Who Wants to Be? October 9, 2007

On the 9th October, a London based art collective ‘The People Speak‘ conduct a radical experiment in live entertainment.

Who Wants to Be?’ mixes democratic decision-making, interactive animation and improvisation into a dangerously spontaneous game show.

Using a computer vision voting system designed for use by hoards of rowdy people, the audience at the Albany Theatre in Deptford will be asked to decide how to spend a £1000 cash pot: the entire box office takings!

But unlike the so-called ‘democratic’ game shows on TV, ‘Who Wants to Be’ takes the idea of audience participation to its most creative and potentially surreal conclusions. By suggesting ideas to the host and then voting, the audience can even change the rules of the game itself.

For example, test participants who survived an early version of the game were only a few votes away from deciding to sack the host and demand their money back. Next they came very close to ditching the voting system in favour of making decisions by doing a massive dance-off to Jean Michelle Jarre with a cash prize for the winner.

The same audience generated all kinds of ideas with what to do with 1000 quid from a flotilla of canoes navigating the Thames, to renting a London flat for a month for the entire audience to use. Luckily, they eventually decided to commission us to do a bigger, better event - and this is it!

What happens at the Albany Theatre on the 9th will be anyone’s guess, and is entirely up to whoever comes to put their 10 quid and their ideas into the pot.

Official Website: http://whowantstobe.co.uk