The Awesome Show is a creative project that has been in the making for nine months. Starting at The Battersea Arts Centre, the four practitioners have been exploring the relationship between audience and performer in an attempt to discover what makes a show awesome – they have yet to find it.
The Awesome Show is essentially a drama workshop – there are games and interactive parts and the audience are encouraged to shout out ideas and chat among themselves about awesomeness in all its forms. Surrounding the stage are little pieces of what the group have discovered over the past nine months to be possible ingredients to making a ground-breaking show. The audience is invited to choose what piece of awesome they would like to see. The group’s perceptions of what is awesome, however, seem to be far removed from their audiences’.
Ideas such as ‘campfire’ prompt the performers to dim the lights a little, sit around as if by a campfire and spiel out insufferable nonsense about the lineage and vastness of time itself. Time is, in terms of abstract scale, an awesome thing, but four adults crouching on the floor spouting about it like a bunch of adolescent stoners is not.
The performers themselves are welcoming and easy-going; there is a strong feeling that the audience and they are all on a journey together to find that show maker. Unfortunately, they have got lost somewhere along the line and appear unable to get back on track.
