Audience Participation
From the very first Vampyr Theatre performance, audience participation was encouraged. "The production has received a warm response from people in the vampire subculture who regularly attend to cheer on the vampires each time they bite someone," said J. Gordon Melton. Sokol later explained "In the early 90s I was taking a break from music and wanted to combine a Grand Guignol style theater piece with the kinds of experiences I'd have at the movies, both doing Rocky Horror (I was Frank N. Furter at a movie theater in Teaneck, N.J. from when I was 15 to 17) and at any horror movie showing at the RKO Valentine in the Bronx, people yelling at the screen, that kind of thing, except at live actors who could yell back."
The troupe also included guests from the local underground, from members of the Coney Island Side Show, for which La Commedia del Sangue participated in a 1995 benefit at Irving Plaza, to fetish performer Mistress Shane to filmmaker Rosemary Delaine. Horror video hostess Jungle Girl, was recruited for a role in "Let Us Prey" at the 1993 Fangoria Convention at Sokol's "snuff film audition."
Read more about this topic: La Commedia Del Sangue: Vampyr Theatre
Famous quotes containing the word audience:
“When a subject is highly controversial ... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)