‘Conception’ is a roughly monthly ‘experiment-all open mic’ that Will Burroughs and I run in Leeds.
Conception is a container for potential. Whereas we’ve perhaps thought of it as a ‘stage show’, really the idea of a stage show just contains some level of ‘raw potential’ within it. The concept of stage performance has certain notions around expectations (the performer will perform to the room, there is a performer, etc.) Conception relies on a playful approach to those rules, and ultimately a disregarding of them at an almost-total level.
This is a useful formality: people who are liable to attend Conception will generally be familiar with the form of ‘stage performance’ whether it’s music, theatre, cabaret, performance, or live art (and so on). This is almost a shorthand or stereotype of a ‘formal’ event that we can play on and push through or bring inwards. The core of Conception has been to play with that form both giving in to that stereotype of an event and pushing past what is seen as a normal stage performance.
What do I mean when I talk about potential? Part of it is the artistic potential of something like ‘work produced’, but also a seed from which we grow futures. From this seed we can create community, we can create ideas, or we can decide that it was a bad seed and needs to be discarded. There are concrete examples in the sense of a development of creative practice, but limiting our definition of potential ignores the possibility for expansion into many other realms. It could look like a friendship or collaboration, it could look like a questioning of someone’s worldview, it could be gained confidence.
‘Stage performance’ is just one of the containers that ‘a Conception’ could live within, and the form with which ‘Conception’ is presented is independent of the point. If you can reach a group of creative people using some other form or an adapted form it doesn’t matter. There’s almost a trick you need to play to your participants in that they ‘believe’ they’re operating within a given formality where they’re pushing the formal boundaries when actually they are part of this seed of potentiality.
Whilst a minor deception, it prompts participants to test and ultimately break the boundaries themselves. As facilitators it is important to show participants that the borders are permeable; they can breach the walls of the container, and start to realise this potentiality.
To give some specific examples, Will and I often ‘compere’ for acts in a way that isn’t particularly funny, usually quite awkward but this does set this idea of a show into people's minds. In contrast, Will had prepared a performance of a Christmas carol in which all of the audience were invited onto the stage, removing the audience and transforming them into performers, breaking a key part of the ‘stage performance formality.’
However, you must find practical use in these forms. If you cannot succinctly explain your event to audiences or venue managers, you will struggle to get buy-in. Concretely, Conception in the stage performance form needs technical support through e.g. a sound person at a mixing board. If you start coming to these people saying that you’re harnessing pure potentiality in their venue they might not understand that people will be speaking and singing into microphones as part of this!
These frameworks are then useful to us because we have used them as tools instead of purely a limitation. It perhaps seems obvious but when someone is performing we do not interrupt them, we do not talk to each other in the room the event is happening and so on. But the form doesn’t typically permit these interventions. This is an example of a useful formality. Having facilitators as performers break these rules you will begin to induce in the minds of participants the potentiality we’re talking about. For example we bring forms of performance that move away from the stage, cast the audience as performers (as the Carol example), or otherwise transform a performance situation into some other form like a workshop.
This raises a question of curation: how can you shape the event when you are giving up this control? Part of this ends up being a community re-enforcing its own values. When you gather similar people they will want to do things their way and evolve that way of doing things. In this you need to try hard to remove your own ego and want to have certain acts or approaches. There’s a need for a feedback loop, where the facilitators are able to give way to the needs of the group they help organise.
There is some risk that you could end up pushing towards a new form of ‘a Conception’. Is this useful? Perhaps if the goal is to create only a space where people are welcome to try things. But to create that form without considering that the purpose is to have that potentiality at the core of the project would be a grave loss, I believe. This is often what I see in generic ‘open mics’. Facilitators mean well, but often set a rigid formal course for their events, and end up reacting poorly when challenged. There’s also a risk that participants become dependent on facilitators as validators of their work, it should be encouraged that this validation comes from within the community or, perhaps better, from within the artist themselves.
Obviously the traditional form of the open mic at its core is really about presentation of ideas that are often fully-formed, so that the potentiality of them has largely been spent. Short-circuiting this idea to have something more raw and unpredictable is both challenging to this form and exciting to audiences, again the form contains the potential so much so that audiences end up crossing the boundary into performers often.
Importantly, the performer should be allowed to fail. There’s often immense pressure in the moment on stage, especially for people for whom it’s their first time. When we start to break down this performer audience binary we end up creating a space of empathy. Further to this you cultivate a community where people begin to support each other’s work, this is vital for many reasons outside of art. This ends up being the core of potentiality, there are many branching paths from which you can deviate. If you fail, hopefully you learn something about your craft, about yourself, and about other people. I’ve personally been on stage flubbing my compere role whilst Will was setting up a domino run and the audience supported me by encouraging me, and jokingly heckling me. It’s important to show participants that the performer isn’t a role at the top of a hierarchy, but a catalyst to what they experience in the room.
The form of ‘stage performance’ does also afford the ability to remain a member of the audience. This sort of safety is important not only because of comfort but also because there’s somewhere to retreat that is away from the pressure of being the performer. After the failed performance (which is something we do want, remember) the performer can then be re-absorbed into the audience and find their community there. We eventually end up with a breakdown of audience and performer into this idea of an audience-performer who can take on both roles, and more importantly know what each role may involve from them.
Thomas Carroll, published 2026