AUDIENCE COLLABORATION

 “Collaboration”: Latin verb collaborare (col- “together” + laborare “to work”)

✧ Rethinking Labour
Labour makes up the most crucial part in dance. Contemporary dance practices and performance-making in the West are deeply shaped by capitalist and colonial modes of labour: the pursuit of innovation, the demand for production under deadlines, the individualisation of authorship, and the relentless pressure to perform — physically, emotionally, conceptually. They operate through deeply interwoven systems of commodification, extraction, competition, and hierarchy. They also frame the conditions under which the audience experience and relate to dance and performance.

• Commodification: dance and performance become a product for market consumption, causing alienation to our labour.
• Extraction: movement and meaning are taken from bodies and cultures without reciprocity, leading to depletion and precariousness.
• Competition: dancers, practices and performances pit against each other within economies of scarcity and prestige, driving division and isolation between them.
• Hierarchy: certain bodies, forms, aesthetics and knowledge systems are privileged while others are marginalised and invisiblised.

More than a personal or artistic choice, integrating audience collaboration into my work is a return to the core of what dance and performance are, how they are made, and why it still matters today.

✧ Dancing is social. Dancing is connective. Dancing is collaborative.
When rethinking about the labour relationship in dance practices and performance-making, I first turn to my own experience of dance for inspiration. I realise that dancing with people has always given me joy and pleasure, whether it’s in the studio, on stage, at a party or in a club. It is not about me, but the connection we make through our bodies in a shared moment and space. And this is what I wish to offer the audience with my works: to join in the dancing. I want them to “move” with me, “move” me and be moved by me, not just watch me. I invite them to step into my work, feel its pulse, sense its rhythm, weave through it and leave personal traces on it. They become a partner, not an outside spectator. When the dance is over, I hope that the memory of our dance together lingers on their bodies.

• Living Process, Not a Commodity
  Collaboration shifts the role of the audience from consumer to co-participant, reimagining performance not as a product, but as a living process. I invite the audience to experience dance not as an object to be bought or consumed, but as a shared act of becoming — a space where presence itself becomes generative. Instead of reducing creative labour to a product crafted for mass appeal within the economy of spectacle, the collaborative format centres human presence, attention, and mutual responsiveness. It offers a slower, more processual, and less transactional form of engagement — one that values embodied encounter over entertainment, and shared attention over instant gratification.

• Relational, Not Extraction
  By collaborating with the audience, I want to shift the transactional aspect of performance (you pay, I perform) toward a relational one. Presence, trust, and mutual risk-taking become the true currency. Artists are invited to relinquish the need to be the most original, beautiful, or virtuosic, opening space for the audience to actively contribute to the unfolding of the work. Both artist and audience are called to listen, adapt, respond, and support one another, creating a shared attunement between them. This process challenges the extractivist gaze that treats dance as something to be consumed and instead nurtures a sense of collective responsibility and emergence. What is created is not simply a performance, but a moment of collective world-building — fleeting, relational, and resisting the reduction of labour to a site of consumption.

• Abundance, Not Competition
  Collaboration opens space for mutual recognition and appreciation, cultivating shared modes of meaning-making that transform both the form and function of performance. When audience collaboration is embraced, it generates its own economy and ecology — one founded on shared time, generosity, and improvisation. Dance no longer focuses on seeking for aesthetic effects, virtuosity, or attention. Instead, it trusts in what is already present in the room, leaning into the collective resourcefulness and creativity of the audience. The emphasis shifts from “being the best” to “sharing something together”, fostering a sense of abundance rather than a relentless competition for artistic endorsement and one-upmanship.

• Collective Envisioning, Not Hierarchy
  Audience collaboration creates space for multiple interpretations and embodied responses, resisting the imposition of a singular narrative or fixed meaning. The audience is invited to actively shape or influence the performance — through choices, responses, movements, or their mere presence. In this way, the boundary between artist and audience becomes porous. This approach decenters the artist’s position as the sole holder of knowledge and creativity — not to erase it, but to place it in dialogue with the audience. It affirms that all bodies hold knowledge and that dance is not the domain of the elite but a shared, embodied language. What emerges is not a controlled finished product, but a co-authored and co-emergent vision of the future.

✧ Redefining the Audience

• The audience is present — not as silent observers, but as protagonists, central to the unfolding of the performance. They are not passive or invisible, but engaged and consequential.
• The audience is intelligent and creative. They carry their own knowing, desires, and intuitions. They understand what resonates, and what works best for them.
• The audience is a free agent. Each person holds the power to choose and express their engagement in ways that reflect their own needs, capacities, and contexts. Non-participation is also a form of participation — a gesture grounded in intention and choice. Both participation and refusal are valid and equally valued.
• The audience is a collective body. The choices of each individual ripple outward, shaping the experience as a whole. Performance becomes a co-constructed field, where transformation is not the task of one, but the gesture of many. Change is a collective act.

✧ Designing for Collaboration
I draw on concepts from user experience design and Buddhist philosophy when creating audience-collaborative performances. They help me shape an environment where participation feels intuitive, produces visible shifts, and encourages reflection.

• Form Follows Function (F.F.F.)
  Movement, text, dramaturgy, light, sound, costume, and set design are not decorative layers, but functional elements that support audience collaboration. I intentionally remove anything that does not serve this purpose — to avoid confusion and ensure clarity of engagement. For me, good design is not about adding more, but knowing what to remove, and when. A well-designed collaborative work is built on gaining the audience’s functional and emotional trust. Unclear conditions create mistrust, and mistrust inhibits participation. A performance cannot be collaborative if it does not feel safe to enter.

• Keep It Simple and Accessible (K.I.S.A.)
  For collaboration to occur, audiences must understand how to participate, why their participation matters, what they can expect, and what their role might become. This information must be delivered in ways that are not only imaginative, but also clear — so that participation feels intuitive rather than intimidating. Beyond content, the design of the space itself plays a role. Overly complex language, ambiguous instructions, disorienting lights or sounds, and poorly considered seating can all become barriers to participation. Simplicity is not a compromise, but a form of care.

• Many i’s, No I (M.i.N.I.)
  A collaborative performance does not center a singular, objective “I” — not even the artist’s. Instead, it becomes a conversation between many subjective perspectives, a dance between performer and audience, and a negotiation among the audience members themselves. It is a space for multiplicity, where difference is not resolved but held. The performer is no longer the protagonist, but the space-holder, the mirror, the catalyst, the avatar — inviting, rather than standing out and apart. Working in this way requires me to accept the limits of my own knowledge and ability — a practice of surrender.

• Dive Into Gaps (D.I.G.)
  Gaps are not mistakes or failures to be edited out — they are invitations. I leave spaces of uncertainty, contradiction, or irresolution in the performance. These are real dilemmas and questions I do not yet have answers to and cannot resolve alone. In this way, the audience is not simply invited to collaborate, but necessary. Their participation completes the work, and each performance becomes a unique act of collective meaning-making and problem-solving. My works are therefore anti-completion. They remain in a state of pre-forming: always yet-to-be-born and in perpetual motion of becoming and re-becoming.