For the internationally known British performance group Forced Entertainment, contact with the audience is a pivotal moment in their artistic work. They constantly re-explore the line between stage and spectators and occasionally subject the relationship between performers and their audience to a serious test.

In live performance, the audience reacts to the performers who, in turn, react to the audience in a constant cyclic interchange. Actors will talk about "feeding off of" an audience's energy, especially in comedy, and complain about audiences who do not react in tangible ways. Actor's performances will vary greatly from one night to the next dependent in large part on audience feedback. Consider the differences in your reactions to a movie you have seen many times; the circumstances of your viewing will make the movie and your reaction to it seem different -- yet in this case there is no live exchange between you and the performers. Audience members will also effect one another's reactions. Large audiences are more likely to laugh or comment out loud than small audiences, in part because of the anonymity, and in part because others' reactions encourage and magnify your own reactions. You may laugh more, cry more, jump in your seat or respond vocally in a large, involved audience. Conversely, if the rest of the audience loves something that you dislike, it may intensify your own negative reaction to hear positive responses all around you.

In ancient times, theatre evolved from rituals which combined spiritual, social, educational, and artistic purposes. These rituals were highly participatory for the audiences. Like ancient audiences, theatre audiences today gather with individual expectations, a variety of levels of knowledge about the production, and a variety of personal tastes. Each audience, however, will form a collective identity for the length of the performance. Although audience members still participate in some sense in performances they attend, conventions of audience behavior today restrict the kinds of participation in the performance that was typical of ritual. Audiences applaud, laugh, boo, perhaps comment out loud, but are unlikely to offer alternative endings, to sing along, or to get up on stage and dance. Some forms of theatre requiring more audience participation remain popular today, examples include children's theatre, magic shows, or improv comedy.

While ritual performance has been universally a part of human history; each of us also has performance in our personal histories. Acting is a fundamental mode of human learning; children learn by acting out stories, games, things they see adults do, and things they imagine. As adults, we spend less time literally acting out our ideas, and we spend a great deal more time vicariously experiencing new stories or desires or dreams. When you see a play, read a novel, or go to the movies, a great deal of the pleasure of that aesthetic experience derives from your empathy with the characters and your vicarious experience of the characters' circumstances.

Film theorists have borrowed from psychoanalytic theory to develop a more complicated model of spectatorship, or how we relate to a filmic event, that is highly applicable to theatre as well. The first form of spectatorship derives from Freud's concept of "scopophilia", which literally means "pleasure in looking". As this concept is applied to audiences, it implies a voyeuristic relationship between audience and event, which is perhaps more appropriate to film than to some forms of theatre, which can be highly participatory as opposed to voyeuristic. Scopophilia suggests that the dramatic action unfolds magically in front of the spectator, unaffected by audience responses, yet gives the watcher an illusion of taking part in, or even controlling, the events of the drama. Consider how we tend to identify with the hero of a film: we shrink back when something threatens him or feel a sense of power when he defeats a foe. At the end we would be disappointed if he did not win the heart of the heroine.

A second idea derives from the "mirror stage", a concept more fully described in psycholanalysis by Lacan. In the "mirror stage" of human development, we see ourselves literally in the mirror and figuratively in other people like us (mom or dad) and imagine ourselves to be like those we see in the mirror, who are usually more powerful than ourselves, especially given that this stage describes children around age two. But film theorists suggest that this kind of imagining ourselves as more capable than we really are continues to shape us, primarily through our relationship to characters in narratives. This does provide a good explanation for our attraction to characters in such genres as action pictures or romances, in which we identify ourselves -- and perhaps literally model our behavior on -- the super human capacities of an action hero or the extremely attractive, poised, and talented romantic hero or heroine

1)Any  skills  you've  learnt  or  developed :
I've learned to use my breathing correctly while singing and I've discovered my inner voice by using muscles contraction of my larynx and pushing the right amount of air.
I would say that i really improved my 'vibrato' technique and I've developed my voice strength.

2)Rehearsal  Techniques:
I tried to use chest voice instead of nasal voice which was something that to be honest it was difficult for me to do as I've always used this nasal voice for my lack of training in this topic.
In class I have learned that "The stronger the air-stream, the stronger the voice" so as my rehearsal technique i used my mouth, throat and nose as a resonator.

3)Challenges  you faced/overcame.
I would say that one of my biggest challenges was to be able to sing loud in front of people as I never had a singing lesson before and I would never say that I have a nice singing voice, so I was really nervous about the idea of having to do a solo, however, I'm really proud about overcoming this fear because I've been able to sing really well on the actual exam.
4)How you  used  your  voice  and  the  information you  learnt  helped you.  
I learnt that the mouth and the throat can both be a voice resonator so I used them in my final performance to have higher control on my vocal folds and to have a stronger tone that could have lasted longer.

5)Compare  the  rehearsal  and  final  videos:

 Comparing the two videos, the main thing that I can see is that in the final video I was much more focused and I thought independently about my own grade and how I could do my best to achieve the top expectations. In the rehearsals you can notice that I’m not singing really loud as I was “saving up my voice” for the final video so that they could hear me clearly even from the camera.

6)What  you  would  like  to  learn  more  about  in  the  future:
In the future, I would love to learn more about belting as is a really efficient way on how to do higher notes and this has been my goal since I started college so, I would be my goal to achieve to sing an higher key, even thou it’s difficult, I’m sure that practice makes permanent so, I’ll be able to do it!