To help us with our performance, we needed to know the type of people who would be in the cafe visiting the Collection Gallery and how many people would be our audience on a Saturday. Therefore one Saturday I sat in the cafe and observed and recorded quotes of peoples conversations. I sat in one of the booths at the end of the cafe as that was the only table free, from 1pm- 3pm. During this time the amount of people in the cafe was very consistent with the busiest, loudest time being between 1pm- 1.30pm. Therefore I think it would be a good time to do our performance between 1pm and 2pm as this will be the best time to have a good sized audience.
The observations from being sat in this part of the cafe made me think the type of people who sit in the booths want to be secluded from the rest of the cafe. Sitting there you can hear whats going on in the rest of the cafe but you cant quite make out the conversations from other people. For example, I could only hear parts of the conversation of an elderly man and woman who were sat behind me and the manager when she was on the phone. The type of people sat at the table behind me also in the booth demonstrated why they chose to be secluded from everyone else. The first woman who sat there was by herself, having a drink and some food. The next couple who sat there were having a small general conversation with the woman noticing the engagement ring on the tree outside the cafe. The last person was the manager who chose to sit away from everyone else so she could do her paperwork in the quieter part of the cafe as well as make business phone calls.
When I got up from my seat to order a drink and observe the rest of the cafe, I noticed a man on his laptop in the seat where my group have noticed one person is always sat there either with a book or newspaper alone. This illustrates that even on a Saturday the space is still chosen for the same thing. Meanwhile, the rest of the tables in the middle were taken up by families with small children. This is another factor which we will have to be aware of in our piece as there will be a mixed audience ranging from young children to the elderly. A couple of the children were observant with their surroundings in the area outside the cafe, playing with the plant pots and peeking into the window of where I was sat. This therefore shows that the children will be more likely to be interested in our performance as they are easily drawn to things and may even notice things before their parents do, maybe causing the parents to notice us through them.
Attached in this blog are the recordings of my observations: Café observations