It is not every day a person gets to experience a full spectrum of emotions, from anger to grief, but yesterday PIJF cadet reporter Tim Scott was shown how to harness the power of the humanity.
Performance artist Hamish Annan specialises in the physical embodiment of human emotions.
His show, as part of the Dunedin Fringe Festival, invites the audience to "access" their emotions alongside him.
"Each performance is like a little improvisation," he said.
He offers six emotions to the audience - aggression, lust, grief, happiness, fear and disgust.
I was treated to a selection of aggression, grief and happiness.
Hamish raised his face to meet mine, a blank canvas waiting to be filled with a colour palette of emotion.
At the sound of my voice, his face slowly morphed towards my requested emotion.
His eyes, cheeks and lips twitched and jerked before settling themselves into a scowl, a snivel, or a grin.
Up first on the menu was anger.
I felt my own body twitch involuntarily in response to the performance.
While I kept my composure and held his gaze, this only seemed to make him angrier.
A tirade of roars were thrown my way, yet once I left my seat, Annan’s face returned to its blank state.
Annan said the energy the audience puts into the interaction was the fuel for his emotional response.
"There is a sliding scale for each emotion, very subtle to very extreme, but always in relation to what the other person is giving me."
Next up was happiness.
A cheeky grin beamed from ear-to-ear and I could not help but burst out laughing, along with our camera crew.
Annan said he had written numerous plays during his career in traditional theatre and live performance art.
The performance was much like a play, except the story was written from the emotional connection forged between performer and viewer.
He concluded the performance with a dose of grief, which was the hardest emotion for me to face.
His face contorted into a shape of pain with mouth agape and body shaking.
Once Annan had returned to normal, I saw him wipe a tear from each eye.
"We don’t know what’s going on in other people’s heads," he told me.
Annan explained that the work was about healthy emotional regulation.
"We have these ideas about what our identity is and what it means to be alive.
"What this work does is it teaches people to operate in a slightly broader sense of their own selves," he said.
"Our emotional bandwidth goes to two major extremes but we only operate in a tiny little fraction in the middle — but our capacity to feel, connect, express and embrace our full humanity is so wide, and yet it is very rare that we ever lean into that."
