The York Research Database

This article investigates the solo spectator and her slippery exploration of participation, focusing on Blast Theory's Rider Spoke. This performance work, which has taken place at a variety of UK-based and international locations from 2007 to 2014, encourages a single spectator to cycle alone through the city with a small computer attached to the handlebars, finding 'hiding places', recording messages in response to questions from the computer, and listening to the recordings of others who have explored the performance. This particular blend of one-to-one performance and archival awareness of other one-to-one encounters presents a complex attention to and performance of truth and truth-telling for the spectator, who for me became the 'spectator-performer' over the course of the piece. Focusing on the playfully antagonistic decision to explore the piece in character, and the shift in my spectatorship-performance that occurred in the encounter with another spectator-performer's voice, the article investigates the ways in which the spectator-performer negotiates the performance in relation to variations on the truthful and the autobiographical.