By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

It has taken me four days to finally coalesce my thoughts, emotions and the culinary happening that was the Audience Conference. Not to mention, time needed to forget about the hosts two-tone wing tips. Those shoes had enough pizazz for ten people . . . or one Loren Feldman.

I have to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect with this conference. Feldman’s persona is larger than life and often, from my perspective, sardonic to a fault. The Audience Conference, however, proved to me that the great ones are often misunderstood.

For anyone that I tried to explain this to in the past four days and failed miserably at, this is the most accurate and cohesive recollection that I can put together.

Like a mad scientist, Loren, with the help of his wife, Anton Mannering and a crew of others put together the most exciting event that I have attended in the last three years. It was closer to a Gnomedex than a podcamp and closer to performance art than theater.

To put together an event like this you need to be a strong character, like a front man in a band. You have to be ready to lead and put your stamp on the thing. When the first speakers hit the stage, after Loren reiterated the no laptop, no tweeting and no phone rule, it was evident that this was Loren’s event – his vision of doing it right. Speakers themselves had no slides or electronic accouterments to distract them (or keep on track) – they were left to their own mental and physical faculties to sink or swim alone on stage. Most of them swam.

Being part of the audience and listening to speakers talk about audience created this weird duality between their experiences and the one in which we were participating. Thus, began the experiment – the performance art. Orchestrated by Feldman and the cadre speakers, they one after another delivered a similar experience the audience present in the Hudson Theater.

I enjoyed what the speakers had to say and I know many of them personally. But there was one that stole the show for me, Jason Calacanis. Someone like Loren that has a strong online reputation which often precedes him in public. Jason came out, sat on the edge of the stage and delivered an open and honest account of how he gained his audience. Both those that admire his work and the haters. He talked candidly about building businesses and what he feels it takes to be an entrepreneur.

On haters – “you have failed them in some way”
On entrepreneurs – “you have to have perseverance”

These quotes might be empty out of context but in the one that Calacanis created by engaging the audience in the way he did it was like Joplin hitting the high notes. She got them, but they were warbly and honest. Whether you like them or not is a matter of taste – and you can’t knock the perseverance to perform them to an audience.

Once the event wrapped, the master of ceremonies was on the floor next to me. I took this as an opportunity to flub an otherwise awesome event by telling Loren that the conference “had changed my opinion of him”. It had, but that wasn’t the most eloquent way to the thank the artist that had just played us, the audience, like puppets.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4