Alison Kobayashi

Seeing Alison Kobayashi’s work was definitely a new experience for me since I have never seen such an interactive performance before. Most shows I have been to have involved me being in the audience watching professional actors play characters. I think the fact that this performance is so inclusive draws people into a weird performance like this. I also think that this forces people to actually watch the performance. I feel like when people watch shows, people could say it was the best performance they’d ever seen and they’d never forget it. I’d say most of the time, that feeling is true, but I feel like they never truly watch the show because people are usually fully engaged when they are involved. With Say Something Bunny, being forced to “act” as a character forces the individual to truly pay attention to what goes on since most people subconsciously enjoy having attention on them. I was sitting in the front so I got to be one of the lucky people who was chosen to play “Julius,” even though he was only mentioned briefly during the introduction of characters. But because of that one label and acknowledgment, I found myself anticipating when Julius would have another line or another part in the script and really got into the performance because I was actively looking for his role.

Alison Kobayashi also mentioned how she kept the original recording in the performance, without any editing or manipulation of the audio. Hearing samples of the audio from the small performance she did, I felt that it would drive some people insane if they had to work around audio in such bad quality. She made an analogy of this recording to the experience of trying to film using a new phone and I thought it was a great and relatable analogy. It made this performance more relatable and intricate because she didn’t make any edits or adjustments to it. As she mentioned, much of the texture and body would have been lost, creating a completely different vibe and environment of the audio. To be an artist, I think the hardest part is to make something from what someone else has already made. Although she set limits to what she could do with her piece, she bypassed many limits to get to the final work. Kobayashi went beyond her artistic boundaries and her own limits to create Say Something Bunny and it shows with its success and how people interact with it. In my opinion, if she hadn’t placed herself in the burden of leaving the audio raw, the livelihood of the characters would not have been as impactful.