Shaping Event

Originally, tellers had a ten minute time limit. However, the organizers observed:

people felt

like they had to use the entire 10 minutes.

You'd get people stumbling up and use

"Uh", "Um", "uh",

trying to drag it all out.

These people sound uncomfortable, and this clearly didn’t make for a great performance. So they decided to change the time limit.

We started looking at it and say, All right.

The 10 minutes is too long.

Let's whittle it down to about five to seven minutes.

That was the magic window.

Just long enough for people to do their story

but they didn't feel like

they had to take up that entire chunk of space.

In Randy’s interview he talked about doing very little to shape the event and having just a few “enabling constraints.” The time limit is one of those constraints. In thinking about how various actors (individuals, the community as a whole, the event as some larger entity, the space) impact the event, it is interesting to see when the organizers make conscious decisions to shape the event in a certain way. In this case, the responded to their observations and made changes to achieve a more favorable result.

Lance shared another very conscious decision he, Randy, and Joyce made that shaped the event: drawing names from a hat to choose the order of the tellers. Again, this decision came about after observing that their first method of taking volunteers didn’t work well with a large number of people. They expected only a few people to volunteer that first night:

we really didn't expect that big of a turn out,

and so, the first one we said if three people got up and told a story

and Randy being one of them [laughs].

If three people got up and told a story,

we'd be totally happy

at that point the night's a success.

However, they ended up with a lot more than that.

And we ended up filling up the whole hour and a half.

It was just person after person after-

there was a good 10 or 12 that very first night.

This led them to discuss other ways of choosing volunteers:

So immediately the next day,

we were kind of looking at each other and going

all right we need to figure out some way to simplify this or some way to

streamline or

stage manage it.

The use of the term “stage manage” here really connects with the performance aspect of Carapace and the impact that the organizers have on the performance. They had been writing people’s names on a list and then calling them up in order but that “didn’t sound any fun.”

Joyce came up with the idea of

let’s do them randomly

to kind of shake things up a little bit.

At that point,

the idea of the top hat came about.

The top hat--

we found the top hat at a costume store in

Marietta,

and from there it was history man.

Write your name down

throw in the hat.

The hat was more fun. It shook things up and added an element of randomness. Randy was philosophical when talking about the hat in his interview, comparing the randomness of the drawing to life. You never know when you will be called upon, and you may not be called upon at all. I was recently reading J. K. Rowling’s writing about the Sorting Hat on Pottermore. In brainstorming ways the students might be sorted, she thought about names being pulled from a hat, perhaps a magic hat, and that morphed into the Sorting Hat. I think it is significant that the Carapace hat is a top hat, like a magician might wear. The Carapace names are pulled from a magic hat that transforms the mundane task of deciding who goes next into an exciting and profound experience.

As MC, Lance had a unique power to shape the event, set expectations, and respond to aberrant behavior. He told the only heckler he remembered having at Carapace to “keep things to yourself” because Carapace is supposed to be a “welcoming environment.” Although there may be a community norm that heckling does not happen, this was reinforced by Lance in his role as MC. After this event, he added to his opening remarks at the beginning of each show that

You know, and if you don't enjoy someone's story,

that's fine

we just ask you to remain respectful

because the person next to may be enjoying that story

and ultimately

it's only 5 minutes.

You can last 5 minutes in a story that you don’t like.

He continued to influence how the audience behaved by reinforcing this each month.

Lance went back to the idea that the kindness of the audience comes mostly from the audience.

We attracted just the right people

to just the right venue.

Our audience knew immediately

what we were trying to do.

And they were very supportive of one another.

These are the right people. Would other people behave differently? Are these people naturally kind audience members, or do they mostly behave this way at Carapace? Saying that the audience knew what they were trying to do implies intent. They did want the teller and audience relationship to be a certain way. The audience knew it and complied? And in stating that they were supportive of one another reminds us again that

you're asking the audience to be the audience

then to be the performer

and then to turn around and to go back to being the audience again

The division is not so straightforward. It isn’t about being kind to the storytellers but kind to each other.

Lance said that in the beginning, some audience members were not that kind or attentive.

There were a few people

in the beginning;

the heckler,

for example,

or

while people are telling the story

we would be watching the audience

just to see their reactions.

In the first three to six

Carapaces, we saw

the bored faces,

and the eye rolling when people would tell a story about something.

But that behavior didn’t persist.

You'd see these facial reactions,

but by about six months into it,

that type of person had started to disappear.

Normally, when we watch the reactions of people

from about the six month on,

normally when we saw the reaction

it was a genuine emotional reaction,

they were laughing, or

they were crying,

you'd see a couple of people tearing up,

or they were supportive of it.

How did these people disappear? Did the actual individuals stop attending to be replaced by others? Or did the same people change their behavior? Lance said:

So the environment itself

started to weed out the people that we didn't really want.

How did the environment do that? Were the kinder listeners able to exert a kind of silent peer pressure? Also, the organizers created the environment, so it makes sense that the things they had control over would send signals to the audience about how to behave.