Last week I introduced one of my favorite acting techniques, audience contact. This week I will move on from “Casting the Audience” to a different form that is called allying. The purpose of this technique is to convince the audience to be on your “side” during the play. Let’s think of Iago from Othello. Throughout the show, this character constantly addresses the audience with what he’s going to do next as well as why he is doing it. Audience members tend to support characters who ask for it, so Iago is the perfect example for this. If the actor can get a lot of time alone with the audience, he or she can convince the audience to be on their side. This creates a strong relationship between actor and audience as well as adds to the meaning of the performance overall. This short post is all for this week, next time I will go into another audience contact element. Thanks for reading.