THE ORANGE PROJECT is a month-long site-specific participatory performance piece that inhabits a single block in Downtown Manhattan. Every workday during lunch hour, artists will inhabit the sidewalks and public spaces of this block creating dance, experiential performance and/or small-scale installation. The Orange Project seeks to explore and deepen the impact of sustained interaction between public art and its community.


PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

The Orange Project investigates what happens when contemporary art becomes a day-to-day fixture in a public setting. For four consecutive weeks, we will create a new performance/installation every day that engages the architectural, social, and cultural topography of one block/site in Lower Manhattan. Though the performances will have different content every day and will appear in varying locations on the street/site, they will all prominently incorporate the color orange as a simple, recurring identifier. As the lunchtime crowd becomes aware of our routine, they’ll start to look out for their “neighborhood” artists and our daily antics. Over the course of the four-week project, the daily performances will be informed by the public’s responses and reactions. We will, in turn, be able to shift and mold our performances’ content and methods of interaction in order to create a deeper dialogue with the street’s daily community.

Daily performances will take multiple forms, and will range from instances of overt performance (a choreographed dance utilizing the site’s architecture), to the seemingly pedestrian (a performer garbed as an orange-aproned June Cleaver handing out orange-sprinkled sugar cookies). The specific content and form of these performances will be informed by historical research and our interactions with the public.

As with any public art, The Orange Project will provide the unsuspecting passerby with exciting, unexpected exposure to contemporary art. Additionally, The Orange Project’s unique structure, focus and multi-week scope enable it to cultivate deep ties between the artists, the art, and the people who routinely have lunch in the site every day. It is this long-term familiarity and exposure that is at the core of The Orange Project.

In any site-specific performance the most rewarding interactions come, not from the members of the arts community who attend the final piece, but from the site’s tenants, business owners, police officers, and workday denizens. We have found that public art’s most long-lasting and impactful relationships are with these local people who see the piece develop and grow. They develop a familiarity and sense of partnership with the artists and art. Working at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian we had security guards (who were initially leery of the “weird artists”) eventually offering interpretations and advice on our creative process. At the South Street Seaport, busboys from local restaurants referred to us as “our dancers”. As The Orange Project’s relationship with the public becomes more familiar, it will more intensely foster these feelings of community and even ownership and personal investment in the daily performances.

One of The Orange Project’s most exciting aspects is the ability to adapt, mold and sculpt our performances in order to more deeply engage with the community and the physical space. Because we’ll be performing in the same site, with the same general audience for four weeks, the project provides the unique opportunity to discover the best practices of interaction with the physical environment and the public.

We’ll be able to shape the content of the performances to respond to the street’s changing physical/social landscape (creating choreographed movement that highlights and interacts with a new construction site…or meeting and becoming friends with the street’s hot-dog vendor…and then having a crack team of orange-jumpsuited performers operate his cart for him one day as he lounges in an orange lawnchair and drinks Mai-Tais)

In addition, the project’s broad scope allows for practical experimentation with the tools and methods of creating site-specific and participatory performance work. We’ll be able, by trial and error, to discover how to adapt our performances to promote more public engagement and more overt interpersonal interaction.

At present, there is relatively little discourse about practical techniques and approaches to creating participatory performance or interactive art. One of the outcomes of this project will be a final report on our experiences, successes, failures and lessons learned. We will create video documentation during every step of the process. These findings may take the form of a documentary, and/or a more scholarly investigation of both site-specific art and participatory art.

Over the course of the project we hope to address the following questions:

1) What methods and techniques are most successful in prompting public interaction?

2) What key factors make these interactions intuitive and appealing? Are there quantifiable aspects that make an interaction “user-friendly?”

3) Is there a correlation between the number of people participating in an activity and how appealing it is? If so, what is that critical mass? Does it vary for different types of interaction?

4) Are cell-phones, pod-casts and the Internet viable tools to prompt interaction/participation? If so what are the most successful methods?

5) What methods of interacting with the physical site are most successful?