A spin-off from The Talking Creature, Q&A begins as the audience enters the space and they write their names on pieces of paper that are dropped into a bucket. We draw the first name, bring the individual onstage and invite the rest of the audience to interview them. In Vancouver, each participant selected the subsequent participant by diligently and responsibly scanning the audience, and identifying who they considered to be the most interesting looking person. There are rules: the audience is allowed to ask any question they desire while the subject has no obligation to answer. The proceedings are aesthetically elevated by a live video feed that projects the subject's image many times life size behind them, and in one instance the proceedings were accompanied by a DJ, improvising under the interviews.

Q&A proves that the banal minutiae of people’s lives can be as compelling as any carefully constructed performance. It is a theatre cliché that an animal onstage will always be more interesting than a human, no matter how brilliant the human’s performance. In the arena of artifice, the unrehearsed and accidental is often much more beautiful, astonishing and revealing. Getting someone onstage simply to be themselves has always been one of theatre’s most daunting aspirations; Q&A accomplishes this, as well as providing an opportunity for people to get to know each other.

The limits and challenges of open inquiry were tested at the Halloween Q&A, a collaboration with Upbag, a visual arts collective. As part of Hotel Canzine, we took over a room at the Gladstone Hotel and installed a miniature apocalyptic cityscape. We invited participants into the environment and a video projection situated the subject in the centre of the destruction. As always with Q&A, the same rules applied: anyone in the room could ask the subject anything they wanted, and all questions could be refused. Being Halloween, there was a desire to ask scary questions with full license granted to break every rule of propriety, with the expectation that evil, prying questions defying all social codes don’t actually hold much power, and any deep dark secret one might reveal while sitting amidst the devastated landscape would be denied the power to haunt you. Some people enjoyed it and some people were annoyed, but it generated intense discussion about the dual responsibilities of the artist when creating extreme performances, and the participants to take care of themselves.

With the support of the Arts in Education office of the Ontario Arts Council we took Q&A in the Classroom to Lakeshore Collegiate Institute and Malvern Collegiate Institute, two suburban high schools in the GTA. There, we wandered the halls and interviewed random students. With curiosity as our only motivation, the students had the opportunity to get to know each other outside of the rigid identity dynamics of high school life. Dances, sports, clubs and extracurricular activities offer the possibility of social interaction, but only as a contingent part of predetermined identities and social groups. Noncontextual socializing is rarely experienced, as the interaction of the multitude in the commons is no longer part of our collective experience. A girl who immigrated from India a few years ago brought this up, stating that she likes Canada, but misses neighborhood conviviality. She pointed out that in Canada, social engagement always occurs via consumer activities (movies, drinks, shopping) while in India, people tend to socialize by helping each other out. Even students who had been in the same school together for years reported learning new things about each other.