Let your tweets do the talking at #txtshow

Conceptualised by award-winning American performance artist Brian Feldman, #txtshow is perhaps the only show in the world that asks the audience to keep their phones ‘On’. In the show, all audience members are instructed to have a smartphone, ideally fully-charged, and actively use it during the show’s 45-minute duration. It is not necessary to have a Twitter account to participate, as everyone in attendance is randomly assigned a protected and anonymous account for their use. During the show, there will be live tweets from the audience which will be immediately enacted and performed by Feldman. Speaking about the show that will be held at Backyard between 7 pm and 8 pm on June 3, Feldman says, “About 8 months after Twitter started (2006), a friend of mine sent me an invite to join, which I promptly turned down.

I just didn’t foresee it’s potential. A few years later, I needed a way to let people know what I was doing in real time as part of a performance project and finally relented. As I began to finally see the value of the service while using it daily, I started to think about how it could be utilised for a performance; not just for promotion and project updates. While reading tweets out loud one day to a friend, it dawned on me that the feed could be the script and the writers, everyone. After staging a small test show for some friends to see if this idea was feasible, I produced a successful run of shows at The Kerouac Project writers residency in Orlando, Florida. Since its premiere in February 2009, I’ve performed #txtshow over 60 times in cities across the United States. This is the show’s first international performance.” 

Based entirely upon what the audience writes in anonymity, the performances may contain mature themes, profane language and explicit sexual content. Since the show largely rests on the spontaneity of both the audience and the performer, it does have its share of challenges. 

“Honestly, performing it isn’t the biggest challenge for me, it’s the getting ready for the performance. Prior to each show, I have to manually reset a minimum of 50 Twitter accounts. I have over 100. With all of life’s commitments and distractions, this process can take days, especially after being blocked by Twitter for exceeding the number of allowed password resets in a certain time period. Apart from that getting the audience to write great stuff is a task. If they don’t send quality tweets, it can be difficult to turn uninspired text into an engaging performance; no matter how emotive I make it. It’s also 100 per cent participatory. All attendees must participate, or else there’s no show. I’m always saying that if you don’t like the show, it’s 50 per cent your fault,” says Washington-based Feldman. 

With everything happening instantaneously, we ask him if there have been times he’s been in a fix or perhaps felt embarrassed to enact a certain tweet. “I’ve never been embarrassed to say anything as part of the show. There is no content restriction whatsoever and anything goes; whatever shows up in my feed is said in the order it’s received. That stated, if anything ever shows up which would endanger myself or the audience, I have a built-in workaround. #txtshow has provided me with some of the funniest dialogue I’ve ever said out loud. In fact, it’s occasionally so funny that I have a hard time keeping a straight face while saying it. On the flip side, it’s also gotten me to say the most horrible things I have ever said. However, one particularly memorable moment was when someone asked someone in the audience out on a date, and actually they said yes!” 

For the nonce though, he says, “This is a show uniquely made for the times we live in. During my time in India so far, I’ve yet to go a single day without seeing at least one person lost in thought while looking at their smartphone, at the expense of missing something happening right in front of them, in non-digital space. At #txtshow it’s just par for the course.”

The performer has leapt off a ladder 366 times over 24 hours (Leap Year Day), had dinner on stage with his real-life family – in front of paying audiences – over 40 times (The Feldman Dynamic), remained inside a playable arcade game for 16 hours (The Skill Crane Kid) and  hand squeezed 1,443 cups of Florida orange juice (Fresh Squeezed); in addition to the more than 115 other projects he has presented since August 2003 through Brian Feldman Projects, one of North America’s premiere presenters of experimental time-based art.