in the audiences between here and Europe, but I will never forget my performance in Moscow. The Russians laughed from beginning to end -- and while my piece certainly has elements of humor, it turned into a kind of action-reaction show, and it was a bit difficult for me to perform a streamlined continuum of movements. Only afterwards did I realize that they probably thought I was channeling Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime. In Asia, particularly Singapore, the audience was amazingly silent - and that was fascinatingly extreme as well. But it is difficult to make these generalizations about culture, especially when one remember who is in my audiences - it is a subset with certain expectations about visual art performance that represent a very specific cross-section of each culture. "
Personally, I haven't figured out how to handle various demands to please everybody. Once I attended a seminar about how to captivate the audience with colors, somehow I'd been more convinced that creative business is as complicated as Dow Jones index. Each culture has their own color chart, definition of nice and bad, particular shape of living things (animals or body shape). I don't want to fall in stereotypes, but in this case, stereotype is rather good.
But again, we cannot make everyone happy, though? Even God made humans suffered.
(did I mention that Le Roy's formerly a biochemist?)
