The Magic Trick explores how a playful and participant-led strategy for impact can facilitate a process of meaningful reflection, facilitated through a Zoom-based participatory experience.
An embedded reflection strategy can support participants to capture what they feel are the meaningful parts of their experience and in doing so, impact on the significance of their overall experience. This demonstrates that such strategies, which combine playful participation with reflection in a participant-centred approach, can take evaluation beyond a process of extracting data and towards something that has intrinsic value for participants.
This practice-research project explored how playful performance practice can support participant participant-led change, taking a multimodal research approach that combines practice research and audience research. The Magic Trick is a Zoom-based participatory experience developed in collaboration with Dr Tassos Stevens and Coney and is a gentle yet impactful piece of play and reflection. It was performed on Zoom to an international audience (2021-2023) 15 times, with around 145 participants in total (capacity of each show was 12 to ensure an intimate and supportive experience). Project webpage: https://coneyhq.org/project/the-magic-trick/
It examines how playful participation and a participant-led design strategy (which enables audience members to choose if or what impact is meaningful for them) can facilitate a process of meaningful reflection. This includes the creation of spaces that do not pre-determine what meaningful change will (or should) look like for participants; instead their (private) reflections following each game determine the direction the performance takes for them. The project also explored the potential for an innovative, embedded reflection approach to facilitate audience research for live performance experiences.
The two, interlinked, research questions in the project were:
The project took an iterative approach, combining practice research with audience research to understand efficacy from the participants’ perspective. This resulted in two key developments in the performance design: the addition of a Tail (which is an optional series of small reflective tasks and games sent to the participants in the days following the performance) and the introduction of a theme for participants to scaffold the potential change they’d like to make.
The project led to new insights on the way an embedded reflection strategy, which effectively annotates the meaningful parts of a participant’s experience, impacts their overall experience. These insights include strategies for combining playful participation with participant-centred experience design to create a performance experience that enables meaningful participation and reflection.
