In the beginning of my creative process two major questions guided my musical experience: Should we read the booklet and get informed about the pieces before going to a concert? Or should we ignore it and get excited? No one wants to be caught on a false applause.
The main issue of any concert ritual is to negotiate the importance of the social protocol vs. the importance of the musical experience. If the idea of going to a concert is to listen to a perfect interpretation, ignoring what surrounds us, we might as well just buy a studio recording, where the interpret and the engineer makes a perfect recording and then seal ourselves off with the piece and our Hi-fi stereo system.
The experience that Cage had in the anechoing chamber shows us that there is no thing as a pure conception of silence. In the same way, this concert shows us that there is no such thing as a pure conception of freedom, especially in a concert hall situation. The workflow, the rules, the audio and video reactions, the actors in the public, the musicians, the order of the pieces, the logistic of the concert, etc., were giving the audience a feeling of freedom that normally they do not have it in this kind of concerts.
In order to reach the goal of having an active public, I needed a safe way to guarantee that everything would be apparently under control. Although everything was calculated, including what the public should do, some interactions should be by chance, but mostly were planned in order to develop the concert.
This confrontation of both controlled and spontaneous interactions was crucial for the production of a feeling of freedom from the audience point of view.
Even if most of the reactions were secretly controlled and highly anticipated, the rules of the rite were brand new. Thus, a feeling of freedom can be accomplished not by refusing rules in general, but by following new rules.
By proposing the audience new rules to follow, the word chance played a big role during the whole evening. The public had the impression that all these interactions were developed naturally by them, but they were also part of the concert and mainly this is the freedom proposed the during the ritual.