My town had their Fourth of July festival last night. The event started at 6pm and ended with fireworks that started at 10pm. People set up their chairs at 6pm to get their space to watch the fireworks four hours later.
The fireworks ran about 28 minutes. The fireworks kinda went in four-ish minute cycles. At the end of each cycle was an finale for that cycle and they were all fairly repetitive. The only real variation was the grand finale, but all the previous cycles felt like watching the same thing on a loop.
OK, so what I noticed is once the second cycle happened people started packing up and leaving. These are people who had brought their own chairs and waited four hours to make sure they had a good viewing spot. My guess is that people felt like they had seen something and were ready to leave. This is similar to street performing. Once the audience feels like they’ve seen something, people will leave. In street performing one technique to keep a crowd is having unfinished business. Like a dollar is borrowed early on and that dollar trick isn’t finished till the end of the show. Less people will walk at the end of tricks during the show because the dollar trick hasn’t been finished.
Personally when I’m doing street (found space) shows, I take it personally when people walk. However watching people walk away a few minutes into a $60,000+ firework show that they waited all day to see gives me some perspective on why people walk during my show.
-Louie
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